by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:
On 17 March 2021, OpenSecrets.org headlined “‘Dark money’ topped $1 billion in 2020, largely boosting Democrats” and reported that, “The 2020 election saw more than $1 billion in ‘dark money’ pending at the federal level, a massive sum driven by an explosion of secret donations boosting Democrats in a historically expensive cycle. That’s according to an estimate from OpenSecrets. The billion-dollar sum includes a whopping $660 million in donations from opaque political nonprofits and shell companies to outside groups.”
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In many prior years, most of the dark money had been going to Republicans, but now this has apparently switched. Most of the billionaires now favor the Democrtic Party.
The current U.S. Presidential election is expected to cost well over two billion dollars just in recognized paid promotions, not even counting such things as billionaires using the news-media that they own, in such ways as to present the nominee that they favor, in a more favorable light to the public than the one they want to lose the election. And, for yet another example of this uncounted political money, think tanks and other nonprofits that hire and employ their staff in order to sway public opinion in the directions that their founders and biggest donors want the public to believe, are, likewise, not counted as being political donations. That’s at least as dark money as the official type of dark-money political spending is. Adding all of it together, it probably constitutes over half of all of the dollars that are being donated to U.S. political campaigns directly and indirectly. And this fact explains why it is that all of the political science analyses of whether the legislation that gets passed into law in the United States reflects the policy-preferences and priorities of the American public or instead the preferences and priorities of America’s super-rich and basically of only America’s billionaires, have found that the latter is the reality: the U.S. Government represents ONLY the billionaires. America is a democracy-in-name-only (a DINO). It is an aristocracy-in-reality (an AIR). (DINO=AIR.)
Since Kamala Harris now appears likely to win the current U.S. Presidential contest, thisi article will be focusing on her campaign. It’s significant that the PAC dollars which had been donated to the Biden campaign up until Biden left the contest to be carried on by his Vice President Kamala Harris, her campaign became the inheritor of all of those funds, which promptly then were announced as reflecting her enormous popularity among the general public. Her campaign consequently built upon Biden’s. In fact, though Harris had more than 25 days before the Platform of the Democratic National Convention, for it to be revised from the one that Biden’s campaign team had produced, she didn’t change even a word of it. She is running on Biden’s platform 100%. If she wins, she will start her Presidency as a super-energized version of President Biden, not weighed down with his low approval-ratings, and therefore far more likely than he would be in his second term to get Congress to pass everything that he was hoping to get passed in his first term. She would therefore be likely to be a much more effective version of what Biden was when he was President.
Biden was already beholden to lots of dark money. On 21 May 2024, the “Sludge” investigative-news site on political money headlined “More ‘Dark Money’ for President Biden”, and reported that, “A new FEC disclosure shows the president’s main super PAC continues to rely on dark money for the majority of its funding. … Dark money donors provided the majority of the $16.2 million that Future Forward reported.”
InfluenceWatch.org reports that,
Future Forward USA PAC (also known as “FF PAC”) is a Democratic Party-aligned super PAC based in Palo Alto, California. FF PAC reportedly spent $108 million in a “blitz” of spending during the last five weeks of the 2020 election to support President Joe Biden’s campaign by attacking then-President Donald Trump on his COVID-19 policies. 1 FF PAC has been criticized by the left-leaning Center for Responsive Politics for being funded by “dark money.” 2
