”Black Gold” is crude oil. It’s refined into gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil and other petroleum products. Natural gas is produced from the same wells and others. Unfortunately, storage of gas is expensive and difficult, so much of it is burned, adding to our air pollution.
Oil royalties are an important part of some state revenues, especially Texas, Oklahoma, the Dakotas. Oil company employees are very well paid, boosting state and local economies. Like the defense industry, there are strong unions. When unions negotiated better benefits and wages, all employees got them. My first job at Texaco in Houston was in payroll. Every new contract, every employee got a raise.
Fracking reopened old oil fields and created new ones. It involves the use of tons of water and chemicals, which are then pumped into the ground, contaminating the earth and sometimes water supplies. It made several of the people mentioned below $billionaires, adding to those who made fortunes earlier.
The Dark Money that has taken over politics in our country isn’t just limited to those fortunes. Jane Mayer wrote an excellent book with that title. There’s a link below to further explanation of the mechanisms used.
The Kochs are just the most well known of the billionaires who funded the takeover of the Republican party. Fred Koch made part of his fortune building refineries for Hitler and Stalin. What he saw in Russia made him fervently anti-communist. He and Lynde Bradley were among the founders of the anti-communist John Birch Society.
Bradley established the Bradley Foundation. It’s a model for dark money organizations. They have a tax exempt 501(c)(3) entity that is not allowed political activity, but also a (c)(4) entity that is, all run from the same offices by the same people. None of the donors have to be disclosed. Art Pope is current chairman. He bought North Carolina for the religious right and the Republican party.
Olin was the Winchester firearm and ammunition fortune. Richard Mellon Scaife and his sister were heirs of the Mellon fortune, established by Andrew Mellon, Sec Treasury who was a factor in the Great Depression, whose wealth included Gulf Oil and finance. The DeVos fortune is from Amway, the Coors fortune was from beer and aluminum, the Richardson fortune from Vicks.
In Texas, five oil and gas billionaires are major funders of the religious right and Republican party. The two Wilks brothers and Tim Dunn are fundamentalist “evangelicals“. The Wilks brothers have their own church. Money trumps ideology though, they sold their companies to an equity investment firm in Singapore. The three of them were the creators of “Empower Texans”, a lobbying and money laundering entity. Ironically, one of the five is a Pakistani Muslim immigrant. Another is Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer LP. He gave $6 million to Rick Perry’s presidential campaign, who’s on the board. Natural gas sellers made $billions from inflated gas prices during the February Texas freeze. They’re major contributors to Republicans, including the three elected members of the Texas Railroad Commission, responsible for oversight of oil and gas production, and our energy grid.
Paul Weyrich was one of the most influential unelected men in modern history. He founded ALEC and their voter suppression legislation, co-founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell and the Heritage Foundation, “I don’t want everybody to vote.”
Other leaders of the religious right were Fr Richard John Neuhaus, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Doug Coe, Fr John McCloskey, James Dobson, Leonard Leo and U.S. Catholic bishops. In the Methodist Church, Edmund Robb and his sons, Donald Wildmon and his son, Paul T. Stallsworth, Mark Tooley, Keith Boyette and other members of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, the Forum for Scriptural Christianity, the Confessing Movement, and the Wesleyan Covenant Association. The Forum… is Good News magazine.
Neuhaus was one of the founders of the IRD and an adviser to GW Bush. Doug Coe was founder of “The Family”, a very influential organization in Washington. I suggest reading Jeff Sharlet’s book on Coe and his organization, link below to an interview with Sharlet. There will be a separate essay on the IRD.
McCloskey was with Opus Dei. He converted Sam Brownback and others to Catholicism. Wildmon founded the American Family Association, with hundreds of radio stations all over the country. Paul Weyrich and Leonard Leo, VP of the Federalist Society, chose judges appointed by Reagan, the two Bushes, and Trump.
The reactionary religious right political movement began over racism, civil rights, in the 1960s. The modern civil rights movement began after WW II, Truman desegregated our military forces. It gained impetus in the 1950s. Women’s and LGBT rights became factors.
Racism wasn’t enough to gain political power. Weyrich came up with the idea to use lies and propaganda about abortion to do so. It worked, uniting “conservative“ Catholics and anti-abortion ”evangelicals”. Weyrich was one of the people who obtained financial backing. Tobacco companies were early contributors. Scaife was a major funder of the early religious right, including the IRD.
My education and experience were in business, but I’ve read the Bible, and other books and articles on religion. Marcus Borg’s “Reading the Bible Again…” is excellent.
Jesus was the most radical progressive in Judeo-Christian history. He was an orthodox Jew who threatened the power and wealth of the Old Testament leaders of His time, and their alliance with the Roman government. That’s why they conspired for and demanded His crucifixion.
Jesus never said anything to justify seizing political power to impose dominionism, white nationalism, racism, putting immigrant refugees in for profit prisons, taking away their children and giving them to adoption mills, discriminating against minorities, criminalizing women who terminate pregnancies, destroying our planet in accumulating wealth, denying science, or discriminating against LGBT people who are as God made them, quite the opposite.
Discrimination against LGBT people was the tool used by the IRD and others to split all three major non-Baptist Protestant churches. Paul Weyrich’s anti-abortion propaganda was used as well.
Before COVID, we saw the decline in churches, and the growth of “nones”. Young people today don’t share the racism, anti-immigrant rhetoric, homophobia, anti-women’s rights efforts, support for voter suppression legislation… The religious right has done tremendous harm to the perception and reality of Christianit, not just in our country, world wide.
Now we’ve seen the results of denying science, the incompetence in dealing with a pandemic.
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