Huffington Post's Paul Blumenthal has
done some profitable digging into two Pennsylvania-based nonprofits which have been actively funding Sen. Rand Paul's (R-KY) presidential campaign, Sen. Pat Toomey's (R-PA) re-election campaign, as well as national education privatization efforts.
The nonprofits, Rosebush Corp. and Green Orchard Inc., both appear to be associated with the Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania-based investment firm and its three wealthy principals: Jeffrey Yass, Joel Greenberg and Arthur Dantchik. The two groups have dispersed at least $6.5 million to conservative nonprofits and super PACs since 2011, though the source of those funds has remained unclear because nonprofits are not subject to disclosure requirements—a phenomenon that led to those funds being known as “dark money.”
The three traders are known for spending big on Pennsylvania politics through super PACs, including governor’s races and Philadelphia’s most recent mayoral primary elections, and in support of a public education privatization agenda. Yass has recently emerged as the biggest backer of Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) bid for the Republican presidential nomination, giving more than $2 million to super PACs that support his campaign. […]
While the structure of the two organizations shields their funders, the executives appear to be tied to the groups through one man: Brian Patrick Sullivan, who is listed as both the director and treasurer for Rosebush Corporation and Green Orchard. (His jobs with the Rosebush Corp. ended in 2013 when the nonprofit terminated. Green Orchard was created that same year.)
Sullivan’s distinct “BPS” signature also appears on documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on behalf of Susquehanna International Group, where he is the chief financial officer and treasurer. The same signature appears on tax forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service for the Susquehanna Foundation, a charitable foundation started and funded by Yass, Greenberg and Dantchik. And his signature appears on the tax forms for Students First, a Pennsylvania education reform group that the three traders have supported.
Susquehanna International Group was founded in the late 1980s and is a big player in options trading. Curiously, considering the group's support for Rand Paul's presidential campaign, its operating philosophy "came from Yass’s years as playing high stakes poker and betting on horses: Spread your bets, bet big and bet often, as it was once described in a
Philadelphia Magazine piece on the secretive trader." Paul is not a particularly good bet for 2016.
But Paul would be good for extremely wealthy people who want to play fast and loose with other people's money in the markets. That's pretty much the theme for 2016, because clearly there are a bunch of guys like these contributing to various Super PACs. Anybody with a shit-ton of money and a political axe to grind is welcome to play. The semi-good news in this is that the Koch brothers don't have a total monopoly on the Republican presidential candidate market in the primaries. The bad news is that their competition are other assholes who will spend anything to buy a friendly government.