Rumble on the Right : Teabagging for Fun and Profit
Trouble in paradise:
Tea-bagger convention is for-profit scam
By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / January 28, 2010
Even though they've had their efforts publicized by Fox News and funded by large right-wing organizations like FreedomWorks, the teabaggers are still not a very organized group of people. They can't even agree on the best way to proceed now that they've made a name for themselves.
Some of them want to start a new teabagger third party. Others want to take over the Republican Party (which they rightly believe is owned by Wall Street). This has already happened in Florida, where establishment party leaders have been ousted and replaced by teabagger leaders.
Then there was word of a teabagger convention to be held in Nashville in February of this year. The organizer of the convention, attorney Judson Phillips, tried to pass off the convention as an effort to unify the teabaggers and provide direction for their future efforts. The fly in the ointment is that he has set his organization, Tea Party Nation, up as a for-profit organization.
In other words, if a profit is made off the convention, he's under no obligation to use those funds toward future teabagger efforts or campaigns. It would be perfectly legal (and very probable) for Phillips to just put the money in his own bank account, and congratulate himself on a successful money-making venture.
Consider the following. He is selling about 500 tickets to the convention for $560 each (and this does NOT include the cost of hotel rooms). That's a cool $280,000 right there. And don't forget that he's booked Sarah Palin for a speech, and he's selling tickets to an additional 600 people for several hundred dollars each. That pushes the take up to around half a million dollars. And that doesn't count the sponsors Phillips has lined up for the event.
He does have to pay for a convention room, but not a very large one -- it only has to have room for 500 participants (and he can easily squeeze another 600 in for just one speech). This space probably doesn't even cost as much as he's paying Sarah Palin to make her speech. And I imagine details like sound system, security, etc. are probably included in the money he'll pay for the convention space.
That leaves him with the cost of Sarah Palin. Rumor has it that she will receive $100,000 for her (probably incoherent) speech. Neither Phillips nor Palin will confirm or deny that this is what she'll be paid, but that in itself confirms the amount. As sensitive as Palin is to bad publicity, I'm sure she would make it known if she was receiving less than that.
I'm betting that Phillips will clear at least $200,000 profit off the convention (probably more). And it looks like some of the teabaggers are finally waking up to the fact that they are being scammed by an unscrupulous lawyer.
Knoxville teabagger Antonio Hinton says, "I don't begrudge people making money, but that's not what the tea party is about. That convention has nothing to do with the tea party movement, as far as I'm concerned." A Nashville-based teabagger called Tea Party Nation "dishonest" and said it is "hijacking the tea party movement."
Conservative and RedState blogger Erick Erickson thinks it "smells scammy" and says, "I think it is a great con of people making money off the passions of others... A $500+ per person fee to a for-profit organization run by people most people have never heard of is neither populist nor accessible for many tea party activists."
At least three sponsors have also withdrawn their support after learning the event is a profit-making venture for Phillips. American Majority, a training group for teabagger organizations, withdrew and said, "Who is this guy? What are his motivations? And what gives him the credibility to try to step in and insert himself as a leader of the movement?"
And now it looks like the convention may suffer the greatest insult of all. Some teabagger organizations are saying they may actually picket the convention. Can you imagine teabaggers picketing outside of a teabagger convention?
Most readers of this blog will know that I have very little respect for the teabagger movement, but I also hate to see people being taken advantage of. I'm glad they are finally waking up and realizing that this convention is nothing more than a scam to separate them from their hard-earned money.
[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]
The Rag Blog
Labels:
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11 comments:
Ooohhh. their support for Corporations being allowed to make vast fortunes by charging people huge chunks of their own money for a service they deny to most of their customers... Meaning Health Insurance. One Right Wing radio investment advisor came out with a statistic that 60% of all claims are initially denied, but if you make a big enough deal out of it (years of litigation in which the Corporate Lawyers have the upper hand) you have about a 20% chance of getting your claim upheld.
That's a total of around 50% denied. I'll go out on a limb here and if the Insurance Company Shills (Fox, for instance) who organized and financed the Tea Party want to contest my opinion, they need to prove I'm wrong, that the number edges into "most" territory.
The Tea Party heartily deny that anything could possibly be wrong with such an arrangement. So it comes back to bite them in Tennessee. Eh.
Freedom for Corporations to charge money for a service they don't actually provide, Imagine that if you will.
They wanted to scream long and loud about it, Corporate "freedom" to make money trumps the rights of the People to survive,
Let them eat cake.
I think Sarah Palin is doing a book signing in Cool Springs before the tea party event. It will be interesting to see how that is received by the area.
Jonah is just lying. No other conclusion can be drawn. I am in a couple of tea party movements in Austin. We have no corporate backers and we dont need any. Most of our time and effort is spent in learning about and being involved in the political activities that interest us. Whenever money is needed, which isnt often, we pay it out of our own pocket. The leaders in these groups are parents and workers just like the members. There are ZERO people in these groups providing any corporate dollars or influence. Jonah is just spreading more hateful lies.
As for insurance claims being denied, I dont need to listen to any talking head on the radio as Jonah seems to. I just need to talk to my relatives, friends and neighbors, most of whom have insurance as I do. This group spans a couple hundred people that I stay in touch with regularly. I can count on one hand the number of claims that I have even heard about that were questioned let alone denied. It rarely happens. Just this last year my wife had a pretty rare heart condition and needed surgery. The claim involved two different insurance companies and a couple of specialists. The insurance providers coordinated the benefits and paid the bill leaving me with only the deductible to pay. No denial, no delay, just service.
