"Flushing Money Down the Tea Party Toilet"

[applegrove]

Flushing Money Down the Tea Party Toilet

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/19/flushing-money-down-the-tea-party-toilet.html

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This article is about the hijacking of a movement that started in 2009 by the modern equivalent of the “Old West Snake Oil Salesman.” Slick, fast-talking, and capable of whipping a crowd into a frenzy, they travel from town to town peddling their promises of “change.’

The problem is evidence indicates some Tea Party groups care far less about your ideals and far more about your money—taking it and making it their own. They’re an ideological Ponzi scheme; they use donations to generate more donations, by creating sensationalistic ad campaigns to persuade donors they’re getting value, and to scare or guilt them, and new donors, into sending more donations.

Here are five very recognizable organizations that spend vastly more on fundraising efforts than on support for any candidate.

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[Laelth]

1. k&r for the truth. n/t

-Laelth

[starroute]

2. Tea Party Leadership Fund

Here's something I originally posted in April:

The Tea Party Leadership Fund is my particular pet peeve

It's headed by Dan Backer -- the lawyer who brought the McCutcheon case and who has also been one of the chief movers behind the phony IRS scandal. There's an article about its scammy ways at http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/11/15/tea-party-leadership-fund-scam/

In fact, last fall Backer had the chutzpah to petition the FEC for his TheTeaParty.net to be allowed to keep not only its donors but even its vendors secret on the grounds that his had been harassed by the IRS and feared public retaliation. (See http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/11/18/2959081/tea-party-fec-exemption/ -- also the chuckle-worthy actual filing at http://saos.nictusa.com/aodocs/1246367.pdf )

Backer also has a long history of scamming tea partiers and has set up any number of right-wing PACs that promise more than they deliver. The most notorious example is the One Nation PAC, which he set up in 2009 on behalf of Kelly Eustis, a twenty year old former College Republican. Eustis had previously been an employee of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC -- the organization behind the Tea Party Express -- before being fired for his apparently outrageous behavior. Most of the PAC's expenditures went to Eustis, his own consulting firm, and an associate from the Tea Party Express who had been fired along with him.

Backer was both the treasurer and the legal counsel of the PAC, and it seems likely that he was calling the shots. For example, in August 2010 Eustis copyrighted the name "One Nation PAC" and Backer immediately brought a copyright infringement suit against a coalition consisting of the NAACP, Sierra Club, AFL-CIO and La Raza that was planning a march on Washington under the name One Nation Working Together.

The thing about people like Backer is that they're not only crooked but crooked in so many different ways it can make your head spin trying to keep track of them. And as the McCutcheon case shows, some of their activities are far from innocuous.

[Ruby the Liberal]

3. I have absolutely NO problem with this

Unregulated Capitalism at its peak. Let the rubes who promote it and fund it (and vote for it, not knowing what the big words mean), and let their candidate's coffers wilter in the dust.

Bravo!!

[Thinkingabout]

4. I wonder what the True the Vote group looks like, she sure has a racket going.

Bet you looked at some of the Karl Rove groups you would see more of the same.

[FSogol]

5. Grifters gotta grift!

[Aristus]

6. It's televangelism without the robes and choir.

Soaking the dim-bulb rubes for whatever loose change they've got in the sofa cushions.

I won't cry for the idiots who fall for this.

[Brother Buzz]

7. Tea Party Express founder, Sal Russo, is scamming and double dipping all over the place

Pro-Troop Charity Misleads Donors While Lining Political Consultants’ Pockets

Move America Forward has collected millions to send care packages to U.S. troops. But its appeals often rely on images and stories borrowed without permission, and its assets have been used to benefit political consulting firms and PACs.

by Kim Barker
ProPublica, Aug. 5, 2014

In February 2013, Move America Forward announced an ambitious fundraising goal. The charity, launched in part by one of the most prominent figures in the Tea Party movement, had adopted the 800 Marines in a battalion fighting in Afghanistan and wanted to send them all care packages.

"For some troops, these care packages are the only mail they will receive all year," the group said in one email solicitation.

The charity later described the fundraising drive as a rousing success: In less than five weeks, all 800 Marines in a 1st Marine Division battalion nicknamed Geronimo were sent care packages and notes in Afghanistan, it claimed.

But that couldn't have been true. The Marines of Geronimo weren't even in Afghanistan during Move America Forward's fund drive. Instead, they were deployed more than 3,000 miles away, in Okinawa, Japan.

Move America Forward calls itself the nation's "largest grassroots pro-troop organization," and has recruited a bevy of Republican luminaries, including former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney, to support its efforts.

<More, much more of an excellent article that only gets better - trust me.>

http://www.propublica.org/article/pro-troop-charity-misleads-donors-while-lining-political-consultants-pocket