;)
March 15th, 2016
Those poor One Percenters. Sure the wealthiest one percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, have multiple homes, cars, planes, yachts, even the newly minted legal defense of “affluenza” to exonerate them from killing people. But they have never been able to enjoy the benefits of social welfare organizations like Doctors Without Borders, the Humane Society or the Wounded Warriors Project. Until now that is.
To combat this gross inequality that has been perpetrated upon these poor souls, the One Percenters have formed special social welfare groups and petitioned the government for non-profit status. The poster child for such groups is Crossroads GPS, spawned by none other than Karl Rove himself. Crossroads GPS has spent every dollar it has collected, approximately $330 million, not on helping those in need, but on politics that benefit the uber-rich, either by funding its own campaigns to smear candidates or organizations who have the audacity to stick up for ordinary Americans or to fund other front groups who employ similar hatchet-job tactics.
Now, thanks to a five-years-in-the-making ruling from the Internal Revenue Service that declared Crossroads GPS a nonprofit social welfare group, the injustice that has long befallen the One Percent shall be no more. No longer shall Crossroads GPS be required to pay taxes on the hundreds of millions it collects to influence or outright buy elections for the benefit of the one percent (non-profit social welfare groups are tax exempt). No longer shall it be required to disclose its billionaire donors’ names, which inform ordinary Americans exactly who is behind the effort to destroy the very ideals (of liberty, justice and equality for all) upon which this country was founded (non-profit social welfare groups are donor disclosure exempt). Thanks to the IRS, the One Percenters can now bribe, err make “political contributions,” in total secrecy and remain completely insulated from those pesky repercussions that sometimes come from trying hard to undermine democracy. Now all the CEO has to do is give that money to Crossroads GPS, who can funnel it to that candidate with total impunity.
It would take the average American about three minutes to understand that groups like Crossroads GPS are just about the furthest thing from social welfare one could ever imagine. It’s not providing support to wounded soldiers, abandoned children or abused animals. On the contrary, Crossroads is nothing but a political group whose money goes entirely to people and organizations that work to actively undermine, or outright abolish, all kinds of social welfare. But these people want to hide in the shadows while doing it, and the IRS has just served them up an invisibility cloak on a silver platter. Of course, the groundwork was laid for this sort of thing by the U.S. Supreme Court’s democracy-killing Citizens United decision, which licensed the purchase of elections by Corporate America and has opened the floodgates in the current election, which has never seen this much money flow into a presidential campaign this early from so few donors ($176 million from just 158 One Percenters).
Political organizations should never receive the sort of benefits that are provided to groups that serve society by delivering food and shelter to folks ravaged by natural disasters or who work to provide clean water to poor communities or mentor foster children. I am sick to death of living in a country torn apart by runaway inequality. We desperately need someone who is willing to fight against the rigged economic system, political corruption and the public/private revolving door. This election season there is exactly one presidential candidate who is speaking out about the absurdities and inequities of campaign financing, who has made ending this sort of thing one of the centerpieces of his campaign. His name is Bernie Sanders, and seeing decisions like Crossroads surely has me paying very close attention to his campaign.
