$446,018

Submitted by Todd Kunioka on Tue, 01/30/2007 - 19:56

For anyone curious, the California state FPPC disclosure reports for the period July 1 - December 31, 2006 were due today. A quick peek at

http://cal-access.ss.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx?id=1013468&view=contributions&session=2005

tells us that Wal-Mart officially spent $446,018 during calendar years 2005-2006. About $410,000 of that was after the March 2005 election. In other words, officially, Wal-Mart spent over $400,000 specifically to defeat the recall. And that still does not count the "advertising" and "marketing" expenditures made in support of the recall.

This shouldn't be news to anyone here, except that news reports covering the recall repeatedly understated Wal-Mart's fiancial intervention in Rosemead's municipal government. The reporters were always about $100,000 behind the curve, because the numbers they reported ignored the debts being incurred by the Wal-Mart front organizations on behalf of the pro-Wal-Mart incumbents.  Or, they ignored spending by groups other than the now-defunct Rosemead Neighbors Against the Recall  (i.e., so-called Rosemead PRIDE, or No on Rosemead Recall).

Just as a final example, the last contributions to "Rosemead Neighbors," for $70,000, came in on September 27, over a week after the election. Why spend money after an election, unless it's to repay previously-incurred debt?

BTW, if you want to try to visualize what $446,000 looks like: A stack of 446,000 crispy new $1 bills would be 153.8 feet tall. Lay those dollar bills end-to-end, and the line would stretch about 44 1/3 miles. Lay those dollar bills on the San Bernadino freeway, and they’d stretch from the Rosemead Blvd exit, east to about the Rancho Ave. exit in Colton (about four miles short of the I-215 interchange).

And, as a final "by the way," there's a new front group plying its wares in Rosemead.  Now they're calling themselves "Rosemead Partners."  But their mailing address is still the post office box that hired gun Mike Lewis used when he was calling his sock puppets "Rosemead PRIDE."