The CCC is financed in part by Soros’s Open Society Institute, with OSI awarding the group $2.9 million in grants in 2007 alone. Other funding sources include the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Fannie Mae Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Some other members of the HCAN “grassroots” are Democracy for America (the organization Howard Dean founded to drive the Democratic Party to the left following his 2004 primary loss to John Kerry); Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (which in 2007 alone received 11 grants from OSI totaling nearly $1.8 million), Progressive States Network (awarded $800,000 in OSI grants in 2007); and True Majority, a far-left organization founded by Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream fame.
Soros-funded clergy have been in the forefront of the universal health care mobilization, often in consultation with Senate Democrats. A group of religious leftists met with Senator Ted Kennedy’s chief advisor on health care reform in April, which culminated in the June 24 “Interfaith Service of Witness and Prayer for Health Care Reform.”
Among the event’s organizers was Jim Wallis’s Sojourners, to which George Soros gave $100,000 in 2007. Concurrently, People Improving Communities Through Organizing (PICO) is rallying the Religious Left for ObamaCare alongside Sojourners and the National Council of Churches (NCC). The NCC is funded by an array of leftist organizations including the Open Society Institute, ACORN, MoveOn.org, TrueMajority, People For the American Way, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Tides Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.
Soros is nothing if not ecumenical; his Open Society Institute blessed Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, an HCAN member, with a $300,000 in 2007. The Catholics are joined by a Protestant counterpart, Clergy Strategic Allegiances, LLC, and the National Council of Jewish Women.
These religious figures march alongside HCAN’s abortion advocates. Chief among these are the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the National Abortion Federation, Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
Planned Parenthood already gets one-third of its billion dollar annual budget from the government, and the Capps Amendment in the current health care bill opens the spigots of federal funding for abortion through fungible payments and accounting transfers. The Alan Guttmacher Institute concluded public funding of abortion increases the number of abortions – and thus pads Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.
Soros-funded feminists are another constituency in the new “grassroots” coalition. The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) pushes for enhanced welfare-state funding and abortion on demand. HCAN also includes the more overtly political Women’s Voices, Women’s Vote which was awarded $400,000 in grants from OSI in 2007 and has long been supported by Teresa Heinz Kerry.
Promoting his new book, Howard Dean has told audiences, “America has had ‘socialized’ medicine since 1964. It’s called Medicare; it covers every American over 65, and they are very happy with the program.”
But as common men and women are proving at Congressional town hall meetings, on radio talk shows, and in diners across the country, those not on George Soros’s payroll are distinctly unhappy with this proposal.