Lincoln Project Still Raising Money to ‘Defeat Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue’ in Georgia Senate Runoff
Do you even grift, bro?
The Lincoln Project, the Democratic-aligned super PAC whose critics have accused it of being a shameless grifting operation, is still raising money for the Georgia Senate runoff elections, which took place on Jan. 5.
The controversial group, which recently parted ways with cofounder John Weaver after dozens of young men accused him of sexually inappropriate behavior, hasn't stopped asking people who subscribe to its email list to donate money "to help us defeat Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue," the Republican senators who were already defeated almost three weeks ago.
"As Donald Trump does everything he can to undermine democracy, the balance of power in the Senate—and Joe Biden's ability to heal this nation—are on the ballot in Georgia," wrote Lincoln Project cofounder Reed Galen in an automated welcome email sent out on Monday.
"The time to act is now," the email continues. "Can you rush a contribution of $100, $50, or $13 to help us defeat Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue? The sooner you can help, the more impactful your investment."
Galen goes on to claim that the Lincoln Project is "the most effective movement reaching and persuading Republicans to vote against Trumpism."
Prior to the Georgia runoffs, in which the Lincoln Project supported the winning Democratic candidates, the super PAC was 0-7 in key Senate races in the 2020 election cycle.
Club For Growth billionaires finance fascist Republican politicians
A recent study by the Center for Responsive Politics, reported by the Guardian, reveals that 42 Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn the January 6 election results received a combined $20 million in funding from the Club for Growth (CFG). The CFG is a billionaire-backed conservative consortium dedicated to advancing the interests of the financial oligarchy by backing anti-tax, anti-regulation and pro-charter school politicians.
In his bid to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself as president-dictator, Donald Trump had the backing of substantial sections of the Republican Party, including many recipients of CFG donations over the years.
Within the last two weeks, two Republican representatives, freshman Colorado Congresswoman and QAnon adherent Lauren Boebert and Maryland Representative Andy Harris, were stopped by Capitol Police trying to enter the floor of the House, each with a gun on their person. Both voted to reject the Electoral College vote on January 6, hours after pro-Trump fascists had overrun the Capitol in a bid to stop the official counting of the votes, and both have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from the Club for Growth. Broebert set off a newly installed metal detector outside the House chamber on January 12, while Harris is under investigation by Capitol police after trying to enter the House floor with a pistol on January 21.
The CFG has been the primary financial backer of Harris since his election in 2010, giving his campaign roughly $345,000 over that time. As of October 6, Federal Election Commission Reports revealed that Club for Growth’s Super PAC, Club for Growth Action, had spent $706,000 on ads and pamphlets attacking Boebert’s opponent.
The current head of the CFG is former Indiana Republican Representative David McIntosh, who has led the organization since 2014. CFG money has been instrumental in electing leading Republican senators over the last decade, including Ted Cruz (Texas), Marco Rubio (Florida), Ben Sasse (Nebraska), Josh Hawley (Missouri), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) and Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania).
In 2018, the CFG spent millions on negative ads targeting the opponents of Cruz and Hawley while giving generously to their respective campaigns, with Cruz receiving $234,832 while Hawley received $299,301. The CFG spent $3 million on attack ads against Hawley’s Democratic opponent, Claire McCaskill, while in Texas, it helped Cruz fend off a challenge by Beto O’ Rourke, spending $1.2 million on negative ads against the Democratic challenger. Cruz and Hawley led the Republican campaign in the Senate to reject the Electoral College vote as submitted by the various states, and both voted against accepting the results of the election in the hours following the attempted fascist takeover of Congress.
In the 2016 presidential campaign, the CFG initially opposed the candidacy of Trump, donating millions to his opponents, but after Trump bested Rubio, Cruz and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul in the primaries, the organization quickly shifted to supporting Trump. As McIntosh recalled in a 2019 interview with the Daily Beast, “it was critical for the survival of the Club for Growth to pivot from having opposed Trump in the presidential primaries to being affirmatively supportive of Trump in the policy battles.” McIntosh added, “If they’re a Never Trumper, we’re not going to support them.”
This pivot to Trump and the fascistic politics he embodies is representative not only of the fascistic turn of the Republican party, but of substantial sections of the ruling financial oligarchy, which are turning toward fascism to defend their wealth in the face of growing militancy and anti-capitalist sentiment in the working class.
The Club for Growth was founded in 1999 by Stephen Moore, former Wall Street Journal writer, Heritage Foundation economist and adviser to Trump. Moore founded the CFG along with Thomas Rhodes, Harlan Crow and Richard Gilder. Since its founding, the CFG has played an outsized role in US politics, donating millions of dollars primarily to Republican candidates, while running negative advertisements against their opponents.
As of 2018, the latest data available, the CFG’s board of directors includes:
* Kenneth Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state and member of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Center.
* Howard Rich, chairman and co-founder of Americans for Limited Government. Rich donated $225,000 to a super PAC that bought ads promoting the candidacy of another QAnon fascist, freshman Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
* Virginia James, the widow of Club for Growth co-founder Richard Gilder. James has donated millions of dollars to far-right causes, including $250,000 in 2020 to the Charles Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity.
Since 2005, the CFG has released an annual scorecard that ranks politicians on their adherence to the CFG’s goals and announces a “Defender of Economic Freedom” award to those who score above 90 percent. For the 2018 congressional cycle, the CFG awarded 25 Republican politicians with scores above 90 percent, while four US senators and three representatives received perfect scores.
