{"id":48623,"date":"2026-06-10T14:33:51","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T21:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=48623"},"modified":"2026-06-10T14:35:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T21:35:15","slug":"how-dark-money-captured-america-and-how-hawaii-just-declared-war-on-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2026\/06\/10\/how-dark-money-captured-america-and-how-hawaii-just-declared-war-on-it\/","title":{"rendered":"How Dark Money Captured America \u2014 And How Hawaii Just Declared War on It"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From Citizens United to Trump-era oligarchy, the billionaire takeover of American politics seemed unstoppable. Then Hawaii found a way to strike at the heart of the system\u2026<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Thom Hartmann<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jun 10, 2026 (HartmannReport.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Against all odds and massive dark money, Graham Platner won. And won big.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran who turned a long-shot run into a movement just took the Democratic nomination to challenge Susan Collins for her Senate seat in Maine, and he did it the hard way, the clean way, the way that\u2019s supposed to be impossible in this age of unlimited corporate and billionaire money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He out-raised a sitting governor backed by the entire party establishment and their corporate funders, he packed arenas with Fighting Oligarchy rallies<\/a> alongside Bernie Sanders, and he built the whole thing out of small-dollar donations from working Mainers rather than checks from corporate political action committees.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019s been a sharp critic of AIPAC<\/a> and the river of industry cash that flows through our politics, and he\u2019s pledged to keep that money out of his campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now look at the woman he\u2019s running against. Susan Collins is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which means she sits atop the federal spending faucet for defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, banks, and agribusiness, and wouldn\u2019t you know it, those are exactly the industries<\/a> pouring money into her reelection.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The single largest organized source of cash in her campaign is AIPAC, the pro-Netanyahu lobby that bundled more than half a million dollars for her in a single filing period and accounted for nearly a fifth<\/a> of everything she raised last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Support the Hartmann Report<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a nonprofit corporation working on behalf of a foreign government\u2019s leader\u2019s agenda, doing in American elections exactly what Citizens United made legal when Stevens\u2019 dissent pointed out the decision \u201cwould have given Tokyo Rose\u201d a voice in US elections during WWII.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roughly ninety-five percent of Collins\u2019 money comes from outside Maine<\/a>. And when Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman dropped two million dollars into a pro-Collins super PAC in the summer of 2025, she voted the very next day to advance Trump\u2019s tax bill<\/a>, stuffed with giveaways to the private equity industry that had just paid to keep her in office. That\u2019s the whole transaction, in miniature, right there in the open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you want to see the same machine running at full industrial scale, just watch what Donald Trump and his sons have been doing for the past year and a half.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 A Reynolds tobacco subsidiary gave five million dollars to a Trump super PAC, and five days later<\/a> the FDA cleared fruit and candy flavored vapes for the American market, with Trump\u2019s own FDA commissioner resigning rather than sign off on addicting kids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 Bayer and Monsanto wanted protection from the tens of thousands of cancer victims suing them over Roundup, so Trump handed them a February executive order<\/a> granting glyphosate producers immunity from lawsuits, then sent his own lawyers to the Supreme Court<\/a> to argue Bayer\u2019s case. And the saddest part of that one is Bob Kennedy, the lawyer who once won nearly $300 million suing Monsanto over Roundup and built his whole brand calling glyphosate a cancer-causing poison, as Health Secretary rolled over<\/a> and praised the bought-and-paid-for order as \u201cputting America first,\u201d betraying the very people who trusted him.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 Crypto financier Justin Sun poured something like ninety million dollars into Trump family crypto ventures, and the SEC promptly paused and dropped<\/a> its fraud case against him, part of a pattern in which the agency walked away from roughly sixty percent of its crypto enforcement after those firms donated to the inauguration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 Big Oil executives gathered at Mar-a-Lago in 2024, where Trump asked them for a billion dollars<\/a> and promised to gut Biden\u2019s climate rules in return, a promise he\u2019s since kept by killing wind, solar, and EV incentives, opening federal lands to drilling, and even paying a French <\/a>company nearly a billion of your tax dollars to cancel offshore wind farms.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 And Tim Cook handed Trump a personal million-dollar inauguration check and a slab of gold, and walked away with tariff exemptions<\/a> worth billions to Apple while the rest of the country pays the price at the cash register.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every one of those deals is sleazy, and every one of them is also perfectly legal, and the reason they\u2019re legal is a Supreme Court decision that I\u2019d argue is the single most corrupt ruling in the history of the Court.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please Support My Writing<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2010, in Citizens United<\/a><\/em>, five Republican-appointed justices declared that corporations<\/em> have a constitutional right<\/em> to spend unlimited money influencing our elections, building on a 1978 case written by Lewis Powell himself (of Powell Memo infamy) called Bellotti<\/a><\/em> that had first cracked the door open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This, despite the fact that the word \u201ccorporation\u201d does not even appear in the Constitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In that five-to-four ruling every vote in the majority was a deciding vote, and one of those five was Clarence Thomas, who for decades had been quietly pocketing gifts<\/a>, luxury trips, private jet and yacht rides, and tuition payments from Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire whose Dallas mansion famously houses a collection of Nazi memorabilia<\/a> including two Hitler paintings and a signed copy of Mein Kampf.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just weeks before the Citizens United<\/em> ruling, Crow even helped fund<\/a> a dark money group co-founded by Thomas\u2019s own wife. The man who cast a deciding vote to legalize secret corporate money in our elections was himself bought-and-paid-for, and he never considered recusing himself for a second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For fifteen years now, we\u2019ve been told there\u2019s nothing to be done about this short of a constitutional amendment, and every attempt at one has died at Republican hands in Congress. But a handful of states have now found a crack in the wall, and it\u2019s so elegant it\u2019s almost funny.