This is an excerpt from a piece
which first appeared at TomDispatch.
Posted by Nomi Prins at 5:02pm,
January 31, 2016.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.
[…]
With three 2016 debates down
and six more scheduled, the two fundraisers with the most surprising amount in
common are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Neither has billionaire-infused
super PACs, but for vastly different reasons. Bernie has made it clear
billionaires won’t ever hold sway in his court. While Trump… well, you know,
he’s not only a billionaire but has the knack for getting the sort of attention
that even billions can’t buy.
Regarding the rest of the
field, each candidate is counting on the reliability of his or her own arsenal
of billionaire sponsors and corporate nabobs when the you-know-what hits the
fan. And at this point, believe it or not, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens
United decision of 2010 and the super PACs that arose from it, all the
billionaires aren’t even nailed down or faintly tapped out yet. In fact,
some of them are already preparing to jump ship on their initial candidate of
choice or reserving the really big bucks for closer to game time, when only two
nominees will be duking it out for the White House.
Capturing this drama of the
billionaires in new ways are TV networks eager to profit from the latest
eyeball-gluing version of election politicking and the billions of dollars in
ads that will flood onto screens nationwide between now and November 8th. As
super PACs, billionaires, and behemoth companies press their influence on what
used to be called “our democracy,” the modern debate system, now a 16-month
food fight, has become the political equivalent of the NFL playoffs. In turn,
soaring ratings numbers, scads of ads, and the party infighting that helps
generate them now translate into billions of new dollars for media moguls.
For your amusement and mine,
this being an all-fun-all-the-time election campaign, let’s examine the
relationships between our twenty-first-century plutocrats and the contenders
who have raised $5 million or more in individual contributions or through super
PACs and are at 5% or more in composite national polls. I’ll refrain from using the
politically correct phrases that feed into the illusion of distance between
super PACs that allegedly support candidates’ causes and the candidates
themselves, because in practice there is no distinction.
On the Republican Side:
1. Ted Cruz: Most
“God-Fearing” Billionaires
Yes, it’s true the Texas
senator “goofed” in neglecting to disclose to the Federal Election Commission
(FEC) a tiny six-figure loan from Goldman Sachs for his successful 2012
Senate campaign. (After all, what’s half-a-million dollars between friends,
especially when the investment bank that offered it also employed your wife as
well as your finance chairman?) As The Donald recently told a crowd in Iowa,
when it comes to Ted Cruz, “Goldman Sachs owns him. Remember that, folks. They
own him.”
That aside, with a slew of
wealthy Christians in his camp, Cruz has raised the second largest pile of
money among the GOP candidates. His total of individual and PAC contributions
so far disclosed is a striking $65.2 million. Of that, $14.28 million has already been
spent. Individual contributors kicked in about a third of that total, or $26.57 million, as of the end of
November 2015—$11 million from small donors and $15.2 million from larger ones.
His five top donor groups are retirees, lawyers and law firms, health
professionals, miscellaneous businesses, and securities and investment firms
(including, of course, Goldman Sachs to the tune of $43,575).
Cruz’s Keep the Promise
super PAC continues to grow like an action movie franchise. It includes his
original Keep the Promise PAC augmented by Keep the Promise I, II, and III.
Collectively, the Keep the Promise super PACs amassed $37.83 million. In terms
of deploying funds against his adversaries, they have spent more than 10 times as much fighting Marco Rubio as battling Hillary
Clinton.
His super PAC money divides
along family factions reminiscent of Game of Thrones. A $15 million chunk comes
from the billionaire Texas evangelical fracking moguls, the Wilks Brothers, and
$10 million comes from Toby Neugebauer, who is also listed as the principal
officer of the public charity, Matthew 6:20 Foundation; its motto is “Support the purposes
of the Christian Community.”
Cruz’s super PACs also
received $11 million from billionaire Robert Mercer, co-CEO of the
New York-based hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. His contribution is,
however, peanuts compared to the $6.8 billion a Senate subcommittee accused
Renaissance of shielding from the Internal Revenue Service (an allegation
Mercer is still fighting). How’s that for “New York values”? No wonder
Cruz wants to abolish the IRS.
