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'Obscene': Billionaire Funders Allowed California Wealth Tax Foes to Outspend Proponents 250 to 1
"California, send these oligarchs a message: Democracy is not for sale," said US Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Nov 03, 2026
Foes of a California ballot initiative to establish a one-time 5% wealth tax on the state's billionaires have spent vastly more on advertising than proponents—and polls show that money may be having an impact.
A Monday report in The Washington Post estimated that opponents of California’s Proposition 40, led by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, have spent 250 times more than those in favor of the tax.
In total, the Post found, tax opponents have raised more than $379 million to fight the wealth tax, while proponents of the initiative have raised just $35 million.
The spending disparity in advertising is even greater, as tax opponents have spent $148 million on ads, while proponents have spent a mere $572,000.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been leading the charge against the measure, having donated more than $100 million to ensure its defeat.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr, meanwhile, have both chipped in $40 million each to help defeat the proposal.
The spending blitz comes as polling has shown a steady erosion of support for Proposition 40.
As noted by Gizmodo on Monday, two recent surveys—one from the Public Policy Institute of California and another from the University of California Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies—show that opposition to the measure now outpaces support. For several months prior, polls showed a majority of California voters in favor of the wealth tax.
David McCuan, a political scientist at Sonoma State University, told the Post that opponents of the tax appear to have held their fire until late in the campaign, when most voters have traditionally started to really pay attention to ballot initiatives.
"The strategy has been to blanket the airwaves in weeks three and four," McCuan said, "and carpet-bomb the airwaves in the last two weeks."
McCuan also estimated that the battle over Proposition 40 "will be the most expensive ballot measure in the history of the world."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) decried the billionaire campaign to defeat the tax in a Monday social media post.
"Oligarchs in California spent $379 million against Prop 40, a 5% billionaire wealth tax, outraising supporters 250-1," Sanders wrote. "They’d rather poor kids die than pay a little more in taxes. Obscene. California, send these oligarchs a message: Democracy is not for sale. Vote for Prop 40."
Economist Gabriel Zucman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview with NPR published Monday that the wealth tax in California was part of a broader fight to take away power from the ultrarich, who have seen their wealth grow by leaps and bounds over the last several decades.
"If California says, 'We can tax billionaires. We can tax the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world,'" Zucman explained, "it will be the beginning of not only a broader US-wide movement, ultimately paving the way for a federal wealth tax—but I think it will be the beginning of an international movement."
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Naomi Klein and Illana Glaser Have a Message: Tax the Billionaires and Block Big Tech IPOs
"We cannot let the billionaire class take these kinds of risks with our future."
Nov 02, 2026
Progressive author Naomi Klein and comedian Ilana Glazer on Monday warned that America's billionaire class is taking "unprecedented risks with our future," and said US policymakers must block further Big Tech initial public offerings and mergers to prevent even more damage from occurring.
In an op-ed published by The Guardian, Klein and Glazer outlined how US billionaires have used tax loopholes, corporate mergers, and IPOs to enrich themselves at an unprecedented scale, as their wealth has grown by an estimated 40% over just the last two years.
Klein and Glazer argued that the upcoming IPOs of artificial intelligence giants OpenAI and Anthropic could be particularly risky to the economy given questions about their ability to be consistently profitable.
"It’s no secret that the AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI are intending to go public in the near future," they wrote. "Both of these players also had major security flaws exposed recently, and openly acknowledge mind-bogglingly huge amounts of debt."
The risk will only grow, they added, if Nasdaq grants OpenAI and Anthropic the same exception it granted to Elon Musk's SpaceX earlier this year by allowing their shares to be immediately included in index funds without having to wait through the one-year "seasoning" period.
"June’s highly contentious SpaceX IPO already carries great risk for regular investors," they explained. "If more speculative tech companies with staggering risk profiles are allowed to follow suit, the results will become too much for the market to bear."
Klein and Glazer said that policymakers need to intervene to put a halt to new Big Tech IPOs, and also pass a wealth tax to take away billionaires' power to spend cavalierly even as they leave working people potentially holding the bag for their failed investments.
"We cannot let the billionaire class take these kinds of risks with our future," they emphasized. "To stop these reckless IPOs we must stand together, take collective action, and push for real change."
Economist Jeffrey D. Sachs last month similarly called for AI IPOs to be halted until Congress "has enacted a public system of licensing, independent safety evaluation, liability, and financial backstops for frontier AI."
