by digby
And the millionaires who fund them:
The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization, went into free fall.
Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.
The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million — and the five ousted employees were back. The force behind their return was Richard J. Stephenson, a reclusive Illinois millionaire who has exerted increasing control over one of Washington’s most influential conservative grass-roots organizations.
Stephenson, the founder of the for-profit Cancer Treatment Centers of America and a director on the FreedomWorks board, agreed to commit $400,000 per year over 20 years in exchange for Armey’s agreement to leave the group.
The episode illustrates the growing role of wealthy donors in swaying the direction of FreedomWorks and other political groups, which increasingly rely on unlimited contributions from corporations and financiers for their financial livelihood. Such gifts are often sent through corporate shells or nonprofit groups that do not have to disclose their donors, making it impossible for the public to know who is funding them.
In the weeks before the election, more than $12 million in donations was funneled through two Tennessee corporations to the FreedomWorks super PAC after negotiations with Stephenson over a preelection gift of the same size, according to three current and former employees with knowledge of the arrangement. The origin of the money has not previously been reported.
Read the whole article, it's just delicious.
I would normally be skeptical about these stories of "disarray" among the conservative movement institutions. The truth is that they tend to thrive in these situations, regrouping, raising money from the faithful and laying low until their next opportunity to move the ball rightward comes along.
But the money is no longer coming from the old-school conservative types like Olin, bradley and Scaife, people who trusted the movement types to do the right thing. This new set of millionaires and billionaires are true believers and self-serving scam artists who watch Fox news and believe what they are seeing. They want to be involved.
In some ways, the right has become more like the left, whose rich donors have been notoriously fickle and meddling in details about which they are ill-equipped to make decisions. The right's millionaires haven't traditionally done that. They spent decades building up their very efficient movement institutions and let them have their way. It will be interesting to see if a new crop of wingnut millionaires will destroy them.
Update: And by the way, do they have open carry in DC?
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