How Dark Money Captured America — And How Hawaii Just Declared War on It

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…

Against all odds and massive dark money, Graham Platner won. And won big.

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’s supposed to be impossible in this age of unlimited corporate and billionaire money.

He out-raised a sitting governor backed by the entire party establishment and their corporate funders, he packed arenas with Fighting Oligarchy rallies 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.

He’s been a sharp critic of AIPAC and the river of industry cash that flows through our politics, and he’s pledged to keep that money out of his campaign.

Now look at the woman he’s 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’t you know it, those are exactly the industries pouring money into her reelection.

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 of everything she raised last year.

It’s a nonprofit corporation working on behalf of a foreign government’s leader’s agenda, doing in American elections exactly what Citizens United made legal when Stevens’ dissent pointed out the decision “would have given Tokyo Rose” a voice in US elections during WWII.

Roughly ninety-five percent of Collins’ money comes from outside Maine. 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’s tax bill, stuffed with giveaways to the private equity industry that had just paid to keep her in office. That’s the whole transaction, in miniature, right there in the open.

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.

— A Reynolds tobacco subsidiary gave five million dollars to a Trump super PAC, and five days later the FDA cleared fruit and candy flavored vapes for the American market, with Trump’s own FDA commissioner resigning rather than sign off on addicting kids.

— 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 granting glyphosate producers immunity from lawsuits, then sent his own lawyers to the Supreme Court to argue Bayer’s 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 and praised the bought-and-paid-for order as “putting America first,” betraying the very people who trusted him.

— Crypto financier Justin Sun poured something like ninety million dollars into Trump family crypto ventures, and the SEC promptly paused and dropped 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.

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

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

Every one of those deals is sleazy, and every one of them is also perfectly legal, and the reason they’re legal is a Supreme Court decision that I’d argue is the single most corrupt ruling in the history of the Court.

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

This, despite the fact that the word “corporation” does not even appear in the Constitution.

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, 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 including two Hitler paintings and a signed copy of Mein Kampf.

Just weeks before the Citizens United ruling, Crow even helped fund a dark money group co-founded by Thomas’s 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.

For fifteen years now, we’ve been told there’s 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’s so elegant it’s almost funny.

Hawaii just became the first state in the nation to redefine what a corporation even is. 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.

It’s not regulation, it’s redefinition, which is the brainchild 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.

Hawaii didn’t 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 to put the same idea on their November ballot, with a measure that would take effect even sooner than Hawaii’s, and at least fourteen states, including New York and California, are today considering versions of their own.

There are limitations to this approach: redefining corporate power at the state level won’t stop the billionaires. It won’t stop Harlan Crow or Elon Musk or the oil and crypto and pharma tycoons who spend as individuals, because they’re 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.

But it’s 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.

I’ve 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, I trace this entire catastrophe back past Citizens United, back past Bellotti, all the way to an 1886 Supreme Court headnote, written not by a justice but by a court reporter, that falsely 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.

The biggest, most critical crisis for America that Citizens United caused is that the oligarchy it produced isn’t a stable form of government: it’s a transitional one, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

When a tiny class of the very rich — billionaires, corporations, or both — captures the machinery of the state, as they’ve now done in the Trump White House and across the entire Republican Party, the people eventually figure it out and rebel as we’re seeing today with the No Kings and other protests.

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 about corporate power back in 1888, called an “iron heel,” crushing the opposition rather than loosening their grip.

That second path is the one that Trump’s 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’t challenge anything I do. When billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky crossed that line, Putin destroyed him, seizing his oil company and locking him away for a decade.

That’s the fork in the road we’re approaching, and it’s why what Hawaii just did is so much bigger than just Hawaii.

The Hawaii-style fix doesn’t 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.

Look them up and contact them at openstates.org, 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’s elections.

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

And on the federal side, the road to actually overturning all 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.

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’ve 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.

Support independent journalism at the Hartmann Report 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’t.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Islands Rise”

Comments on Tuesday’s Daily Take:

While America Burns, Trump Builds Himself a Colosseum

The UFC cage is a perfect metaphor for what we have become. As a friend points out, the movie “‘Idiocracy’ has become a documentary”.
~ Tom Halstead

We must remember that trump is a mere employee, paid in election contributions and the right to loot for the purpose of transferring wealth from the working class to the ruling, oligarchical class. And he is doing a great job. These side shows serve the purpose of demonstrating how ruthless he is and providing a circus to distract the public from the theft of their wealth that is simultaneosly going on.
~ Shea Foote Hansen

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.