Promotional image for mini-series The Dark Money Game – Fair Use

The Dark Money Game, the new two-part documentary from Alex Gibney, confirms the worst: America has all-but succumbed to the terminal cancer of corruption. It is difficult to say how much time is left, but that end is a certainty. Things fall apart: It’s scientific, goes the Talking Heads song. Gibney’s film is inspired by Jane Mayer’s book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Mayer is a longtime staff writer at New Yorker, and has been nominated for Pulitzers a number of times for her reporting on the dark side of American politics. She appears in the film, providing journalistic testimony that strengthens Gibney’s analysis.

Mayer’s book opens with a famous quote from the American jurist Louis Brandeis: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Mayer’s book title and this quote proves to be prescient, prophetic even, and dismayingly ironic, as the film moves from the corporatization of American politics, as demonstrated by the passage of Citizens United in 2010, to the stinky corruption destroying the Supreme Court today.

The Dark Money Game is largely a character-driven narrative. Insiders and proselytizers; operatives wearing bugs to capture private conversations with power brokers are shown working largely behind the scenes in the dark and away from public scrutiny to create what Hillary Clinton, herself no slouch when it comes to corruption, once describes as “a vast right wing conspiracy.” Boy, did she get that right. And the Left is no slouch either.

In Part One of The Dark Money Game, “Ohio Confidential,” we’re introduced to the House Bill 6 First Energy bribery scandal in the state of Ohio, the largest ever such corruption conspiracy. The essential players are executives at First Energy, former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, former state Rep. Jay Edwards and the late lobbyist Neil Clark, a wannabe mafiosi, who committed suicide as a result of the breaking scandal. According to local media outlet WKYC,........

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