Those who received perfect scores from the CFG included two Arizona representatives, Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, both of whom voted to overturn the election results and were instrumental in leading and organizing “Stop the Steal” rallies in Arizona following Trump’s electoral defeat, as well as the rally outside the White House on January 6. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Biggs received over $55,000 from the CFG between 2015 and 2020.
The biggest donors to the CFG are billionaires Richard and Liz Uihlein, owners of Uline Packaging, and billionaire Jeffery Yass, who co-founded the Susquehanna International Group, an options trading company. The Center for Responsive Politics revealed that Richard Uihlein donated $27 million to the CFG in 2020 and $6.7 million in 2018, while Yass donated $20.7 million to the CFG in 2020 and $3.8 million in 2018.
The Uihleins have played a leading role in mobilizing and organizing politically disoriented and fascistic elements against coronavirus-induced lockdowns. In April, the Uihleins, along with Stephen Moore, secretly organized an unsuccessful recall campaign against Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers, along with multiple protests at the state Capitol against any restrictions to stop the spread of the virus.
WBEZ in Illinois revealed on January 12 that Richard Uihlein gave nearly $4.3 million to the political action committee of the Tea Party Patriots, including $800,000 this past October. The marchtosaveamerica.com website, before it was taken down after the January 6 coup attempt, listed the Tea Party Patriots as one of the 11 groups “participating in the March to Save America,” as part of the “#StopTheSteal coalition.”
The Uihleins also funneled $800,000 into two Midwest Senate races, supporting Republicans John James in Michigan and Joni Ernst in Iowa. Ernst has fought against any restrictions on business to halt the spread of the virus, labeling it a “hoax.” Salon reported last October that James, along with Vice President Mike Pence, was photographed with the head of the American Patriot Council, Grand Rapids resident Ryan D. Kelley.
Kelley, who gave thousands to James’s 2018 and 2020 campaigns, organized the “Well-Regulated Militia” American Patriot Council rally on June 27 in Lansing to protest coronavirus restrictions and “government tyranny.” One of the attendees at the rally was Adam Fox, the alleged leader of the Wolverine Watchmen, which, according to the FBI, was planning to kidnap and assassinate Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. FBI affidavits allege that Fox used the rally to recruit accomplices.
Faurecia Gladstone Rank-and-File Committee calls for congressional investigation into Trump's coup attempt
The following statement was issued by the Faurecia Gladstone Rank-and-File Safety Committee, which was formed last year by auto parts workers in Columbus, Indiana to oppose unsafe working conditions during the pandemic. To join or build a rank-and-file safety committee at your own workplace, contact the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter at autoworkers@wsws.org.
Brothers and sisters:
The Faurecia Gladstone Rank-and-File Safety Committee opposes the bipartisan efforts to bury the January 6 coup attempt by Donald Trump. We demand a full public congressional investigation, as well as the arrest and prosecution of all those responsible for planning, carrying out and providing political cover for the attempt to overthrow the Constitution! We must prepare for political general strike action against these fatal threats to our democratic rights!
Why are there no charges against all the criminals who planned and carried out the attack on our nation’s capital? Why are there no hearings and public investigations of the widespread conspiracies involved? Every day there are new indications of the breadth and depth of involvement of powerful figures in the Republican Party, the Defense Department and police departments from coast to coast. But nothing of consequence is being done to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Until almost the day of the fascist assault, Senator Mitch McConnell provided Trump’s coup plot with a political pretext by promoting bogus claims of ballot fraud. He now proposes to postpone the impeachment until February to give Trump’s lawyers “time to prepare.”
And from Biden and the Democrats, we hear no objection. They are desperate to prevent us, the workers, from seeing the criminals in our midst. More than the fascist right, they fear the independent mobilization of the working class.
Who are the conspirators? The congresswoman from Colorado who gave a tour to the mob the day before the insurrection. The Pentagon brass that ordered the National Guard to stand down. They seem to want to provoke another civil war. They must be exposed before the working class.
The conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution cannot be separated from the conspiracy to sacrifice human lives for private profit. Last year US billionaires raked in over $1 trillion even as 400,000 Americans died. Elon Musk, who raked in over $150 billion, is working with the military to build a “cybertruck.” Jeff Bezos, who took in some $80 billion during the pandemic, made billions in contracts with the CIA for cloud computing services. And the government is giving them trillions of dollars and giving the working class chicken feed.
Every day we come to work we enter a cesspool of COVID-19 and place ourselves and our families in danger. Most jobs are not essential production. The Democrats and Republicans are pumping billions into the profits of the pandemic profiteers instead of handing workers a paycheck so they can stay home, stay safe and take care of their families.
Faurecia pushes herd immunity, encouraging the spread. They put on a show about wearing masks and social distancing. But that is just PR. On the shop floor, the rules go out the window. They have used the pandemic to lay off more than 250 workers. They have cut costs imposing overtime to push up production. These companies are making billions of dollars at our expense. They are spreading the virus like wildfire and killing their employees.
People are fearful they are going to lose their houses, their cars, everything. There is immense anger among workers over these conditions. The profiteers are fearful their party is over—the working class is banding together. They are doing all they can to stop the working class. This is what was really behind Trump’s coup attempt.
The time has come to join forces. Take a stand! We are appealing to our co-workers in the South Plant in Columbus, at Louisville and Fort Wayne. Join us and build the national network of rank-and-file safety committees.
The way forward for workers is to form rank-and-file safety committees in every workplace, as part of our growing national network, which includes representatives from auto plants, school districts and Amazon warehouses from around the country. Join the fight today!
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