Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label campaign finance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label campaign finance. Show all posts

Thursday, January 12, 2023

Today's Broken Shit


Our shit is broken - just not in the way Republicans keep screaming about.

And that's one of the shitty little insidious tricks that shitty little insidious pricks use to amp up the rubes while kinda freezing the rest of us in place. We can't just run to the opposite extreme and proclaim everything's peachy, and also dandy - because we know politics is pretty fucked up. So we have to agree - in part.

But the rubes have been conditioned to think in Manichean terms. Everything has to be all one way, or all one other way. So if you acknowledge the tiny kernel of truth in whatever their assertion is, they take it as your being in total agreement, and if you argue otherwise, you're either a hypocrite or a wishy-washy liberal who can't even be on his own side in a fight.

So anyway, along comes George Santos to show us Dark Money isn't so dark anymore, and to demonstrate the standard GOP shuffle - deny, double down, counterattack.


The Mysterious, Unregistered Fund That Raised Big Money for Santos

A review of records and newly uncovered documents reveals that efforts to elect George Santos may have run afoul of campaign finance rules.


A month before George Santos was elected to Congress, one of his large donors received a call asking him to consider making another sizable contribution.

The request came from a Republican loyalist calling on behalf of RedStone Strategies, which was described in an email to the donor as an “independent expenditure” group that was supporting Mr. Santos’s bid to flip a Democratic House seat in New York. The group had already raised $800,000 and was seeking to raise another $700,000, according to the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times.

The donor came through: Days later, on Oct. 21, he sent $25,000 to a Wells Fargo Bank account belonging to RedStone Strategies.

Three months later, Mr. Santos is now in Congress, but where the donor’s money went is unclear. The Federal Election Commission said it had no evidence that RedStone Strategies was registered as a political group, and there do not appear to be any records documenting its donors, contributions or spending.

Mr. Santos and his lawyer refused to answer questions about RedStone’s fund-raising efforts and whether Mr. Santos was involved in them. But he did have ties to a Redstone Strategies LLC, registered to an address in Merritt Island, Fla., in November 2021, as Mr. Santos was preparing his second run for Congress. The firm listed the Devolder Organization, a company owned by Mr. Santos, as one of its managing officers.

A company website describes that Redstone as being run by “experters in marketing and others in politics” whose services in ad creation, communications and fund-raising have value “no matter if you are in a local race or if you are going to be the next president of the United States.”

Yet the firm’s body of work — at least for candidates and committees that are required to file campaign expense reports — appears limited. A Times search of campaign finance records uncovered payments from a failed House candidate on Long Island and two groups tied to New York legislative candidates.

It also shows a payment from a PAC called Rise NY, run by Mr. Santos’s sister, Tiffany. State records show the group sent a wire transfer for $6,000 in April 2022 to Red Stone Strategies. It listed a Wells Fargo Bank branch on Merritt Island as its address.

The murkiness around the fund-raising operations on behalf of Mr. Santos makes it difficult to know whether any laws were broken. But a close examination of available records suggest RedStone may have skirted the law.

The email to the donor described it as an “independent expenditure committee under federal campaign finance law” with the “singular purpose” of electing Mr. Santos.

Such groups, also known as super PACs, can support candidates by raising vast sums of money far beyond strict campaign donor limits. Even so, there are rules: They must register with the Federal Election Commission and disclose their donors. And they must not coordinate directly with campaigns.

Yet the F.E.C. has no record of RedStone Strategies. The Daily Beast has reported that Redstone Strategies LLC of Florida had a connection to Mr. Santos, but the existence of a group operating under the name RedStone raising large sums of money for his election has not previously been revealed.

“I don’t see a record by a committee of that name registered with the F.E.C., and our regulations would be if a political group raises more than $1,000 for the purpose of influencing a federal election, they would be required to register with the F.E.C. within 10 days,” said Christian Hilland, an F.E.C. spokesman.

The person who solicited the donor said he was asked by Mr. Santos in the weeks leading up to the campaign to approach donors, some of whom had already given the maximum allowed to Mr. Santos’s election campaign, and to help coordinate their donations to RedStone, according to a person familiar with the arrangement who wished to remain anonymous.

A lawyer for Mr. Santos declined to respond to The Times’s questions about RedStone, saying that “it would be inappropriate to respond to anything related to this apparent investigation of my client’s campaign finances.”

