Menards, Scott Walker, Dark Money And Meager Job Growth

Menards!!!

The uber wealthy spend more money buying politicians than actually working with their CEO’s to offer products and services at a reasonable price to consumers. Why provide cost effective products and services, when the business owner can contribute via Citizens United to campaign sponsorship at unlimited levels in total anonymity?

Anonymity…A beautiful state of incognito where the uber wealthy live quite the opposite their physical lives of conspicuous consumption, opulence and lavishness. We can watch them tool around in the yachts, take-off and land in private jets often limousine chauffeured by man servants, but when they exercise their ;real social power they slide into obscurity. Anonymity….a place of nameless nowheresville that is off limits to you and me beyond our meager state of self imposed secrecy on social media; if we so chose.

Apparently, the owner of Menards, hardware chain, is one such money-broker. As Rachel Maddow indicates in the following piece, he is one of the nation’s, thus the world’s, most wealthy and he wields power via his wealth. Wealth and power wherewithal exercises like a magic wand via political conduits such as the new Republican Party darling: Scott Walker.

http://on.msnbc.com/1CNowJg

http://player.theplatform.com/p/7wvmTC/MSNBCEmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_maddow_isi_150324_525508

Maddow’s piece was spot-on, as is always the case. But, lets sprinkle a piece from Yahoo News over the Walker dark money for a better absorption of the facts. Yahoo News……Wisconsin gov scott walker photo charlie

And, how does the potential conduits go about fertilizing the environment that so lavishly anoints them with “dark money?” They consult with corporatist, they lie, and they manipulate the voters into beliefs patterns that lead to re-election despite poor records as political leaders.

Example…… Scott Walker and Job Growth. The shifty will not mention job growth as winning strategy. He would prefer to flagship his union busting while comparing the war on the states middle class union memebrs to the nation’s fight with ISIS.

Ugly eh?

Sine we made a point about the extent to which political candidates play to their money broker constituents with the ever present “lie” as a tool, I have linked a Politifact’s review of Walker’s statements. I think only Rand Paul lies more.

Robert Reich, Common Cause, Citizens United And You!

Robert Reich, Common Cause…Citizens United

 Robert Reich

The vast wealth that has accumulated at the top of the economy is not itself the problem. The problem is that political power tends to rise to where the money is. America isn’t yet an oligarchy, but that’s where the Koch’s and a few other billionaires are taking us. When billionaires supplant political parties, candidates are beholden directly to the billionaires. And if and when those candidates win election, the billionaires will be completely in charge.

At this very moment, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (worth an estimated $37.9 billion) is privately interviewing potential Republican candidates, in what’s being called the Sheldon Primary. “The ‘Sheldon Primary’ is an important primary for any Republican running for president,” says Sheldon Adelson, George W. Bush’s former press secretary. “Anybody running for the Republican nomination would want to have Sheldon at his side.” Adelson spent $100 million on the 2012 election but denies he’s doing it for personal gain. He just wants the federal government to ban online gambling (and judging from legislation now being pushed on Capitol Hill, his investment seems to be paying off).

It’s more urgent than ever that we reverse “Citizen’s United” (if by Constitutional amendment if necessary), establish strict campaign finance and disclosure laws, and stop the wholesale takeover of America by the new billionaire political bosses. I chair the citizen’s group Common Cause, that’s trying to do all this

(website:http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=8281551). Please join us.

Open Secrets: Dark Money

The following is a re-blog from Open Secrets Dot Org.  

The piece is as relevant to US politics and US society as state and federal government.  Money is flowing into US politics at an alarming and dangerous rate.  Ultimately, lobbying dollars and political contributions work for business entities and special interest groups. There are few to no organizations, which pour money into Congress on behalf of “The People.” It just does not happen comparable to money funneled to support 360 degree wealthy accumulation by the nation’s Top 20% (ers). 

As is the case with all ‘high information”, the following is not a quick read.  Of course, we are aware, people really do not like long reads. Well, there are times when our tendencies contribute to “low information.” Do you want to live your life as do most Fox News viewers? How about Beck viewers and listeners?  Or, better yet, people who visit Breitbart News Dot Com and actually feel they are being informed vs. entertained.  In fact, entertainment and political posturing is the basic media model for each of the three entities. 

Open Secrets, nor  do we have an answer to the horrors of purchased legislation, purchased votes, and purchased politicians However, we feel an obligation to inform. When information flows, good things eventually happen. What we do know is Citizens United open a door that leads to nothing the horrors of plutocracy. As the IRS attempted to investigate the legitimacy of the Citizens United money flood, it became immersed in conservative, “hands-off” our SCOTUS decision rhetoric  that lingers even today. 

OpenSecrets.org’s New Dark Money Data Measures Groups’ Politicization

by Robert Maguire on September 9, 2013 11:00 AM 

Update, Sept. 11: For clarity, we have added two paragraphs to this story (see *) explaining that the IRS and FEC definitions of political spending are not identical, and have rephrased headlines to two charts.

Building on our previous work on “dark money” nonprofits, the Center for Responsive Politics is rolling out new information on the activities of these groups that are playing an increasing role in U.S. elections. 

Dark money groups — politically active 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations and 501(c)(6) trade associations that, under tax law, don’t have to disclose their donors — aren’t supposed to spend the majority of their resources on politics. But over the last six years, a combination of Supreme Court decisions that loosened restrictions on their electoral activity, coupled with regulatory confusion, has led to a surge in their political expenditures. Direct spending on federal elections by 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) groups has risen from $10 million in 2004 to well over $300 million in 2012 — and that’s just counting what they reported to the Federal Election Commission, which doesn’t include all of their political spending.

And the nature of their activity has changed in recent elections. Nearly half of the political spending by these groups in 2004 went for communications to their own members — what the FEC calls “communication costs.” Now, it shows up almost entirely in the form of negative, often misleading ads aimed at influencing the outcome of elections. In 2012, only 2 percent of the spending by these groups was directed at their own members. 

But trying to sort out exactly what these groups are doing ranges from very difficult to impossible, given how little information is available to the public. For example, the groups must disclose their total spending on their IRS Form 990s, due annually. But nowhere do they have to break down those expenditures in detail and say exactly how they spent the money, as unions must in reports with the Department of Labor. On top of that, the 990s are filed anywhere from five to 23 months after the spending in question actually takes place. Once they’re filed, the IRS offers no searchable database or machine readable data to the public. It provides only scant summary data. 

