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<blockquote data-quote="oldngray" data-source="post: 1398647" data-attributes="member: 45230">We can say for sure that the $490 million Trudeau cited came from more people than just Charles and David Koch. It included campaign contributions from Koch Industries political action committees and from Koch Industries employees. In fact, the article itself doesn’t contend that all the money came from the Kochs. It called it part of the &quot;Koch network.&quot;&quot;I saw that claim in Doonesbury and was surprised by it,&quot; Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a University of Notre Dame Law School professor who studies political nonprofits, told us. &quot;Trudeau may have mistakenly overestimated the amount attributable to the Koch brothers.&quot;&quot;We have no idea how much of the money comes from the Kochs,&quot; Maguire said.There are difficulties, too, in trying to calculate spending by unions.We found a variety of totals for union political spending, although only the one cited by Trudeau exclusively tallied up the activities of the top 10. Remember, Doonesbury compared the Kochs to that smaller group.One of the problems is the national unions give money, but so do their local affiliates. Some of that spending is on candidates and parties, and some is on lobbying. A comparable analysis on the Koch Industries side would include similar spending by its 12 companies and their subsidiaries. We did not find anything like that.To further complicate the picture, the unions also give through third-party organizations that don’t reveal their donorsOn the Koch side, the sources Trudeau cited did not say that all of the money connected to David and Charles Koch was their personal money. The Kochs have played a key role in creating a unique legal mechanism to raise and spend money that obscures the ultimate donors, and the nature of that mechanism gives them a high level of of control over how it is spent. To some extent, unions also feed into third-party money operations. And union political activity is spread much wider and among more organizations than the Kochs’ giving.In short, a true apples-to-apples comparison is quite difficult.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="oldngray, post: 1398647, member: 45230"] We can say for sure that the $490 million Trudeau cited came from more people than just Charles and David Koch. It included campaign contributions from Koch Industries political action committees and from Koch Industries employees. In fact, the article itself doesn’t contend that all the money came from the Kochs. It called it part of the "Koch network." "I saw that claim in Doonesbury and was surprised by it," Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a University of Notre Dame Law School professor who studies political nonprofits, told us. "Trudeau may have mistakenly overestimated the amount attributable to the Koch brothers." "We have no idea how much of the money comes from the Kochs," Maguire said. There are difficulties, too, in trying to calculate spending by unions. We found a variety of totals for union political spending, although only the one cited by Trudeau exclusively tallied up the activities of the top 10. Remember, [I]Doonesbury [/I]compared the Kochs to that smaller group. One of the problems is the national unions give money, but so do their local affiliates. Some of that spending is on candidates and parties, and some is on lobbying. A comparable analysis on the Koch Industries side would include similar spending by its 12 companies and their subsidiaries. We did not find anything like that. To further complicate the picture, the unions also give through third-party organizations that don’t reveal their donors On the Koch side, the sources Trudeau cited did not say that all of the money connected to David and Charles Koch was their personal money. The Kochs have played a key role in creating a unique legal mechanism to raise and spend money that obscures the ultimate donors, and the nature of that mechanism gives them a high level of of control over how it is spent. To some extent, unions also feed into third-party money operations. And union political activity is spread much wider and among more organizations than the Kochs’ giving. In short, a true apples-to-apples comparison is quite difficult. [/QUOTE]

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