Mr. Santos’s finances have come under scrutiny after The Times reported last month that his successful run for Congress in New York was built on lies, including fabrications of real estate fortune, academic distinction and a glittering career on Wall Street.

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Much about his web of personal and political entities — and whether or how they are in fact interrelated — is still unknown and has attracted interest from local state and federal investigators. His sudden claim to wealth has also raised questions.

According to financial disclosures that he filed as a candidate, Mr. Santos claimed that he went from earning $55,000 to running a company worth more than a million dollars in just a few years. That ostensibly enabled him to lend his campaign more than $700,000 — slightly less than the amount that RedStone Strategies claimed to have raised.

Mr. Santos’s campaign spending has also come under question, with scores of expenses for $199.99 — exactly one cent below the threshold for requiring receipts. The suspicious spending pattern served as a partial basis of a complaint that the Campaign Legal Center filed on Monday with the Federal Election Commission, accusing Mr. Santos of not only using campaign funds for personal use and misrepresenting spending but also of scheming to obscure the true source of his campaign funding.

The fund-raising efforts by RedStone Strategies seem equally opaque.

The person who solicited the $25,000 donation to RedStone has been active in the Queens Republican Party and described himself as Mr. Santos’s friend.

The donor, who did not wish to be identified, confirmed that he was told by the Queens Republican operative that the $25,000 that he gave to RedStone in October would be used as part of a large ad buy for Mr. Santos.

But the donor said he did not hear anything back on how the funds were spent. A review of spending by the company AdImpact does not show the group making any ad buys on Mr. Santos’s behalf, nor did it show any spending for Mr. Santos from other independent groups in the months leading up to Election Day.

If a group raised money under false political pretense, that activity could lead federal election officials to regard it as what is commonly known as a “scam PAC” — a group that raises money without spending it on the stated political purpose, a practice that is increasingly a concern of the F.E.C., Mr. Hilland said.

Redstone Strategies LLC of Florida listed one other manager in its incorporation records: Jayson Benoit, a business partner of Mr. Santos and former colleague at Harbor City Capital, which shut down after the S.E.C. filed a lawsuit accusing it of operating as a Ponzi scheme. (Neither Mr. Santos nor Mr. Benoit, who did not respond to requests for comment, were named in that suit.)

Mr. Santos was sworn in over the weekend, despite pressure from some Democrats, including Assemblyman Charles Lavine, to resign.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Mr. Santos ultimately acknowledged having misled voters about his educational and work history, saying that his sins were embellishing his résumé and nothing more. He was sworn in last weekend, even as colleagues in Congress have called for ethics inquiries into his behavior, and Republican leaders in New York, including four first-term congressmen, have called for his resignation. Prosecutors at the local, state and federal level have indicated they are looking at Mr. Santos.

Another potential area of concern about RedStone Strategies was the way it was described in its donor solicitation email as a 501c4 — a type of tax-exempt group organized for the promotion of social welfare. These entities pay no federal taxes and may engage in politics so long as their major purpose is not electing candidates to office.

“They can spend up to 49.9 percent of their budget on candidate election work,” explained Paul S. Ryan, an expert in federal election law, who added that political spending was allowed as long as it was not the group’s primary purpose.

But while the donor email describes the group as a 501c4, it also pledges to dedicate “all its resources” to electing Mr. Santos — language that Mr. Ryan suggested was troubling.

“You can get away with it if you are not foolish enough to put in writing that you’re all about candidate elections,” Mr. Ryan said.

RedStone Strategies was not the only group whose activity raised warning flags among campaign finance experts.

Rise NY is a state PAC created in December 2020 by Mr. Santos’s campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, and his sister. A Twitter profile of the group describes its purpose as “new voter registration & education as well as raising election awareness & voter enthusiasm.” The PAC raised vast sums from donors who had otherwise maxed out donating to Mr. Santos’s campaign, as reported by Newsday. One donor contributed $150,000, according to New York State Board of Election records, well beyond the limits of $2,900 per election placed on federal campaign contributions for direct campaign activity.

Social media posts show that Rise NY organized demonstrations and voter registration events on Long Island. In a Twitter post from August 2021, Rise NY claimed it had “pulled in 7800+ new Republican voters on LONG ISLAND, NY alone.”

