Dark Money

I'm annoyed by partisan documentaries which aim to help their side's cause to the detriment of being enlightening or informative. This is definitely one of them. It (rightly) blames the disproportionate affect that money has on elections, and how it hinders the vote of the common people. I agree 100%.

Unfortunately it only looks at it from the perspective of the left, and attacks corporations. It makes the Koch brothers (and Adelson) boogeymen. It's extremely partisan. And that is about as informative as when the right blames everything on Soros and labor unions. Guess what? Rich politically active donors have a massive impact on elections, whether it is left or right. Organized single party interest groups provide substantial support to candidates, whether it is right (guns, pro-life, religion, etc) or left (atheists, minorities, LGBT, unions, pro-choice, etc.)

The topic of campaign finance reform is even more pressing in 2020 when Bloomburg has spent over $100 million dollars before even the first primary was held. Yet, the left won't criticize him for this because he's on their team. Yet I find it as distasteful as when Trump with his enormous wealth enters politics and drowns out the voices of regular people.

In summary, if you're looking for an honest and objective documentary that exposes the problems of campaign finance, you better keep looking. If you're looking at a shallow documentary that supports your side, which you won't learn much from, this is it!

Nice documentary on US political campaign contributions and disclosure laws

There is no doubt these are very scary times that we're living in, and this movie is certainly proof of that. I've been interested in campaign financing reform for a long time now and this movie does a really good job of getting to the heart of how horrific and heinous that influence this is on American politics. For anyone who has spent a lot of time overseas in third world countries, you see that the corruption tends to be fairly transparent. However in America the corruption is equal to or greater than that which you see in the third world, but it's very well hidden, and it's hidden with a great degree of skill and craftsmanship by criminals organizations like American Citizens for Prosperity, the Koch brothers (who appear to be satanic, lol) and so many other interest groups that fund campaigns in a very dark manner.

This has to stop and the only way it can be stopped as they said in the film, is if we as Americans get angry enough to take things into our own hands like the brave people of Montana have done.

This film is very well done, it's very engaging, the people who are interviewed are real salt of the earth people who are genuine and sincere and concerned about the direction things are moving. This is a very cautionary tale, kudos to the filmmakers.

Even Open Secrets shows less than 10% of "Dark Money" is corporate. More of it is from unions and the MOST is from foundations and supposed charities that are actually highly political. This is lousy reporting leaving out 90% of a phenomena because the data show the large majority of corporate money goes to Democrats.

My wife and I watched this marvelous documentary at the Sundance Film Festival last night. It is extremely well done and it presents a compelling narrative about the role of "dark money" (political funds that cannot be traced to their source) in contemporary American politics. Flawed campaign financing laws lie at the heart of many of our difficult political problems. Kudos to Kimberly Reed and everyone involved in producing this gem.