Sachs noted that Anthropic executives and employees, including CEO Dario Amodei, have warned that AI could pose a threat to all human life, and he questioned why the creators of such technology should become unfathomably wealthy before such risks are understood and eliminated.
"A company should not disclose a risk of catastrophe to humanity and then sell its shares to the public before any public authority has the power to evaluate that risk or to stop deployment," argued Sachs. "In fact, to proceed rapidly in the face of such dire warnings is beyond folly."
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'Oligarchy Is on the Ballot': Reports Uncover Unprecedented Sums Ultrarich Spent to Buy 2026 Midterms
"In a democracy, it’s supposed to be one person, one vote, and the more one person can influence, the less egalitarian our system becomes," said one expert.
Nov 02, 2026
Some of the richest people in the US have spent unprecedented sums of money to influence the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections, and a Sunday report in The New York Times estimated that the top 20 biggest donors alone have spent a combined $2 billion in federal races this cycle.
The single largest funder of the 2026 midterms, by a wide margin, is far-right billionaire Elon Musk, who has shoveled nearly $450 million to help GOP candidates.
In fact, pro-Republican donors account for the five largest individual contributors to midterm races.
In addition to Musk, the other largest donors this cycle are industrialists Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who have given $150 million to help elect Republicans; flagship GOP Senate super PAC One Nation, which has spent $138 million; venture capitalists Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, who have given $116 million; and hedge fund investor Jeff Yass, who has given $110 million.
On the Democratic side, the top spenders have been flagship Democratic Senate super PAC Majority Forward, which has spent $104 million, and George and Alexander Soros, who have given $103 million.
The Times' report echoes an analysis published last week by the Brennan Center for Justice showing that the 40 largest individual donors to the 2026 elections had spent a combined $2.4 billion as of mid-October.
According to Brennan, this represents the single largest amount of money spent on a midterm election ever since the US Supreme Court's landmark 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC unleashed limitless political campaign spending.
The Brennan analysis reveals that the spending of the very largest donors has grown dramatically over the last decade.
"The donations coming from the top 40 donors for the midterms total eight times the amount from the top 40 donors by mid-October in the 2014 midterms (the first full midterm cycle after Citizens United), adjusted for inflation," the analysis explains. "The cutoff to be in the top 40 has also increased to 10 times what it was four cycles ago, to $25 million."
And while the biggest spenders used to favor Democrats, their loyalties have since shifted to the GOP, and in this election cycle "donors loyal to the GOP now give more than three times the amount that reliably Democratic donors give."
And while labor unions were once at least represented in the list of top 40 election donors, they have since fallen out and have been replaced by donors from the cryptocurrency industry, the Brennan Center analysis finds.
Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel at Brennan and co-author of the analysis, told The Guardian in an interview published Monday that it's become easier for politicians to be totally beholden to a single large donor while ignoring the needs of voters.
"In a democracy, it’s supposed to be one person, one vote," Vandewalker explained, "and the more one person can influence, the less egalitarian our system becomes."
Economist Paul Krugman expressed similar concerns about the influence of big money in US politics, writing on his Substack page Monday that "oligarchy is on the ballot" in the 2026 midterms.
In assessing the massive spending by megadonors on elections, Krugman said the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision deserved significant blame. However, he said it was also a simple reflection of the fact that the US economy for decades has been rigged to provide benefits primarily to the ultrawealthy.
"Now we... have men big enough to own the government of the United States," Krugman commented. "This midterm is a test of whether they will get away with it."
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With Trump in Office, 'Corruption' Becomes Key Issue for Midterm Voters
Voters across party lines "rank government corruption among their top concerns, believe Trump puts his own interests ahead of the country, and connect his self-dealing directly to the costs hitting their budgets."
Oct 30, 2026
As US voters contend with an affordability crisis under President Donald Trump and a Congress controlled by his Republican Party, polling released Friday shows that with next week's midterm election looming and tens of millions casting their ballots early, many people are worried about not only the cost of living, but also government corruption.
Since Trump's first term, which concluded with his supporters storming the US Capitol after he failed to cling to power in the 2020 election, he has been condemned as the "most corrupt president in our lifetimes" and "most dangerous criminal in US history."
