Corporations are using the dark-money bribery legalized by conservative supreme court justices to control and undermine our democracy, just like the conservatives intended. All the important agencies that are designed to regulate industry and protect us, are now compromised and captured, making the government work only for big money. Our votes mean little any more, as they capture our government with their money and turn it into their puppet, destroying our democracy in the process.

Joe Biden's agenda faces an unprecedented onslaught of dark money: The FCC is just the start
https://www.salon.com/2023/02/19/how-much-of-bidens-agenda-will-be-defeated-by-dark-money-fcc-is-just-the-start/

#GreedKills
#GreedKillsDemocracy
#GreedCheatsNLies
#GreedHatesDemocracy

"Joe Biden's struggle to get FCC nominee Gigi Sohn confirmed by the Senate offers an early warning sign of the legislative battles ahead.
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Dark money spending — untraceable political donations funneled through super PACs that aren't required to report who their donors are — topped $1 billion in the 2020 election cycle. Perhaps surprisingly, that funding largely benefited Democrats, and that sum exploded to the unprecedented $8.9 billion midterm spending spree of 2022.
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Sohn has pointed to ISP and telecom dark money as the cause of a delay that now threatens to divide Biden from members of his own party, aiming to peel off key Democratic votes and sink her nomination.
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Craig Holman, Public Citizen's Capitol Hill lobbyist on ethics and campaign finance, argued in an email to Salon that the telecom industry offers a prime example of how dark money transcends pure partisanship.

"While some dark money groups spend most of their money supporting candidates of a single party...many dark money groups could care less about party affiliation and support anyone who promotes their specific causes," Holman said.

"This is particularly the case for industry-related dark money groups, such as in the telecom industry.
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All this Big Telecom dark money, he adds, has endangered Sohn's nomination, "despite the fact that she espouses traditionally Democratic values and thus should otherwise easily be confirmed by the Democratic majority in the Senate."
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"Corporate-backed nonprofit groups are an easy and effective vehicle for special interests to push a particular policy or decision without necessarily having their name attached to the campaign," said Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

"These groups are often made to look like legitimate grassroots organizations when in reality they're consultant- or lobbyist-run astroturf groups, crafted specifically to fit the policy goals of their corporate funders, whose identities are often difficult or even impossible to suss out."
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According to public records gathered by Open Secrets, 254 businesses and organizations sent lobbyists to the FCC in 2022, for a total body count of 781 actual human lobbyists. Forty-two percent of those actual humans were former government regulators, former members of Congress members or former congressional staffers. Leading the pack were the usual industry players: T-Mobile, Charter Communications, Verizon, Comcast and the NCTA, a leading cable and broadband trade group.
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Members of the 2022 Senate Commerce Committee, where Sohn now awaits a vote, received $4.5 million in campaign contributions from internet industry groups. Those members, both Democrat and Republican, received $3.8 million from telecom services industry groups.
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But dark money's best strategy isn't always aimed at determining outcomes so much as delaying them endlessly, by preventing basic governmental bodies from functioning as intended.
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"These dark money efforts are designed around shaping outcomes in government without revealing to the public who is behind it," he told Salon.
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Falcon tweeted last year: "...It is not the people, it's functional government under attack,"

"Why attack functional government? Because billions of $ are made from the current dysfunction...If you make billions from a bad status quo and Biden's Administration signals they want to fix it, you'll spend a lot of dark money to stop them."
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"It's clear the industry sees no problems with the status quo," said Getachew. "In a Senate where the Democratic majority is not high, they only need a couple of Democrats to tilt the balance in their favor."

Corporations changed American culture to favor private industry and loathe government all to secure more profit and control for their greed. Their despicable, sociopathic plans now threaten all of us and imprison us in a capitalist dystopia with the wealthy on top and the rest of us their captured serfs, driving toward climate and social disaster

How the Electric Utilities Industry Created One of the 'Largest' Propaganda Campaigns in U.S. History - DeSmog https://www.desmog.com/2023/02/21/oreskes-conway-the-big-myth-free-market-capitalism-climate-change-mont-pelerin-society/

#GreedKills
#GreedLies
#GreedIsAMentalIllness
#GreedHatesDemocracy

"...The book documents how today’s prevailing anti-regulatory and anti-government postures that deride Big Government and cheer for Big Business did not arise simply from grassroots demands. Instead, they arose from well-funded industry campaigns creating what Oreskes and Conway have called a manufactured consensus “quasi-religious belief” in deregulated markets and an accompanying diehard opposition to governmental solutions to public policy problems.
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In the 1920s, according to Oreskes and Conway, “electricity industry leaders organized one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the history of the United States.” The campaign aimed to persuade the public that municipal-owned electricity was a bad thing, advocating instead for investor-owned utilities.
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NELA’s influence operation — involving rewriting K-12 and university textbooks, courting and funding industry-friendly professors, utilizing astroturf campaigns, deploying sophisticated lobbying techniques to facilitate regulatory and legislative capture, and other deceptive practices — resembles much of the fossil fuel industry’s political pressure
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And NELA’s goal went far beyond merely winning a PR campaign, Oreskes and Conway conclude; it had much deeper ideological underpinnings.
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“Rather, the goal—expressed outright in numerous documents—was to change the way Americans thought about private property, capitalism, and regulation” altogether.

Core to NELA’s campaign, Oreskes and Conway wrote, was the idea “that free-market capitalism was the embodiment of freedom, writ large, and that any restriction on the freedom of any business would put us on a slippery slope to tyranny.”
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Today, its successor EEI and its member companies continue to wage deceptive PR campaigns to fight renewable energy and bolster the continued consumption of fossil fuels.
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In making its case for child labor and against regulations protecting children, NAM espoused “that the federal government had no business interfering in business” and called such a notion “socialistic in its origin, philosophy and associations.”
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Like NELA and NAM, Mont Pelerin’s roots lay in anti-regulatory and business-funded ideology. But unlike them, Mont Pelerin came out of academia and via professors committed to the now globally pervasive neoliberal ideology they created. Mont Pelerin inspired similar groups that are, like it, still active today, such as the Koch Industries-funded Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and the University of Chicago’s free market-oriented Economics Department.
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Known today as the Powell Memo, the 1972 letter called for Big Business to undergo “careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

The Powell Memo...spearheaded free market fundamentalist groups such as the Cato Institute, Koch Family Foundations, Scaife Family Foundations, Olin Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society, among others. All of these entities, and the groups they fund or work alongside in coalitions, remain powerful forces within U.S. and global politics.
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Although this “quasi-religious belief” in the power of the market holds the greatest sway with conservatives...belief in the “magic of the marketplace” has become an intoxicating ideology within liberal circles too, including within climate policy debates.
..."right-wing think tanks helped spread the pro-market, antigovernment gospel across the country and insert what had been decidedly niche views into the mainstream,” the authors explained of the ideology’s spread. Other scholars have referred to this as the “force field” effect, moving the gravitational pull of what’s possible within U.S. politics further and further toward right-wing, corporate-created policy solutions."