Downwind From Pew

Investor's Business Daily has a few things to say about the fraud called Campaign Finance Reform and the involvement of Pew Charitable Trust and seven other liberal organizations. All the more reason for Congress to launch an investigation into whether Pew and their "co-conspirators" attempted to loby Congress, which would be quite illegal for them to do.

"Free Speech: Was the campaign for campaign finance reform just another big-money front? It seems that those who complain most about the corrupting influence of money in politics know whereof they speak."

A good deal of this money provided by George Soros' Open Society Institute.

"A tape obtained by Ryan Sager of the New York Post gives it away. Sean Treglia, a former program officer for tax-exempt Pew Charitable Trust, is heard on the tape telling students at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications last year that Pew essentially functioned as a money-laundering operation for large left-of-center foundations interested in the passage of campaign finance reform legislation.

"The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot," Treglia said, and that everywhere Congress looked, "people were talking about reform."

At another point Treglia said: "By law, the grantees always have to disclose. But I always encouraged the grantees never to mention Pew," with the purpose "to convey the impression that this was something coming naturally from outside the Beltway.""

Try and deny that this is fraud and it strikes me that it may be a violation of the law and money laundering as well.

"So what we have here was an attempt to use big money to manipulate the political process to pass legislation designed to prevent big money from manipulating the political process.

The passage of McCain-Feingold did nothing of the sort, however, since Soros and his cronies found a way around the law, with Soros alone funneling at least $24 million through a variety of issue advocacy groups known as 527s.

According the nonpartisan Political Money Line, Pew spent an average of $4 million a year over 10 years to promote campaign finance reform; of the $140 million spent to promote it in the last decade, $123 million came from eight left-of-center foundations.

Not only is this attempt to curb political speech transparently hypocritical, and borderline illegal, it is doomed to fail. As we have noted before on this page, money is like water. It finds its own level and if you dam it up in one place, it merely finds another route."

This appears to qualify as a conspiracy. In this case, a conspiracy to hoodwink the American people an Congress. If anything cries out for a full investigation, this does. By the way, where is the MSM on this? The silence from them is deafening. Of course, they are exempted from all of this reform, so perhaps they have a conflict of interest here. I continue to urge all of you to contact your Congressional representatives and demand a full investigation into this fiasco. - Sailor