The Koch Brothers' Dark Money

The once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle has an in-depth investigative piece in today's edition examining the "dark money" being raised by a right-wing network led by the god-awful Koch brothers.  (To remind you of the Koch brothers' political pedigree, their father Fred was a founding member of the John Birch Society, so the nuts didn't fall far from the tree.)  Here's an intro into the lengths to which the Kochs and their minions go to shield their plutocrat donors from exposure:

Its funders remain largely unknown; the coalition was carefully constructed with extensive legal barriers to shield its donors.

But they have substantial firepower. Together, the 17 conservative groups that made up the network raised at least $407 million during the 2012 campaign, according to the analysis of tax returns by The Washington Post and the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.  [snip]

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a University of Notre Dame Law School professor who studies the tax issues of politically active nonprofits, said he has never seen a network with a similar design in the tax-exempt world.

“It is a very sophisticated and complicated structure,” said Mayer, who examined some of the groups’ tax filings. “It’s designed to make it opaque as to where the money is coming from and where the money is going. No layperson thought this up. It would only be worth it if you were spending the kind of dollars the Koch brothers are, because this was not cheap.”

Having lost in their efforts to buy the 2012 election, the Kochs are funneling millions of dollars into sabotaging the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), as well as efforts to weaken or eliminate environmental regulations, gun control laws, and social safety net programs.  Their network includes allies such as the National Gun Manufacturers Rifle Association, the Club for Growth, Jim "Demented" DeMint's Heritage Foundation, and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform.  In other words just about every frothing fringe right-wing assortment of sociopaths extant.

For all of this and more, let's not forget to thank Chief "Justice" John Roberts and his merry band of anarchist right-wingers for their Citizens United ruling! (We have a feeling "Justice" Kennedy's permanent blinders would still cause him to find that such arrangements "do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption." )