The gig is up for the everyone's favorite deficit fetishists, Simpson and Bowles. It starts great with the headline:
Anti-debt group finds itself in red. It gets even better.
A year and a half after launching with much fanfare, a group affiliated with fiscal watchdogs Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson is nearly broke
Well, that was a little sloppy of them. Oh, and about that "grass-roots energy":
“Without someone/something else covering staff costs and without fundraising miracles like Stan or near-Stan happening consistently, I don’t know how we both sustain [an] organization and do meaningful things,” Nick Troiano, co-founder and communications director of the group, wrote in a November email.
Troiano was referring to a large donation by hedge fund manager Stan Druckenmiller. According to emails, Druckenmiller provided the group with a $250,000 check in June 2013. That single check accounted for nearly 40 percent of the group’s fundraising haul last year.
... it also took meetings or made fundraising asks of former oil and gas executive T. Boone Pickens, aerospace magnate Norman R. Augustine and First Pacific CEO Bob Rodriguez, among others, since 2012 ... and asked to be set up with former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, eBay CEO John Donahoe and others.
As Politico says, "Both Fix the Debt and The Can Kicks Back have struggled with the perception that they are 'astroturf' advocacy groups that are acting as mouthpieces of Wall Street and corporate interests." Gee, hard to imagine where
that perception came from.
Frauds. But we already knew that. Now we know they're frauds who can't even balance a budget.