Trump won the 2024 election after not only campaigning on a slew of right-wing policies but also making clear that he would serve the interests of the climate-wrecking fossil fuel industry and Big Tech. For his latest inauguration, the president surrounded himself with some of the richest people on the planet—the event was dubbed "a coronation of our country's descent into oligarchy."
The president has spent the past two years enriching himself—annual disclosures from July show he pocketed at least $2.2 billion during his first year back in the White House—as well as relatives and rich allies, including by waging an illegal war on Iran that has boosted the profits of fossil fuel companies, in which he's invested, while everyday Americans feel the pain at the pump.
According to the new Harris poll, conducted for The Guardian October 22-24, "The rising cost of living is still expected to drive the election, with 36% of voters saying it is the single most important issue to how they plan to vote in the midterms."
However, it is followed by government corruption, at 12%. After that are immigration (9%), healthcare (7%), and taxes (5%).
Democrats running for office this cycle have focused heavily on affordability as they try to win majorities in Congress, but they've also pledged that if they succeed, they'll "hold the crooks accountable," and even teased possible impeachments.
However, the new polling shows that it's not just Democratic voters who are concerned about corruption. The newspaper reported:
Nearly nine out of 10 Americans said that government corruption... defined as elected officials putting their own or their donors' financial interests ahead of the public's, is a problem, according to the survey.
Three-quarters (76%) of voters said that elected officials care more about enriching themselves than improving the economy for ordinary people. Voters were more likely to say that government corruption (65%) is more concerning than corporate power (29%). Just under 10% said that neither concerns them.
The Harris poll is not an outlier. The Not Above the Law coalition—made up of more than 150 organizations focused on protecting democracy and fighting for the rule of law—noted Friday that "voters rank government corruption among their top concerns, believe Trump puts his own interests ahead of the country, and connect his self-dealing directly to the costs hitting their budgets. That alarm crosses party lines, with Republicans, independents, and even Trump's own voters rejecting this administration’s corruption."
The coalition highlighted various recent surveys in a statement:
- Corruption tops the list, alongside grocery prices. In the CNBC All-America Economic Survey (October 14-18), 36% of registered voters named government corruption as their top issue, narrowly ahead of food costs at 34%, with protecting democracy and gas prices each at 23%.
- Six in 10 voters are extremely concerned. The Fox News Poll (October 9-12) found government corruption led all voter concerns, with 60% extremely concerned, ahead of inflation (58%) and gas prices (50%).
- Perceived corruption is at a record high. According to Gallup (May 1-June 10), a record 89% of Americans say government corruption is widespread, the highest level in 20 years and a 10-point jump from last year.
There was also a Financial Times/Focaldata poll from October 16-18, which found that 69% of US voters are concerned about corruption, self-dealing, or conflicts of interest in the current administration.
"When a family reads a story about presidential crypto profits at the same time as they are deciding whether they should put off their expensive doctor's appointment, they see that the system is working for someone—just not for them," Columbia Business School professor Jeremy Ney told the Financial Times.
"Voters can tolerate some economic pain, as long as they believe it is shared," added the professor. "But when that pain only flows in one direction, discontent boils to the surface."
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Why US Voters of All Political Stripes Loath the Big Tech Billionaires
Let us count the many reasons.
Oct 22, 2026
One of few silver linings of these dark Trump times is that much of what had been hidden has now been exposed.
I’m referring specifically to where the power lies in our system—power to decide how most Americans live and work. This exposure is having a huge effect on American attitudes. It may even lead to a fundamental political realignment along with major reforms.
To summarize: America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech.
Let me start with some historic context, then discuss how this affects the most pressing issues in the 2026 campaign, and finally suggest some likely outcomes.
I. The First Gilded Age’s Robber Barons and the Second Gilded Age’s Billionaire Barons of Big Tech
The first Gilded Age, which stretched from the late 1870s to around 1900, featured “robber barons” who lived like kings while corrupting the federal and state governments with bribes to get whatever they wanted from pliant legislators.
Today’s second Gilded Age is led by the billionaire barons of Big Tech, who are similarly living like kings while corrupting our democracy.
Just three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms, an all-time record.
One of them—Elon Musk—sank more than a quarter of a billion dollars into getting Trump elected in 2024 and is sinking even more into the 2026 midterms.
In return, Trump has allowed Musk to extend his monopoly on satellite communications, financed largely by taxpayers—even giving him the power to disable Ukraine intelligence. Trump also allowed Musk’s DOGE to rampage through federal databases and gather information on every American.
