Ted Cruz's outside power over the Senators and House Reps of his own party is not due to some mystical charisma or even to the ungovernable distributed and amoeba like power of the "grassroots" Tea Party--it is straight up due to control over a pot of money containing no more than a few million dollars donated by corporations. (Politico)
Things got particularly heated when Cruz was asked point-blank if he would renounce attacks waged on GOP senators by the Senate Conservatives Fund, an outside group that has aligned itself closely with the Texas senator.
Cruz’s response: “I will not,” according to an attendee.
The closed-door Wednesday meetings hosted by the Senate’s conservative Steering Committee are supposed to be private, so senators interviewed for this article asked not to be named.
“It seems that there is nothing the media likes to cover more than disagreements among Republicans, and apparently some senators are content to fuel those stories with anonymous quotes,” Cruz told POLITICO. “Regardless, my focus — and, I would hope, the focus of the rest of the conference — is on stopping Harry Reid’s shutdown, ensuring that vital government priorities are funded, and preventing the enormous harms that Obamacare is inflicting on millions of Americans.”
Here's a link to some of the bigger donors. I'm not able to go down the rabbit hole, as SteveM would, with his superior google fu. The top dollar donor is something called
ISRAEL ANALYTICS CONSULTING SERVICES LTD
Location: Giv'at Ze'ev , IsraelRegistration Number: 513185033
About whom I can find nothing. Murphy Tomatoes is just a San Antonio Tomato Packing business. But what is Credit Suisse Group doing there? Is it possible that donors don't grok that their penny ante donations are being used to create and manage chaos in the market?
1Israel Analytics Consulting Services$10,000$10,000$01
Murphy Tomatoes$10,000$10,000$03
Babcock & Brown$6,000$6,000$04
College Loan Corp$5,000$5,000$04
Credit Suisse Group$5,000$5,000$04
Ekstrom Properties LLC$5,000$5,000$04
Fast Food Systems$5,000$5,000$04
Gallagher Construction Co$5,000$5,000$04
Harris Mycfo LLC$5,000$5,000$04
Hcss Sugar Land 77478$5,000$5,000$04
Idi Group$5,000$5,000$04
Mountaire Corp$5,000$5,000$0
Peck Enterprises$5,000$5,000$04
Primecap Management$5,000$5,000$04
Uline Inc$5,000$5,000$04
Western Mutual Insurance$5,000$5,000$04
Woodvine Group$5,000$5,000$018
Bogosian & Co$3,000$3,000$019
Exxon Mobil$2,500$2,500$019
Rodman Publishing$2,500$2,500$0