Dark Money (2018)

This is a movie that every body, literally everyone over age 14, should see.  It is a beautifully succinct description of the history of corruption in American politics and how it has come thundering back, now allowing foreign money to influence who governs our country.
The movie begins with an invocation of the Anaconda Mining Company, headquartered in Butte, Montana, that had a not nominally inappropriate grip on Montana politics during its heyday, which began at the turn of the 19th century. Then a Montana legislator was by definition an Anaconda legislator, a situation leading to such corruption that Montana eventually adopted a group of laws that went beyond federal regulations curbing corporate influence in politics. In Montana, in 2011, the question is whether those regulations will hold in the wake of the Citizen’s United ruling. Reed covers a lot of ground, interviewing members of the U.S. Senate and many state legislature figures, bringing up the tradition of the “citizen legislator” that represents Montana politics at its most grounded and useful. Montana pushed back, and it was a ground swell of citizen resistance, a pattern for the rest of us to follow.