Just call Texas Governor and new Republican presidential candidate ‘Pay To Play Perry.”
As I write this, Mark Halperin’s back on MSNBC (after getting too big for his pants in talking about President Obama) talking about Rick Perry in sloppily glowing terms that only a conservative like Halperin can. It’s not surprising Rick Perry’s problems would go unmentioned by Halperin, but that’s not so for The Wall Street Journal.
Let’s put it this way: if you give a lot of money to Rick Perry, he will steer government money your way. So, with Perry, according to The Wall Street Journal, if you’re rich and give to Governor Perry, you get government help.
What Perry’s people in Texas did in 2009, and by extension Perry himself, is steer $4.5 million of Texas taxpayer money toward a company Convergen LifeSciences owned by a Perry campaign donor named David G. Nance, the executive chairman of the firm. Nance gave $75,000 to the Perry campaign between 2001 and 2006.
On top of that, Perry’s company, again, Convergen LifeSciences, was rejected by the Texas taxpayer-funded Texas Emerging Technology Fund until Nance complained. Then, the managers of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund turned around and, er, ‘reconsidered his application,’ giving him the $4.5 million.
In other words, Nance is thinking ‘I gave all that money to Perry to get elected, just to be rejected? Hell no! Give me what I want!,’ and, after bitching and moaning, Nance got it.
That’s not the only example of Pay to Play Perry’s using Texas taxpayer money. This paragraph from the WSJ says it all:
All told, the Dallas Morning News has found that some $16 million from the tech fund has gone to firms in which major Perry contributors were either investors or officers, and $27 million from the fund has gone to companies founded or advised by six advisory board members. The tangle of interests surrounding the fund has raised eyebrows throughout the state, especially among conservatives who think the fund is a misplaced use of taxpayer dollars to start with.
Read the rest at the WSJ here.
Stay tuned.
Bill Carroll