When you think of “Big Oil”, you think of a group of evil men in evil suits smoking evil cigars around an evil conference table, plotting evilly how they’re going to control the world.
However, the truth is pretty far from this fiction.
For instance, the American Petroleum institute is “Big Oil’s lobby”. You’d imagine them to be flush with money: dirty, dirty money.
According to Rebecca Leber of ClimateProgress, the American Petroleum Institute “funneled at least half a million dollars through groups that ran attack ads against Democratic candidates.”
And how was this money split up?
API used membership dues to finance several dark money groups:
• $50,000 to Americans for Prosperity’s 501(c)(4) group, which ran ads against President Obama and congressional Democrats.
• $412,969 to Coalition for American Jobs’ 501(c)(6) group, a front set up by API lobbyists to air ads for industry-friendly politicians, including former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA).
• $25,000 to the Sixty Plus Association’s 501(c)(4), which ran ads against congressional Democrats.
So in a year, the company spent close to $500k on different groups around the country. It’s not “dark money”, they’re legal social welfare and chamber-of-commerce style groups that are allowed to run ads.
Essentially, this is all the money the oil industry came up with for the 2012 election–$500,000.
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood’s Action group spent $2.2 million, in 2012 alone, in just the state of Ohio.
Planned Parenthood is one company, smaller than even the smallest oil companies, who was able to contribute around four-and-a-half times what the entire oil industry could muster in just one state.
And as far as the funds being “secret”? Well, they were disclosed on publicly-available IRS forms, so if that’s a secret, it’s a pretty poorly-kept one.
Turns out “Big Oil” is a lot smaller than most people think.