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hawaii just became the first state in the nation to redefine what a corporation even is<\/a>. States are the entities that charter corporations and grant them their powers in the first place, so Hawaii simply rewrote the definition to say that a corporation operating in the state does not have the power to spend money influencing elections or ballot measures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not regulation, it\u2019s redefinition, which is the brainchild<\/a> of Tom Moore at the Center for American Progress, and the beauty of it is that the Supreme Court has held for two hundred years that defining the abilities and powers of corporations is a matter of state law the federal courts have no business touching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hawaii didn\u2019t overturn Citizens United: it just made the ruling meaningless inside its borders, where every dollar spent on an election will now have to come from a human being. Montana is gathering signatures<\/a> to put the same idea on their November ballot, with a measure that would take effect even sooner than Hawaii\u2019s, and at least fourteen states<\/a>, including New York and California, are today considering versions of their own.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are limitations to this approach: redefining corporate power at the state level won\u2019t stop the billionaires. It won\u2019t stop Harlan Crow or Elon Musk or the oil and crypto and pharma tycoons who spend as individuals, because they\u2019re flesh-and-blood people, not corporate charters, and reaching them still requires either overturning Citizens United through a constitutional amendment or changing the composition of the Court that handed it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s a real start, and just as importantly it drags the whole rotten arrangement back into the daylight, forcing Americans to look at what Thomas and Roberts and the rest of the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court did to us and our democracy, and ask why we ever let corporations buy our government in the first place.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve spent a good chunk of my life writing and broadcasting about how we got here, and in my new book, Who Killed the American Dream<\/a><\/em>, I trace this entire catastrophe back past Citizens United<\/em>, back past Bellotti<\/em>, all the way to an 1886 Supreme Court headnote, written not by a justice but by a court reporter, that falsely<\/em> declared corporations to be persons under the Fourteenth Amendment and threw us to the mercy of the oligarchs. The book lays out the other solutions, too, the ones that reach the billionaires and not just the corporations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The biggest, most critical crisis for America that <\/strong>Citizens United<\/strong><\/em> caused is that the oligarchy it produced isn\u2019t a stable form of government: it\u2019s a transitional one, as I lay out in <\/strong>The Hidden History of American Oligarchy<\/a><\/strong><\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a tiny class of the very rich \u2014 billionaires, corporations, or both \u2014 captures the machinery of the state, as they\u2019ve now done in the Trump White House and across the entire Republican Party, the people eventually figure it out and rebel as we\u2019re seeing today with the No Kings and other protests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that point, the oligarchs are left with only two choices. They can back down and let the country become less corrupt, the way America did during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, or they can come down with what Democratic President Grover Cleveland, warning Congress<\/a> about corporate power back in 1888, called an \u201ciron heel,\u201d crushing the opposition rather than loosening their grip.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That second path is the one that Trump\u2019s mentor, Vladimir Putin, chose. Russia had become an oligarchy in the neoliberal chaos of the 1990s, and when Putin took over he gave the Russian oligarchs a simple bargain: keep your billions, pay me off, and don\u2019t challenge anything I do. When billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky crossed that line, Putin destroyed him<\/a>, seizing his oil company and locking him away for a decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the fork in the road we\u2019re approaching, and it\u2019s why what Hawaii just did is so much bigger than just Hawaii.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Hawaii-style fix doesn\u2019t require Congress, it requires your statehouse, which means your own state representative and state senator are the people who can make this happen where you live.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Look them up and contact them at openstates.org<\/a>, and tell them in plain words that you want them to do what Hawaii did and what Montana is about to do, and to redefine corporate power so that only human beings can spend money in your state\u2019s elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Support the Hartmann Report<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Make sure you and everyone you know is registered and ready to vote at vote.org<\/a>, because the same ballot box that elects a Platner can pass these measures. If you\u2019re in Montana, go find the signature drive<\/a> and sign it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And on the federal side, the road to actually overturning <\/strong>all<\/strong><\/em> of Citizens United, call your senators and representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to back a constitutional amendment and meaningful Supreme Court reform.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this current state of corruption fixes itself: it requires citizen action, or the special interests and billionaires will prevail. So, share this piece with the people in your life who\u2019ve given up believing anything can be done about the money, because something finally can, and forward it to the friend who thinks corruption is just like the weather, something about which nothing can be done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Support independent journalism at the Hartmann Report<\/a> so we can keep dragging this into the light. The oligarchs are counting on you to believe the game is rigged forever. Hawaii just proved it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Louise\u2019s Daily Song: \u201cThe Islands Rise\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Citizens United to Trump-era oligarchy, the billionaire takeover of American politics seemed unstoppable. Then Hawaii found a way to strike at the heart of the system\u2026 Thom Hartmann Jun 10, 2026 (HartmannReport.com) Share Against all odds and massive dark money, Graham Platner won. And won big. The oyster farmer… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1879],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48623"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48624,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48623\/revisions\/48624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}