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Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
This election may be America’s last stand against this country becoming, like Hungary and Russia, a full-on oligarchy run of, by, and for a small, malevolent group of the morbidly rich.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been found by a jury of his peers to have raped a woman. He’s a traitor who’s embraced foreign dictators, particularly Russian President Vladimir Putin, who just sentenced an American to prison while actively bombing a democratic American ally. He’s a convicted criminal who stole money from a children’s cancer charity and scammed students out of millions of dollars. He tried to end American democracy by force. Like Hitler justifying the Holocaust, he claimed some Americans are genetically inferior. And he’s a whisker away from the presidency.
How is this even possible?
You can trace it all back to dark money.
Ever since Citizens Unitedlegalized literally unlimited contributions to the new category of political action committees it created (SuperPACs), just in the 15 months from January 2023 to April of 2024 over $8.6 billion was raised for this year’s federal campaigns with over 65% of that money—$5.6 billion—running through PACs.
Nine years ago, former President Jimmy Carter said on my program:
It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president… So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.
He's right. But it’s even worse than Carter imagined. Dark money—billions from the morbidly rich and giant corporations, often untraceable—has taken over the entire GOP and is the main weapon being used today against members of the Democratic Party.
It’s also badly distorting public policy.
For example, remember when Donald Trump was outspoken about banning TikTok from America because the app is owned by Chinese billionaires beholden to that nation’s communist government? In August of 2020, he signed an Executive Order that said, in part:
This data collection [by TikTok] threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary information—potentially allowing China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.
Proving the old adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day, Trump was right about TikTok and its owner, ByteDance. Federal lawsuits blocked his ban so it never went into effect, but in the meantime a fellow most Americans have never heard of—Jeffrey Yass—either flew down to Mar-a-Lago and spent time with Trump or met him backstage at an Elon Musk event (media reports conflict).
Yass—the world’s 64th richest person worth an estimated $40 billion—owns Susquehanna International Group, a trading company that owned large blocks of stock in both ByteDance (TikTok’s parent) and Digital World Acquisition Corporation, the company that merged back in March with Trump Media & Technology Group just as that company was desperately running out of cash.
Reportedly, the merger not only prevented Trump’s Truth Social app from going bankrupt but also let Trump take the combined company public, putting an estimated $3 billion in his own personal pocket.
Even more interesting, given Yass’ holding $15 billion in ByteDance stock—the largest holding outside China, representing 7% of the company’s stock—after the Trump/Yass meeting the former president suddenly reversed his opposition to TikTok. As ABC News reported at the time:
[T]he former president has been rebuilding his relationship with a GOP megadonor who reportedly has a major financial stake in the popular social media platform.
And that megadonor has been busy.
While Pennsylvania-based Yass’ entire donation portfolio to Republican politicians was reported as a mere $78,000 in 2012, this year he’s the nation’s second largest political donor, reportedly having dropped more than $80,000,000 in support of Republicans over the past few months. He’s spent more in Pennsylvania than the top 10 corporate PACs combined, according to the All Eyes on Yasscampaign.
You and I have one vote each, and are limited to giving a maximum of $3,300 to any one political candidate. Pretty much every penny after that falls into the simple category of dark money, or potential dark money.
And America’s billionaires and corporations are pouring billions of that dark money into PACs and SuperPACs that are, right now, flooding the nation’s airways with attack ads against Democrats.
How did it come to this?
In 2010, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court made it super easy for billionaires to give lavish gifts and support to Supreme Court justices and members of Congress. Their Citizens Uniteddecision blew open the doors to a bizarre new era of dark money-driven oligarchy in America.
Right-wing billionaires are nearly in control of our government—and easily control the Republicans on the Supreme Court and in Congress—but now they want all of it. And they sure as hell don’t want to have to cough up the taxes to pay for our government.
A report from Americans for Tax Fairness details the damage these democracy-destroying decisions, made by SCOTUS members who, themselves, were at the time being groomed by billionaires, have done to our political system.
