The recent midterm elections
offered an opportunity for America’s moneyed elites to spend their ridiculous
wealth on a catalog of their favorite causes and candidates. We are locked in a
vicious cycle, where billionaires continue to amass wealth due to policies
their influence has bought, which in turn enrich them with even more resources
with which to shift the American polity in their favor.
Part of the problem is that
billionaires’ control over our democracy is largely invisible. As a recent
study by The Guardian showed, high-profile wealthy elites like Warren
Buffett or Bill Gates are anomalies. To that point, “[M]ost of the wealthiest
US billionaires have made substantial financial contributions—amounting to
hundreds of thousands of reported dollars annually, in addition to any
undisclosed ‘dark money’ contributions—to conservative Republican candidates
and officials who favor the very unpopular step of cutting rather than
expanding social security benefits,” write the report’s authors. “Yet, over the
10-year period we have studied, 97% of the wealthiest billionaires have said
nothing at all about social security policy.”
The midterm races in
California saw several examples of the insidious ways in which the billionaire
class made its mark on democracy, most notably in the defeat of Proposition 10,
the state ordinance that would have expanded local governments’ jurisdiction
over rent control. Several years ago, Wall Street hedge fund managers began
scooping up rental properties and foreclosed homes in Los Angeles. According to
journalist David
Dayen, “Hedge funds, private equity firms and the biggest banks have raised
massive amounts of capital to buy distressed or foreclosed single-family homes,
often in bulk, at bargain prices.” He added, “It’s the next Wall Street gold
rush, with all the warning signs of a renewed speculative bubble.”
So it should have come as no
surprise that those same firms spent
millions to protect their investments from returning lower profits in
their fight against Prop 10. Sadly, Californians bought the corporate
propaganda hook, line and sinker, and voted
it down by a whopping 61.7 percent, saying “no” to rent control.
(Incidentally, the opposition to rent control was also bizarrely funded in part
by the Pharmaceutical
Research and Manufacturers Association.)
Also in California,
billionaires bankrolled the campaign of Marshall Tuck, a corporate candidate
for school superintendent who strongly supports the privatization of schools.
The race between Tuck and his union-backed rival, Tony Thurmond, broke
records for the millions of dollars that the candidates raised and the
tens of millions that flowed in from outside groups—a shocking trend considering
the down-ballot status of the race in a critical midterm election year. Among
the deep-pocketed individuals who backed Tuck were members of the Walton
family, the CEO of Netflix and Eli Broad, a wealthy philanthropist known for
his pro-charter school agenda.
If voters knew that
billionaires were spending ridiculous amounts of money to elect a
pro-privatization candidate, surely teachers and the parents of public school
students might be inclined to view them with distrust?
In San Francisco, voters cast
ballots for a tax initiative called Proposition
C, a progressive tax on large corporations aimed at funding initiatives for
the homeless. But Proposition C passed, likely because there were billionaires
spending big on both sides of the campaign. The city has Salesforce
CEO Marc Benioff to thank for deigning to do the right thing and pushing for
the initiative in opposition to the likes of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and
others.
Countless examples abound
around this nation, where billionaires have gotten what they wanted simply
because they had limitless wealth to throw at their favorite causes. As voters,
we need to become literate in the ways of the moneyed class when it comes to
elections. It’s very simple: Figure out who has poured millions into an issue
or candidate and ask whether that person’s agenda might be less than noble. It
may be that once in a while, the values of ordinary Americans align with those
of billionaires. But that is the exception rather than the rule.
Wealthy people are swimming in
riches because the rest of us are not. Their wealth is relative—they are the
haves, we are the have-nots. And they clearly like having a lot more than
us—and are willing to spend some of their mountains of cash to ensure they
remain ensconced in power.
Throwing enormous amounts of
money at a race doesn’t always bear fruit. For example, the politically active
billionaire Sheldon
Adelson failed in his recent bid to stop a renewable energy initiative
in Nevada. But these (mostly) male magnates are so wealthy that the calculus of
their political influence is on a completely different scale than ours. They
literally have money to burn. They could lose $100 million in a political fight
and walk away still brazenly wealthier and more privileged than most of us
could imagine being.
Billionaires are not all
Republicans. Were it so clear-cut, ordinary Americans could unite under the
wing of the Democratic Party to beat back the GOP’s billionaire agenda. But
corporate greed is a bipartisan project. For example, J.B. Pritzker waltzed
into the position of Illinois governor after running as a Democrat. He had so
much money that he didn’t need to raise funds for his candidacy—he simply used
his own, an unimaginable amount of $171.5 million. Had he lost, he probably
would have had plenty left over to spend on a future second, third or fourth
try until he won. His opponent, Republican incumbent Bruce Rauner, is also
fantastically rich; between the two candidates, Illinois voters were bombarded
with a whopping $230 million worth of campaign spending. Imagine the badly
needed projects that such money could have funded.
Wealthy Americans are already
benefiting hand-over-fist from the tax giveaway that their Republican proxies
in Congress passed last year. According to The
New York Times, the law didn’t necessarily help the “merely rich” but was a
windfall for the “ultra rich,” because, as author Andrew Ross Sorkin noted, “If
you’re a billionaire with your own company and are happy to use your private
jet so you can ‘commute’ from a low-tax state, the plan is a godsend. You can
make an assortment of end-runs around the highest tax rates.” The so-called “pass-through”
tax deductions were written in expressly for the obscenely wealthy.
It appears that for the greedy
few, no amount of wealth hoarding is enough. Alongside election literacy, we
voters need to develop a healthy sense of disdain, disgust and revulsion toward
the billionaire class. In matters of politics, they are literally the “enemies
of the people,” to borrow a phrase from President Trump.
No comments:
Post a Comment