Just like liberals, conservatives like to whine about the perfidy of the “other’s” foundations and activist groups, and a perennial complaint of conservatives is the liberal Tides Foundation.
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Tides is a “dark money” group. The idea is to allow liberal heiresses like Teresa Heinz Kerry to donate money to left-wing causes without actually donating money directly to e.g., the lefty magazine Mother Jones. You can contribute to Tides and tell them with a wink and a nod that you’d like the money to go to your favorite lefty whack-job: no questions asked. Very convenient for the lefty heiress that blushes easily.
Tides is no small operation. Here’s a peek at its 2011 Form 990 pdf filed with the IRS.
It turns out that the right has its own “dark money” foundation. It’s called Donors Trust. Who knew? Well, Mother Jones does, and now it has told us all about it. In the interest of fairness, because, as President Obama would say, that’s who we are, here is a peek at the 2011 Form 990 pdf for Donor’s Trust.
Comparing like to like, Tides punched out $95 million in grants in 2011, whereas Donors Trust distributed $30 million. But Andy Kroll at Mother Jones writes that that’s not the half of it for Donor’s.
Last year, DonorsTrust (and its sister group, Donors Capital Fund) doled out a record $96 million, making it one of the largest honeypots for right-leaning groups. That’s an increase from $85 million in 2011 and $78 million in 2010.
For some reason, Kroll doesn’t run us through the Tides Foundation finances for the benefit of his inquiring readers, except to note that Tides contributes monies to Mother Jones. So when he says that the total Donors output for 2011 was $85 million, who knows what the Tides equivalent, including its sister groups if any, would amount to?
And really, the moneybags on the right have far more need of anonymity. It’s easy for Silicon Valley oligarchs to do the crony capitalist waltz with Obama and the Democrats. Giving to left-wing causes is almost respectable. But if you contribute to right-wing causes like the Koch brothers, you can subject yourself to endless abuse from the thoughtful folks at MSNBC and others.
By the way, it turns out that the lefty opinion mags have their own troll problems. Here’s a comment on Andy Kroll’s article from “acidulous.”
You leftie make me laugh. You are in high dungeon because the right is raising money? Yeah – we shouldn’t do that. We need to be suppressed and you are up for the job. You have the IRS, George Soros, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, myriad trusts, PACS, Move On, the Media Project, …should I go on?
How about that IRS Foundation! I wonder what its Form 990 looks like? Oh wait, I do. Here are the IRS numbers for 2011:
Line 8 Total Contributions $3,603,100 million
Line 13 Total Grants, etc. $2,303,500 million
The IRS dark money operation really makes Donors Trust and even the Tides Foundation look like chump change. You gotta hand it to those liberals; they really know how to spread the wealth around.