Another of Cruz’s
contributors is Bob McNair, the real estate mogul, billionaire owner of the
National Football League’s Houston Texans, and self-described “Christian steward.”
2. Marco Rubio: Most Diverse
Billionaires
Senator Marco Rubio of
Florida has raised $32.8 million from individual and PAC contributions and
spent about $9 million. Despite the personal economic struggles he’s
experienced and loves to talk about, he’s not exactly resonating with the
nation’s downtrodden, hence his weak polling figures among the little people.
Billionaires of all sorts, however, seem to love him.
The bulk of his money comes
from super PACs and large contributors. Small individual contributors donated
only $3.3 million to his coffers; larger individual
contributions provided $11.3 million. Goldman Sachs leads his pack of corporate donors with
$79,600.
His main super PAC,
Conservative Solutions, has raised $16.6 million, making it the third largest
cash cow behind those of Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz. It holds $5 million from Braman
Motorcars, $3 million from the Oracle Corporation, and $2.5 million from
Benjamin Leon, Jr., of Besilu Stables. (Those horses are evidently betting on
Rubio.)
He has also amassed a
healthy roster of billionaires including the hedge-fund “vulture of Argentina” Paul Singer who was the third-ranked conservative donor for
the 2014 election cycle. Last October, in a mass email to supporters about a
pre-Iowa caucus event, Singer promised, “Anyone who raises $10,800 in new, primary money
will receive 5 VIP tickets to a rally and 5 tickets to a private reception with
Marco.”
Another of Rubio’s
Billionaire Boys is Norman Braman, the Florida auto dealer and his mentor.
These days he’s been forking over the real money, but back in 2008, he gave
Florida International University $100,000 to fund a Rubio post-Florida
statehouse teaching job. What makes Braman’s relationship particularly
intriguing is his “intense distaste for Jeb Bush,” Rubio’s former political
mentor and now political punching bag. Hatred, in other words, is paying
dividends for Rubio.
Rounding out his top three
billionaires is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who ranks third on Forbes’s billionaire
list. Last summer, he threw a $2,700 per person fundraiser in his Woodside, California, compound for the
candidate, complete with a special dinner for couples that raised $27,000. If
Rubio somehow pulls it out, you can bet he will be the Republican poster boy
for Silicon Valley.
3. Jeb Bush: Most Disappointed
Billionaires
Although the one-time
Republican front-runner’s star now looks more like a black hole, the coffers of
“Jeb!” are still the ones to beat. He had raised a total of $128 million by
late November and spent just $19.9 million of it. Essentially none of
Jeb’s money came from the little people (that is, us). Barely 4% of his contributions were from donations of $200 or
less.
In terms of corporate
donors, eight of his top 10 contributors are banks or from the financial
industry (including all of the Big Six banks). Goldman Sachs (which is nothing
if not generous to just about every candidate in sight—except of course, Bernie)
tops his corporate donor chart with $192,500. His super PACs still kick ass
compared to those of the other GOP contenders. His Right to Rise super PAC
raised a hefty $103.2 million and, despite his disappearing act in the
polls, it remains by far the largest in the field.
Corporate donors to Jeb’s
Right to Rise PAC include MBF Healthcare Partners founder and chairman Mike
Fernandez, who has financed a slew of anti-Trump ads, with $3.02 million, and
Rooney Holdings with $2.2 million. Its CEO, L. Francis Rooney III, was the man
George W. Bush appointed ambassador to the Vatican. Former AIG CEO Hank
Greenberg’s current company, CV Starr (and not, as he has made pains to
clarify, he himself), gave $10 million to Jeb’s super PAC. In the same Fox Business interview where he stressed that distinction,
he also noted, “I’m sorry he is not living up to expectations, but that’s the
reality of it.” AIG, by the way, received $182 billion in bailout money under Jeb’s brother, W.