Larry Ellison and his son, David, defanged CBS News and its flagship “60 Minutes” and kicked Trump critic and satirist Stephen Colbert off the air. In return, Trump has greenlit the Ellisons’ acquisition of a media empire stretching from Paramount to CNN, CBS and CBS News, TBS, TNT, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, Discovery, HBO, and TikTok.
Jeff Bezos gave Melania Trump a $40 million licensing fee for a puff documentary about her (with about $28 million going directly to her) and another $35 million for marketing the movie dud. Bezos also destroyed the integrity of the editorial page of The Washington Post by barring it from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and from writing anything negative about capitalism under Trump.
In return, Trump has given Bezos and his Amazon carte blanche to monopolize online retailing along with federal contracts to provide cloud infrastructure for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the National Security Agency (NSA).
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and $25 million to Trump’s White House ballroom fundraising campaign, and he gave Trump personally a custom engraved glass and 24-karat gold base plaque. In return, Trump has given Cook and Apple critical exemptions from Trump’s sweeping tariffs, allowing them to import electronic components from China.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, also helped finance Trump’s inauguration and his ballroom, gave Trump $25 million to settle his lawsuit against Meta for suspending him from its platforms after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, rolled back content moderation and fact-checking on his platforms, and brought Trump loyalists into Meta’s leadership.
In return, Trump went along with Zuckerberg and Meta’s wish not to have a federal AI regulator but to rely on “self-policing” and to pressure European and other countries not to impose taxes on digital services.
II. The Billionaire Barons and AI
The billionaire barons of Big Tech are now investing more than $1 trillion of other people’s money and debt—along with taxpayer-financed subsidies—into AI. (Last year’s giant Trump-Republican tax cut featured major tax breaks for Big Tech, helping drive a big decrease in corporate tax payments even as AI spending soars.)
The billionaire barons are thereby exposing the US economy to the largest gamble since Wall Street’s wanton betting led to the 2008 financial crisis—threatening tens of millions of jobs, putting energy-guzzling data centers all around the nation, and posing a non-negligible threat to the survival of the human species.
The barons are also hastening climate change through the data centers’ exponential energy and water demands, along with the expansion and resurrection of fossil fuel infrastructure to power AI.
Tech giants’ self-reported greenhouse gas emissions have surged. Meta’s emissions jumped over 60 percent, Google’s rose nearly 50 percent, Amazon’s increased by 33 percent, and Microsoft’s by more than 23 percent—almost entirely driven by building and expanding data centers.
The billionaire barons of Big Tech are also among the biggest beneficiaries of Trump’s war in Iran, through their ownership of advanced AI.
Peter Theil’s Palantir is powering the US military's targeting and data operations through its Maven Smart System platform, which processes massive streams of satellite, drone, and intelligence data.
Billionaires Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, and Trae Stephens are behind Anduril, which provides major counter-drone defense systems used to intercept Iran’s low-cost Shahed drones. Billionaires Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s Google—along with billionaire Sam Altman’s OpenAI and billionaires Eric Schmidt and Dario Amodei’s Anthropic—are providing advance AI models and technology for military planning, intelligence, and counter-drone operations.
III. Will History Rhyme?
By the first decade of the 20th century, Americans had had enough of the brazen inequalities and corruption that characterized the first Gilded Age. A wave of reforms—antitrust laws, progressive taxation, pure food and drug regulation, bans on corporate political activities—blocked much of what the robber barons had been doing.
Then, after the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the nation ensured that the barons could no longer wreak havoc on America. Labor laws, securities laws, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and additional taxes on high incomes were enacted, laying the basis for the prosperity of the post-World War II era.
Are we on the precipice of another age of reform?
Perhaps. A new Politico poll shows that Americans are fed up with the billionaire robber barons of Big Tech—and Republicans are likely to take most of the political blame on Election Day.
The top tax priorities for voters, according to the poll, are hiking taxes on billionaires and curbing tax breaks for big companies.
Nearly half of respondents—47 percent—called Republicans the party of tech tax breaks, more than double the 21 percent who said the same for Democrats. Voters are also far more likely to want candidates who propose stripping away tax incentives for the data centers needed to fuel the AI boom.
About a fifth of respondents said that ending those tax breaks would be among their most important tax issues in the midterms (only 1 in 10 wanted to offer new preferences for data centers).