Shame on you Jonah. Your hate filled lies reflect poorly on those progressives on this site that are passionate in their beliefs, but dont stoop to lying to make their case.
DHS-
It's no surprise that you're a teabagger, but don't hide your head in the sand. FreedomWorks has provided money and organizers and Fox News has provided publicity, and I doubt that is anywhere near the end of the corporate support.
One thing that I hear often from Progressives is that because there arent a lot of black people in the tea party groups, we must be a bunch of racists.
I visted "brother" Jonahs weblink at Not My Tribe and guess what I found? Well well well. A bunch of white people listed as "contributors". Not a single black person made the list and only one woman is listed.(http://notmytribe.com/about-us). I guess that means we should consider Jonah and his co contributors as racists as well. Welcome to the team ya haters :)
Hey Ted. Fuck You and your teabagger comment. If you think corporate support and media publicity makes an organization somehow illegitimate, then you better include OFA, MoveOn, and the Daily Kos (Jet Blue)
You were the one claiming ZERO corporate dollars, DHS.
And by the way DHS, you really should clean up your language. Cursing and name-calling don't win you any points in a debate.
Hey, I've been treated to the Health Care system as it stands if you're disabled, unemployed and in Texas. As a result thereof, I now have a titanium shank holding my right foot and ankle together.
That was my first priority once I got SSI and the resulting Medicaid. Socialized Medicine saved my Left Foot. It was 14 years too late for the Right one though.
One big parcel of Tea-Party hatred and lies is the notion that somebody can sue any corporation just for having a minor injury and being set for life. Oh, and the anti-Union rhetoric. If there had been a strong union in Texas the accident that claimed the use of my Right Foot wouldn't have happened. Left to Good Ol' Free Market Capitalism, with no safety regulation, the Pendejo I was working for had taken the ladder to a second job site and left us to walk up and down a conveyor belt like a ramp. Real "Industry being strangled by Unions and Safety Regulations" there.
I was also working out of a Temp Labor Service run by a Halliburton Subsidiary. You know Halliburton, right? one of the largest construction companies in the World and THE largest in Texas. They didn't even keep records of my employment, they were taking out my social security tax but not reporting it.
Y'all still fly that Rebel Flag at the Tea Parties? I plumb reckon you don't think of that as racist, "not Hate, Heritage" is the Lie they put on their bumper stickers...
You're sticking a flag of slavery in the faces of not just blacks but Native Americans (I'm only part and not tribal) and Hispanics. That flag has been used to drape every Racist action the Klan ever did and you still fly it.
"Hey, we don't Hate you, we're just proud that our ancestors started a war that killed 300,000 Americans not counting Confederate casualties to try to keep slavery Legal".
"We don't Hate you, exactly, we just think we're that much superior to you, by the color of our skin, that you have to do as we say or we'll lynch you".
Your Tea Party Klan lynched "in effigy" the president of the United States in Georgia. Not a red hot month ago.
I had Confederate ancestors and relatives, one of my Cherokee uncles had part of his skull torn off by a Yankee Minie-ball in Virginia. The doctor said it would kill him, and sure enough, 80 years later, it did.
I'm just not proud that any of my kin had anything to do with that horse-shit.
I can't be ashamed of their actions, because they weren't MY actions. I'm sure as Hell not going to celebrate them though.
The Tea Party has been coordinated and for all practical purposes run by Clear Channel and by Fox "News". The same ones who just a 3 years ago had a week-long Hissie-fit "OUTRAGE!" Segment Tantrum because the New York Times dared to enter into a business agreement for a half-page newspaper ad critical of George coWard Bush and his puppet Generally Betrays Us.
Even got the Then-Republican controlled Congress involved.
Fox and Clear Channel provide for the Teabaggers a much more monetarily valuable service. Where's the Tea Party OUTRAGE! over that? Oh, that's right, Glenn Beck and O'Reilly and Rush (ChickenHawk hypocrites all) haven't Told them to be outraged.
My mistake for thinking that somehow that's evidence demonstrating that they're running the show for you.
The "Brother" part of my name is a Christian informality. We use it in Church a lot. It's incidentally why black PEOPLE use the terms "Brother" and "Sister". Not being black or not being white wouldn't be any part of any consideration I make for standing against Racist Hatred.
Meditate on this truth with us...
I'm also multi-"racial", I have the United Nations in my family. So do you. Whether you acknowledge that or not.
In Texas it's why people call each other "Cousin" all the time. You live there, you might have encountered that.
Come look at my foot and tell me again how I'm "lying" about any of the health care comments. I plumb reckon you won't, the Teabaggers hide behind their Shouting Crowd Mob to say that Poor people don't deserve health care, or any other part necessary to life. They're generally too yellow to come to one's face and tell him that he doesn't deserve to live. When confronted with it on an individual basis the crawl away, shamed. Until they get back into their Mob and the Mob Mentality takes over again.
I wonders, yes I does, if any of the Teabagger "leaders" who carry guns to presidential appearances and have Mock-Lynched the President of the United States... all in the name "Liberty"... will extend even a polite squeaky little protest against DHS and the FBI for arresting a Black American the other day, in Colorado, for carrying literature that's far less inflammatory than the speech or actions of the TeaBaggers?
Actually, I don't actually wonder. The Local Teabagger Leaders and propaganda outlets are calling Ojore Lutalo a Terrorist. Mostly because they live in a perpetual state of Terror.
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