Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is in the news this week for calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor. That kind of personal political sniping grabbed all the headlines this weekend, but as usual the major media missed the bigger Cruz story, reported by Zaid Jilani:
Farris and Dan Wilks, billionaires who have enriched themselves from the fracking frenzy in West Texas, made a “record-setting” $15 million contribution to the pro- Ted Cruz Super PAC Keep The Promise. This is the largest-known donation by any individuals in the 2016 race so far.
And why shouldn’t he get such fossil fuel funding?
ClimateProgress just named him the “most extreme” presidential candidate on climate change denial, and his policy proposals would essentially set off the carbon bomb.
Farris and Dan Wilks (who, as a random aside, have 17 children between them), made their fortune in 2011 by selling off their company, Frac Tech, which designs, makes and sets up hydraulic pumper rigs used to frack shale. The company has a gross history of labor and safety blights on its record, including the death of an employee in 2005 in which Frac Tech was found to have been lax about employee safety. They’ve also been the targets of lawsuits on the part of employees who allege they were wrongly classified as salaried employees so Frac Tech could deny them overtime. This is in addition to, you know, endangering local water supplies through fracking in a pretty dry part of Texas and making money off the general destruction of the future for the human race, but hey, who’s keeping score, right?
So what exactly are these polluting, anti-labor, anti-reason billionaires from the Big Country in Texas hoping to buy for their $15 million? That’s pretty simple: they want a president of the United States who shares their warped vision for the future—a future that includes corporations being able to dig up carbon and pump it into the atmosphere for cash. That’s exactly what they’d get with Ted Cruz.
Here’s the punch line: Cruz is sitting right in the middle of the pack of the 15 or so people running for the Republican presidential nomination right now. But, thanks to the Citizens United decision and other recent Supreme Court cases, the ability of very rich people like Farris and Dan Wilks and other fossil fuel fortune families to essentially buy an election cannot be overstated. This is one area where the movement to end climate change has to link up with other movements—because if we don’t get money out of politics or find effective ways to counter its influence with people power, we will lose the fight to save our future on this planet.
Here’s a nice list of ways you can help fight the corrupting influence of money on our politics.