A majority of respondents thought that tech chief executives have been secretive about the potential risks of AI, while a plurality of Americans believe both that the risks of artificial intelligence development outweigh the benefits and that the government should strictly regulate AI.
It’s impossible to know whether the upcoming midterms elections will reflect these sentiments or, even if they do, whether these sentiments will find their way into subsequent legislation.
But—given the polls, and also what I’m hearing informally from around the nation—it seems likely to me that high on the nation’s emerging progressive agenda will be busting up Big Tech monopolies, getting big money out of our politics, enacting a wealth tax, putting guardrails around AI, seeking to reverse climate change, and preventing billionaires from creating and owning media empires.
I can’t say precisely when we’ll see these enacted, but I’m confident we will see them. America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech, with good reason.
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Billionaire Media Barons Are Destroying the United States
Why are billionaires so interested in owning our social, on-air, and online media? Because regulating the conversation Americans can see and hear protects everything else they own.
Oct 22, 2026
As many of us were showing up this past Saturday for our local No Kings marches, with over 3,000 of them underway, the movement’s organizers suddenly found themselves locked out of their Instagram account for hours.
Meta blames it on a software glitch or something close to that, but that episode illustrates exactly the concern progressives and anti-fascists have been voicing for years: that Big Tech and the billionaires behind it have way too much power, and that they are using it to control public opinion to their own benefit.
Then on Tuesday morning, Christiane Amanpour announced that after reporting for CNN for 43 years she’s leaving the network. While she didn’t mention nepo-baby David Ellison who now owns the network, she didn’t have to: back in May at a journalism summit in London she said she was “concerned” about Ellison ownership and how it might bring about the same kind of “ideological realignment” that he’d already imposed on CBS News.
What we’re seeing here with these two companies in microcosm is that the men who own the social media digital square where a near-majority of people get their news, and the people who own the TV networks and papers like The Washington Post, are the same handful of billionaires with political and financial axes to grind that fit nicely with Trump’s vision of a strongman state run by a ruling elite.
Whether it turns out that Meta did something for politics or it was just an error doesn’t change the fact that one company run by one man can switch off a national movement’s megaphone and doesn’t legally owe anybody an explanation.
(The good folks at Indivisible have a shocking list of egregious political insertions and manipulations by Facebook over the years that you can read here.)
Down in Brazil, Facebook deactivated one of lefty Lula’s Facebook pages just before the election, leading a top judge in that country to rule that Meta can’t throttle political content, restrict searches, or remove posts in ways that create a political imbalance. Meta denies bias, but the AP notes they never explained why Lula’s channels were getting beat down on Facebook’s algorithm.
Here at home, after Trump worked out a TikTok deal with an investor group led by Larry Ellison, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said it had “independently confirmed instances” of suppressed content there critical of Trump.
TikTok says it’s a glitch, but a study published in Nature in May found TikTok’s algorithm had systematically favored Republican content in three swing states during 2024 when the Chinese—who Trump is courting—still largely owned the platform. Another Nature study this year found X’s feed measurably pushes users to the right so quickly that it just takes a few weeks of exposure to happen.
And this is nothing new. Back in 2017, Google rolled out a change to the news and opinion websites they were pointing people to that caused AlterNet, then one of the biggest progressive sites in the country, to lose 40 percent of its search traffic almost overnight, about 1.2 million readers a month, along with progressive sites Common Dreams, Truthout, and a dozen others.
No announcement, no hearing, no appeal.
After throttling comes self-censorship, which I watched Sunday night on CNN as a host gave a warm, friendly interview to a Republican congressman who told several easily debunked naked lies and she never called him on a single one. No memo from Ellison was necessary; Timothy Snyder calls it “anticipatory obedience.”
I’ve lived through this movie before. In late 2006, as Mitt Romney was leaving the Massachusetts governorship to run for president, his company, Bain Capital co-led a $26.7 billion leveraged buyout of Clear Channel, the radio network that carried Air America programming to around 90% of American households.
I helped start the network, wrote its first business plan, and was on its air, regularly beating Limbaugh in the ratings, and we helped get Obama into the White House. But when Bain took it over they started dropping us off their stations until, in 2010, we couldn’t sell enough advertising to stay in business. I can’t prove this was a sneaky trick by Romney or Bain, but that’s the point; we have virtually no rules or regulations to require disclosure to protect our public square.