A close examination of the group’s spending, however, reveals that many of Rise NY’s actions would be considered unusual, if not a violation. PACs like Rise NY are allowed under New York State law to give directly to candidates or authorized committees, but may not spend in other ways to help a campaign.

Yet Rise NY issued payments for wages and professional services to Santos campaign workers, including Mr. Santos’s press secretary. It also directed $10,000 in payments to a company run by Ms. Marks, the campaign treasurer. And Ms. Santos earned $20,000 for her work as the PAC’s president. She did not respond to a request for comment.

Its expenditures took place at many of the spots that Mr. Santos’s campaign filings show he liked to frequent, including Il Bacco, a restaurant in Queens where his campaign spent roughly $14,000, and an Exxon Mobil gas station that is a two-minute drive from his former apartment in Whitestone, Queens.

One donor said that he gave to the PAC after being contacted by Samuel Miele, who said in an email that he was the vice president of Rise NY. Mr. Miele was also working directly for Mr. Santos, but was later fired after he was caught impersonating a staffer for Representative Kevin McCarthy, at the time the Republican minority leader, in a fund-raising appeal, several people close to the campaign said.

A company that Mr. Miele manages, the One 57 Group, was paid $43,000 by the Santos campaign and nearly $10,000 from Rise NY PAC. Mr. Miele did not respond to requests for comment.

Two former consultants to the Santos campaign who requested anonymity in order to speak freely about their former client said that they were concerned about the close arrangement between the campaign and Rise NY, and told Mr. Santos that he should shut it down. A third former consultant turned down what it described as a lucrative offer from Mr. Santos to fund-raise for the PAC, citing legal concerns.

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Pay To Play


Ya gotta know something's wrong when a candidate for POTUS has to raise close to a billion dollars to land a job that pays $400k a year.

That's pretty fucked up right there.

Sunday, March 10, 2019

That Campaign Thing

Lawrence Lessig On Campaign Finance and the Electoral College.

Take-away 1:
Talking about Campaign Finance Reform is a tough one because we have to figure out how to acknowledge the overall corruption of the way we're doing things without letting the discussion degenerate into "Both Sides".

Take-away 2:
99% of the money spent by the presidential campaigns in 2016 was spent in 14 states.

Take-away 3:
Mitch McConnell defends the current system of Money-Is-Speech and Electoral College Disproportionality because it supports his Minority Rules / Plutocracy approach to governance.

Take-away 4:
I'm still not buying the bit about "Bernie got screwed and it was all illegal and Trump's right, Hillary should be in prison - and that Wasserman-Schultz bitch too..." 
There's a good argument to be made here, but it's way overblown and hyperbolic. Bernie's not a Democrat. He got used, and used badly - but the DNC didn't do anything to him that he wasn't trying to do to them. And it's devolved into pure speculation at this point anyway.



Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Number 48


Tom Garrett (aka: Trump's Bitch) says he won't run for re-election this fall - cuz he's an abusive drunk.

WaPo:

RICHMOND — Rep. Thomas Garrett (R-Va.) announced Monday that he is struggling with alcoholism and will abandon his run for a second term in Congress so he can focus on recovery and his family.

Garrett, a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus, is the 48th Republican to retire or announce they will not seek reelection to the House this year, according to a list maintained by the House Press Gallery.

Many are leaving in anticipation of a strong Democratic performance in congressional races this fall and out of frustration with partisan politics in Washington.

Garrett, 46, was facing a robust challenge from his Democratic opponent, journalist and author Leslie Cockburn, who had raised more money and had more cash on hand than he had. In recent days, unnamed former staffers had accused him and his wife of mistreating staff who worked in his congressional office.

But in a videotaped statement, Garrett, a former Virginia state senator, said his departure from politics was spurred by his addiction.



That's 48 House Members total, with 32 giving up their seats for reasons other than running for some other office or being tapped into 45*'s "Administration" - they're just bailing out.

This is going to be a tough pull - better get goin'.


Leslie Cockburn's Campaign





Saturday, September 09, 2017

Watch That Social Media


This could get fun

Vox, Ella Nilson:

It is unclear how successful the so-called Russian “troll farm” on Facebook was. Many of the accounts were crudely designed and used stilted, awkward language, and many of their posts were not widely shared throughout social media. Also, the majority of them ran in 2015, the year before the election, when Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were still competing with other candidates in the primaries.

