ThaRoots

liberal-focus:

Washington’s scandal machinery, rusty from recent disuse, is cranking back up to speed due to the alleged targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service. So it might be useful to ask: Did the I.R.S. actually do anything wrong?

In fact, what are political groups that can accept donations from billionaires without taxes or outing such billionaires doing going either tax free or working anonymously???

Billionaires already own the largest businesses, and are taking over the news media, and even education.  We have a perfect storm of Big Money control brewing and Citizens United and tax law allows  the Big Money sources to be secret.

But I’ll let constitutional expert and lawyer Jeffrey Toobin explain more:

So the scandal—the real scandal—is that 501(c)(4) groups have been engaged in political activity in such a sustained and open way. As Fred Wertheimer, the President of Democracy 21, a government-ethics watchdog group, put it, “it is clear that a number of groups have improperly claimed tax-exempt status as section 501(c)(4) ‘social welfare’ organizations in order to hide the donors who financed their campaign activities in the 2010 and 2012 federal elections.”

Some people in the I.R.S. field office in Cincinnati took the names of certain groups—names that included the terms “Tea Party” and “patriot,” among others, which tend to signal conservatism—as signals that they might not be engaged in “social welfare” operations. Rather, the I.R.S. employees thought that these groups might be doing explicit politics—which would disqualify them for 501(c)(4) status, and set them aside for closer examination. This appears to have been a pretty reasonable assumption on the part of the I.R.S. employees: having “Tea Party” in your name is at least a slight clue about partisanship. When the inspector-general report becomes public, we’ll surely learn the identity of these organizations. How many will look like “social welfare” organizations—and how many will look like political activists looking for anonymity and tax breaks? My guess is a lot more of the latter than the former.

Read full article at link above and find out how deeply we are screwed by the very wealthy.

Plus read below:

Picture above of flags and banners at a Tea Party Express rally clipped and used via Creative Commons License Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to Fibonacci Blue who has no connection to this blog.

Tea Party Express is described by Source Watch:

Tea Party Express is the name for a public relations blitz in 2009 via a cross-country caravan of buses and cars making 35 stops for rallies featured on conservative media.

In what appears to be the earliest news listing for the Tea Party Express, a Talking Points Memo post of August 3rd, 2009 mentioned that sponsors of the tour were Our Country Deserves Better PAC, and Americans for Prosperity^[4];

Source Watch describes Americans for Prosperity:

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a group fronting special interests founded in 2004 by oil billionaire David Koch and Richard Fink (a member of the board of directors of Koch Industries). AFP has been accused of funding astroturf operations but also has been fueling the “Tea Party” efforts. ^[1] AFP’s messages are in sync with those of other groups funded by the Koch Family Foundations and the Kochs’ other special interest groups that work against progressive or Democratic initiatives and protections for workers and the environment.

So basically, billionaires doing their politicking to get more tax cuts, and getting that service tax free as if they are a Social Welfare group ie a charity.

Isn’t it a bigger scandal that such billionaires’ puppet groups want tax breaks?