This isn't exactly news; I was surprised when I was took History of Los Angeles class in grad school that millionaires (equivalent to a lot more money today) were among the big funders of some of Southern California's socialist communes in the 1900-20 period.

There are a couple of disturbing examples that have popped up in the news in the last few days. The first is that one of the leftist groups funded by billionaires like George Soros and Peter Lewis was fined very heavily for unlawful contributions:

The Federal Election Commission has fined one of the last cycle’s biggest liberal political action committees $775,000 for using unregulated soft money to boost John Kerry and other Democratic candidates during the 2004 elections.

America Coming Together (ACT) raised $137 million for its get-out-the-vote effort in 2004, but the FEC found most of that cash came through contributions that violated federal limits.

The group’s big donors included George Soros, Progressive Corp. chairman Peter Lewis and the Service Employees International Union.

The settlement, which the FEC approved unanimously, is the third largest enforcement penalty in the commission’s 33-year history.

ACT, which ceased operations in 2005, was formed in late 2003 and rapidly deployed an enormous organization to do the retail-level grunt work of politics.

It opened more than 90 offices in 17 states from which it mobilized an army of more than 25,000 paid canvassers and volunteers to knock on doors, stuff envelopes and make phone calls urging voters to defeat President Bush and support Democratic or “progressive” candidates including Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate.

It makes you wonder how much larger Bush's victory margin would have been if the billionaires hadn't been breaking the law. This other news item is about some rather curiously large campaign contributions to Hilary Clinton's campaign. From the August 28, 2007 Wall Street Journal:

DALY CITY, Calif. -- One of the biggest sources of political donations to Hillary Rodham Clinton is a tiny, lime-green bungalow that lies under the flight path from San Francisco International Airport.

Six members of the Paw family, each listing the house at 41 Shelbourne Ave. as their residence, have donated a combined $45,000 to the Democratic senator from New York since 2005, for her presidential campaign, her Senate re-election last year and her political action committee. In all, the six Paws have donated a total of $200,000 to Democratic candidates since 2005, election records show.

...

It isn't obvious how the Paw family is able to afford such political largess. Records show they own a gift shop and live in a 1,280-square-foot house that they recently refinanced for $270,000. William Paw, the 64-year-old head of the household, is a mail carrier with the U.S. Postal Service who earns about $49,000 a year, according to a union representative. Alice Paw, also 64, is a homemaker. The couple's grown children have jobs ranging from account manager at a software company to "attendance liaison" at a local public high school. One is listed on campaign records as an executive at a mutual fund.

The Paws' political donations closely track donations made by Norman Hsu, a wealthy New York businessman in the apparel industry who once listed the Paw home as his address, according to public records. Mr. Hsu is one of the top fund-raisers for Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign. He has hosted or co-hosted some of her most prominent money-raising events.

People who answered the phone and the door at the Paws' residence declined requests for comment last week. In an email last night, one of the Paws' sons, Winkle, said he had sometimes been asked by Mr. Hsu to make contributions, and sometimes he himself had asked family members to donate. But he added: "I have been fortunate in my investments and all of my contributions have been my money."

Does this remind anyone of what happened when a bunch of Buddhist nuns gave big contributions to the Clinton/Gore campaign--and then admitted that it wasn't their money? From September 4, 1997 CNN:

Man-Ho Shih, one of three nuns testifying today at the Senate campaign finance hearings, said she threw away a copy of her list of donors who gave a total of $45,000.
Asked why, Man-Ho said, "I'm afraid the document might cause embarrassment to the temple." The temple's administrative officer said she destroyed other documents too, in Fall 1996 after news stories about the now-infamous Hsi Lai Temple luncheon appeared.
Yi-Chu, the temple's bookkeeper, said she also destroyed documents and made new entries in the temple's books. "Developments were unfolding so fast that I was -- I really got nervous," she said. "See, I'm the bookkeeper of the temple, but I'm not a professional accountant. And for a lot of entries, I don't know how to deal with them. So I decided to destroy some of the documentation and make some new entries in the books."
Both Man-Ho and Yi-Chu said they acted on their own, and not at the direction of anyone else.
The nuns, dressed in brown robes, appeared on the first day of renewed campaign finance hearings by Sen. Fred Thompson's committee. In a written statement read by their attorney, Brian Sun, the nuns acknowledged the temple reimbursed members of the order who made $5,000 contributions to the Democrats, but said if the temple broke the law, it did not do so intentionally and none of the money came from overseas. (288K wav sound)
Tax-exempt religious organizations, like the temple, are not allowed to make political contributions. It is illegal for anyone to make political donations in someone else's name.
Gore's appearance at the fund-raiser has proven a major embarrassment for the vice president, but he also faces new Justice Department scrutiny on another front: his 46 fund-raising calls from the White House.

Oh yes, I'm sure none of that money came from overseas! Without question!

My friend Stacy McCain's book Donkey Cons has a very detailed account of the corruption involved with overseas money coming into the Clinton/Gore campaign in 1996--and how Republicans made no serious effort to look into this.