Who is bankrolling Alex Mealer?

Since we can only vote once this fall, and we can only attend so many rallies that make us feel slightly better, and we can only register so many voters, what else CAN we do in these horrible, hot days of relentless summer? We can dig into fundraising reports and shame some companies and rich people for donating to MAGA candidates!

Today, let’s look at who sent money to Alex Mealer this reporting period, candidate for House seat TX-09. As I’ve mentioned before, Alex doesn’t live in this district and is running as an opportunist after Texas Republicans redistricted this area in such a way that Al Green will no longer have a seat in Congress.

And again, I’m passionate about this race because this is the area where I grew up, where chemical plants explode, where cancer rates are higher, where people are much poorer than in her Heights neighborhood. It’s where Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was murdered by ICE. These areas are heavily Hispanic. Pasadena, Galena Park, Baytown, Channelview, East downtown.

And…rural Liberty County. Shared values and experiences, for sure.

I have extreme misgivings about Alex Mealer, a wealthy former investment banker from Sacramento (and the granddaughter of the guy who created the Golden Globes?!), appropriately representing these neighborhoods where ICE is running rampant and the oil and gas industry profits off of our rancid air and lax safety regulations.

Mealer has raised $2 million overall and has around $362,000 cash on hand currently. Her opponent, Leticia Gutierrez, who was born and raised in this area, has only raised $55,000 overall, which is pretty upsetting, and speaks to the extreme uphill battle that Texas Democrats have. Without significant help from wealthy people who aren’t rotten, I’m not sure how we win elections.

I’ll focus on donors who have contributed more than $1,000 and have something to do with Houston:

• Mark Boyer and his wife: more than $15,000. Boyer is listed as “manager” of Boyer, Inc., which appears to be a municipal infrastructure contractor.
• Billionaire Kathy Britton, owner of Perry Homes, has donated $9,500.
• Jeff Gray and his wife Susan, Grayco Partners, multifamily real estate developers with a terrible website: $14,000
• Oil heiress and socialite Windi Grimes: $7,000
• Jeff Haas of Jeff Haas Mazda: $3,500
• Tobias Hlavinka, CEO of American Plant Food, a fertilizer producer based in the extremely under-resourced and polluted Galena Park: $3,500
• James Holcomb, real estate developer with a broken website: $5,500
• Ned Holmes, another real estate developer millionaire with a long history of being shady and suppressing public transportation movement in Texas: $13,000.
• Orhan Kucukosman, Sr., president of the Texas Turkish American Chamber of Commerce: $2,000
• Mark Lanier of the Lanier Law Firm: $4,500
• Brenda Love of Love Advertising, who I remember as a popular contractor with CenterPoint Energy while I worked there: nearly $10,000
• Robert Marling, bank executive who donated $650,000 to Dan Crenshaw: $7,250
• David and Diane Modesett of Vega Energy Holdings LTD, some amorphous natural gas infrastructure something or other: $21,000
• Michael Plank, CEO of The Plank Companies, “industrial real estate development, rail logistics and construction equipment manufacturing”: $7,500
• Grady Roberts (and his wife Sissy), CEO of GWR Equities, which buys up and manages apartment complexes, including a real shady one in South Houston where my mom lived for a spell and got robbed: $15,000
• Christopher and Courtney Sarofim, familiar names in Houston arts, sports and social circles thanks to their inherited fortune: $9,500
• James Scott, president of Trans-Global Solutions, “a leading provider of transportation, comprehensive railroad and heavy civil construction services”: $10,500
• W. Carroll Smith, president of Monument Chevrolet in Pasadena, formerly Timmers Chevrolet, where I worked my first job for $5/hour answering phones as my dad hustled on the sales floor as a salesman for I wanna say maybe decades? I can’t even begin to get into my feelings about that place: $14,000
• Richard and Anne Tauber of Tauber Oil, a petrochemical marketing company (ew): kind of hard to tell, but around $12,000
• Wayne Webb, banker with Stellar Bank: $2,000

Then we have some corporate PACS:

• Air Line Pilots Association PAC: $2,500
• Arkema PAC, which has a chemical plant near Galena Park that has been riddled with problems and famously released chemicals during Hurricane Harvey due to poor safety planning: $1,000
• Gulf States Toyota PAC: $2,500
• Halliburton Company PAC: $2,500
• Houston Pilots PAC (somehow based out of Deer Park): $9,000
• Koch Inc PAC: $7,500
• PHILLIPS 66 PAC: $5,000

PHEW.

This is why I don’t buy the myth of the grassroots donor making a dent in our fucked-up political system, and why I now delete every fundraising text and unsubscribe from any fundraising email. I will never be this wealthy, this disconnected from where my money should be flowing to. If you’re a wealthy Democrat, I hope you’re maxing out your donations to these smaller candidates because those of us sending $10, $25 can’t prop you up anymore.

When I look at this list of real estate developers, oil and gas enjoyers, bankers and billionaires, I just know that deep in their hearts, they think they’re doing wonderful things for Houston. These are the Job Creators! These are the Art Investors!

Nah. These are the people destroying our country. These are the people who don’t want you to have healthcare, don’t want you to be safe on the job, don’t care about the communities that they pollute, defend ICE every time they kill someone, and work at every level of government to ensure that Donald Trump remains king for as long as he wants. Alex Mealer will certainly do everything in her power in Congress to be a useful idiot for him if elected.

Finally, a plea: I’m finding that so many Democratic campaigns aren’t on BlueSky, which is Where The Liberals Go. If you’re posting on Twitter or Threads, you should be posting on BlueSky, too, because it’s a place where people might be able to help you.