Over 2 Million Spent By Anonymous Donors For Gingrich In Just One Day

If you’re looking for an example of the explosive growth of corrupt campaign finance in the 2012 presidential election, consider what happened this Thursday. Just one Super PAC, Winning Our Future, spent more than two and a half million dollars in just one day to promote Newt Gingrich and criticize Mitt Romney.

It’s a story of economic inequality. 99.9 percent of Americans won’t ever have anything close to a total net worth of 2.5 million dollars, but the Winning Our Future political action committee spent that more than that much in just three purchases of TV and radio commercials.

It’s a story of secret exchanges of money. Nobody knows where that 2.5 million dollars came from. Yes, Winning Our Future spent that money to make Newt Gingrich look good and to make Mitt Romney look bad, but who did Winning Our Future get the money from? 2.5 million dollars doesn’t just appear all on its own. Winning Our Future refuses to say where all that cash came from.

We do know, thanks to the Miami Herald, that Sheldon Adelson has acknowledged giving 5 million dollars to Winning Our Future. Sheldon Adelson is the CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corporation – a gambling giant that made more than 2.4 billion dollars in profit over the last three months alone. Las Vegas Sands got that money from eight hotels and casinos in Las Vegas, Pennsylvania, Macao, and Singapore.

One estimate of Sheldon Adelson’s personal fortune is 26 billion dollars. In 2010, Adelson was counted as the 13th most wealth American. Consider the source of that money: Convincing working Americans to place bets that, collectively, they are certain to lose.

Another person we know is connected to Winning Our Future is Rick Tyler, founder of the atheist-bashing organization Renewing American Leadership. Bloomberg news describes Tyler as a senior advisor to the Super PAC. Less than a year ago, Tyler was working as the spokesman for the Newt Gingrich presidential campaign, and before that, he was the paid Press Secretary of Gingrich Communications.

Legally, presidential campaigns are not supposed to coordinate their activities with Super PACs. Super PACs like Winning Our Future are supposed to make “independent expenditures” without direction from the official campaigns. The actions of people like Rick Tyler skirt the letter, but not the spirit, of campaign finance law. Someone like Rick Tyler can spend enough time with an official presidential campaign to be fully briefed on the strategy and anticipated tactics of the campaign, and then resign from the campaign, only to go work for a Super PAC that supports the same candidate, able to take anonymous unlimited contributions upon the premise that those contributions are independent.

Another Super PAC staffer who seems quite well coordinated with Newt Gingrich is Gregg Phillips, the Managing Director of Winning Our Future. Thirteen months ago, the Las Vegas Sun suggested that Phillips was quite well acquainted with the Gingrich 2012 campaign strategy, being sent to Nevada to speak on behalf of Gingrich, and telling a crowd there, “If the speaker decides to step into the race, he wants to do so with the full knowledge that he understands how the people of Nevada, of South Carolina, New Hampshire and Iowa feel about the values he believes in… Should he announce that he’s interested, Nevada would be one of the most important states on his list, where he will not only spend time but money.” The newspaper’s reporter on the story called Phillips “an advance man for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich”. How can an advance man for Newt Gingrich run a Super PAC promoting Gingrich that is not coordinated with the Gingrich for President campaign?

Gregg Phillips has a record of radical manipulation of government economic programs that started when he was Director of the Department of Human Services in Mississippi. In a 2003 Houston Chronicle article, Wendell Paris of Mississippi Action for Community Education, warned Texans when Gregg Phillips was put in charge of creating budget cuts on programs for nursing homes, deaf and blind citizens, physically abused children, and disabled citizens, “If he does in Texas what he did in Mississippi, I feel sorry for the poor people of Texas.”

Paris charged that Gregg Phillips helped institute policies that provided cheap labor to casinos in Tunica, Mississippi, by forcing recipients in government assistance programs to take low-paying jobs at the casinos. That’s a particularly interesting fact given that the one source of funding for Winning Our Future that we know of is Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire who made his fortune in the casino business.

Gregg Phillips went on to trigger an ethics scandal when he went to work for Strategic Partnerships Inc. of Austin, a lobbyist dealing in the very same area Phillips had worked for as an employee of the Texas government.

We may not know about all the sources of money that have gone into the pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future Super PAC, but what we know about the people working at Winning Our Future suggests that ethics is not among their highest priorities.