Krystal Ball just accused Warren of abandoning economic populism in favor of "gender tokenism"

[lapucelle]

50. Is Krystal Ball's PAC a fresh approach or a get-rich scheme?

A new Democratic group — one with support from Democratic congressmen and three of the biggest names in the tech industry — is testing the boundary between a new approach to politics and a self-enriching scam.

When the People’s House Project launched last May, founder Krystal Ball billed it as an organization that would defy old conventions and show Democrats a new model for winning campaigns. The former MSNBC host said her political action committee would support longshot candidates who embraced economic populism and lacked a political background — the kind of office-seekers who normally don’t receive support from party leaders.

But thus far, nobody has benefited more financially from the group than Ball herself. Of the $445,000 Ball raised for the group, she paid herself more than a third of that — $174,000 — in salary, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission. The majority of her salary — $104,000 — came in the first three months of this year alone. That’s nearly eight times more than the nearly $22,000 the PHP has used to support its dozen endorsed candidates, some of whom have received just a single $1,000 contribution.

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Political groups with a glaring discrepancy between personal salaries and candidate contributions are often deemed so-called “Scam PACs,” a type of organization that enriches its founders while doing little to assist the cause or candidate they purportedly support. And indeed, when presented with the FEC data by McClatchy, several of PHP’s donors and supporters reacted with anger, going so far as to withdraw their endorsement and contributions.

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Ball also paid her own salary in fits and starts, something she says happened because of the group’s early uneven fundraising. When she received Hughes’s $50,000 contribution on December 21st, for example, she paid herself $25,000 the same day.

On a single day this year, March 1, she received $61,000 total in salary, according to FEC reports.

Ball said her annual salary should be $15,000 a month (or $180,000 annually) and that the extra money she made in the first three months of this year was back pay for last year’s efforts. (Her executive director, Moffett, should make a salary of $120,000 annually, she said.)

Pressed why her group hasn’t paid more money directly to candidates, she said PHP plans to eventually maximize a $5,000 contribution to all of its endorsed candidates. She said the group will “probably” also begin an independent expenditure campaign to help some of its candidates

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https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article210775574.html

You can find all the details at Open Secret. In the 2018 cycle, the top recipient of the donations was Ball herself at $279,333 in salary.

https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/expenditures.php?cycle=2018&cmte=C00639997