Big Dark Money in our politics is ruining not only our politics and our elections, but also the environment.

A lot of this big dark money is from oil companies, and other interests of the oil industry. Other money destroying our media is from the media owners, big corporations, and their supporters. The American networks CNN and MSNBC are not friends of progressives in the US. They represent corporate interests, as much as Fox News does.

I frequently watch the BBC network for news because American TV media is so incredibly awful. However, one thing about the BBC is they often get politics wrong. They also get America wrong. They frequently think we are stupider, more racist and more ignorant and a lot of other more negative things than they are (a holdoever from their colonial past I presume) when it seems lately that the UK is even more racist than the US. They think Joe Biden is unpopular (he’s more popular than Trump ever was) and they think he’s too elderly to run for president again (I mostly agree) and they actually thought we were going to have a real civil war a few months ago! (I heard that last night). The can’t seem to differentiate between online talk and reality. But in other matters, mostly world news, the BBC is a genuinely good source of news because they talk about important things more accurately than American media. And they are not run by corporate overlords. I recommend everyone listen to “foreign” news instead of American news for that reason. The one thing they get glaringly wrong about American politics is the reason for our political problems. It’s not the “ignored working class blokes” – it’s MONEY.

Big, dark, opaque MONEY is destroying our entire political system. It is a deep threat to our election system. It will be the eventual ruin of all of it if we don’t get a handle on it (and probably ban large PAC and corporate donations, at the very least). The BBC doesn’t talk about this, and neither does any American media, except sporadically. Yet it’s the biggest political problem we face other than the erosion of voting rights.

No one knows this more than Sheldon Whitehouse, a progressive Democratic Senator from Rhode Island. I have long admired Senator Whitehouse for his environmental and climate change focus, and he also is an expert on dark money in politics. Here is a recent video he made talking about the dangers of dark money in politics.

And more from Whitehouse on this subject:

WHITEHOUSE ILLUMINATES DARK-MONEY NETWORK’S PROJECT TO UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY

Washington, DC – In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday on the intensifying harassment of election workers, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) shone a floodlight on the right-wing dark-money network seeking to undermine the future of democratic elections in the United States.

“There is nothing about this, Mr. Chairman, that is random,” said Whitehouse. “I hope that there will be investigations that are done, either civilly or otherwise, to connect these obvious dots: that there is a fraudulent lie, that it is deliberately propagated, that the propagation of that lie is intended to cause harassment and threats to election officials, which in turn is designed to cause vacancies in the legitimate election official ranks that can then be filled with election denier cohorts.”

Whitehouse described how interconnected organizations in a dark-money network appear to be fraudulently sowing doubt about the integrity of elections in order to whip up anger towards honest, hardworking election officials. The network employs many of the same associates of former President Trump who attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Across the country, many election officials have stepped down from their posts since the election due to harassment, leaving key vacancies that can be filled by extremist election deniers.

Whitehouse was recently talking about dark money on the new-ish podcast called Fast Politics with Molly Jong Fast. (This is a better podcast than her other one, The New Abnormal) He is also frustrated by the lack of action by the Biden administration on climate change, which I can relate to. Biden has talked about climate change a lot, but virtually nothing has been done so far. It’s time to get some real climate action going, considering we were out of time on climate change action about 5 years ago. We are now grossly overdue for big climate action.

And it doesn’t help at all that the fucking Keystone Pipeline just leaked another 14,000 barrels of oil in rural Kansas and Kansas just backed up a few feet and said “Nothing to see here. All is under control” when nothing is under control. This is the 3rd leak of the Keystone Pipeline since 2010. Naturally big oil money will suppress this as much as possible, and they are succeeding so far.

Kansas oil spill is Keystone pipeline’s biggest ever, according to federal data

Kansas officials claim none of this oil spill is endangering the water in Kansas but you can clearly see from this photo it has leaked into the waterways. Yes, it’s very bad.

The American broadcast media has barely mentioned it.

The Keystone pipeline spill in a creek running through rural pastureland in Washington County, Kansas, about 150 miles northwest of Kansas City, also was the biggest in the system’s history, according to U.S. Department of Transportation data. The operator, Canada-based TC Energy, said the pipeline that runs from Canada to Oklahoma lost about 14,000 barrels, or 588,000 gallons.

This has to stop, obviously.

You can Listen to the December 9, 2022 episode of Fast Politics for more Sheldon Whitehouse,  from this list of episodes.

#sheldonWhitehouse #darkmoney #oilMoney #PACmoney #Politics #BBC #CNNSucks #AmericanMedia #KeystonePipeline #OilSpill #KansasOilSpill