This is the brave new world Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking vote brought America when the Supreme Court, in their 2010 Citizens United decision, legalized both political bribery and massive intervention in elections by corporations and billionaires.
Prior to Thomas’ vote on that decision, Harlan Crow—who helped finance the original Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004—and other billionaires had lavished millions on him and his family.
Crow gave the group that Thomas’ wife, Ginni, started a half million dollars; he bought Thomas’ mother’s home and others in the neighborhood so she could live rent-free for the rest of her life; he put Thomas’ nephew through an expensive prep school. Another billionaire bought Thomas a quarter-million-dollar luxury RV.
It was a remarkably successful investment for Crow, his family, and his billionaire buddies. Just his own family’s political contributions went from an average of a few hundred thousand dollars a year during the decade preceding 2010 to multiple millions every year after Thomas’ vote. Americans for Tax Fairness calculated it at an 862% increase just for the Crow family.
(Graphic: Americans for Tax Fairness)
In 2010, the year of the Citizens Uniteddecision, all of America’s billionaires together spent a mere $31 million on elections: There were still substantial limits on dark money in American politics.
That number jumped to $231 million in the 2012 and 2014 elections, and over $600 million for both 2016 and 2018.
The dark money blowout came in 2020, when Trump was running for reelection and there was a very real chance the billionaires could seize complete control of our federal government.
They spent a total of $2,362,000,000 in that election, with $1.2 billion of it going to elect conventional politicians who would then be beholden to their patrons.
As Americans for Tax Fairness notes:
The report finds that almost 40% of all billionaire campaign contributions made since 1990 occurred during the 2020 season. Billionaires had a lot more money to give politicians and political causes in 2020 as their collective wealth jumped by nearly a third, or over $900 billion, to $3.9 trillion between the March beginning of the pandemic and a month before Election Day.
Billionaire fortunes have continued to climb since: as of October 2021, billionaires were worth $5.1 trillion, more than a 20-fold increase in their collective fortune since 1990, when it stood at $240 billion, adjusted for inflation.
These campaign donations are a profitable investment: They buy access to politicians and influence over tax and other policies that can save tycoons billions of dollars. While that $1.2 billion “investment” in 2020 was massive, it totaled less than 0.1% of billionaire wealth (and less than one day’s worth of their pandemic wealth growth), leaving almost unlimited room for future growth in billionaire campaign spending.
And this year will be far worse, once the dark money numbers come in this winter. As NBC Newstells us:
Political ad spending is projected to reach new heights by the end of the 2024 election cycle, eclipsing $10 billion in what would amount to the most expensive two years in political history.
While Thomas Jefferson was still the U.S. envoy to France and living in Paris, just after the Constitution had been written but a year before it would be ratified, John Adams wrote him on December 6, 1778 arguing that Jefferson’s fear of a strongman president wasn’t as big a concern as Adams’ fear of rich people corrupting American politics:
You are afraid of the one—I, of the few. We agree perfectly that the many should have a full fair and perfect representation.—You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy.
Today, if Trump is reelected, we will have both.
Vice President Kamala Harris has made it clear that if she’s elected her first order of business will be to pass the For The People Act, which will overturn large parts of Citizens United and again regulate dark money in politics.
That’s probably why our airwaves are currently saturated with hit-piece ads against Harris and other Democrats—paid for by shady dark money PACs—that make George H. W. Bush’s Willie Horton ads seem tame.
Right-wing billionaires are nearly in control of our government—and easily control the Republicans on the Supreme Court and in Congress—but now they want all of it. And they sure as hell don’t want to have to cough up the taxes to pay for our government.
This election may be America’s last stand against this country becoming, like Hungary and Russia, a full-on oligarchy run of, by, and for a small, malevolent group of the morbidly rich. But, to paraphrase Jim Morrison’s 60’s protest anthem: They got the money, but we got the numbers.
