(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) The Democrat establishment publicly champions organized labor, and the job protections that come with it, but that didn’t stop a left-wing major fundraising platform from laying off nearly 20% of its workforce.
Political donation aggregator ActBlue, which reportedly raked in a staggering $3.5 billion-plus for Democrat candidates and allied groups in the 2022 election cycle alone, explained that the reduction in force was necessary for “long-term financial sustainability” heading into the next election season, and those to follow, a press release from the organization indicated.
Relatively new CEO Regina Wallace-Jones asserted in the statement that she expects “strong fundraising to continue.”
Those being shown the door in the 17% layoff are vaguely described as working “on the non-technical side” and are set to received two months’ severance from ActBlue, which is a nonprofit organization.
In an eight-part Twitter thread, the ActBlue union implied that progressive poseurs in management were hardly setting a good example for the Left.
“We call upon Leadership to freeze further layoffs until all other cost-saving options are exhausted [and] for ActBlue Leadership to live up to their progressive ideals,” the union tweeted, in part.
Ironically in the ideological context, union negotiations had dragged on for two years before the ratification of a collective bargaining agreement, which has been in place for a mere two months.
Union dues have traditionally filled the Democrat coffers, and union members participate extensively in their get-out-the-vote efforts.
According to the ActBlue union, the layoff earlier this week eliminated 54 jobs, of which 32 were the bargaining unit.
The union also seemed to accuse “out of touch” higher-ups of an unwillingness to accept a pay cut in their own salaries to save the jobs of rank-and-file employees amidst the organization’s “current financial difficulties.”
Returning to the theme, the union insisted that “Prioritizing executive profit over rank and file workers’ livelihoods does not live up to ActBlue’s progressive values.”
About seven million individual donors supposedly forked over the billions that ActBlue collected in 2022.
However, an expose by former Project Veritas boss James O’Keefe calls into question the possibility about the way megadonors might have circumvented federal campaign finance law.
In an initial late-March video, O’Keefe, the journalist who now runs the eponymous and cleverly named O’Keefe Media Group (OMG, for short), interviewed some senior citizens in Maryland who made thousands of donations to the Biden presidential campaign and other candidates, much of it through ActBlue.
The plot twist was that the donations were made unbeknownst to them, however, suggesting perhaps that a money-laundering scheme used their identities.
O’Keefe has encouraged the crowd-sourcing of further investigations into this matter.
Even back in 2020, doubt was already surfacing over the allegedly sketchy way ActBlue may have operated.
A conservative group called the Take Back Action Fund analyzed 2019 Federal Election Commission data and discovered that almost half of ActBlue donations apparently came from jobless individuals or those who left the employer field blank.
“That figure has risen to 50.1% in the first eight months of 2020, said Take Back president John Pudner, who has for years sounded the alarm about the potential for foreign influence on ActBlue over what he described as its lax online credit card security measures,” the Washington Times reported in September 2020.
