ACT NOW: TODAY. NO EXCUSES. CALL YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS NOW.

Stop whining and wringing your hands. DO SOMETHING TODAY. Save our Services (S0S) Non-Profit Organizations deliver to our communities every single day.

(Screenshot from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, November 18, 2024)

Today may be the day when the food bank down the street from you—which keeps hundreds of your neighbors from starving to death each week—could be declared to be a “terrorist organization,” and wiped out.

Insane, you say? 

Well that’s what pro-Trump Republicans (and a few too many Democrats) are considering on the floor of the House of Representatives today.

Yes, TODAY.  Not after January 20, 2025, although I’m sure they’ll try to sneak it past us then, too.    But TODAY.  

I don’t want to hear your excuses, or your despair, or the empty words that “it doesn’t matter.”  And, please, don’t tell me you are too busy to do it.  The grandchild you may save from going hungry might be your own; the young woman you save from having her insides butchered could be your sister; the religious institution where you worship just might be the one being threatened with closure. Yes, really.

For starters, you need to  IMMEDIATELY  contact your local Member of Congress that they MUST oppose H.R. 9495 which is coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives sometime today.  This should take no more than 5 minutes of your time.

You don’t even have to spend time thinking of what to say.  Here’s your script:

“Hi my name is [Your Name], and I’m your constituent living in (town]. I’m calling to urge you to oppose H.R. 9495, scheduled for a vote later today.

This bill poses a direct threat to nonprofits by granting the Treasury Secretary and the IRS unchecked power to label organizations as “terrorist supporting” and strip their tax-exempt status.

 Even worse, this can happen without evidence or any requirement to disclose the reasons for the designation. The lack of due process and accountability leaves nonprofits defenseless against vague and potentially politically motivated accusations.

 If this bill passes, a Treasury Secretary, guided by a grudge-bearing President could use the IRS to strip ANY non-profit organization of their tax-exempt protection to provide healthcare service, feed the hungry, care for the disabled, protect our rivers and oceans, give legal aid to those who can’t afford expensive lawyers, or shut down any religious institution– Church, Synagogue or Mosque—they don’t like.

Please oppose H.R. 9495 to protect nonprofit organizations and the essential services they provide to each of us in our communities. Thank you for your time and consideration.”

Now, don’t relax if you live in  “Blue” State, and think that you have nothing to worry about.  This action would effect non-profits everywhere and anywhere in the United States.  And, some 52 Democrats from states like California, New York, Illinois, New Mexico, Colorado, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Washington State—as well as key Democrats in some “Red” States—did not vote to kill this deadly bill the last time it came up for a vote earlier this month. Why?

Some were out campaigning and some, just didn’t read the entire bill, getting fooled by the deceptive, American-as-apple-pie title of it:  “ the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act.”

Who could be opposed to that?

Well, hardly anyone was opposed to THAT part of the bill, which took up only the first few paragraphs.   Then some GOP ghouls in the House of Representatives—taking their cue from the extreme playbook of Pogrom 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s Fourth Reich Manifesto—tried to pull a fast fraud.

 They sneakily slapped a provision onto the ass-end of the “Stop Terror Financing” Act, which  “authorizes broad and easily abused new powers for the executive branch. It grants the Secretary of the Treasury virtually unfettered discretion to designate a U.S. nonprofit as a “terrorist supporting organization” and to strip it of its tax-exempt status…”

Wonder where they got THAT idea?

Look no further than Page 4 of Project (Pogrom) 2025, written by many of the people Trump is now pumping into his in-coming administration.  This is actually what they said, concerning “woke” non-profits, in an eery projection of what they wanted to do to the Civic (non-profit) sector:

“Today, the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject “woke” progressivism.  They will soon turn to Christian Schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.  The next Conservative President must make the institutions of American Civil Society hard targets for “woke” culture warriors.  This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI, gender awareness, gender sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights…out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant and piece of legislation that exists.”

As if that wasn’t blatant enoughThe Non-Profit Law Professor’s Blog underscored Project 2025’s clarion call for “the next conservative Administration to implement policies to counter the growth of “woke,” “leftist”, or “left-leaning non-profits.” 

The Propagandists of Pogrom 2025 gave us an even more concrete clue on page 837, when they specifically targeted the Consumer Financial  Protection Bureau for elimination.

The apologists for the corporate interests behind Pogrom 2025 were apoplectic in their rabid attacks on the pro-consumer agency created by Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren in 2010 to reduce exploitative junk fees charged by banks, credit card companies and mortgage lenders– which has saved American taxpayers some $21 billion as of this May. 

Sounding like they were ranting from the Reichstag, the Pogrom 2025 authors called the CFPB:  “a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist non-profits, politically aligned with those who spearheaded its creation.” 

That “creation” of the CFPB passed by a 20-vote margin in the US, Senate, 59-39, on May 20, 2010, meaning that both Republicans and Democrats combined to “spearhead its creation.”  They did it by comfortably passing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Protection Act of 2009, which by Congressional action created the CFPB, and saved millions of Americans from suffering from another Great Depression, following the financial collapse of 2008. 

Pogrom 2025 continued its’ jihad against the CFPB (on page 837) by slamming it as “a slush fund for poverty groups tied to the Democratic Party,” and “bankrolling some 60 liberal non-profits.”

In the eyes of the propagandists behind Pogrom 2025, saving 300 million average Americans from financial disaster was “leftist,” and “liberal,” despite the fact that most of the bailout funds from Dodd-Frank went to the giant financial institutions which caused the financial crisis, and are funding the Heritage Foundation.

Dangerously, the tell in these terrible present-day efforts to eviscerate non-profits they don’t agree with, is that Project 2025’s totalitarians have tipped their hand as to what their true agenda is after January 20, 2025, when the “Conservative Administration” of their dreams come to power.  It has clearly framed our fight for existence ahead.

They want to destroy any power that a strong, vibrant, service-oriented civic society may have in rural communities, cities, towns, states and nationally by defunding non-profit organizations they perceive as a threat to them, as if we’re going to thrown cans of peas at them from behind the card-tables at a food bank.

All it takes, in their squinty, evil eyes, is to control the IRS, and wipe out the non-profit status of those religious, social, cultural, fraternal, health-related, and community-serving non-profits they define as “leftist” or “terrorist.”

Today’s battle over protecting non-profit organizations which impact hundreds of millions of lives, is a warm-up of the bigger struggles coming next year and the years ahead, for a more livable, humane and just society.  In the Darwinian world view of Pogrom 2025’s progenitors that’s blasphemy, no matter how well-intentioned or effective.

Ironically, the more these amoral, shrivel-souled ideologues cut from government programs, the greater the need for non-profit organizations to stitch together the safety net, and save lives.  Unless, of course, they intentionally don’t want to save those lives.

We must start by beating back H.R. 9495 today if we are to galvanize our forces to fight again tomorrow.   Call you Member of Congress NOW, and demand that they save the life and death services provided by non-profit organizations in your schools, on your block, in your community and across the country.

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