Questionable Donations

While looking around at the campaign donation statistics at opensecrets.org, this table of Lyndon Larouche’s top contributors’s caught my eye :

Lockheed Martin $5,700
American System Publications $5,675
Eastern States Distributors $5,500
PGM Inc $5,250
Hsdi $5,130
US Postal Service $4,600
Levit & James $4,000
City of New York $3,650
Internal Revenue Service $3,100
Aerospace Corp $3,000
EIR News Service $2,700
State of New Jersey $2,650
JC Penney $2,625
City of Los Angeles $2,590
US Army $2,350
Esdi $2,250
Continental Airlines $2,250
Eirns $2,250
Verizon Communications $2,250
Sels $2,200

Does anybody know if the highlighted sections are legal? I’ve searched the whole site looking for more details on the contributions but I can’t find anything. Is this kind of thing normal?

It seems to me that there are three possibilities here : (1) these government organizations are funneling tax dollars to a political candidate, (2) PAC’s set up by the employees of these government organizations are donating their personal money to a candidate in the name of their employer, or (3) this is all a big mixup by either opensecrets.org or the Larouche campaign. The most logical explanation is (2), but even that seems a little sketchy. Is it really a good idea for tax-supported groups to appear to support one candidate over another?


posted by greg on December 22, 2003 @ 4:27 pm

2 comments

  1. The IRS wants dibs on any Martian taxes from LaRouche’s planned colony.

    Comment by Darth Revenue — December 22, 2003 @ 8:20 pm

  2. When you donate to a polical campaign they are required by law to ask who you work for. Opensecret and other campaign watch dogs then take everyone from a given company and list them as if the company donated all that money.

    The reason they do this is that only 1% of americans give more than $50.00 to political campaigns, or some such number, so it is a good bet that if 50 guys from Lockheed Martin each give the $2,000 maximum to Bush, in the primaries and again in the general election, they are acting in concert to reward Bush for helping out Lockheed Martin.

    That having been said, people tend to bandy around these numbers as if the City of New York, say had given LL $5,000, when in fact there are just several Larouchites who work for the City of New York who gave him money, and just in case the City of New York is supporting LaRouche covertly trough its employees’ contributions, we add all those up and list it as if it were a donation from the City of New York. But it’s not.

    Any way, I think that’s how it works.

    Comment by joew — December 23, 2003 @ 12:55 pm

Copy link for RSS feed for comments on this post

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.