The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Politicians Bought and Paid for … Richly!

Aug 29, 2022

It’s election season in this so-called democracy. Have you donated to your local politician so that he or she can buy $500 ads in your small local newspaper? How about the thousands of dollars needed to pay for ads every week in large newspapers? Or does the candidate have millions in campaign contributions—coming currently in the multi-millions of dollars to your local Democrats or local Republicans from their national committees—to fund attack ads on television or radio?

This money is what’s required all over the country, especially in state-wide races, but even in some district-wide ones. And thanks to the Supreme Court, it is now legal to spend many millions of dollars on so-called non-profits set up to hide the names of donors making these large political donations.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund has been known to send millions of dollars in support to Democrats, and the Rule of Law Trust sends millions to support Republicans. And because these trust funds are set up legally as non-profits, it really means U.S. tax-payers support all these exemptions to the tax laws—taxes not paid on the income of the rich.

In the 2020 elections, the Democrats funneled more than one and a half BILLION dollars to candidates this way, while the Republicans reported just under a billion dollars spent this way. And that was on ONE election and does not count the millions of dollars in donations that go in the usual way to a finance committee named for a single candidate, all of which is reported to the IRS.

For this election cycle, a new trust, the Marble Freedom Trust, was set up by the former vice president of the Federalist Society, the organization that helped stack all courts, not just the Supreme Court, with conservative judges. This trust received the assets of a company sold by a wealthy computer equipment supplier to an Irish conglomerate. Then somehow, all legally of course, one and a half billion dollars of this company’s money ended up in this new trust to funnel into the campaigns most important to the Republican Party in 2022.

And wouldn’t you know it, the Democratic Party used to talk against all this money going into these legal trusts and winding up supporting Republican candidates—until the Democrats began funneling their billions of dollars to candidates using the same kind of trusts!

All’s fair in love, war, and the American campaign system!