There were very few surprises during this summer’s three-week federal court hearing to decide the fate of election reform legislation that was passed in 2013 and implemented in 2014 – but there was one big revelation.
The only real surprise was a guest appearance by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright at the Moral Monday march that took place the evening of the first day of the trial. Yes, that was the same Jeremiah Wright who screamed that God should damn America in his famous “sermon” in his church in Chicago. Wright showed up at the latest sideshow from the faltering Moral Monday movement.
The real revelation at the outset of the hearing was less a shock than it was confirmation of something Civitas and others have suspected but until now couldn’t confirm – the Moral Monday organization in 2013-2014 was a union-funded project.
It was the North Carolina Republican Party that discovered and highlighted U.S. Department of Labor reports showing $20,000 in 2014 in direct compensation from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to William Barber, the president of the NC NAACP who is also the Moral Monday mouthpiece.
The NCGOP also exposed millions of dollars being funneled from the SEIU and other labor unions to groups that worked to organize and populate Moral Monday rallies. The reports also suggested the money was used to pay protesters to push a radical agenda. Finally, the revelations showed that union money, coordinated with the left-wing Blueprint “eviscerate” NC organization, was the fuel that kept the protests going until they began to fizzle out during the 2014 legislative session.
According to the NCGOP:
- In 2014, SEIU funneled $1.5 million to a shell group in North Carolina called “Carolina Workers Organizing Committee.”
- That group paid $1.12 million of the SEIU money to Moral Monday backer “Action NC,” a group registered in Charlotte and a member of the notorious Blueprint NC organization.
- Deep in the Labor Department’s report for Carolina Workers Organizing Committee is data showing Action NC used the money for “Payroll Services” to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars each month – totaling $1.1 million.
As always with the liberal Left in North Carolina, it’s the connections that are so important. Action NC is the group that essentially replaced ACORN after its demise. Pat McCoy, Action NC’s director, had been the director of North Carolina’s chapter of ACORN at the time it supposedly disbanded. He is currently also a member of the Blueprint NC board of directors.
As for the ACORN-SEIU connection, in 2009 before the supposed downfall of ACORN, Matthew Vadum, writing for the Capital Research Center, said, “ACORN was virtually indistinguishable from SEIU.”
Even though North Carolina has the nation’s lowest union membership rate, at Moral Monday’s peak during the 2013 legislative session, Civitas watched unions organize some of the protests, and they always had a presence at every protest. On Labor Day 2014, there was even a moral Monday Talking Union Tour. It was at this event that Barber said: “If labor and civil rights get together the right way, that’s the formula for transforming America. That’s the formula for transforming the South and the nation.”
More than one person has speculated that the Moral Monday activity in the 2015 legislative session was minimal because the money dried up. Now that we have evidence that the unions were funneling money through Action NC, we can surmise that the unions decided they were not getting a good return on their investment.
We can only imagine what the health care workers, custodians and security guards who pay dues to the SEIU think about millions of their hard-earned dollars being used for protests in North Carolina.
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