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http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34048-how-dark-money-groups-can-get-away-with-breaking-the-law
How Dark Money Groups Can Get Away With Breaking the Law
Tuesday, 15 December 2015
By Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report
"If you've been watching TV in Iowa this primary season, chances are you've seen an ad featuring Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio waxing poetic about the "American dream." The ad plugs a list of "new ideas" such as "throwing out the tax code" that mirror Rubio's campaign platform - but his campaign has nothing to do with the ad, at least not on paper.
The group behind the ad, Conservative Solutions Project, has been accused of violating the tax code by filing as a nonprofit charity that appears to be working for the benefit of only one person: Rubio. But that hasn't stopped the group from injecting millions of dollars into the campaign without publicly disclosing where that money came from. So far, the group raised and spent more money than both Rubio's official campaign and a super PAC dedicated to electing him, leaving voters with no idea as to who is paying top dollar for pro-Rubio ads.
Rubio's campaign is not alone. "Dark money" has exploded into the political scene since the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision unleashed a flood of corporate cash into the nation's elections. Groups that don't disclose their donors spent $300 million in the 2012 elections and at least $174 million in the 2014 midterms, when they were responsible for 38 percent of all political ads bought by outside groups, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).
The bulk of this spending is done by a growing number of groups that file with the IRS as 501(c)(4) nonprofits and are considered by law to primarily be social welfare organizations, not political campaigners, and therefore are not required to reveal their donors. Under vague IRS guidelines, political activity is supposed to make up less than half of what these groups do, but they routinely spend most of their money on efforts to influence elections.
For years, campaign watchdogs have called on the IRS and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to crack down on dark money groups that brazenly circumvent the tax code and even break the law, but their efforts have repeatedly stalled in the face of partisan gridlock.
"If action isn't taken now, we will see more and more of these groups every year," said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which has filed numerous civil - and recently, criminal - complaints against dark money groups and their operatives. "We are filing these complaints to stop them before this problem becomes widespread."..."
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I think Bernie Sanders is the only candidate that has directly addressed this problem in his campaign...over and over again.
