The billionaire takeover

The takeover of America’s politics by billionaires appears to have reached overdrive and the public is right to worry that our democracy is being corrupted as a result.
Concern over the power of big money in our politics has grown steadily ever since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its now infamous Citizens United decision, which found that money equals political speech and couldn’t be regulated as Congress had intended.
The 2010 decision opened the floodgates of billionaire cash to political campaigns, and the billionaires have prospered as a result. Nearly 15 years after Citizens United, the billionaires are flexing their political muscles like never before, whether it be through massive political donations to candidates willing to do their bidding, or through controlling sources of information.
Perhaps the most heavy-handed in the current presidential race is Elon Musk, who is using X, formerly known as Twitter, to spread increasingly destructive disinformation to advance Donald Trump, who Musk has endorsed. Musk is not just allowing nefarious actors to spread false information on X… he’s actively doing it himself.
As a reward, Trump is openly kowtowing to Musk and recently hinted he might appoint Musk to a government efficiency panel, an idea that Musk promoted to the highly impressionable former president. Given that Musk has billions of dollars in federal contracts, such a perch would give him the opportunity to further feather his nest or gather intel on competitors. Trump, who has long viewed government authority as a commodity to be horse-traded for his own benefit, would be putty in Musk’s hands.
Musk will be looking for more influence here in the U.S. as a counter to the pushback he is receiving elsewhere in the world. His conversion of Twitter from a formerly moderated social media service to a haven for rightwing disinformation and conspiracy-mongering has put the company in the crosshairs of regulators in both Europe and Brazil, which rightfully see Musk’s reckless use of X as a threat to democracy.
But it isn’t just Musk and other Republican-supporting billionaires who are throwing their weight around. Democratic-leaning mega-donors have reportedly pressured Vice President Kamala Harris to abandon the “billionaire tax” from President Biden’s tax plan, which would require the wealthiest Americans, i.e. those with $100 million or more in assets, to pre-pay capital gains taxes.
Harris announced last week that she would propose a lower top tax rate for those with over $100 million in assets than Biden had proposed, 28 percent versus 39.6 percent. While Harris’s proposal still represents a willingness to adopt the new tax, it’s a troubling sign of the ways in which the mega-wealthy use their vast resources to constantly press their thumb on the political scale. In the end, it should surprise no one if the new wealth tax is never actually enacted into law, regardless of who sits in the White House next January. While the billionaires have enormous influence in presidential politics, they are even more influential in most cases when it comes to Congress, where their influence can often be wielded behind the scenes, with little public attention.
It used to be that political parties influenced the candidates. And while that wasn’t always ideal, at least the major parties were a reflection of a much broader base of Americans, many of them of modest means. That input from the party faithful helped the major parties draft platforms that highlighted the party’s principles and political objectives, and reflected to some degree the diversity of the country.
Imperfect as it is, that’s still true to some degree in the Democratic Party, which is why their nominees may be influenced by the big donors, without completely capitulating to them. The GOP, by contrast, makes no bones about its fealty to those at the top. It’s a party today that’s literally in service to a billionaire focused on gaining power for himself to further his own wealth and to stay out of prison.
Rather than a party platform, the GOP’s direction is determined not by Republican activists but by billionaires and their hangers-on, who use their money and their economic power to mislead voters into supporting their self-serving agenda, served cold with heaping helpings of division and misdirection. All they really want, of course, are more tax cuts.
It’s the founding fathers’ worst nightmare come true. James Madison talked of “an oligarchy founded on corruption” through which the wealthy dominate political decision-making. It’s exactly what we are witnessing today. The only question is whether “We the People” stand for it.