© Huffington Post
Obscure limited liability companies have ultimate say over the Koch network's nonprofits, which spend hundreds of millions of dollars to advance conservative causes.Libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch were among the first to grasp the political potential of social welfare groups and trade associations - nonprofits that can spend money to influence elections but don't have to name their donors.
The Kochs and their allies have built up
a complex network of such organizations, which spent more than $383 million in the run-up to the 2012 election alone. [Click link for interactive graphic]
Documents released in recent months show the Kochs have added wrinkles to their network that even experts well versed in tax law and campaign finance say they've never seen before - wrinkles that could make it harder to discern who controls each nonprofit in the web and how it disperses its money.
A review of 2012 tax returns filed by Koch network groups shows that most have been set up as nonprofit trusts rather than not-for-profit corporations, an unusual step that reduces their public reporting requirements.
It sounds complicated and arcane because it is. Some of the nation's top nonprofit experts said they could only speculate on the reasons for the network's increasingly elaborate setup.
"My guess is that we're looking at various forms of disguise - to disguise control, to disguise the flow of funds from one entity to another," said Gregory Colvin, a tax lawyer and campaign-finance specialist in San Francisco who reviewed all the documents for ProPublica.
Four other leading nonprofit experts and three conservative operatives with knowledge of the Koch network said the most likely reason that the Kochs and their inner circle are using this arrangement was to exert control over the groups without saying publicly who was in charge. In particular, they said, the Kochs likely wanted to prevent any of the groups that they help fund from going against their wishes - as
happened with the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank the Kochs had long supported before they got into a dispute with its president, Ed Crane.
After a top Cato official ridiculed Charles Koch in
a 2010 New Yorker article, the brothers pushed to put allies on the think tank's board. The following year, they
pressed Cato to provide "intellectual ammunition" for their oldest politically active nonprofit, Americans for Prosperity, Cato officials later alleged. The dispute was
settled in 2012, with the departure of Crane and the installation of a traditional board. (Cato previously was controlled by four private shareholders, including the Kochs, an unusual setup for a nonprofit.)
Robert Levy, Cato's board chairman, told ProPublica that while he didn't disagree with the Kochs' aims, Cato's leaders were uncomfortable with serving as advocates for their political agenda.
Comment: On the last link to the US Army website we learn that So Rapid Trident 2014 will be the 12th year NATO forces have been 'conducting military exercises' in Western Ukraine, the very region where far-right extremists, well-armed and well-trained, took over Ukraine's capital city in a bloody coup earlier this year.
Coincidence?