The President's A-Team for Campaign Cash

Full text: http://rollingstone.com/features/nationalaffairs/featuregen.asp?pid=2829

Excerpt from Rolling Stone Magazine:

"Welcome to the most ambitious and best-organized shakedown in the history of American presidential politics. Bush is working to raise a record $200 million -- and so far, at least sixty percent of his campaign donations have come from just 416 elite fund-raisers... Never before have so few raised so much so quickly. It's a fine-tuned operation that takes the principles of corporate America and applies them to political fund-raising: Bigger is better. Foster competition. Reward your best salesmen. Each Pioneer is assigned a tracking number, which donors write on their checks. Results are posted online, ranked by success level, and the campaign uses the list to encourage the fund-raisers to even greater heights...

...In essence, these select fund-raisers serve as bagmen for the president. They hit up wealthy friends and colleagues to give the maximum legal donation of $2,000 each, then bundle up those contributions and deliver them to the campaign.

Some Pioneers rely on a sort of pyramid scheme to gather money...
"Basically, it's an Amway sort of model," says Kevin Rennie, a former Republican state legislator from Connecticut who has monitored Bush's fund-raising effort...

Bush's troops know their efforts will be richly rewarded. After the 2000 elections, the president appointed thirty-eight Pioneers to his transition teams, where they helped shape White House policies to benefit their own industries. He made four of them Cabinet secretaries: Elaine Chao (Labor), Don Evans (Commerce), Tom Ridge (Homeland Security) and Alphonso Jackson (Housing and Urban Development). And he named twenty-two Pioneers to ambassadorships -- including plum posts such as France, Spain, Switzerland and Austria --despite the fact that many had no diplomatic experience. John Price, a Utah shopping-mall developer, was appointed ambassador to Mauritius just a month after a jury found him guilty of swindling his partners of more than $1 million. What mattered more, it seems, was the $1.3 million he raised for Bush. "How would you know about me without those donations?" Price observed. "You wouldn't."

How many of George Bush's pioneers and rangers have children, or for that matter grandchildren, serving in Iraq either now or during the first year of the invasion.

My feeling is once again the children of families that are in the middle (white collar) and working (blue collar) classes are being sent to die while Bu$h and his rich buddies laugh at us.