31 October 2022

You, Poor Voter, Must Stand Back and Watch as Billionaire Plutocrats Purchase Democracy

[Photo: From the Facebook page of Arteide – International Catalogue of Contemporary Art. ]

By Sam Pizzigatia
Source:  Inequality.Org

Editor's Note
Both Democrats and Republicans believe that democracy is in the balance in this election. When I heard this, I went “Huh?!”. A beat after that I heard the chants about  Democrats from various Trump camp meetings. This brought me (as an aside) to the continuously renewed awareness that Trump’s lies are often truth – at least as at least half of what he is saying is true about him. The ‘Big Lie’ is one example of this. Yes, there is a massive fraud going on about the 2020 vote – by Trump and the GOP. So people of both parties are concerned about democracy, but only one party is fighting to overthrow democracy (and the rule of law) and that should give the acolytes of Trump pause because the Republican people may wake up at some point and realize that it is NOT democracy they are working so hard to install.

Big money is a big deal and it is destroying us, Decisions by SCOTUS over money, and money in politics, and voting rights, are driving the ship of democracy onto the harsh rocks of plutocratic fascism. Joined with laws that have removed funding for public media and that corporate media self-sponsor campaign information has magnified the problem. Add this to a failure to think on the part of much of the voting public who generally vote for whoever’s face and name they hear the most, and the deal is sealed on the wealthy walking away with democracy, our government, and control of everyone else – yeah you and me and our 6 times cousins.

I thought that the 2020 elections were bad in terms of money in politics, but it feels like the about of dark money and big money in the mid-terms is even worse. Both my email and text messages are bombarded with requests for finances. So when I read articles like Sam Pizzigfati’s I get this sense of hopelessness. How can we (the rest of us – and really only those concerned about what the Republicans are doing), with our $3-$30 contributions, stand up to the deep pockets who dump out millions of dollars like it’s chump change?

I really must struggle to not beat myself. And, I truly believe that being well informed is our best weapon against being sucked into the maw of propagandists. It is also important to share that information as far as we can, and that is part of the job that the “royal we” here at UncommonThought have taken on as an important piece of our civic duty. While you are readings, I urge you to take a look at a couple of other articles critical to our upcoming election. One is by Thom Hartmann at CommonDreams, Literally Killing Americans With Its Policies, the GOP Must Be Defeated. Hartmann points out that Americans’ life expectancy is the lowest in the industrial west and even below Cuba, Panama, and Croatia. Further, a new study from the NIA and NIH shows that if Republicans had been able to enact “their healthcare, tax, labor, and gun policies on the Blue states, there would have been an additional 217,635 dead Americans.” A study by the Brookings Institute showed that there were 400,000 unnecessary deaths due to lack of masking and pursuing “snake oil” treatments. Hartmann goes through a thorough argument about the health consequences of Trump and the Republicans.

Then from Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan at DemocracyNow!, a discussion of veteran consumer advocate Ralph Nader on Why the Most Dangerous Political Movement Since the Civil War Must Be Crushed. He says:

“This is an order of magnitude we have never seen before,” Nader concluded, denouncing Republicans. “We have never seen a party literally trying to repress the vote, miscount the vote, purge the vote, intimidate precinct worker volunteers and steal elections. They have actually basically said, ‘Any election we lose is because it has been stolen from us.’ That is the word of a dictatorship party.”

Nader also lays out the cruel policies toward children by the Republicans:

“For example, 20 or 25 million people will get a raise to $15 minimum wage under the Democrats. The GOP is against that. The assault on children by the GOP is absolutely stunning. from not using available Medicaid funds to insure them, to exposing them to hazardous pesticides and denying paid family leave and sick leave. The GOP is against that. The $300 a month child tax credit to 58 million children in our country, cutting child poverty by a third, was suspended because of GOP opposition in January.”

And last on my recommendations for today’s reading is Report Details ‘Extremist’ GOP Plot to Nationalize Voter Suppression at CommonDreams, in which he discusses a report on extremism by Common Cause, and the plot to nationalize voter suppression. Frankly, give the shift to the extreme right by elected Republican representatives, my guess is there is a plan to nationalize a lot of the extremist agenda.

No matter what other issues are important to you, if we don’t save democracy in the U.S. we won’t see any of them addressed. So Support Democrats if you can, vote, and encourage others to vote.

