Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones has done a three-part investigation of Tea Party Patriots, which bills itself as the "Official Grassroots American Movement" and claims to have 3,000 local affiliates and 15 million supporters.
Mencimer found that TPP has been secretive about its money, jumping through a loophole to avoid filing its first tax form until this year, more than two years after it was set up by Jenny Beth Martin.
Former TPP employees told Mencimer that TPP has become a fundraising machine, constantly asking for money via e-mail, phone and direct mail.
While TPP asserts that "100% of donations will be used to empower our Tea Party Patriots member groups by providing access to much needed web tools, educational and training material, event assistance as well as networking and strategy opportunitie," it's clear from Mencimer's reporting that lots of that money has gone to Republican fundraising consultants, and to Martin's family.
That last bit is what this diary will focus on, the riches-to-rags-to-riches story of Jenny Beth Martin.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's May 2010 profile of Martin is mostly sweetness and light, about the down-on-her-luck young mom who became one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World.
It does have one interesting detail -- Martin makes "about $6,000 a month" at TPP.
The profile makes it sound like Rick Santelli's rant inspired Martin to become politically active, but neglects to mention that she and her husband had been active Republicans for several years before that.
And the profile is vague about her husband Lee's temp agency, which made them millionaires for a few years (big house, two SUVs, club membership, etc.), but gets the public-record facts right -- the company, Indwell Corp., went bankrupt in 2008, and the Martins still owe more than $600,000 to the IRS and the state of Georgia.
The third part of Mencimer's investigation, with the headline "The Tax-Dodging Treasurer," reports that the allegedly unpaid Lee Martin
has taken a wide-ranging role in the organization, managing a range of payroll and personnel issues. Former employees describe him as a financial gatekeeper of sorts.
Lee Martin does have some experience with human resources from his temp agency days, but Mencimer dropped a hint about Indwell that was somewhat startling:
Indwell supplied non-English speaking temporary workers to local businesses.
Hmm, I wonder what that's about.
Google searching provided some answers -- Indwell (a dissonantly Christian name) essentially recruited/imported thousands of Spanish-speakers from Central and South America to work minimum-wage jobs for large Atlanta-area corporations, mostly in food production (Coca-Cola was a client) and distribution centers.
Lee Martin bragged about his firm's competitive advantage:
(Food processors) "can get lower (wage rates) with us than they can with their own people," he said, "and have greater flexibility in the number of hours they have to work employees."
So the source of the Martins' temporary fortune was providing cheaper, more "flexible" foreign workers to replace more expensive American-citizen workers.
Is that a tea party value TPP has been keeping secret?
There's not much on the Internets, from standard media sources, about Indwell, but there are several blogs and comments that paint an even darker picture.
The person who writes at The Strange Death of Liberal America notes:
I was unable to determine whether Indwell was supplying illegal aliens to businesses, but even if it was not it the fact that it supplied foreign workers seems grossly at odds with the Tea Party message.
Note particularly the language Martin used “get them there” (from an Atlanta Business Chronicle story) implying that the company actively sought out workers in their native countries, which means that they were non-citizens at the time Indwell recruited them.
Cindy Chafian, a California tea partier, slammed the Martins in this open letter:
All indications are that your husband’s company, InDwell, was nothing more than an employment agency for “immigrant workers.”
Your husband, Lee Martin, and his partners developed a plan to provide workers for business at a very low cost. They chose to exploit workers from Central America and India knowing they would work for next to nothing.
The fact that you and your husband chose to employ foreign workers at a low cost raises the question of just how much you support the “American worker.” It appears that you and your husband attempted to get rich by exploiting foreign workers while taking jobs from American’s who needed the work.
While I don’t take issue with people coming up with an idea for a business and working to better their life, the nature of InDwell’s operations are in direct contradiction with your newly espoused support of the American worker.
You didn’t care when you were living in a beautiful home with 3 cars living the “American dream.” It only began to matter to you when you lost everything.
Well, not exactly.
The Martins were Republican activists well before the media-promoted tea party thing happened.
But the Martins sensed a business opportunity quickly, incorporating Tea Party Patriots in February 2009, and have well-earned this diss from Mark Williams, the former spokesman/leader of the Tea Party Express -- "The Tea Party Patriots’ Bernie Madoff."
TPP is not quite a Ponzi scheme, but it certainly is also not a group that devotes all of the millions it's raised to supporting its affiliate groups and their members, who provided most of the money.
They'll be lucky to get a little trickle down, after the Republican fundraising consultants and greedhead TPP leaders have put most of that money in their pockets.
Hopefully, the corporate media will cover the TPP financial scandal the same way they covered every tea party rally.