The Russia-linked accounts worked to spread misinformation in two ways, according to a recent New York Times report. In one strategy, they bought political ads that focused on social issues including immigration, race, gay rights, and gun control, rather than touting one candidate over another.

Their second strategy was to create hundreds of fake accounts that linked back to their own websites, filled with hacked material on Hillary Clinton and prominent Democrats like businessman and investor George Soros. The Times investigation found a concerted effort to spread misinformation and direct traffic to these sites using these fake accounts.

Fake accounts are nothing new in social media; Twitter is rife with fake “bots” that can spread dubious stories or popularize hashtags. As the Times pointed out in their report, enough fake Twitter bots can push certain hashtags into Twitter’s “trending” category, where tweets with those hashtags can then be seen by more people.

Twitter has mechanisms in place to try to prevent bots from spreading fake trends around the internet, but new research by a cybersecurity firm called FireEye found that one bot-propelled hashtag still broke through, and Twitter’s relative lenience on fake accounts compared to Facebook doesn’t help.

Facebook, on the other hand, is taking new steps to crack down on fake accounts. It recently announced it wouldn’t allow pages to advertise on its site if they repeatedly posted fake content, and that it has been increasingly monitoring and shutting down fake accounts.

A former FBI agent named Clinton Watts recently told the New York Times that Facebook and Twitter are both experiencing a “bot cancer eroding trust on their platforms.” To Facebook’s credit, Watts said the site is currently doing much more to combat the issue, “cutting out the tumors by deleting false accounts and fighting fake news.”

It’s worth noting that even the most successful fake Facebook accounts have nothing on Fox News when it comes to influencing voter’s decisions, according to a new study.


I'm wondering if there might be some legal action against Zuckerberg and/or his minions for violations of various Campaign Laws.

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Sometimes You Vote With Your Checkbook

Reuters:
Kerry Woolard, the 37-year-old manager of Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, went online in June and made her first political contribution: A $250 donation to the campaign of her boss, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Woolard's donation was unusual.
Only a dozen of an estimated 22,450 people employed at Trump's companies have donated more than $200 to the celebrity businessman's bid for the U.S. presidency, a Reuters review of federal campaign finance records through August shows. Those who gave less to either Trump's campaign or his joint fundraising committees would not have shown up in the review.
The contributors, including an office cleaner, a golf course groundskeeper, a bartender and an attorney, have given $5,298 to Trump's campaign, a fraction of the $112 million Trump's political operation has received from donors and joint fundraisers.
An employee at Trump enterprises gave $275 to the campaign of her employer’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. A 13th Trump employee, a lawyer at the Trump Organization, contributed to a Trump Super PAC, giving $1,000. 

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Uh-Oh


Donald Trump’s campaign has alerted Senate Republicans that he won’t have much money to spend fending off attacks from Hillary Clinton over the next couple months.

The notice came when Paul Manafort, Trump’s senior advisor, met with a group of Senate Republican chiefs of staff for lunch last week, sources familiar with the meeting told the Washington Examiner. The admission suggests that Trump will be far more dependent on the GOP brass for money than he has led voters to believe, but it’s consistent with his reliance on the Republican National Committee to provide a ground game in battleground states.

“They know that they’re not going to have enough money to be on TV in June and probably most of July, until they actually accept the nomination and get RNC funds, so they plan to just use earned media to compete on the airwaves,” one GOP source familiar with Manafort’s comments told the Examiner.


Trump is also refusing to use his own money to fund his campaign. In other words, what Donald Trump is telling the voters is completely different from what is happening behind closed doors.

When Republicans nominated Trump, they thought that they were getting a billionaire who could help the party raise money while throwing his own cash into the pot for his White House bid.

What the GOP is stuck with is a deadbeat who talks a good game that they are going to have to fund in the general election because he is either unwilling or unable to pull his own weight.

Donald Trump’s wealth appears to be a myth, and it is obvious that Trump is using the Republican Party to build his cult of personality. Donald Trump has no intention of giving anything back Republicans.

