The Circle of Scam

Paul Waldman, January 7, 2014

Welcome to conservative politics, where everybody's fleecing somebody.

I've long held that what William Goldman said about Hollywood—"Nobody knows anything"—is equally true of Washington. At the same time though, people in politics are particularly adept at finding those who know even less than they do, and scamming them into giving over their political support or their money, or both.

I thought of this when reading the long investigation The Washington Post published the other day on the byzantine network of organizations the Koch brothers have established or funded to funnel their ample resources into politics. There are dozens of groups involved, and money moves back and forth between them in intricate ways. The Post was able to trace $400 million they spent in the last election, but since there were a number of organizations whose money they weren't able to track, the real number is almost certainly higher. As a tax law expert quoted in the article says, "It is a very sophisticated and complicated structure ... It's designed to make it opaque as to where the money is coming from and where the money is going. No layperson thought this up. It would only be worth it if you were spending the kind of dollars the Koch brothers are, because this was not cheap." The Koch brothers no doubt can avail themselves of the most skilled and creative accountants money can buy.