And now we must turn out those numbers if our democracy is to survive this all-out assault by a handful of obscenely rich people who think, as does billionaire-funded Curtis Yarvin (JD Vance’s favorite philosopher) that we should just all “get over” our “dictator phobia.”
Vote!
The top 50 contributors "skew Republican" but the list includes donors to both major parties, an analysis from The Washington Post showed.
Just 50 donors have contributed more than $1.5 billion in total to the 2024 federal elections, The Washington Postreported Monday, based on an analysis of Federal Election Commission data.
The Post's top 50 list, which includes contributions reported by August 20, is comprised mainly of individual megadonors but also includes some organizations. Most of the contributions accounted for in the list have gone to super political action committees (PACs), which can accept unlimited funds from individuals and corporations, thanks to the 2010 Citizens United ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that loosened campaign finance law.
Monday's list led critics of the political system to lash out on social media, with one X user arguing that billionaire influence is undemocratic and leads to policies that hurt the working class, and another positing that it showed "capitalists bankrolling both capitalist parties."
Thanks to Citizens United and the Supreme Court.
Meet the megadonors pumping millions into the 2024 election https://t.co/PJHj74bm2U
— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) August 26, 2024
The Post reported that those on the list "skew Republican" and the top several individual donors on the list are in fact Republicans.
The top donor is Timothy Mellon, an 82-year-old billionaire who was heir to a banking fortune and has given $165 million in total this cycle. He contributed $125 million to the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Inc. super PAC, which supports Republican nominee Donald Trump, and $25 million to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s now defunct campaign.
Kennedy withdrew from the presidential race Friday and endorsed Trump. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who's now a a professor and progressive commentator, said the Trump-Kennedy union was no surprise, given that they shared the same "billionaire nepo baby" donor.
Number two on the Post's individual list is Kenneth Griffin, a billionaire hedge fund manager who's given $75.7 million this cycle, largely to congressional races. The top individual Democratic donor is Michael Bloomberg at $41 million.
The list's top organizational donor is Coinbase, a corporation that hosts a cryptocurrency exchange platform and pushes for deregulation of the industry. Coinbase made an $86 million contribution to the pro-crypto super PAC Fairshake, which spent heavily to influence primaries in both parties. For example, Fairshake spent $2 million to help defeat Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), a progressive who was also the target of pro-Israel super PACs.
Coinbase is one of several cryptocurrency organizations on the list, as the industry moves to expand its influence in Washington. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump's running mate, reportedly has ties to cryptocurrency interests.
Super PACs aren't legally allowed to coordinate their electioneering efforts with campaigns but regularly do so, according to media reports, and in any case can wield great influence by, for example, buying advertising to support—or attack—a candidate. The FEC has also eased coordination rules for canvassing and paid materials.
Progressives have recently amplified their calls for campaign finance reform. Last week, OpenSecrets, a nonprofit campaign finance watchdog, released an analysis showing that super PACs had spent over $1.1 billion on federal elections through August 15, more than half of it on the presidential election.
OpenSecrets said this was roughly double what super PAC spending had been up until the same point in the 2020 cycle. The group found that MAGA Inc. was by far the largest super PAC spender so far this cycle, with about $125 million in outflows.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) spoke forcefully about the need for a better campaign finance system in a speech at the Democratic National Convention last week.
"Billionaires in both parties should not be able to buy elections, including primary elections," he said. "For the sake of our democracy, we must overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move toward public funding of elections."
A new analysis and call for a constitutional amendment comes as reporting sheds light on Sen. JD Vance's ties to a right-wing group backed by tech and digital currency investors.
A report out Wednesday takes aim at how giants of the cryptocurrency industry are using the 2010 Citizens United ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which opened the floodgates for dark money in political campaigns, to make a massive deregulatory push ahead of this year's pivotal election.