Why are billionaires so interested in owning our social, on-air, and online media? Because regulating the conversation Americans can see and hear protects everything else they own.
Lewis Powell laid it out for the Chamber of Commerce in his 1971 memo, telling corporate America that television “plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people” that business had better take it over.
It took them fifty years, Project 2025, and the internet to finish the job, but here we are.
— Zuckerberg paid Trump $25 million for having suspended his account after the January 6th attempt to end our democracy. Then when Trump came into office again Zuck scrapped fact-checking, and has been a regular visitor to the White House ever since. Common Dreams reports the Justice Department, just by coincidence of course, has since halted a federal probe of Zuck’s company.
— ABC paid Trump $15 million, Paramount paid $16 million over a 60 Minutes edit, and in June Trump approved the Ellisons’ $110 billion merger without demanding a single change. Even Gavin Newsom caved on that one, presumably for fear of offending the billionaires.
— Meanwhile Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, has openly threatened broadcasters’ licenses over coverage of Trump scandals that he calls “news distortions.”
This is not only wrong, it’s ahistoric. From the founding of America, we’ve treated information systems as a public trust. George Washington’s administration, via the Postal Service Act of 1792, subsidized American newspapers with a special one-cent charge to deliver anywhere in the country while a letter could cost a quarter.
Washington and Madison understood that a republic can’t survive an ignorant or misinformed citizenry.
The result of that act was that between 1783 and 1820 we went from 73 newspapers in America to over 620.
Telegraph lines, also privately owned, were made “common carriers” by legislation that required them to carry everybody’s messages at the same rate.
Radio and television broadcasters got their licenses in exchange for serving what the Fairness Doctrine called “the public interest, convenience and necessity” which was generally enforced as requiring honest news reporting hourly on radio and during primetime on TV. Reagan killed that in 1987 and fast-tracked Rupert Murdoch’s citizenship, paving the way for Fox “News.”
But then the neoliberals got into their deregulation act. Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which erased the national cap of 40 radio stations per company.
Clear Channel exploded from 40 stations to nearly 1,200. In 2017 Trump’s first FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, repealed the rule that kept one company from owning the newspaper and the TV station in the same town, by coincidence the same year Google buried AlterNet.
And Section 230 of that law made it so that while newspaper publishers can still be held responsible for the content of their publications, owners of social media can’t be. At the time, Nigel Peacock and I were making a good living moderating content for CompuServe; all that went away when they no longer needed to care if there were drug sales or human trafficking on their sites.
What’s truly astonishing is that the internet itself was built by our government (DARPA and the National Science Foundation) with our tax dollars; these oligarchs who lord over our content today didn’t build this public square, they simply appropriated it and now insist it’s their private property.
The internet, in fact, is the first vehicle for the widespread dissemination of information since George Washington’s day that hasn’t been subject to any meaningful form of regulation or blocking of monopolies.
John Sherman, when he wrote the antitrust law that bears his name in 1890, put it in words that could have been found on a No Kings sign this past weekend:
“If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.”
As I laid out in The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream, Robert Bork and the Reagan Justice Department rewrote that law into meaninglessness.
While pre-Reagan we had enormous diversity in media ownership and every downtown and mall was filled with small local businesses, forty-five years later there’s not a single significant industry in America that’s not dominated by a small handful of companies that typically behave like cartels, our media is in a half-dozen hands, and our downtowns and malls are nothing but big national chains.
Sherman’s law being gutted by Reagan and subsequent neoliberals is the only reason the Ellisons, Zuck, Musk, and Alphabet can own so much of our nation’s information system and exercise such extraordinary power over public opinion and elections.
There are some quick and easy solutions:
- Break up the empires with reinvigorated anti-trust laws.
- End Section 230 so social media owners have responsibility for what’s on their platforms.
- Restore the statutory cap on how many news outlets a single company or family can own.
- Require algorithms that manipulate our feeds to be publicly disclosed, and that people can get a non-algorithmically modified feed if they want.
And then there are some truly transformational bigger solutions that America could consider:
- Create a 21st century Digital Postal Services Act that establishes a publicly-owned, publicly financed, independently governed national social network, with no advertising, no billionaire owners, no political manipulation of feeds, and no selling personal information. Call it the United States Digital Postal Social Service, with constitutional protections against government censorship and surveillance.