Sam Pizzigati

Do you have a favorite candidate in the upcoming congressional midterm elections? Want to do everything you can to see that candidate elected? Thinking about opening your wallet in the campaign’s final days?

If you do feel so inclined, you’ll find out — as soon as you move to make an online contribution — that you can only open your wallet so wide. Federal election law sets strict limits on how much you can contribute, as an individual, to your candidate of choice. That limit now stands at $2,900 per election.

Contribute more than that and you’ll be breaking the law. And you could face some hefty penalties, nearly $22,000 or even more depending on the specifics of your oversized contribution.

Wait. How can ordinary Americans face substantial penalties for contributing too much to their favorite candidates when we regularly see headlines about the multiple millions America’s wealthiest are legally investing in our elections?

USA Today, for instance, reported earlier this month that U.S. billionaires have so far this election cycle dropped “nearly $675 million” into campaign coffers, “with almost all of that coming from the top 50 mega-rich givers.” Earlier this week, the Washington Post put the total 2022 federal-level campaign cash from the nation’s 50 biggest donors at $1.1 billion.

Campaign dollars from billionaire pockets, data from the researchers at Open Secrets show, make up over 10 percent of all the dollars spent so far in 2022. Some perspective on that 10 percent-plus share: In the United States today, we have three billionaires for every million adults.

Billionaires haven’t paid any federal fines for all these contributions. They can spend as much as they would like to influence election outcomes, the Supreme Court ruled in the 2010 Citizens United decision, so long as they conduct their political business “independently” of individual candidate campaigns.

How does all this work out in practice? Consider the U.S. Senate campaign of GOP Senate hopeful Herschel Walker in Georgia. The biggest donor to Walker’s campaign, journalist Judd Legum points out, has been the Senate Leadership Fund, a Super PAC run by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell’s Super PAC, in turn, gets its dollars from America’s super rich and the corporations they run, including $10 million each from private equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman and hedge fund CEO Kenneth Griffin. But we still don’t know the Herschel Walker campaign’s full billionaire story. The largest single donor to McConnell’s Super PAC — a “nonprofit” known as One Nation — can legally keep its donors secret. Those donors have so far handed McConnell $33.5 million.

No billionaire has done more to exploit the political manipulation of rich people-friendly not-for-profits than Charles Koch, a deep pocket who, notes the Center for Media and Democracy, “controls a multibillion-dollar fleet of nonprofits that he and other wealthy business people have built into a massive influence machine over the past 20 years.”

In the 2020 election cycle, the 28 organizations in this politically minded Koch network spent a combined $1.1 billion. The billionaire has shuffled his groups around for the 2022 cycle.

“Frequent shifts in structure often correspond with election cycles,” observes Center for Media and Democracy analyst Connor Gibson. “The changes help keep Koch’s dark money organizational structure opaque.”

The billionaire Wisconsin couple Elizabeth and Richard Uihlein share the Koch fondness for expressing themselves politically through multiple organizations. Their large donations this political cycle have so far totaled $70.2 million, not counting, the Washington Post notes, any “direct independent expenditures” the Uihleins may have made.

Re-electing Wisconsin U.S. senator Ron Johnson has been, in the current election cycle, job one for the Uihleins. They’ve shoveled $5.8 million to his campaign through various channels. The Uihleins, all the while, have been rigorously observing the Federal Election Commission’s strict and meaningless limits on “individual giving.” They’ve each donated just $2,900 individually directly to the Johnson campaign.

The overall Uihlein investment in Johnson’s campaigning for office has, over the years, certainly had its rewards. In 2018 alone, ProPublica reports, “a federal tax break for pass-through companies pushed by Sen. Johnson and made part of Trump’s 2017 tax cut legislation saved Uline $43.5 million in federal taxes.”

Plenty of other deep pockets can point to similar payoffs from their political activism. America’s rich and the corporations they run, writes political commentator and former adman Thom Hartmann, poured $7 billion in the 2016 elections and, just a year later, collected from the GOP congressional majority they helped elect “almost $2 trillion in tax breaks and another trillion in forgivable loans with few strings attached.”

For the wealthiest among us, plutocracy does most certainly pay.


Sam Pizzigati, veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, edits Inequality.org. His recent books include: “The Case for a Maximum Wage” (2018) and “The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970” (2012).


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Posted October 31, 2022 by Rowan Wolf in category "Classism", "dark money", "Democracy", "Guest", "Health - Medical", "Hegemony", "The .01%