To help get around some of the hurdles posed by the dearth of IRS data, CRP has manually input more than 14,000 records, with the aim of bringing more clarity to the financial activities of nonprofits that have spent money to influence, directly and indirectly, federal elections over the last three cycles. 

CRP’s data includes all politically active 501(c)(4)s and 501(c)(6)s, whether or not they have been granted tax-exempt status by the IRS. Such groups as Crossroads GPS, American Commitment, and Citizens for Strength and Security either have not received or not applied for exempt status. The IRS does not include such groups in the data it makes available. Also, CRP’s new data includes other information that’s absent from the IRS data: total expenditures, total grants and total political spending reported to the IRS, over a period of multiple years. 

On the other side of the divide, at the FEC, these groups must file reports when they make certain political expenditures, but the agency doesn’t require them to provide identifying information — such as Employee Identification Numbers (EINs). So CRP has gone through three cycles of outside spending data and matched FEC filers with IRS identifiers, allowing us to link the two sets of data. 

The result is that we are providing multiple years of data reported to the IRS and the FEC, matched over the same time periods that the spending took place. We’ve included direct political spenders as well as what we call “dark money mailboxes” that reported no spending to the FEC themselves, but sent more than half their funds to politically active nonprofits. 

Not only have we matched spending reported to the FEC for the spenders themselves over the exact dates covered by each IRS report, but we have also incorporated recipient political spending into the donor profiles, so that users can get a better understanding of how much a donor’s grant recipients spent on politics. This information has never been provided anywhere until now.

Here are some of the larger findings that stand out in the new data.

From 2009 through 2011, overall spending reported to the IRS was often much greater during the election year.  

Looking at overall spending reported to the IRS for the three-year period from 2009 to 2011, at least 27 dark-money groups active in the 2010 midterms reported election-year expenditures that were more than the combined total of the two off-years, 2009 and 2011. On average, during this three-year period, more than 70 percent of the groups’ expenditures came during the election year. 

Top 10 Group	IRS 2009	IRS 2010	IRS 2011	Election- Year
Crossroads GPS	$0	$42,344,884	$22,375,630	65%
American Action Network	$1,446,675	$25,692,334	$11,482,833	67%
America Votes	$3,474,968	$14,193,741	$9,635,163	52%
American Future Fund	$1,913,598	$21,352,090	$3,637,462	79%
Americans for Tax Reform	$4,593,543	$11,379,668	$3,114,979	60%
Republican Jewish Coalition	$2,858,109	$12,409,886	$3,143,053	67%
Americans for Job Security	$3,490,547	$12,417,809	$2,481,855	68%
Susan B Anthony List	$2,837,834	$7,000,004	$3,531,134	52%
Americans for Limited Government	$1,840,743	$8,613,552	$1,038,919	75%
Faith & Freedom Coalition	$880,421	$5,661,250	$3,582,897	56%

Likewise, some of the most prominent donor organizations — 10 dark money mailboxes, for example — demonstrate the same trends. 

Dark Money Mailbox	IRS 2009	IRS 2010	IRS 2011	Percent Election-Year Spending
Center to Protect Patient Rights	$12,048,952	$60,245,391	$23,172,155	63%
Freedom & Values Alliance	$0	$1,070,585	$651,557	62%
Wellspring Cmte	$664,628	$11,521,432	$2,204,730	80%
TC4 Trust	$7,758,262	$30,880,071	$0	80%
American Justice Partnership	$2,225,711	$8,147,071	$1,849,827	67%
Patriot Majority USA	$76,269	$5,315,658	$0	99%
America’s Families First	$0	$7,647,638	$800,093	91%
Alliance for Freedom	$0	$4,375,434	$197,433	96%
Common Sense Issues Coalition	$9,054	$201,954	$23,924	86%
Atlantic Advocacy Fund	$18,963,628	$43,462,445	$13,964,521	57%

Significance?  We know that dark money groups engage in a lot of political activity during periods that are outside the FEC’s reporting windows, which means that their spending as reported to the FEC is often not an accurate measure of their participation in the electoral process. Unfortunately, those FEC reports are often the best metrics we have. That’s because the financial information reported to the IRS partially or entirely lacks important details like the group’s vendors, how much they were paid, for what products or services, and on what dates.  

Given the shortcomings of both IRS and FEC financial data on nonprofits, it’s important to look at the available information from different angles. Checking the ebb and flow of overall spending reported to the IRS and how it relates to election cycles is one way to do this.  

Dark Money Mailboxes Multiply. 

Dark money mailboxes are nonprofits with no direct federal political spending of their own and no substantial programs, staff, or volunteers. A majority of the spending by these groups goes for grants to other politically active nonprofits. (CRP has detailed the activities of several dark money mailboxes in our Shadow Money Trail series.)   

These organizations have proliferated with every election cycle, and as the 2012 filings start coming in, there may well be new discoveries. The following is a list of the top 10 such groups.

Dark Money Mailbox	IRS Spending	Grants	Percent Grants
Center to Protect Patient Rights	$95,466,498	$70,189,431	74%
Green Tech Action Fund	$28,243,610	$23,547,726	83%
Wellspring Cmte	$23,745,592	$16,886,369	71%
TC4 Trust	$38,638,333	$36,778,493	95%
American Justice Partnership	$15,693,198	$10,487,000	67%
Patriot Majority USA	$5,315,658	$2,896,708	54%
America’s Families First	$8,447,731	$7,794,000	92%
Atlantic Advocacy Fund	$103,089,084	$100,317,633	97%
Freedom & Values Alliance	$1,722,142	$1,717,346	100%
Alliance for Freedom	$4,572,867	$4,515,000	99%

(The Patriot Majority USA listed above is only one of three iterations of Patriot Majority USA.) 

Significance?  From a practical standpoint, dark money mailboxes serve two purposes. First, they add another level of opacity in a system where the sources of funds that ultimately are spent on politics are already difficult or impossible to find. If the IRS were to investigate, say, the 60 Plus Association‘s sources of income, it would also have to investigate the provenance of the money given out by three of its largest donors: the Center to Protect Patient Rights, TC4 Trust and Free Enterprise America, two of which are now defunct. 

