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Sunday, September 15th, 2013

Dark Money: Bombshell Report Exposes the Koch Brothers’ ‘Secret Bank’

Author:     MIKE ALLEN and JIM VANDEHEI
Source:     Politico
Publication Date:     9/13/13 5:54 AM EDT
 Link: Dark Money: Bombshell Report Exposes the Koch Brothers’ ‘Secret Bank’
Stephan:   Those who represent the interests of the non-geographical corporate states, treat democracy as just another operational problem, whose solution is to use money to manufacture in the public mind a worldview, and to bribe Congresspeople -- oh, sorry, lobby them. To people like the Koch brothers, influencing American politics is good business. It may seem profligate to spend $200 million, but if the laws you get passed as the result of buying some Congresspeople, make you billions of dollars, 200 million is just an operational cost. Until we get public financing in politics, and get money out of the process, corruption is inevitable. Citizens United, like gutting the Voting Rights Act is a way of achieving business goals. Buying governments courts, and voters is just the process by which a corporate 'individual' achieves its goals.

An Arlington, Va.-based conservative group, whose existence until now was unknown to almost everyone in politics, raised and spent $250 million in 2012 to shape political and policy debate nationwide.

The group, Freedom Partners, and its president, Marc Short, serve as an outlet for the ideas and funds of the mysterious Koch brothers, cutting checks as large as $63 million to groups promoting conservative causes, according to an IRS document to be filed shortly.

The 38-page IRS filing amounts to the Rosetta Stone of the vast web of conservative groups – some prominent, some obscure – that spend time, money and resources to influence public debate, especially over Obamacare.

The group has about 200 donors, each paying at least $100,000 in annual dues. It raised $256 million in the year after its creation in November 2011, the document shows. And it made grants of $236 million – meaning a totally unknown group was the largest sugar daddy for conservative groups in the last election, second in total spending only to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which together spent about $300 million.

Short, a soft-spoken but ferociously conservative 43-year-old operative, provided us a draft of a forthcoming IRS filing that will soon be […]

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