Billionaire who funded Clarence Thomas's vacations also gave thousands of dollars to Kyrsten Sinema

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

and Joe Manchin

A Republican megadonor has been secretly funding lavish vacations for Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, according to a new ProPublica report.

But Texas billionaire Harlan Crow's largesse goes far beyond yacht trips and resort stays with the top conservative jurist. It also includes thousands of dollars in contributions to congressional Democrats known for bucking their party.

According to an Insider review of federal campaign finance data, Crow has given a total $5,800 to Democratic-turned-Independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's campaign account and $5,000 in May 2022 to Getting Stuff Done PAC, a leadership PAC tied to the Arizona senator.

Crow first contributed $2,900 to Sinema's campaign in June 2021 before giving another $5,800 in November 2021 — prompting the campaign to refund half of it after Crow apparently exceeded federal contribution limits.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-billionaire-who-funded-clarence-thomas-s-vacations-has-also-given-thousands-of-dollars-to-kyrsten-sinema-and-joe-manchin/ar-AA19yiPG

[ChazII]

1. Thank you!

This is good to know.

[pscot]

2. Money corrupts

Big money corrupts bigly. It's astonishing how many newly created Congress-persons go from $.00 to $40 millions over the course of their 1st term.

[Me.]

3. Good To Know

thanks again Pro Publica

[wackadoo wabbit]

4. It's astounding how cheaply she was bought ... n/t

[Irish_Dem]

8. I wonder what is costs to buy a US senator?

[Mr.Bill]

11. For the amounts mentioned above,

Sinema probably doesn't even know his name.

[Irish_Dem]

12. Exactly.

She is someone's dancing bear and it did not come cheap.

[Mr.Bill]

14. To have control of a member of Congress

I imagine would require suitcases full of unmarked bills.

[Irish_Dem]

15. Probably $50 to 100 million?

Senators with no money enter office and became multi-millionaires and remain so for the rest of their lives.

Sinema is a conniving grifter who thinks she is the smartest one in room.
She is all about money.

Somebody is paying her a great deal of cash.
And they expect something in return.

[Mysterian]

5. Someone check that state legislator in NC who switched parties

for dirty money.

[TheRealNorth]

7. That's exactly what I was thinking.

[betsuni]

6. A Republican contributed the legal limit to Sinema and Manchin and the insinuation seems to be

it's somehow corrupting.

He can't just like Democrats who "buck their party," it has to be a conspiracy theory: because he's a billionaire that $5,000 or so has special corrupting powers and he can tell them what to do and they have to do it forever. It's not as if the Democrats he contributed to weren't "bucking their party" already and only started after receiving those magically corrupting "thousands of dollars." The idea that Joe Manchin, especially, has changed in any way because of campaign contributions is silly -- he's not secretly progressive and only being the way he is because he's bribed.

[Celerity]

16. Manchin's coal corruption is so much worse than you knew (from moderate Democrat Sean Casten's

official US House governmental website's newsroom section.)

That contribution from the RW billionaire, as you correctly said, did not change Manchin. With Manchin the issues were baked into the cake decades and decades before that.

The moderate Casten defeated the progressive Marie Newman in an incumbent Dem on incumbent Dem primary for IL-6, then beat the Rethug in the general. I was glad to see him beat Newman, as she had serious ethics investigation issues, plus Casten is superb on the environment, he is one of the top House member experts on climate issues.

https://casten.house.gov/media/in-the-news/manchins-coal-corruption-so-much-worse-you-knew

snip

The truth is, Manchin is best understood as a grifter from the ancestral home of King Coal. He is a man with coal dust in his veins who has used his political skills to enrich himself, not the people of his state. He drives an Italian-made Maserati, lives on a houseboat on the Potomac River when he is in D.C., pals around with corporate CEOs, and has a net worth of as much as $12 million. More to the point, his wealth has been accumulated through controversial coal-related businesses in his home state, including using his political muscle to keep open the dirtiest coal plant in West Virginia, which paid him nearly $5 million over the past decade in fees for coal handling, as well as costing West Virginia electricity consumers tens of millions of dollars in higher electricity rates (more about the details of this in a moment). Virginia Canter, who was ethics counsel to Presidents Obama and Clinton, unabashedly calls Manchin's business operations "a grift." To Canter, Manchin's corruption is even more offensive than Donald Trump's. "With Trump, the corruption was discretionary — you could choose to pay thousands of dollars to host an event at Mar-a-Lago or not," Canter tells me. In contrast, Manchin is effectively taking money right out of the pockets of West Virginians when they pay their electric bills. They have no say in it. "It's one of the most egregious conflicts of interest I've ever seen."

Manchin's grift is emblematic of generations of political leadership in West Virginia. I'm always struck by the difference between coal country and the rest of the state. Unmined places like New River Gorge (now a national park) hint at the spectacular beauty of West Virginia before the coal barons arrived; up in Morgantown, you see a thriving city that is not entirely built with money from mining and burning black rocks. But much of the state is a landscape of corporate exploitation, a place that has been pillaged by outsiders who have sucked out its gas and mined its coal and built mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Hamptons, but left little behind beyond black lung and broken labor unions. The people I have met in coal country in my many visits over the years are tougher than the blade of a bulldozer, smart, self-reliant, deeply connected to the natural world. But the poverty and quiet distress is heartbreaking. If fossil fuels brought prosperity to a place, West Virginians would be dancing on gold-paved streets. Instead, West Virginia is the second-poorest state by median income, and near the bottom of virtually every social indicator of well-being, from obesity to opioid addiction to education. The few well-paying coal jobs that are left are disappearing fast. In 1950, there were 120,000 coal workers in the state; today there are only around 13,000 workers, less than two percent of the state's workforce.

Despite the relentless hardship, Manchin figured out a way to do pretty well for himself. "Joe Manchin will absolutely throw humanity under the coal train without blinking an eye," says Maria Gunnoe, director of the Mother Jones Community Foundation and a longtime West Virginia activist. "My friends and I have a joke about his kind: They'd mine their momma's grave for a buck."

So it was no surprise to Gunnoe that during an appearance on Fox News a week before Christmas, Manchin knifed President Biden's first-term agenda by announcing that he could not support the $1.8 trillion Build Back Better Act: "I have tried everything I know to do" to support this, he told Fox host Bret Baier. Never mind that the bill includes billions of dollars in programs that would help West Virginians struggling with poverty and hardship, or that without the tax breaks and other clean-energy measures in the bill, Biden's goal of cutting U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions in half from 2005 levels would be all but impossible to achieve. And without U.S. leadership on climate, the chances that the nations of the world will reduce emissions fast enough to hold warming at 1.5 C, which is the threshold for dangerous climate change, is virtually zero. "If Build Back Better goes down," says John Podesta, a Democratic powerbroker and former special adviser to President Obama who has been deeply involved in international climate negotiations, "then we are completely fucked."

snip

[2naSalit]

9. Heh...

[erronis]

10. There appear to be no controls whatsoever on who can produce $$$ at will.

The USofA and most nations have tried to have a national currency that is somewhat controlled - actual value vs. fiat.

I'm starting to think that the sums of cash that are now floating out there for the most unworthy are artificial - they are not attached to any true value.

Back in some olden days, the Soviets used to manufacture "fake bucks", and so did the US against its adversaries.

Now I think that the current USSRussia and many other petro-countries are doing the same thing. Question is - how can we detect it, and what can we do about it?

[Stuart G]

13. Thank You for Posting & Sharing With Us...K and R