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"The great Tea Party swindle: How to make lots of money off the naive"
Anyone surprised at this?
This should be pretty obvious, I hope, but you probably shouldn’t donate money to a “Tea Party” group. You, the Salon reader, probably weren’t considering doing that any time soon, but what I mean is that no one should ever donate money to a “Tea Party” group, even (especially!) people who explicitly agree with “Tea Party” politics and support “Tea Party” candidates. Because (and this shouldn’t surprise you if you’ve been keeping up with the modern conservative movement) many of these groups don’t actually do anything to help Tea Party candidates. They just raise money and spend it on themselves and their friends. Because barely regulated free-for-all campaign financing is both a boon to powerful interests and a windfall for shady political consultants.
Roll Call recently ran the numbers on spending by a number of Tea Party groups, and they are all spending quite a bit on overhead and “office expenses” and travel and not that much on actual candidates. The Wire’s Philip Bump helpfully broke down the spending into pie charts, to make it clear how much these groups are spending effectively on themselves. A PAC called the Madison Project spent $1.8 million in the 2012 cycle. $97,000 of that spending was on candidates. The Daily Caller tells us of another PAC, the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, that has spent a grand total of zero dollars on candidates, though it has spent quite a bit of money on other things:
According to the year-end spending report filed with the Federal Election Commission, of the $6,405,087 that the group has raised since early last year, $5,335,162 has been spent, and all of it has been put toward operating expenditures.
Roll Call recently ran the numbers on spending by a number of Tea Party groups, and they are all spending quite a bit on overhead and “office expenses” and travel and not that much on actual candidates. The Wire’s Philip Bump helpfully broke down the spending into pie charts, to make it clear how much these groups are spending effectively on themselves. A PAC called the Madison Project spent $1.8 million in the 2012 cycle. $97,000 of that spending was on candidates. The Daily Caller tells us of another PAC, the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, that has spent a grand total of zero dollars on candidates, though it has spent quite a bit of money on other things:
According to the year-end spending report filed with the Federal Election Commission, of the $6,405,087 that the group has raised since early last year, $5,335,162 has been spent, and all of it has been put toward operating expenditures.
Yep, that's right. The whole damn thing is just a scam. Here's the link
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