- Establish a “right to digital exit” where you own all the information about you that the social media sites have collected (followers, contacts, photographs, posts, and social connections), with the power to edit, remove, or take them to a different site. You can change phone companies and still call your friends; why not the same with social media?
- Prohibit advertising based on sensitive personal information and cross-site behavioral surveillance, while still allowing contextual advertising and subscriptions. This could restrict political microtargeting and secret tailoring of messages to different voters.
- Codify a democratic right to reach your own followers, so your messages (other than spam, fraud, threats, harassment, and illegal material) aren’t limited, shadow-banned, or otherwise manipulated by the social media site’s ownership.
- Outlaw government contractors from owning social media sites that they can use to promote their own interests that are, essentially, being funded by our tax dollars.
We don’t let Elon Musk own the Interstate Highway System, or Mark Zuckerberg own the Postal Service, or Larry Ellison own the streets and sidewalks where Americans gather to protest.
Why, then, do we let them have such extraordinary control over the “digital streets and sidewalks” where Americans increasingly gather, organize, debate, and learn about the world?
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No Kings—and No Oligarchs
Even if the Democrats secure a victory in the midterm elections, would-be king Donald’s ultra-rich supporters will continue to find ways to protect their privileged status in society.
Oct 17, 2026
Two opposing views from America’s Founding Fathers are particularly relevant to the upcoming No Kings rallies:
- “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”—Thomas Paine
- “There never was, nor ever will be a civilized Society without an Aristocracy.”—Gouverneur Morris
I once played the historic figure of Gouverneur Morris in Paul Foster’s stage play, Tom Paine, about the life of Thomas Paine who, in 1776, wrote a pamphlet called “Common Sense,” which guided and gave form to the American Revolution. Much has been written about how that work has direct relevance to today’s No Kings rallies, making a compelling case for the preservation of a republic and representative democracy over authoritarianism. However, thinking back to Foster’s play, I’m reminded that it’s important to also remember Morris because, as a bitter critic of Paine, he represents a viewpoint diametrically opposed to Paine’s egalitarianism, as represented in the role of oligarchs in society, or the “gentry,” as he called them. Their loyalty and support underpins the power of a king. And 250 years later, this is just as true for today’s oligarchs and their would-be king, Donald J. Trump.
Simply have a look at any image of the 2025 presidential inauguration. The platform behind Trump is crowded with the richest people in the country, among them, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, and Rupert Murdoch.
Attending the No Kings rallies to express loudly and clearly the views of the 99% is a step in the right direction.
These people are enablers of Donald Trump, but at the same time, as Paine points out, the relationship between oligarchs and an authoritarian ruler is an uneasy one: “The rich are in general slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel.” How else to describe the obsequious fawning over Donald Trump by those same people on the platform?
A wealthy landholder and capitalist, Gouverneur Morris was a member the “1%” of his day. And when resentment against King George III was brewing in the colonies in the 1770s, he and his fellow landowners worried that any change to the status quo could threaten their power and privilege. Suppressing discontent, however, he realized, would not be easy. Referring to popular leaders in the colonies, in a 1774 letter to John Penn, Morris wrote: “These sheep, simple as they are, cannot be gulled as heretofore. In short, there is no ruling them; and now, to leave the metaphor, the heads of the mobility [mob] grow dangerous to the gentry, and how to keep them down is the question.”
Today’s oligarchs have a simple answer: Spend a billion dollars to elect right-wing candidates in this year’s midterm elections. The degree to which that will work any better than Morris’ efforts in the 1770s remains to be seen.
After armed conflict broke out between colonists and British troops in Lexington and Concord in April 1775, most wealthy landholders did not openly side with the king. However, many argued for negotiations to end the hostilities and reconciliation with the Crown. Thomas Paine thought this was madness. Once blood has been shed, he said, reconciliation was impossible: “As well can the lover forgive the ravisher of his mistress, as the continent forgive the murders of Britain." Indeed, in the end, a peaceful settlement between king and colonists was not to be.
Today, with two years of increasing violence, both rhetorical and physical, on the part of the second Trump administration, that same line has undeniably been crossed.
If in the elections on November 3, Democrats win control of Congress, there will no doubt be calls for toning down the rhetoric, more cooperation across the aisle, and a working relationship between Trump and a Democratic Congress. But, as with Paine’s argument, that may very well not be possible.
