The Congressman from... Delaware LLC?
Before he was President Harry Truman or the unprosecuted war criminal that dropped nuclear holocausts upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, Truman was known broadly and dismissively in Washington as “the Senator from Pendergast.”Tom Pendergast was the fraudulent and violent political machine boss of 1930’s Kansas City and the local captain of gambling, drugs, and prostitution that, at the pinnacle of his power within organized crime, elevated the bespectacled haberdashery owner, Truman, into a U.S. Senate seat in 1934.
In Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-born refugee elected to Congress, is being challenged in a primary by a Twin Cities corporate attorney named Antone Melton-Meaux, who criticized the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015 and worked to protect employers against the #Metoo movement in 2018. While polls show that Omar is popular in her district, Melton-Meaux raised $3.2 million for his campaign during the second fiscal quarter, $400,000 of it from pro-Israel PACS that are presumably hostile to Omar’s uniquely-tough rhetoric against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
According to his FEC filing last week, candidate Melton-Meaux dropped $1.1 million from his war chest to an entity called “WCPA.” It’s unclear who this is. The entity does not have a match in the OpenCorporates online database, though there is a WPCA, LLC that registered in Delaware in May. And the campaign has also paid $100,000 to two Delaware LLCs registered late in 2019. The names of those companies, North Superior Consulting LLC and Lake Point Consulting, suggest they are Minnesota-based, but they aren’t. His campaign calls them “communications and strategy consulting firms that work largely outside of politics, with very limited political experience,” adding the fact that the campaign has signed nondisclosure agreements with both companies.
What’s the nature of their work? Why are they being paid? And why is money being shuffled around to include unidentified subcontractors? Melton-Meaux’s television ad buys in Minnesota have gone through Canal Partners Media, according to his Federal Communications Commission filings, but that group is not listed on his report to the Federal Election Commission. Joe Biden’s Delaware is, of course, famous for being a safe haven for the credit card businesses of Citi, Chase, Barclays, Discover, and Bank of America, half the national market for credit. It’s a state flooded with “home bases” for interstate and international corporations, with low tax rates for banks and where corporate legal disputes are resolved by judges, not juries.
Financial entities seem to be very interested in Minnesota’s fifth congressional district. The cash is coming in fast to Melton-Meaux-- 94% of it from outside the state, and at six times the rate that the incumbent is raising it for the last quarter-- and from fewer contributors overall, but comprised of much larger individual contributions. The candidate’s law firm has defended union-busting companies so that would certainly be attractive to the world of finance. After that, 65% of the money is being spent in Delaware. But to whom? It’s a violation of the law if secondary vendors are being used to hide the ultimate recipients of a campaign’s spending. Antone Melton-Meaux is vying to become “the Senator from….” Where, or who? We don't know. But it’s not Minnesota.
posted by CM @ 11:33 AM
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