Dark-money mailboxes have been tied to questionable activities around the country. In California, millions of dollars were funneled through a daisy chain of three nonprofits, including the Center to Protect Patient Rights, in what the California Fair Political Practices Commission called “campaign money laundering.“ 

Also, dark money can be used to diminish the likelihood of IRS scrutiny. Large contributions from one individual or corporation can trigger an audit to evaluate whether or not the recipient organization is serving the financial interests of the donor, a major no-no in the 501(c) world. To get around this, a donor, or small set of donors, can establish a constellation of nonprofits that then channel contributions to the same ultimate destination. 

Tens of millions of dollars in political spending goes entirely unreported to the IRS.

In 42 instances over the last four years, groups that reported at least $25,000 in spending to the FEC did not report political spending to the IRS. In nearly three-fourths of the cases, the spending they reported to the FEC was above $100,000, and in nine it was above $1 million. In 14 instances, the unreported political spending made up at least one-fifth of the group’s total spending as reported to the IRS, and in eight instances, the unreported spending ranged from 40 percent to 65 percent of the group’s expenditures. Such high levels of political spending could have raised suspicions at the IRS. 

The following groups had the largest amount of unreported political spending that also made up more than 20 percent of total spending the group reported to the IRS over the specified period.

Top 10 Group	Period	Total IRS Spending	FEC spending	Percent
Americans for Job Security	Nov 2007-Oct 2008	$12,343,781	$8,084,268	65%
Vets for Freedom	Jan 2008-Dec2008	$9,095,588	$4,757,685	52%
American Rights at Work	July2008-June2009	$16,450,569	$3,667,018	22%
Let Freedom Ring	Jan 2008-Dec2008	$7,364,554	$3,535,786	48%
Center for Individual Freedom	Oct 2010-Sept 2011	$5,757,719	$2,482,313	43%
Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$2,728,232	$1,128,162	41%
Americans for Job Security	Nov 2008-Oct 2009	$3,490,547	$890,488	26%
Ending Spending	Jan 2011-Dec 2011	$2,282,332	$688,090	30%
Judicial Confirmation Network	July2008-June2009	$1,405,553	$571,063	41%
American Energy Alliance	Jan 2008-Dec2008	$1,675,617	$485,307	29%

Two organizations — Let Freedom Ring and Nevada Advocates for Planned Parenthood — answered “yes” to a question on their tax forms asking whether they had engaged in efforts to influence the outcome of elections, directly or indirectly. Yet they did not report any political spending to tax authorities. 

Two other organizations — Americans for Job Security and Vets for Freedom — neglected to report political spending to the tax agency on two separate occasions. The largest discrepancies were in 2008, when Americans for Job Security’s $8 million in unreported political spending made up 65 percent of its total spending reported to the IRS; and Vets for Freedom’s $4.8 million in spending reported to the FEC, but not the IRS, made up more than half of the groups’ total outlays. 

*It’s worth noting that the FEC and IRS definitions of political spending are not identical. The IRS asks all filers of 990 forms to answer the question: “Did the organization engage in direct or indirect political campaign activities on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office?” That’s more vague than the FEC’s reporting requirements and, on its face, would seem to include all spending reported to the FEC and possibly more. However, as the Congressional Research Service (CRS) noted in a report issued last year, spending on issue ads that run shortly before an election and must be reported to the FEC might not necessarily be required to be reported to the IRS. The only two rulings the IRS has released on when issue advocacy becomes campaign spending indicate that the agency applies a complicated “facts and circumstances” test, and, as CRS notes, there are no “bright-line rules.” 

However, some experts say that organizations should not imagine there’s a practical difference between what the two agencies are asking for. “I have never been presented with an example of spending that is sufficiently political to be reported to the FEC, but would not be political under the IRS definition,” said tax attorney Marcus Owens, a former head of the exempt organizations office at the IRS. 

Significance? The IRS has no system in place to monitor spending reported to the FEC, and, as we’ve noted, even if it did, the FEC doesn’t require nonprofits to provide their EINs; without those unique identifiers, it would be hard for the IRS to check political spending by the organizations it oversees. To assess the political activity of a nonprofit, the IRS relies to a great degree on how much the group claims to have spent engaging “in direct or indirect political campaign activities on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office.”  

Millions more are only partially reported to the IRS.

At least thirteen groups that reported spending more than $25,000 to the FEC in either 2008 or 2010 reported spending much less than that on politics when they filed their 990s with the IRS. Together, these groups reported more than $51.6 million in spending to the FEC, while only reporting political spending of $24 million to the IRS over the exact same period.  

Top 10 Groups	Period	Total IRS Spending	Spending Reported to FEC	Political Spending Reported to IRS
American Action Network	July 2010-June 2011	$25,692,334	$18,885,679	$5,535,845
Freedom’s Watch	Jan 2008-Dec 2008	$36,933,305	$16,307,398	$10,745,848
Americans for Job Security	Nov 2009-Oct 2010	$12,417,809	$7,696,267	$4,351,478
Americans for Tax Reform	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$11,379,668	$4,160,299	$1,859,239
Republican Jewish Coalition	Jan 2008-Dec 2008	$6,521,230	$1,163,002	$104,567
Alliance for a Better Minnesota	Jan 2008-Dec 2008	$3,752,685	$1,415,453	$754,500
Alliance for America’s Future	Feb 2010-Dec 2010	$7,669,093	$703,772	$343,776
West Virginia Conservative Foundation	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$652,574	$534,974	$49,829
Citizens for the Republic	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$1,177,452	$195,411	$88,456
Citizen Action of Wisconsin	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$680,456	$110,617	$88,460

In all, about $67 million less in political spending was reported to the IRS than to the FEC in 2008 and 2010 by all groups that either failed to report or underreported political spending to the tax agency.

Significance? The IRS can’t effectively evaluate the political activity of a particular organization if it is not getting all the information it needs.  The agency does not systematically monitor spending that’s reported to the FEC, so it relies to a large extent on the political spending claimed by the filers on their 990s.  

Some organizations’ 2012 political spending alone surpassed their entire 2010 budgets.