4. Ben Carson: No Love For
Billionaires
Ben Carson is running a
pretty expensive campaign, which doesn’t reflect well on his possible future
handling of the economy (though, as he sinks toward irrelevance in the polls,
it seems as if his moment to handle anything may have passed). Having raised
$38.7 million, he’s spent $26.4 million of it. His campaign received 63% of its contributions from small donors, which leaves it
third behind Bernie and Trump on that score, according to FEC filings from
October 2015.
His main super PACs, grouped
under the title “the 2016 Committee,” raised just $3.8 million, with rich retired people providing the bulk
of it. Another PAC, Our Children’s Future, didn’t collect anything, despite its
pledge to turn “Carson’s outside militia into an organized army.”
But billionaires aren’t
Carson’s cup of tea. As he said last October, “I have not gone out licking the
boots of billionaires and special-interest groups. I’m not getting into bed
with them.”
Carson recently dropped into
fourth place in the RealClearPolitics composite poll for election 2016 with his
team in chaos. His campaign manager, Barry Bennett, quit. His
finance chairman, Dean Parke, resigned amid escalating criticism over his spending
practices and his $20,000 a month salary. As the rising outsider candidate,
Carson once had an opportunity to offer a fresh voice on campaign finance
reform. Instead, his campaign learned the hard way that being in the Republican
hot seat without a Rolodex of billionaires can be hell on Earth.
5. Chris Christie: Most
Sketchy Billionaires
For someone polling so low,
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has amassed startling amounts of dosh. His
campaign contributions stand at $18.6 million, of which he has spent $5.7 million. Real
people don’t care for him. Christie has received the least number of small
contributions in either party, a bargain basement 3% of his total.
On the other hand, his super
PAC, America Leads, raised $11 million, including $4.3 million from the securities and
investment industry. His top corporate donors at $1 million each include Point
72 Asset Management, the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation, and Winnecup Gamble
Ranch, run by billionaire Paul Fireman, chairman of Fireman Capital Partners and
founder and former chairman of Reebok International Ltd.
Steven Cohen, worth about $12 billion
and on the Christie campaign’s national finance team, founded Point 72 Asset
Management after being forced to shut down SAC Capital, his former hedge-fund
company, due to insider-trading charges. SAC had to pay $1.2 billion to settle.
Christie’s other helpful
billionaire is Ken Langone, co-founder of Home Depot. But Langone, as he told the National Journal, is not writing a $10 million
check. Instead, he says, his preferred method of subsidizing politicians is
getting “a lot of people to write checks, and get them to get people to write
checks, and hopefully result in a helluva lot more than $10 million.” In other
words, Langone offers his ultra-wealthy network, not himself.
6. Donald Trump: I Am A
Billionaire
Trump’s campaign has
received approximately $5.8 million in individual contributions and spent about
the same amount. Though not much compared to the other Republican contenders,
it’s noteworthy that 70% of Trump’s contributions come from small individual
donors (the highest percentage among GOP candidates). It’s a figure that
suggests it might not pay to underestimate Trump’s grassroots support,
especially since he’s getting significant amounts of money from people who know
he doesn’t need it.
Last July, a Make America
Great Again super PAC emerged, but it shut down in October to honor Trump’s no super PAC
claim. For Trump, dealing with super PAC agendas would be a hassle
unworthy of his time and ego. (He is, after all, the best billionaire: trust
him.) Besides, with endorsements from luminaries like former Alaska Governor
Sarah Palin and a command of TV ratings that’s beyond compare, who needs a
super PAC or even his own money, of which he’s so far spent remarkably little?
On The Democratic Side:
1. Hillary Clinton: A
Dynasty of Billionaires
Hillary and Bill Clinton
earned a phenomenal $139 million for themselves between 2007 and 2014, chiefly
from writing books and speaking to various high-paying Wall Street and international
corporations. Between 2013 and 2015, Hillary Clinton gave 12 speeches to
Wall Street banks, private equity firms, and other financial corporations,
pocketing a whopping $2,935,000. And she’s used that obvious money-raising skill
to turn her campaign into a fundraising machine.
