The really big money in politics

Charles-David-KochNow if you only get information from uber-liberal media sources like Mother Jones or Media Matters, you might have the impression that the Koch brothers (pronounced “Coke” like the soft drink) are probably the most powerful and corrupting influence out there, when it comes to the really big money in politics. Right?

No, you would actually be wrong.

Wait a minute — even if the Kochs are not the absolute biggest individual political donors on the list, they must at least be in the top 10, correct?

Nope. Not even close.

But hold on now — when Rolling Stone magazine suggested these e-e-e-vil brothers are trying to “buy up our political system” with ill-gotten profits of their “toxic empire,” there must be some truth to those allegations, or their printed accusations would constitute libel, wouldn’t it?

Maybe. I’m not a lawyer. Nor do I play one on television. But if I’m reading the definition of libel correctly from the dictionary, perhaps a lawsuit looms in the magazine’s near future.

So, if not even in the top 10, where exactly on the list of big money donors do the Koch brothers fall?

Well, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website published by the Center for Responsive Politics, Charles and David Koch rank http://ccritz.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ccritz_casebook.pdf 59th out of the top 100 political donors with donations of slightly more than $20 million dollars from 1989-2014.

According to that same list, the largest single political donor is ActBlue, which alone donated over do you need a prescription to buy disulfiram $100 million dollars more than the Koch brothers.

Unsurprisingly, given their name, 99 percent of ActBlue’s $121 million in total donations went to Democrats. None went to Republicans.

In stark contrast, the Koch brothers were a little less biased, donating at least 8 percent of their total political contributions to Democrat candidates.

Now if one simply looks at the list and the top ten donors and adds the total donations of the ten largest political donors, it becomes easy to determine that well over a whopping $400 million more went in big money campaign contributions from lawyers, big business, and labor unions to Democrat candidates.

So remember this information, the next time a political candidate tries to win your sympathy and your vote by demonizing the Koch brothers.

Their paltry (in comparison to the others on the list, of course) $20 million dollars is just a drop in the bucket of big money in politics.

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  1. […] even among the top 50 political donors, which means they really aren’t behind the really big money in politics. Big money tends to go to liberal Democrats, apparently because their votes are less […]

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