Among groups that spent more than $50,000 on politics in 2012, 10 emerge as standouts because they spent more on politics in 2012 than they spent on everything in 2010.  

Group	IRS 2010	FEC 2012
Crossroads GPS	$42,344,884	$71,161,698
American Future Fund	$21,352,090	$25,404,956
Americans for Prosperity	$24,064,187	$36,364,103
Americans for Tax Reform	$11,379,668	$15,794,552
American Energy Alliance	$1,019,928	$1,361,500
Center Forward	$130,358	$2,057,089
Hispanic Leadership Fund	$228,613	$838,417
Emergency Cmte for Israel	$439,081	$827,965
Michigan League of Conservation Voters	$219,775	$860,237
Colorado Family Action	$64,578	$78,045

These 10 groups spent a combined total of almost $155 million in 2012 on politics, according to what they reported to the FEC — more than all of the spending reported to the FEC by 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) groups in 2010. In order to keep that total safely within IRS limits of political activity, they’re going to have to report more than $380 million in combined total expenditures to the IRS when they file their 990s covering 2012. That’s $280 million more in combined total IRS spending than these groups reported in 2010. Crossroads GPS alone accounts for $136 million of that increase. Its 2012 political spending of more than $71 million, as reported to the FEC, is nearly double its total 2010 budget. In order to keep that $71 million well under half of its total expenditures, it will need to report more than $177 million in total expenditures in 2012 on its tax return.  

Significance? It is normal for organizations promoting an agenda to be more active during an election year. Naturally, that is the time when the public and the media are paying the most attention, so organizations take advantage of election-year conditions to gain traction for their cause.  Of the groups CRP tracks, 160 filed 990s in the three-year period from 2009 to 2011, and 134 reported a rise in expenditures during 2010. 

But when a group’s spending surges dramatically in election years, particularly when the group in question is known to have made large political expenditures, it raises questions. 

Over the four-year period from 2009 through 2012, nine of the 10 groups listed here will have made, at a minimum, between 71 and 93 percent of their total expenditures for those four years combined during the election years of 2010 and 2012. Viewed together, these 10 groups reported a combined total of $68.7 million in total spending during the off years of 2009 and 2011. Using their total spending from 2010 and the spending they reported to the FEC in 2012, we’ve calculated a projected minimum estimate of what we expect their overall expenditures to be when they file their 990s covering last year. That analysis shows that the combined election-year overall spending totals for these 10 groups will come in at more than $483 million, a nearly seven-fold increase over off-year spending.

Attributable political spending puts some groups over the limit.  

Dark money groups rarely report that more than 30 or 40 percent of their total expenditures went towards political activities. One way they get around reporting too much in direct political expenditures is to make large grants to like-minded dark money groups and, sometimes, coordinate the expenditures. Factoring in this recipient political spending — by comparing the size of the grant to the group’s spending as reported to the FEC, then taking the smaller number — puts nine groups over the 50 percent political spending limit. Not factoring in recipient political spending shows just one group, American Action Network, spending above the limit.

Group	Period	Total IRS Spending	Donor’s FEC Spending	Attributable Recipient Spending	Total FEC Spending	FEC Spending with Recipients
Center to Protect Patient Rights	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$60,245,391	$0	$36,675,105	0%	61%
Crossroads GPS	June 2010-May 2011	$42,344,884	$16,564,728	$11,095,406	39%	65%
American Action Network	July 2010-June 2011	$25,692,334	$18,885,679	$200,000	74%	74%
Republican Jewish Coalition	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$12,409,886	$1,143,465	$8,000,000	9%	74%
Environment America	July 2008-June 2009	$10,573,775	$214,848	$6,514,090	2%	64%
Green Tech Action Fund	Aug 2008-Dec 2008	$2,375,000	$0	$2,375,000	0%	100%
Freedom & Values Alliance	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$1,070,585	$0	$1,067,000	0%	100%
Common Sense Issues Coalition	Nov 2009-Oct 2010	$201,954	$0	$195,000	0%	97%
Annual Fund	July 2011-June 2012	$103,612	$0	$100,000	0%	97%

Even with recipient political spending factored in, these estimates are still on the low end for most groups, because many have state-level political expenditures and unreported “issue advocacy” that isn’t included here.  For example, in 2012, Americans for Job Security spent more than $1 million in judicial races in Michigan, according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, on top of the $16 million it reported spending at the federal level in 2012.

Significance? These totals do not attribute all political spending by recipients to the donor.  We compare the size of the grant with the recipients’ spending as reported to the FEC over the same period, then take the lower figure.  The aim is to get an estimate of how much political spending was facilitated by the donor.

The IRS has not yet made it clear whether giving large grants to other organization with political activities is a valid “social welfare” function. If not, the agency could take action against the groups that do this on a large scale.
_____________________ 

End Open Secrets

If you read the Open Secrets piece and are not alarmed at what you read, you are lost in a web of plutocracy.

Open Secrets: Dark Money

The following is a re-blog from Open Secrets Dot Org.  

The piece is as relevant to US politics and US society as state and federal government.  Money is flowing into US politics at an alarming and dangerous rate.  Ultimately, lobbying dollars and political contributions work for business entities and special interest groups. There are few to no organizations, which pour money into Congress on behalf of “The People.” It just does not happen comparable to money funneled to support 360 degree wealthy accumulation by the nation’s Top 20% (ers). 

As is the case with all ‘high information”, the following is not a quick read.  Of course, we are aware, people really do not like long reads. Well, there are times when our tendencies contribute to “low information.” Do you want to live your life as do most Fox News viewers? How about Beck viewers and listeners?  Or, better yet, people who visit Breitbart News Dot Com and actually feel they are being informed vs. entertained.  In fact, entertainment and political posturing is the basic media model for each of the three entities. 

Open Secrets, nor  do we have an answer to the horrors of purchased legislation, purchased votes, and purchased politicians However, we feel an obligation to inform. When information flows, good things eventually happen. What we do know is Citizens United open a door that leads to nothing the horrors of plutocracy. As the IRS attempted to investigate the legitimacy of the Citizens United money flood, it became immersed in conservative, “hands-off” our SCOTUS decision rhetoric  that lingers even today. 

