We Have Been Stung
If you remember the movie, The Sting from a few years ago, you will know how it feels to have the wool pulled over your eyes. That is exactly what has happened to the American people concerning campaign finance reform. The truth has finally come out.
Real Clear Politics yesterday pointed to an article by Ryan Sager in yesterday’s New York Post, entitled, Buying ‘Reform’. You simply must read the entire article to be fully informed.
Mr. Sager, has a tape “”of a conference held at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication in March of 2004”” in which “Sean Treglia, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts” has confessed to the scam.
As Mr. Sager outlines, “The Story in Brief” from the tape:
“Charged with promoting campaign-finance reform when he joined Pew in the mid-1990s, Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of “experts” all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.
“The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington,” Treglia says ”100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. “The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot” that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform.”
The money to pay for the scam:
” These foundations were: the Pew Charitable Trusts ($40.1 million), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy ($17.6 million), the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($14.1 million), the Joyce Foundation ($13.5 million), George Soros’ Open Society Institute ($12.6 million), the Jerome Kohlberg Trust ($11.3 million), the Ford Foundation ($8.8 million) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($5.2 million).
Not exactly all household names, but the left-wing groups that these foundations support may be more familiar: the Earth Action Network, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the Public Citizen Foundation, the Feminist Majority Foundation . . . “
He further lays out what the money bought:
” What did this liberal foundation crowd buy with its $123 million?
For starters, a stable of supposedly independent pro-reform groups, with Orwellian names you may have heard in the press: the Center for Public Integrity, the William J. Brennan Center for Justice, Democracy 21 and so on.
Plus, favorable press coverage.”
Further quoting from the tape:
” Back to the videotape, where an unidentified (but apparently sympathetic) individual asks Treglia: “What would have happened had a major news organization gotten a hold of this at the wrong time?”
“We had a scare,” Treglia says. “As the debate was progressing and getting pretty close, George Will stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column. And a lot of his partisans were becoming aware of Pew’s role and were feeding him information. And he started to reference the fact that Pew had played a large role in this” “that this was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress.”
“But you know what the good news is from my perspective?” Treglia says to the stunned crowd. “Journalists didn’t care . . . So no one followed up on the story. And so there was a panic there for a couple of weeks because we thought the story was going to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up.”
So we have all been had. We have all been duped into thinking that campaign finance reform would be a great benefit to all of us.
It is our hope that as the light of day shines on this story, the rats, roaches, and other parasites, are scattered and finally exposed.
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July 16th, 2005 at 5:02 pm
[…] We wrote extensively concerning how this law got through both houses of Congress finally to rest on the President’s desk for signature. Our previous article, We Have Been Stung, quoted a New York Post article, Buying ‘Reform’ which exposed a tape “of a conference held at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication in March of 2004” which demonstrated that in fact it was a highly motivated, and well financed media blitz designed to make the public believe that campaign finance reform was needed. It was so effective, the House and Senate overwhelmingly approved the law, and the President signed it fearing a backlash from a contrived public approval. […]