As of October 16, 2015, she
had pocketed $97.87 million from individual and PAC contributions.
And she sure knows how to spend it, too. Nearly half of that sum, or
$49.8 million—more than triple the amount of any other candidate—has already
gone to campaign expenses.
Small individual
contributions made up only 17% of Hillary’s total; 81% came from large individual
contributions. Much like her forced folksiness in the early days of her
campaign when she was snapped eating a burrito bowl at a Chipotle in her first major
meet-the-folks venture in Ohio, those figures reveal a certain lack of savoir
faire when it comes to the struggling classes.
Still, despite her speaking
tour up and down Wall Street and the fact that four of the top six Wall Street banks feature among her top
10 career contributors, they’ve been holding back so far in this election cycle
(or perhaps donating to the GOP instead). After all, campaign 2008 was a
bust for her and nobody likes to be on the losing side twice.
Her largest super PAC,
Priorities USA Action, nonetheless raised $15.7 million, including $4.6 million from the
entertainment industry and $3.1 million from securities and investment. The
Saban Capital Group and DreamWorks kicked in $2 million each.
Hillary has recently tried
to distance herself from a well-deserved reputation for being close to Wall Street, despite the mega-speaking fees she’s
garnered from Goldman Sachs among others, not to speak of the fact that five of
the Big Six banks gave money to the Clinton Foundation. She now claims that her
“Wall Street plan” is stricter than Bernie Sanders’s. (It isn’t. He’s
advocating to break up the big banks via a twenty-first-century version of the
Glass-Steagall Act that Bill Clinton buried in his presidency.) To top it off,
she scheduled an elite fundraiser at the $17 billion
“alternative investment” firm Franklin Square Capital Partners four days before
the Iowa Caucus. So much for leopards changing spots.
You won’t be surprised to
learn that Hillary has billionaires galore in her corner, all of whom backed
her hubby through the years. Chief among them is media magnate Haim Saban
who gave her super PAC $2 million. George Soros, the hedge-fund mogul,
contributed $2.02 million. DreamWorks Animation chief executive Jeffrey
Katzenberg gave $1 million. And the list goes on.
2. Bernie Sanders: No
Billionaires Allowed
Bernie Sanders has stuck to
his word, running a campaign sans billionaires. As of October 2015, he had
raised an impressive $41.5 million and spent about $14.5 million of it.
None of his top corporate
donors are Wall Street banks. What’s more, a record 77% of his contributions came from small individual donors,
a number that seems only destined to grow as his legions of enthusiasts vote
with their personal checkbooks.
According to a Sanders
campaign press release as the year began, another $33 million came
in during the last three months of 2015: “The tally for the year-end quarter
pushed his total raised last year to $73 million from more than 1 million
individuals who made a record 2.5 million donations.” That number broke the
2011 record set by President Obama’s reelection committee by 300,000 donations,
and evidence suggests Sanders’s individual contributors aren’t faintly tapped out.
After recent attacks on his single-payer healthcare plan by the Clinton camp,
he raised $1.4 million in a single day.
It would, of course, be an
irony of ironies if what has been a billionaire’s playground since the Citizens
United decision became, in November, a billionaire’s graveyard with literally
billions of plutocratic dollars interred in a grave marked: here lies campaign
2016.
The Media and Debates
And talking about billions,
in some sense the true political and financial playground of this era has
clearly become the television set with a record $6 billion in political ads slated to flood America’s
screen lives before next November 8th. Add to that the staggering rates that
media companies have been getting for ad slots on TV’s latest reality
extravaganza—those “debates” that began in mid-2015 and look as if they’ll
never end. They have sometimes pulled in National Football League-sized audiences and represent an
entertainment and profit spectacle of the highest order.
