Increasingly bizarre story of Dick Army's (former GOP House Majority Leader)

(I put Tea Party in quotes, because its original grass roots base has become a sad joke.)

From the Washington Post, December 25: "The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization, went into free fall.

Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.

The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million — and the five ousted employees were back. The force behind their return was Richard J. Stephenson, a reclusive Illinois millionaire who has exerted increasing control over one of Washington’s most influential conservative grass-roots organizations.

Stephenson, the founder of the for-profit Cancer Treatment Centers of America and a director on the FreedomWorks board, agreed to commit $400,000 per year over 20 years in exchange for Armey’s agreement to leave the group."

The episode illustrates the growing role of wealthy donors in swaying the direction of FreedomWorks and other political groups, which increasingly rely on unlimited contributions from corporations and financiers for their financial livelihood. Such gifts are often sent through corporate shells or nonprofit groups that do not have to disclose their donors, making it impossible for the public to know who is funding them.

In the weeks before the election, more than $12 million in donations was funneled through two Tennessee corporations to the FreedomWorks super PAC after negotiations with Stephenson over a preelection gift of the same size, according to three current and former employees with knowledge of the arrangement. The origin of the money has not previously been reported. (FW President Dick Army said said he had no knowledge of the donations or their dispostion until afterward.)

Stephenson, like the Koch brothers and our very well funded Congressman and former VP candidate Paul Ryan, is an admirer of Ayn Rand--

"Money is the barometer of a society's virtue."

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which mean deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other."

The rest of yet more of a peek inside the "tea party" at the link below.