Trump’s inability to run ads in June and July is a gift to Democrats, who should be blanketing the airwaves over the next two months. Democrats have a chance to define Trump, and he can’t fight back. Supporters should expect to see Democrats strike early and often before Trump can even get his ads on the air.

Donald Trump’s “business sense” has struck again. This time, Trump has bankrupted his presidential campaign and is expecting Republicans to pick up the tab.

I wonder if this will have any effect on Trump's core supporters - yeah, prob'ly not.  Never mind.

Monday, May 27, 2013

The Big Bamboozle

...part 

Seems like politicians never stop campaigning.  Well, guess what - it seems that way because it is that way.  People get riled up during a political campaign, so campaigning is a good way to keep 'em riled up enough to get 'em to send you lots and lotsa money.  The more riled up they are, the bigger the fuckloads of money they send in, and you have practically no obligation to account to them for any of it.  You can fail over and over again, and they'll still pony up the next time you ask.

It's an astounding racket - and it's one of the big objections most people have when it comes to griping about "the system", but we've become almost completely conditioned to hate The Gubmint, so even when the IRS (eg) tries to get to some simple truth about who's buying our elections this time around, we lose our shit and start screaming about tyranny.

(yes, Dub, I know - using the IRS as an attack dog against your political opponents is a rotten thing to do.  I don't think that's exactly what happened in Cincinnati, but if there really was an element of intimidation to it, then it was low-level and weak.  Remember now, these are The Democrats we're talkin' about; the very same Librul Bureaucrats that you claim can't find their own asses with GPS and a bloodhound at noon on a clear day.  If you can't bring yourself to read any history, at least try to remember some of the shit that fell outa your own gob yesterday - you deliberately ignorant puke)


But take a peek here:


I haven't done much research on it, so please, can somebody point me to a "growth industry" in America that's done a lot better than this?

And if you took this graph and added the growth curves of the campaign contributions of Big Corp, along with the growth curves of the profitabilities of Big Corp - what do you think that might look like?

Cutting to the chase - this stinks of Government-as-Private-Enterprise.  We make a lot of noise about what a great thing The American Revolution was; and about the great sacrifice our uniformed services continue to make to ensure the life and health of our little experiment in democratic self-governance - especially on Memorial Day.  So, in addition to planting flags and going to parades and bowing our heads between the 3rd and 4th Budweisers at the neighbors' BBQ, and generally trying to "Out-Patriotic" each other the whole fucking day, maybe we could best honor those heroes by pushing back against the small minds with the big ambitions of returning us to the glories of the 18th century.

Just sayin'.

hat tip = MoJo

Friday, September 07, 2012

Differences

I know way too many people who don't vote.  They cop an attitude, saying politicians and their parties are all alike, so what's the point?

Here's one point: On the one really huge question of how we fund candidates and campaigns, it's pretty easy to see a difference.

1956
"We condemn illegal lobbying for any cause and improper use of money in political activities."
2012
"We oppose any restrictions or conditions that would discourage Americans from exercising their constitutional right to enter the political fray or limit their commitment to their ideals."
1956
"The Democratic Party pledges itself to provide effective regulation and full disclosure of campaign expenditures and contributions in elections to Federal offices."
2012
"We support campaign finance reform, by constitutional amendment if necessary. We support legislation to close loopholes and require greater disclosure of campaign spending."
There are some other points as well - Mother Jones breaks it down.

Monday, May 07, 2012

Well, That Sucks

86% of us (per recent polling) think that unlimited donations to SuperPACs has a corrupting influence on our democracy.

Which means there're more than twice as many Americans who don't understand how fucked up Campaign Financing is in this joint than there are who believe the moon landings were faked.

And Jesus wept.

hat tip = Republic Report

Saturday, December 10, 2011

This Won't End Well

From truthout.com:
A logical explanation of why true oversight hearings have continued to decline is that there is less and less stomach to hold hearings that would expose and embarrass powerful corporations and individuals who would or could become a steady source of campaign money. So, it is easier to have fewer hearings and hearings on safe subjects such as social issues and to attack bureaucracies that aren't within the political beliefs of the party in power. Meanwhile, as more and more of the federal government is contracted out to major corporations, there is less interest in exposing fraud, waste and abuse in contracting, favoritism in contract selection, and other forms of cronyism such as the revolving door.

It would be simply astounding to find no fire when there's so much smoke in the air.