OpenSecrets.org’s New Dark Money Data Measures Groups’ Politicization

by Robert Maguire on September 9, 2013 11:00 AM 

Update, Sept. 11: For clarity, we have added two paragraphs to this story (see *) explaining that the IRS and FEC definitions of political spending are not identical, and have rephrased headlines to two charts.

Building on our previous work on “dark money” nonprofits, the Center for Responsive Politics is rolling out new information on the activities of these groups that are playing an increasing role in U.S. elections. 

Dark money groups — politically active 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations and 501(c)(6) trade associations that, under tax law, don’t have to disclose their donors — aren’t supposed to spend the majority of their resources on politics. But over the last six years, a combination of Supreme Court decisions that loosened restrictions on their electoral activity, coupled with regulatory confusion, has led to a surge in their political expenditures. Direct spending on federal elections by 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) groups has risen from $10 million in 2004 to well over $300 million in 2012 — and that’s just counting what they reported to the Federal Election Commission, which doesn’t include all of their political spending.

And the nature of their activity has changed in recent elections. Nearly half of the political spending by these groups in 2004 went for communications to their own members — what the FEC calls “communication costs.” Now, it shows up almost entirely in the form of negative, often misleading ads aimed at influencing the outcome of elections. In 2012, only 2 percent of the spending by these groups was directed at their own members. 

But trying to sort out exactly what these groups are doing ranges from very difficult to impossible, given how little information is available to the public. For example, the groups must disclose their total spending on their IRS Form 990s, due annually. But nowhere do they have to break down those expenditures in detail and say exactly how they spent the money, as unions must in reports with the Department of Labor. On top of that, the 990s are filed anywhere from five to 23 months after the spending in question actually takes place. Once they’re filed, the IRS offers no searchable database or machine readable data to the public. It provides only scant summary data. 

To help get around some of the hurdles posed by the dearth of IRS data, CRP has manually input more than 14,000 records, with the aim of bringing more clarity to the financial activities of nonprofits that have spent money to influence, directly and indirectly, federal elections over the last three cycles. 

CRP’s data includes all politically active 501(c)(4)s and 501(c)(6)s, whether or not they have been granted tax-exempt status by the IRS. Such groups as Crossroads GPS, American Commitment, and Citizens for Strength and Security either have not received or not applied for exempt status. The IRS does not include such groups in the data it makes available. Also, CRP’s new data includes other information that’s absent from the IRS data: total expenditures, total grants and total political spending reported to the IRS, over a period of multiple years. 

On the other side of the divide, at the FEC, these groups must file reports when they make certain political expenditures, but the agency doesn’t require them to provide identifying information — such as Employee Identification Numbers (EINs). So CRP has gone through three cycles of outside spending data and matched FEC filers with IRS identifiers, allowing us to link the two sets of data. 

The result is that we are providing multiple years of data reported to the IRS and the FEC, matched over the same time periods that the spending took place. We’ve included direct political spenders as well as what we call “dark money mailboxes” that reported no spending to the FEC themselves, but sent more than half their funds to politically active nonprofits. 

Not only have we matched spending reported to the FEC for the spenders themselves over the exact dates covered by each IRS report, but we have also incorporated recipient political spending into the donor profiles, so that users can get a better understanding of how much a donor’s grant recipients spent on politics. This information has never been provided anywhere until now.

Here are some of the larger findings that stand out in the new data.

From 2009 through 2011, overall spending reported to the IRS was often much greater during the election year.  

Looking at overall spending reported to the IRS for the three-year period from 2009 to 2011, at least 27 dark-money groups active in the 2010 midterms reported election-year expenditures that were more than the combined total of the two off-years, 2009 and 2011. On average, during this three-year period, more than 70 percent of the groups’ expenditures came during the election year. 

Top 10 Group	IRS 2009	IRS 2010	IRS 2011	Election- Year
Crossroads GPS	$0	$42,344,884	$22,375,630	65%
American Action Network	$1,446,675	$25,692,334	$11,482,833	67%
America Votes	$3,474,968	$14,193,741	$9,635,163	52%
American Future Fund	$1,913,598	$21,352,090	$3,637,462	79%
Americans for Tax Reform	$4,593,543	$11,379,668	$3,114,979	60%
Republican Jewish Coalition	$2,858,109	$12,409,886	$3,143,053	67%
Americans for Job Security	$3,490,547	$12,417,809	$2,481,855	68%
Susan B Anthony List	$2,837,834	$7,000,004	$3,531,134	52%
Americans for Limited Government	$1,840,743	$8,613,552	$1,038,919	75%
Faith & Freedom Coalition	$880,421	$5,661,250	$3,582,897	56%

Likewise, some of the most prominent donor organizations — 10 dark money mailboxes, for example — demonstrate the same trends. 

Dark Money Mailbox	IRS 2009	IRS 2010	IRS 2011	Percent Election-Year Spending
Center to Protect Patient Rights	$12,048,952	$60,245,391	$23,172,155	63%
Freedom & Values Alliance	$0	$1,070,585	$651,557	62%
Wellspring Cmte	$664,628	$11,521,432	$2,204,730	80%
TC4 Trust	$7,758,262	$30,880,071	$0	80%
American Justice Partnership	$2,225,711	$8,147,071	$1,849,827	67%
Patriot Majority USA	$76,269	$5,315,658	$0	99%
America’s Families First	$0	$7,647,638	$800,093	91%
Alliance for Freedom	$0	$4,375,434	$197,433	96%
Common Sense Issues Coalition	$9,054	$201,954	$23,924	86%
Atlantic Advocacy Fund	$18,963,628	$43,462,445	$13,964,521	57%

Significance?  We know that dark money groups engage in a lot of political activity during periods that are outside the FEC’s reporting windows, which means that their spending as reported to the FEC is often not an accurate measure of their participation in the electoral process. Unfortunately, those FEC reports are often the best metrics we have. That’s because the financial information reported to the IRS partially or entirely lacks important details like the group’s vendors, how much they were paid, for what products or services, and on what dates.  

Given the shortcomings of both IRS and FEC financial data on nonprofits, it’s important to look at the available information from different angles. Checking the ebb and flow of overall spending reported to the IRS and how it relates to election cycles is one way to do this.  

Dark Money Mailboxes Multiply. 

