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March 08, 2007

Kevin Mannix Raising Money for FreedomWorks

My favorite dirt-digger in the blogosphere, Hart Williams, has dug up something very interesting. It seems Kevin Mannix is FreedomWorks's highest paid subcontractor. That's not Oregon FreedomWorks – he works for the big boys at FreedomWorks's national headquarters. He must have done a heck of a good job for them, too, because he was paid $200.000 in 2005 - 2/3 as much as the group's Chairman, Dick Armey – and about $80,000 in 2004, as well, to do "fundraising consulting." You've really got to be a great fundraiser to make that kind of dough. Typically, fundraisers earn $45,000 to $80,000 for a person with "significant experience" and top-end is about $150,000. And that's for full-time work. Mannix did his consulting work for Freedomworks while he had a job as Chair of the Oregon Republican Party. And that's not all he was doing back in 2005.

On top of all that money, Willamette Week reported back in 2005 that as "Project Manager" of the "Oregon Litigation Fairness Project," Mannix was paid to lobby for laws that would make it harder to sue corporations.

"Tort reform" first arose in the '80s when tobacco companies, insurance companies and HMOs formed groups to limit people's ability to sue them. As for who's behind this Oregon effort, beyond some unnamed "business groups" Mannix won't say. "That's one reason why you create an organization sometimes,'' Mannix says. "People want to come together, and they don't want to publicize themselves."

Of course, the primary beneficiaries if consumers couldn't sue corporations for damaging products would have been tobacco companies and pharmaceutical companies. As Blue Oregon reported back in 2005, Mannix was definitely in bed with Big Pharma. In fact, the "Oregon Litigation Fairness Project" turned out to be a pharmaceutical company project and spent over $60,000 that year on lobbying the Oregon legislature (a sizable chunk of that no doubt went to Mannix himself). Not coincidentally, Mannix previously had received $626,000 from the pharmaceutical industry for his campaign for governor back in 2002. And, as Our Oregon reports in its latest news update, Big Tobacco is best friends with Freedomworks, meaning Mannix is in bed with Big Tobacco, as well.

When I first met Mannix in the late 1990s, he was still focusing his efforts on helping the little guy. That was before he sank into the moral abyss of money maneuvering. Somewhere along the way, Mannix lost his populism and has become quite adept at earning six figures helping the big guys screw the little guy.

Posted by Becky at March 8, 2007 02:14 PM