As "Beta Boy" O'Rourke Fades Will The Media Tell You What a Fraud He Was?
"Beat Boy" O'Rourke - That great Kennedy like star the Media created last summer is now flaming out, trying to pander to every and any person who would give this clown 30 seconds of attention.
"Beta Boy" made his main platform "Ban Ar-15's and AK-47's" and "We will have mandatory buy backs and punish anyone who does not sell"
“Beto” grew up in a 4,000-square-foot home, one of the first in the El Paso, Texas area with a swimming pool.
He had a housekeeper. His mother owned a high-end store that retailed furniture, and his father, Pat O’Rourke, owned an apartment building, both on Stanton Street.
His father ran two sweatshops staffed with labor from neighboring Juarez, Mexico.
As a local social and political climber, he aspired to make El Paso the “Hong Kong of the southwest,” that is, a cheap labor haven.
Both of the maquilas failed, however, and Pat O’Rourke was at best semi-successful in pivoting toward local politics, where he tacked to the left and right and back again as his career goals demanded.
The father supported the Reverend Jesse Jackson in his two presidential bids, and Beto has a photo of himself and the Democratic “civil rights activist” in his home.
In a right-wing stunt, the same Pat O’Rourke, as county executive, sent then president Ronald Reagan an “invoice” for local hospital costs purportedly incurred as a result of illegal immigrants pouring into El Paso and straining social services.
Pat O’Rourke won election as county executive as a Democrat, left office after a single term, then ran again for the same position in 1998 as a Republican, aligned with the reelection campaign of Texas Governor George W. Bush, but he was badly defeated, since El Paso remained a Democratic stronghold even while Texas as a whole passed under Republican rule for several decades.
According to the cover article of April’s Vanity Fair, his father put enormous pressure on Beto to make something of himself, shunning him for failing math, and ultimately shipping his son off to a boarding school in Washington, D.C. While studying at New York’s Columbia University, he wrote a research paper on the U.S. overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, founded an environmental club and frequented the punk music scene.
Throughout his twenties, Beto enjoyed a bohemian existence dotted with a drunk driving accident and a trespassing charge, before he moved back into the family home and opened a web design firm with $19,000 from mom and dad, “Stanton Street Technology” to wit.
In November 1999, he posted an article on Stanton Street Technology’s “City Talk Readers’ Forum” on a topic that would draw the attention of his future campaign financiers. “The big issue today is access to capital,” he wrote, “and whether or not banks are making credit available to the qualified small businesses in town who need it.”
Beto O’Rourke came into his own around this time, schmoozing with his father’s friends and business associates, making the rounds, joining the Rotary Club, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and “every organization that would have me,” as he said. “If someone had an open slot, I wanted to be on it.”
By 2004, after his father’s death at the age of 58 in a bicycle accident, O’Rourke was considering his first political campaign for El Paso city council. It was around this time that his mother arranged a date for him with Amy Sanders, the daughter of local real estate mogul Bill Sanders.
Mogul might be an understatement, as Sanders had made hundreds of millions of dollars in the Chicago real estate scene, pioneered the investment instrument known as a REIT, or real estate investment trust, and was described by Bloomberg News in 1999 as “the Warren Buffett of real estate.” He moved from Chicago to Santa Fe, New Mexico, before returning to El Paso where he had grown up.
Funded by several of El Paso’s richest businessmen, Beto won a city council seat in 2005 on a platform of tax abatements for business. He married Amy shortly thereafter and became the chief promoter for an eminent domain redevelopment scheme centered on bulldozing working-class neighborhoods to make room for eateries and high-end stores on the downtown riverfront.
Meanwhile, Bill Sanders formed the Borderplex Realty Trust, a holding company that bought up real estate in El Paso speculating on steep value increases as a result of the city’s (and Beto’s) gentrification plans. His fortune was estimated at $500 million in 2018—a solid “base” for an ambitious son-in-law.
By 2011, Sanders was encouraging O’Rourke to run for the U.S. House of Representatives seat held by a fellow Democrat and eight-term incumbent, Silvestre Reyes. Sanders established a Super PAC that spent some $240,000 attacking Reyes as corrupt.
O’Rourke won the primary and the election, along with two more in 2014 and 2016. His congressional tenure is marked by the pay-to-play crookery that, in its totality, comprises much of everyday bourgeois politics. He received campaign cash from employees of companies run by major donors. Employees of his father-in-law’s former company, Strategic Growth Bank, along with Sanders himself, donated $57,400 to O’Rourke’s 2014 and 2016 House campaigns. Likewise, employees of El Paso-based Western Refining gave $10,600 in 2014.
The biggest investment came from employees of Hunt Companies: $60,300 for the 2014 and 2016 election campaigns. In return, O’Rourke opposed decreases in defense appropriations that threatened Hunt Companies’ bottom line as the nation’s largest builder and manager of private housing for military personnel and families. O’Rourke assisted House Republicans in protecting $2 billion worth of subsidies to these large-scale slumlords.
Between 2016 and 2018, a foundation set up and funded by Woody Hunt of Hunt Companies paid Amy O’Rourke (a one-time teacher and charter school founder) $146,085 in “consulting fees,” a euphemism for services rendered.
O’Rourke was the 97th-richest person in the last Congress according to Roll Call. Tax returns show that between 2008 through 2017, nearly 40 percent of the O’Rourkes’ $3.4 million in income came from dividends, interest, capital gains and rental revenue from entities their parents owned or gave to them, including $1 million from two entities established by Amy O’Rourke’s father.
It is obvious "Beta Boy" is no different from any of the other corrupt entrenched bureaucrats in our nation.
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