Dark money mailboxes are nonprofits with no direct federal political spending of their own and no substantial programs, staff, or volunteers. A majority of the spending by these groups goes for grants to other politically active nonprofits. (CRP has detailed the activities of several dark money mailboxes in our Shadow Money Trail series.)   

These organizations have proliferated with every election cycle, and as the 2012 filings start coming in, there may well be new discoveries. The following is a list of the top 10 such groups.

Dark Money Mailbox	IRS Spending	Grants	Percent Grants
Center to Protect Patient Rights	$95,466,498	$70,189,431	74%
Green Tech Action Fund	$28,243,610	$23,547,726	83%
Wellspring Cmte	$23,745,592	$16,886,369	71%
TC4 Trust	$38,638,333	$36,778,493	95%
American Justice Partnership	$15,693,198	$10,487,000	67%
Patriot Majority USA	$5,315,658	$2,896,708	54%
America’s Families First	$8,447,731	$7,794,000	92%
Atlantic Advocacy Fund	$103,089,084	$100,317,633	97%
Freedom & Values Alliance	$1,722,142	$1,717,346	100%
Alliance for Freedom	$4,572,867	$4,515,000	99%

(The Patriot Majority USA listed above is only one of three iterations of Patriot Majority USA.) 

Significance?  From a practical standpoint, dark money mailboxes serve two purposes. First, they add another level of opacity in a system where the sources of funds that ultimately are spent on politics are already difficult or impossible to find. If the IRS were to investigate, say, the 60 Plus Association‘s sources of income, it would also have to investigate the provenance of the money given out by three of its largest donors: the Center to Protect Patient Rights, TC4 Trust and Free Enterprise America, two of which are now defunct. 

Dark-money mailboxes have been tied to questionable activities around the country. In California, millions of dollars were funneled through a daisy chain of three nonprofits, including the Center to Protect Patient Rights, in what the California Fair Political Practices Commission called “campaign money laundering.“ 

Also, dark money can be used to diminish the likelihood of IRS scrutiny. Large contributions from one individual or corporation can trigger an audit to evaluate whether or not the recipient organization is serving the financial interests of the donor, a major no-no in the 501(c) world. To get around this, a donor, or small set of donors, can establish a constellation of nonprofits that then channel contributions to the same ultimate destination. 

Tens of millions of dollars in political spending goes entirely unreported to the IRS.

In 42 instances over the last four years, groups that reported at least $25,000 in spending to the FEC did not report political spending to the IRS. In nearly three-fourths of the cases, the spending they reported to the FEC was above $100,000, and in nine it was above $1 million. In 14 instances, the unreported political spending made up at least one-fifth of the group’s total spending as reported to the IRS, and in eight instances, the unreported spending ranged from 40 percent to 65 percent of the group’s expenditures. Such high levels of political spending could have raised suspicions at the IRS. 

The following groups had the largest amount of unreported political spending that also made up more than 20 percent of total spending the group reported to the IRS over the specified period.

Top 10 Group	Period	Total IRS Spending	FEC spending	Percent
Americans for Job Security	Nov 2007-Oct 2008	$12,343,781	$8,084,268	65%
Vets for Freedom	Jan 2008-Dec2008	$9,095,588	$4,757,685	52%
American Rights at Work	July2008-June2009	$16,450,569	$3,667,018	22%
Let Freedom Ring	Jan 2008-Dec2008	$7,364,554	$3,535,786	48%
Center for Individual Freedom	Oct 2010-Sept 2011	$5,757,719	$2,482,313	43%
Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$2,728,232	$1,128,162	41%
Americans for Job Security	Nov 2008-Oct 2009	$3,490,547	$890,488	26%
Ending Spending	Jan 2011-Dec 2011	$2,282,332	$688,090	30%
Judicial Confirmation Network	July2008-June2009	$1,405,553	$571,063	41%
American Energy Alliance	Jan 2008-Dec2008	$1,675,617	$485,307	29%

Two organizations — Let Freedom Ring and Nevada Advocates for Planned Parenthood — answered “yes” to a question on their tax forms asking whether they had engaged in efforts to influence the outcome of elections, directly or indirectly. Yet they did not report any political spending to tax authorities. 

Two other organizations — Americans for Job Security and Vets for Freedom — neglected to report political spending to the tax agency on two separate occasions. The largest discrepancies were in 2008, when Americans for Job Security’s $8 million in unreported political spending made up 65 percent of its total spending reported to the IRS; and Vets for Freedom’s $4.8 million in spending reported to the FEC, but not the IRS, made up more than half of the groups’ total outlays. 

*It’s worth noting that the FEC and IRS definitions of political spending are not identical. The IRS asks all filers of 990 forms to answer the question: “Did the organization engage in direct or indirect political campaign activities on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office?” That’s more vague than the FEC’s reporting requirements and, on its face, would seem to include all spending reported to the FEC and possibly more. However, as the Congressional Research Service (CRS) noted in a report issued last year, spending on issue ads that run shortly before an election and must be reported to the FEC might not necessarily be required to be reported to the IRS. The only two rulings the IRS has released on when issue advocacy becomes campaign spending indicate that the agency applies a complicated “facts and circumstances” test, and, as CRS notes, there are no “bright-line rules.” 

However, some experts say that organizations should not imagine there’s a practical difference between what the two agencies are asking for. “I have never been presented with an example of spending that is sufficiently political to be reported to the FEC, but would not be political under the IRS definition,” said tax attorney Marcus Owens, a former head of the exempt organizations office at the IRS. 

Significance? The IRS has no system in place to monitor spending reported to the FEC, and, as we’ve noted, even if it did, the FEC doesn’t require nonprofits to provide their EINs; without those unique identifiers, it would be hard for the IRS to check political spending by the organizations it oversees. To assess the political activity of a nonprofit, the IRS relies to a great degree on how much the group claims to have spent engaging “in direct or indirect political campaign activities on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office.”  

Millions more are only partially reported to the IRS.

At least thirteen groups that reported spending more than $25,000 to the FEC in either 2008 or 2010 reported spending much less than that on politics when they filed their 990s with the IRS. Together, these groups reported more than $51.6 million in spending to the FEC, while only reporting political spending of $24 million to the IRS over the exact same period.  