Based on Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool's analysis of federal election data from OpenSecrets, the consumer advocacy group accused the crypto industry of "exploiting" the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling "to an unprecedented degree, dwarfing direct corporate spending by Big Oil and other corporate sectors in the 2024 elections."
Claypool found that crypto companies have dumped over $119 million into the 2024 federal elections so far, mostly through super political action committees (PACs) focused on elevating candidates that back their industry and opposing any skeptics.
"Nearly half (48%) of all corporate money contributed during this year's elections ($248 million so far) came from crypto backers," the report notes. Koch Industries, the conglomerate of the infamous Koch brothers, "is a distant second place," having put $25 million toward Americans for Prosperity Action and $3.25 million toward electing Republicans to Congress.
"That cryptocurrency companies like Coinbase and Ripple are able to spend over a hundred million dollars to silence crypto's critics and elevate its backers embodies everything that is wrong with the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United decision."
Since Citizens United, there has been at least $884 million in known corporate contributions to elections. Already, crypto corporations' spending for the past three cycles amounts to 15% of that total—and 92% has been during this cycle. The industry now only trails fossil fuel companies in election-related spending in the wake of the 2010 ruling.
"That cryptocurrency companies like Coinbase and Ripple are able to spend over a hundred million dollars to silence crypto's critics and elevate its backers embodies everything that is wrong with the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United decision," Claypool said in a statement.
Claypool stressed that "corporations can't vote. But the sole reason crypto is a hot-button topic in this election cycle is that crypto businesses are spending eye-popping sums to make themselves impossible to ignore."
"All this spending is a concern not just because the crypto companies may be able to buy deregulation," he warned. "This direct spending by crypto corporations is shattering a long-standing norm—and is likely to set a precedent for vastly more direct spending by corporations in upcoming elections."
Much of the industry's money from this cycle—nearly $114 million—has gone to the sector's Fairshake PAC and its affiliates. The report details how the group intervened in two Democratic primaries:
When Fairshake and its affiliates spend money to influence races, either by attacking crypto skeptics or boosting crypto supporters, the ads don't mention crypto at all. The super PAC spent $10 million on ads against Rep. Katie Porter in California's Senate primary and $2 million against Rep. Jamaal Bowman in a primary contest in New York. Rather than criticizing candidates for not sufficiently supporting crypto, both attack campaigns smeared the candidates' using unflattering claims having nothing to do with crypto policy.
In Bowman's case, he was also targeted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliates for his criticism of U.S. support for Israel's assault of the Gaza Strip. Another target of both pro-Israel and crypto groups was fellow progressive Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), who lost her primary earlier this month.
Industry use of Fairshake is expected to continue through November. The report points out that "the super PAC recently pledged to spend $25 million backing 18 House candidates—nine Democrats and nine Republicans—in the general election."
The report also lays out how both major parties' presidential nominees—former Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris—and their allies have been courting the industry this cycle:
The new Public Citizen report—which concludes with a call for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United—was released a day after Reutersreported that before Vance joined the Republican ticket, "he co-founded a Silicon Valley-backed donor organization to finance right-wing news stories, voter turnout operations, and election polls."
"The existence of Rockbridge and Vance's link to it have been previously reported," the outlet detailed. "But three internal Rockbridge documents reviewed by Reuters and half a dozen sources familiar with the group reveal the scale of its ambitions, its roughly $75 million budget for 2024, and its role in seeking to influence November's presidential election."
"Rockbridge showcases how Trump's selection of Vance as his running mate could empower a new set of Republican businessmen: heavyweight tech investors who favor far-reaching deregulation," Reuters continued. "Many want to weaken the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates Wall Street, and reduce oversight of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence."
Meanwhile, in remarks cheered by Bush, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) declared at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night that there is an urgent "need to get big money out of our political process."
"Billionaires in both parties should not be able to buy elections, including primary elections," he said. "For the sake of our democracy, we must overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move toward public funding of elections."
OpenSecrets revealed last week that outside spending during the current election cycle has hit a record $1 billion.