So here’s a little rundown
on those debates thus far, winners and losers (and I’m not even thinking of the
candidates, though Donald Trump would obviously lead the list of winners so
far—just ask him). In those ratings extravaganzas, especially the
Republican ones, the lack of media questions on campaign finance reform and on
the influence of billionaires is striking—and little wonder, under the
money-making circumstances.
The GOP Show
The kick-off August 6th GOP
debate in Cleveland, Ohio, was a Fox News triumph. Bringing in 24 million viewers, it was the highest-rated primary debate
in TV history. The follow-up at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California,
on September 16th, hosted by CNN and Salem Radio, grabbed another 23.1 million
viewers, making it the most-watched program in CNN’s history. (Trump
naturally took credit for that.) CNN charged up to $200,000 for a 30-second spot. (An average prime-time
spot on CNN usually goes for $5,000.) The third debate, hosted by CNBC,
attracted 14 million viewers, a record for CNBC, which was by then
charging advertisers $250,000 or more for 30-second spots.
Fox Business News and the Wall
Street Journal hosted the next round on November 10th: 13.5 million viewers and (ho-hum) a Fox Business News
record. For that one, $175,000 bought you a 30-second commercial slot.
The fifth and final debate
of 2015 on December 15th in Las Vegas, again hosted by CNN and Salem Radio,
lassoed 18 million viewers. As 2016 started, debate fatigue finally
seemed to be setting in. The first debate on January 14th in North Charleston,
South Carolina, scored a mere 11 million viewers for Fox Business News. When it
came to the second debate (and the last before the Iowa caucuses) on January
28th, The Donald decided not to grace it with his presence because he didn’t think
Fox News had treated him nicely enough and because he loathes its host Megyn
Kelly.
The Democratic Debates
Relative to the GOP debate
ad-money mania, CNN charged a bargain half-off, or $100,000, for a 30-second ad during one of the Democratic
debates. Let’s face it, lacking a reality TV star at center stage, the
Democrats and associated advertisers generally fared less well. Their first
debate on October 13th in Las Vegas, hosted by CNN and Facebook, averaged a
respectable 15.3 million viewers, but the next one in Des Moines, Iowa,
overseen by CBS and the Des Moines Register, sank to just 8.6 million viewers. Debate number three in Manchester, New
Hampshire, hosted by ABC and WMUR, was rumored to have been buried by the
Democratic National Committee (evidently trying to do Hillary a favor) on the
Saturday night before Christmas. Not surprisingly, it brought in only 7.85 million viewers.
The fourth Democratic debate
on NBC on January 17th (streamed live on YouTube) featured the intensifying
battle between an energized Bernie and a spooked Hillary. It garnered
10.2 million TV viewers and another 2.3 million YouTube viewers, even though it,
too, had been buried—on the Sunday night before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. In
comparison, 60 Minutes on rival network CBS nabbed 20.3 million viewers.
The Upshot
So what gives? In this
election season, it’s clear that these skirmishes involving the ultra-wealthy
and their piles of cash are transforming modern American politics into a form
of theater. And the correlation between big money and big drama seems destined
only to rise. The media needs to fill its coffers between now and
election day and the competition among billionaires has something of a
horse-betting quality to it. Once upon a time, candidates drummed up
interest in their policies; now, their policies, such as they are, have been
condensed into so many buzzwords and phrases, while money and glitz are the
main currencies attracting attention.
That said, it could all go
awry for the money-class and wouldn’t that just be satisfying to witness—the
irony of an election won not by, but despite, all those billionaires and
corporate patrons.
[…]
Nomi Prins, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of six books, a speaker,
and a distinguished senior fellow at the non-partisan public policy institute
Demos. Her most recent book is All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive
American Power (Nation Books). She is a former Wall Street executive.
Special thanks go to researcher Craig Wilson for his superb work on this piece.
[Note: The non-partisan
D.C.-based research group Center
for Responsive Politics deserves a special shout-out for the remarkable
work it’s done in the past and in election 2016, keeping track of donor data
with the kind of attention and diligence that any journalist can only admire
and thank them for.]
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