Top 10 Groups	Period	Total IRS Spending	Spending Reported to FEC	Political Spending Reported to IRS
American Action Network	July 2010-June 2011	$25,692,334	$18,885,679	$5,535,845
Freedom’s Watch	Jan 2008-Dec 2008	$36,933,305	$16,307,398	$10,745,848
Americans for Job Security	Nov 2009-Oct 2010	$12,417,809	$7,696,267	$4,351,478
Americans for Tax Reform	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$11,379,668	$4,160,299	$1,859,239
Republican Jewish Coalition	Jan 2008-Dec 2008	$6,521,230	$1,163,002	$104,567
Alliance for a Better Minnesota	Jan 2008-Dec 2008	$3,752,685	$1,415,453	$754,500
Alliance for America’s Future	Feb 2010-Dec 2010	$7,669,093	$703,772	$343,776
West Virginia Conservative Foundation	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$652,574	$534,974	$49,829
Citizens for the Republic	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$1,177,452	$195,411	$88,456
Citizen Action of Wisconsin	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$680,456	$110,617	$88,460

In all, about $67 million less in political spending was reported to the IRS than to the FEC in 2008 and 2010 by all groups that either failed to report or underreported political spending to the tax agency.

Significance? The IRS can’t effectively evaluate the political activity of a particular organization if it is not getting all the information it needs.  The agency does not systematically monitor spending that’s reported to the FEC, so it relies to a large extent on the political spending claimed by the filers on their 990s.  

Some organizations’ 2012 political spending alone surpassed their entire 2010 budgets.

Among groups that spent more than $50,000 on politics in 2012, 10 emerge as standouts because they spent more on politics in 2012 than they spent on everything in 2010.  

Group	IRS 2010	FEC 2012
Crossroads GPS	$42,344,884	$71,161,698
American Future Fund	$21,352,090	$25,404,956
Americans for Prosperity	$24,064,187	$36,364,103
Americans for Tax Reform	$11,379,668	$15,794,552
American Energy Alliance	$1,019,928	$1,361,500
Center Forward	$130,358	$2,057,089
Hispanic Leadership Fund	$228,613	$838,417
Emergency Cmte for Israel	$439,081	$827,965
Michigan League of Conservation Voters	$219,775	$860,237
Colorado Family Action	$64,578	$78,045

These 10 groups spent a combined total of almost $155 million in 2012 on politics, according to what they reported to the FEC — more than all of the spending reported to the FEC by 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) groups in 2010. In order to keep that total safely within IRS limits of political activity, they’re going to have to report more than $380 million in combined total expenditures to the IRS when they file their 990s covering 2012. That’s $280 million more in combined total IRS spending than these groups reported in 2010. Crossroads GPS alone accounts for $136 million of that increase. Its 2012 political spending of more than $71 million, as reported to the FEC, is nearly double its total 2010 budget. In order to keep that $71 million well under half of its total expenditures, it will need to report more than $177 million in total expenditures in 2012 on its tax return.  

Significance? It is normal for organizations promoting an agenda to be more active during an election year. Naturally, that is the time when the public and the media are paying the most attention, so organizations take advantage of election-year conditions to gain traction for their cause.  Of the groups CRP tracks, 160 filed 990s in the three-year period from 2009 to 2011, and 134 reported a rise in expenditures during 2010. 

But when a group’s spending surges dramatically in election years, particularly when the group in question is known to have made large political expenditures, it raises questions. 

Over the four-year period from 2009 through 2012, nine of the 10 groups listed here will have made, at a minimum, between 71 and 93 percent of their total expenditures for those four years combined during the election years of 2010 and 2012. Viewed together, these 10 groups reported a combined total of $68.7 million in total spending during the off years of 2009 and 2011. Using their total spending from 2010 and the spending they reported to the FEC in 2012, we’ve calculated a projected minimum estimate of what we expect their overall expenditures to be when they file their 990s covering last year. That analysis shows that the combined election-year overall spending totals for these 10 groups will come in at more than $483 million, a nearly seven-fold increase over off-year spending.

Attributable political spending puts some groups over the limit.  

Dark money groups rarely report that more than 30 or 40 percent of their total expenditures went towards political activities. One way they get around reporting too much in direct political expenditures is to make large grants to like-minded dark money groups and, sometimes, coordinate the expenditures. Factoring in this recipient political spending — by comparing the size of the grant to the group’s spending as reported to the FEC, then taking the smaller number — puts nine groups over the 50 percent political spending limit. Not factoring in recipient political spending shows just one group, American Action Network, spending above the limit.

Group	Period	Total IRS Spending	Donor’s FEC Spending	Attributable Recipient Spending	Total FEC Spending	FEC Spending with Recipients
Center to Protect Patient Rights	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$60,245,391	$0	$36,675,105	0%	61%
Crossroads GPS	June 2010-May 2011	$42,344,884	$16,564,728	$11,095,406	39%	65%
American Action Network	July 2010-June 2011	$25,692,334	$18,885,679	$200,000	74%	74%
Republican Jewish Coalition	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$12,409,886	$1,143,465	$8,000,000	9%	74%
Environment America	July 2008-June 2009	$10,573,775	$214,848	$6,514,090	2%	64%
Green Tech Action Fund	Aug 2008-Dec 2008	$2,375,000	$0	$2,375,000	0%	100%
Freedom & Values Alliance	Jan 2010-Dec 2010	$1,070,585	$0	$1,067,000	0%	100%
Common Sense Issues Coalition	Nov 2009-Oct 2010	$201,954	$0	$195,000	0%	97%
Annual Fund	July 2011-June 2012	$103,612	$0	$100,000	0%	97%

Even with recipient political spending factored in, these estimates are still on the low end for most groups, because many have state-level political expenditures and unreported “issue advocacy” that isn’t included here.  For example, in 2012, Americans for Job Security spent more than $1 million in judicial races in Michigan, according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, on top of the $16 million it reported spending at the federal level in 2012.

Significance? These totals do not attribute all political spending by recipients to the donor.  We compare the size of the grant with the recipients’ spending as reported to the FEC over the same period, then take the lower figure.  The aim is to get an estimate of how much political spending was facilitated by the donor.

