Reply #17: McClendon is a major player in all of this [View All]

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Aubrey McClendon is not just some cousin of Fred Upton's. I checked my files for what I had on him and his name came up in a 2004 list of donors to the Progress for America Voter Fund -- $250,000, just a few lines above T. Boone Pickens.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Progress_for_America

Progress for America (PFA) (a 501c4) and its affiliate Progress for America Voter Fund (PFA-VF) (a 527 committee) are national tax-exempt organizations. The PFA was, from the beginning, "closely associated" with the Bush administration, the Republican National Committee and "their consultants."

PFA was established in 2001 to support George W. Bush's "agenda for America." The PFA Voter Fund, which was set up in 2004, raised $38 million in support of Bush's 2004 election bid.

Progress for America, a "friends of the party" organization "operated by Tony Feather, the former political director of Bush-Cheney 2000 and a close friend of White House political adviser Karl Rove, is described by some Republicans as a new group dedicated to corralling outlawed party soft money."

And I also found McClendon mentioned in a thread I started here in October 2004 about the dirty tricks connections of the Swiftboat Veterans: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1162991

Chesapeake Energy donated $250,000 to the Swifties, too. (Not surprisingly, there were multiple overlaps between that group and Progress for America -- one of them being lawyer Ben Ginsberg, who is now representing Prosser in the Wisconsin recount.) And I quoted this article from an Oklahoma newspaper:

The top two executives of Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy Corp. have contributed $500,000 to a group running a statewide television ad criticizing U.S. Senate candidate Brad Carson.

Aubrey McClendon and Tom Ward each donated $250,000 within the past month to a recently formed group affiliated with Club for Growth.

Club for Growth has been helping raise money for Republican Senate candidate Tom Coburn and sponsoring media ads for him.

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Price said McClendon and Ward gave money to Club for Growth, which is based in Washington D.C., because of "the agenda that they have, which is increased prosperity through lower taxes and lower regulation."

And Club for Growth, of course, is these people:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Club_for_Growth

Club for Growth is a right-wing political group that endorses and raises money for candidates. According to a February 22, 2011 article by John Nichols in The Nation, the Club for Growth is "an organization funded by extremely wealthy conservatives to carry out their budget-stripping goals," and that "has been a key player in Republican Governor Scott Walker's move to take out the state's organized workers." Nichols writes that the Club for Growth is part of a "national strategy" to get "newly elected Republican governors" to destroy labor and unions. R.J. Johnson, who served as a political strategist for Walker's campaign, is a key adviser to the Club for Growth. Johnson has refused to disclose where the Club for Growth gets its funding.

So this is not just about local Michigan politics. It's all about "the agenda" and the "national strategy" and just happens to be zeroing in on Michigan at the moment.