How You Pay for Corporate Donations to Reich-Wing Politics

Forget the public donations corporations and the obscenely wealthy give to politicans both repug and Democratic. The real money destroying our Democracy is not just hidden in secret donations - it's hidden in secret tax-deductable donations. And that means you and every other tax-paying working chump in the country is subsidizing the very corporatist politics-for-the-rich that is killing our jobs, stealing our homes and condemning us to poverty.

karoli at Crooks and Liars:

If you're wealthy and a Republican and you like your donations to be tax-deductible whenever possible, then Donors Trust, Inc. is your kind of "charity". AlterNet touched on the edges of what they do back in October, when they focused on a large donation which funded a weird effort to distribute a DVD entitled "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West", but they primarily focus on the donor and projects around the DVD with Koch Industries as the primary player.

Koch Industries is one player, but they're by no means the only player, nor are they even the only primary player.

What is Donors Trust?

Donors Trust is a tax-deductible slush fund. If a donor or foundation wants to put money toward a project and doesn't want it to be a direct gift reportable to the IRS, all they do is give it to Donors Trust.

Through multiple "non-profit" entities that receive donations and distribute grants, Donor's Trust allows corporations and the obscenely wealthy to subsidize every reich-wing, anti-democratic, un-American project out there, including:

• union-busting
• election fraud
• attacks on  minimum wage
• attacks on public schools
• kill Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Health Care
• tort reform (deny working people access to the courts)
• turning student journalists into Fox clones of Megan Kelly and Glenn Beck
• selling reich-wing propaganda through Hollywood movies and video games

Karoli again:

On and on it goes. There are many more organizations who received substantial gifts, including FreedomWorks, State Policy Network, Leadership Institute, Young America's Foundation and more.

At the very least, now you get a sense of who the donors are, and the circular nature of non-profit funding. They recycle the money through organizations like this -- it's almost a laundering operation, at least to the extent that it puts one degree of separation between the donor and the recipient for disclosure purposes. The next time some new policy think tank pops up out of nowhere to start touting libertarian/conservative/authoritarian think-tanky kind of ideas, bet on at least part of its funding coming through Donors Trust. It's a slush fund and an incubator for the inundation of public policy with conservative ideas on a state-by-state basis.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?