The IRS has not yet made it clear whether giving large grants to other organization with political activities is a valid “social welfare” function. If not, the agency could take action against the groups that do this on a large scale.
_____________________ 

End Open Secrets

If you read the Open Secrets piece and are not alarmed at what you read, you are lost in a web of plutocracy.

Open Secrets Sheds Light On Political Non Profits

What do Germany, Colombia, Ireland, Mexico, Georgia, Indonesia, Macedonia, and Serbia have in common? According to the nonprofit global governance watchdog Global Integrity, they all beat out the United States on regulating money in politics. – See more at: http://unitedrepublic.org/u-s-flunks-corruption-indexs-money-in-politics-test/#sthash.UYbFqZiX.dpuf

Do you recall the major issues surrounding the revelations of IRS scrutiny of non-profit 501(c)(4)s and 501(c)(6)? You recall, I am sure. An Open Secrets look at the issue is available (below).

While the revelations initially appeared and sounded like a nefarious plot against conservative organizations, the issue later fizzled like Benghazi, Fast and Furious and Issa’s embarrassment based on his failures as a GOP hit-man.  The unsettling revelations eventually proved to have been exaggerated. The director of the IRS field office responsible for investing initial request for non-profit tax status held a piece of information. Information that could be called a secret if the information been intentionally held. The man is a Republican appointed by George W. Bush!  Moreover, we have recent revelation liberal and progressive organizations received like investigations and were required to answer same or similar questions.

Now let’s “walk-the-plank” regarding alleged IRS heavy handed investigations of Right-wing non-profit groups. The Citizens United Decision was issued in 2010 certainly factored into the workload of the Cincinnati Ohio Field Office.

WIKI

“Citizens United” redirects here. For the political organization, see Citizens United (organization).

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 24, 2009 Reargued September 9, 2009 Decided January 21, 2010
Full case name	Citizens United, Appellant v. Federal Election Commission
Docket nos.	08-205
Citations	558 U.S. 310 (more) 130 S.Ct. 876
Prior history	denied appellants motion for a preliminary injunction 530 F. Supp. 2d 274 (D.D.C. 2008)[1] probable jurisdiction noted 128 S. Ct. 1471 (2008).
Argument	Oral argument
Reargument	Reargument
Opinion Announcement	Opinion announcement
Holding
A provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act prohibiting unions, corporations and not-for-profit organizations from broadcasting electioneering communications within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary election violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. United States District Court for the District of Columbia reversed.
Court membership
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Associate Justices John P. Stevens · Antonin Scalia Anthony Kennedy · Clarence Thomas Ruth Bader Ginsburg · Stephen Breyer Samuel Alito · Sonia Sotomayor
Case opinions
Majority	Kennedy, joined by Roberts, Scalia, Alito; Thomas (all but Part IV); Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor (only as to Part IV)
Concurrence	Roberts, joined by Alito
Concurrence	Scalia, joined by Alito; Thomas (in part)
Concur/dissent	Stevens, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor
Concur/dissent	Thomas
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. I

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), is a US constitutional law case, in which the United States Supreme Court held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting political independent expenditures by corporations, associations, orlabor unions. 

transparent
…..The decision overruled Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) and partially overruled McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003).^[4]The Court, however, upheld requirements for public disclosure by sponsors of advertisements (BCRA §201 and §311). The case did not involve the federal ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidate campaigns or political parties, which remain illegal in races for federal office.^[5]

The IRS field office was inundated with request. Since the Right has a tendency to label their PACs and contribution entities with what they perceive as patriot names, reports were the organizations drew early scrutiny. It should be noted, not one organization, progressive or conservative, was denied the desired tax status.

OpenSecrets.org published a quick view set of charts  related to nonprofits. (Don’t miss both links (Types and Viewpoint)

Political Nonprofits

Politically active nonprofits — principally 501(c)(4)s and 501(c)(6)s — have become a major force in federal elections over the last three cycles. The term “dark money” is often applied to this category of political spender because these groups do not have to disclose the sources of their funding — though a minority do disclose some or all of their donors, by choice or in response to specific circumstances.

These organizations can receive unlimited corporate, individual, or union contributions that they do not have to make public, and though their political activity is supposed to be limited, the IRS — which has jurisdiction over these groups — by and large has done little to enforce those limits. Partly as a result, spending by organizations that do not disclose their donors has increased from less than $5.2 million in 2006 to well over $300 million in the 2012 election.

View totals by: (See Charts by Type of Group and By Viewpoint) 

Special credit to and mention of the Center for Responsive Politics. 

The information is no surprise.  Citizens United was to be a gold mine for conservative paths to the White House. Actually, contributions to Democrats outpaced Conservative contributions.  But, what do conservatives hate more than President Obama? They detest paying taxes. They will contribute at gross levels, but do not ask them to pay taxes to support their desire for a plutocracy. 

Keystone XL Pipeline: The Ugly, The Bad And The Secret Funnel!

If you approve of a Canadian corporation building yet another pipeline across the heart of the American Midwest, that is your prerogative.  If you oppose Obama’s potential approval of the northern leg of the Keystone XL Pipeline, as an American, that is also your prerogative. Before, moving-on, I am anticipating you know Trans Canada has an existing Keystone Pipeline (See bold red pipeline in 2011 MCT image, left). The XL project is a “brontosaurus” version surrounded by a protecvtive moot of lies (jobs), misrepresentations (safety and jobs), and financial contributions (Congress, lobbyist, surrogates and stooges across party lines).  Most Americans have no idea there is active development and funding of a ‘secret’ pipeline that is even more dangerous to the nation than the XL pipeline. 

On August 15, 2013 USdailyrepresent Dot US’s Jasper McChesney published an infographic about the secret pipeline (posted below). The secrecy surrounding this pipeline is focused on you, me and others who allow ourselves to continue as unknowing subjects in the active and flourishing world of international corporatism.

While the secret pipeline is as old as US history it has grown with time to a reliable funnel of contributions to political campaigns.  The funnel was given a major fissure with the SCOTUS ruling on the Citizens United case in 2010.

USdailyrepresent Dot US

Congress’ Secret Pipeline!

H.R. 3 Northern Route Approval Act  (Project as an Eden’s Garden for Members of Congress)

Keystone XL: The Push

Keystone XL: Imminent Danger

More to come on Keystone XL……