I got a surly note from the New Mexico State University Foundation about its acting as a pass through for the Domenici Institute. They said my answers would be found in a large list of news releases they provided. Period. They could not take the time to provide me with just a link to the specific document. I found it easily though. My suspicions were confirmed that Yates Petroleum was the source of a $500,000 gift to the Domenici Institute. The money was given to the Foundation directly and they were instructed to send it on to the institute. Why not just give it to the institute? Of course the Institute is supposed to do oil and gas economic studies and it might have been embarrassing to easily find out the studies are being funded by the oil and gas industry. And why didn't the institute give me the information instead of saying they were not allowed to do so. If there was a press release why camouflage the funding? One can only wonder if this is the just part of the story.
Since the NMSU Foundation did a news release back in 2008 they were not being secretive. If anyone ever wrote a story about this I never saw it and I looked into a few archives to find it.
The Albuquerque Journal's Thomas Cole this morning did a piece on where the Democratic candidates for U.S. Senator are getting their money. That is fair game. He says it indicates how they might govern. But when a U.S. Senator's legacy institute gets a huge donation from an industry he carried water for, you hear little about it. Domenici gets a free ride on this one. Maybe because he is a republican?
I can not imagine what kind of press there would be if former Governor Bill Richardson's favorite institute were to collect half a million bucks after leaving office from the operators of the racino at the New Mexico Expo. It would run on the front page of the Journal for years.
I don't disrespect Pete Domenici. I disagreed with his energy policies and blind support of the military industrial complex. He did good things too. Like his concern for mental health issues.
1 comment:
Domenici deserves as much front page scrutiny as Richardson, especially when politicians become co-opted by influence and big money.That's all it becomes, is, and has been.
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