Wingnut Welfare even for the 1%
by digby
They have more money than they what to do with:
Former FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey revealed that the Tea Party group paid Glenn Beck about $1 million to say "nice things" about the group on his radio show, and that it got a negative return on that investment, in an interview Friday — with the liberal group Media Matters, of all places. It's the latest strange revelation in the FreedomWorks civil war. Armey reportedly tried to stage an armed coup last fall, but his reign didn't last long, and donor Richard J. Stephenson agreed to pay Armey $400,000 a year for 20 years to go away. Apparently that didn't come with a non-disparagement clause.
After the liberal magazine Mother Jones posted a copy of a FreedomWorks document about its fundraising, Armey reached out to Media Matters to explain how the group wastes money by trying to raise money through radio hosts Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Armey said FreedomWorks paid Beck $1 million to say nice things about the group to raise more cash, but Beck's appeals raised considerably less than that.
"The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air," Armey said, adding that, initially, Beck's kind words were only supposed to cost $250,000 a year. "Once that was approved by the trustees, it then took on a life of its own, it got bigger than we understood it to be. All of a sudden it was we are paying Limbaugh as well as Beck." The price of Beck's nice words then went up to $1 million a year, Army said. He explained how it was a bad investment:
"If Limbaugh and Beck, if we were using those resources to recruit activists and inform activists and to encourage and enthuse activists, that's one thing... If we are using these things to raise money; one, it's a damned expensive way to raise money; and two, it makes raising money an end on to itself not an instrumental activity to support the foundation work that our organization does..
"It is like federal budgeting... We count the receipts we get from people who have sent in money, and we, meaning they, I am not a part of it anymore, do not count what the funds that are laying out are. They don't say, we paid Beck a million dollars and we had this program where we raised $300,000, you had a net cost of $600,000, or whatever the numbers are.
Included in the document posted by Mother Jones is the chart below, which shows there is, indeed, some kind of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh "program."
First of all, these numbers are staggering. Even by wingnut standards. No wonder nobody bats an eye about writing a couple of blog posts for 30k or accepting 350k from a foreign government. It's chicken feed for the small fry(ers.)
The blogosphere has been calling this "wingnut welfare" for many years, but I think it was meant more to describe the various sinecures at think tanks and corporations that hired the movement warriors for big bucks so they could wage the crusade in comfort. It also applied to the funding mechanism like buying of books in bulk to create the illusion of popularity. But I honestly didn't know that it existed on this scale for major media figures as some sort of gratuity.
To Armey's credit, he thinks this is a waste of money, and it obviously is. But I'm going to guess that these Malaysian government and Freedomworks revelations is just the tip of the iceberg.
It's so funny to think back to all the crap these people say about "dependency" and "I build that" when so much of what they make is graft and payoffs. Typical gangster society, I guess.
When I think of how hard the progressive movement struggles to stay afloat, with liberal media under constant threat of going under while
our establishment refuses to spend even a tiny portion of the billions that run through their hands on advertising in these venues, it's depressing. In fact, the Democratic political establishment, including big liberal donors, have no interest in supporting a progressive media. Sadly, I can only conclude that this is best explained by the fact that their interests do not align with the progressive movement. Perhaps they should start questioning whether their interests are being served by wingnut welfare though. It's obviously drowning in money. They have so much of it they can throw it at people who are already making hundred of millions doing exactly what they want them to do.
.