At the end of the War of Independence, when the new country’s constitution was being considered, America’s wealthy managed to guarantee their continued privileged position in society. Paine had argued: “The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights. Every man has a right to one vote… The rich have no more right to exclude the poor from the right of voting, or of electing and being elected, than the poor have to exclude the rich.” However, at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Morris made the case that only those who owned property should have the right to vote. “Children do not vote,” he said, “Why? Because they want prudence; because they have no will of their own. The ignorant and the dependent can be as little trusted with the public interest.” James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams agreed, and although the Constitution left the right to vote in the hands of the individual states, in most cases that meant that only white male voters with property could vote.
Although they will still seek to benefit from their proximity to power in the wake of a Democratic victory in the midterms, like Morris and his fellow gentry, Trump’s ultra-rich supporters will continue to find ways to protect their privileged status in society. With virtually unlimited resources, both financial and technical (including advanced AI models), along with increasing control of the media, the oligarchs will do their best to influence policy, legislation, regulation, and public opinion. This will make them difficult to keep in check. But attending the No Kings rallies to express loudly and clearly the views of the 99% is a step in the right direction.
Before the war, judges in the colonies were appointed and paid by the Crown. This made them natural allies of the king and the wealthy in society. Morris believed that “the principle purpose of the state was protecting private property” and a strong executive and the courts were the instruments to ensure that. In today’s America, this alliance is again in force on the Supreme Court. Trump has nominated 3 of its 9 judges, and 3 others were nominated by Republican presidents, giving the conservatives a supermajority. For this reason, the court has ruled in Trump’s favor in many cases, notably rolling back voting rights and loosening campaign financing laws, both of which entrench the power of the wealthy over the poor. But the court has also afforded Trump king-like immunity from prosecution for all “official acts.”
Thomas Paine had a response to that: “When it is laid down as a maxim, that a King can do no wrong, it places him in a state of similar security with that of idiots and persons insane, and responsibility is out of the question with respect to himself.” I leave it to you to decide if that description applies to our would-be king.
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‘Billionaires Aren’t Compatible With Democracy’: Elon Musk Tries to Boost Ken Paxton With $158 Million Donation
"How does democracy function when one person can donate $150 million for one Senate race?" said one observer.
Oct 16, 2026
The world's richest man is spending an unprecedented sum of money to help Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton win a crucial US Senate race, according to Federal Election Commission filings disclosed Thursday.
As reported by the Texas Tribune, the filings show SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in September gave $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the largest super PAC dedicated to defending Republicans' majority in the US Senate.
While the donation to SLF theoretically could have been directed toward any GOP Senate candidate, filings show the super PAC immediately plugged the Musk money into an entity called Texas PAC, which took to the air with advertisements praising Paxton and attacking Democratic rival James Talarico.
"Musk’s donations armed Senate Republicans to take over the airwaves in Texas," the Texas Tribune noted. "Using Texas PAC as the vessel to book airtime, SLF has thus far spent over $159 million on TV, radio, and digital advertising, double the outlay from Talarico’s campaign, according to media tracking firm AdImpact."
Polls have consistently shown Paxton trailing Talarico, whose campaign has raised an estimated $134.3 million from 1.3 million individual donors, 97% of whom donated $100 or less to the Texas Democrat.
This means that, in just one month, Musk singlehandedly gave Paxton more money than Talarico's campaign has raised since its inception in September 2025.
The sheer scale of Musk's contributions stunned Punchbowl News co-founder John Bresnahan.
"How does democracy function when one person can donate $150 million for one Senate race?" Bresnahan asked in a Thursday social media post. "In a state where one of his companies has major facilities?"
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, indirectly answered Bresnahan's question by opining that Musk's attempt to buy an election shows "billionaires aren’t compatible with democracy."
Author EW Niedermeyer, a longtime critic of Musk, speculated that the billionaire moved his companies' operations from California to Texas so that he could "buy people like Ken Paxton wholesale."
Princeton historian Kevin Kruse argued that Talarico's campaign could turn Musk's massive intervention in the Senate race into an advantage.
"I'm begging James Talarico to run against Musk," Kruse wrote. "He's an unpopular and creepy white nationalist asshole billionaire whose approval rating in most polls is 20 points underwater. You can mock Paxton for needing to be bailed out and mock the puppet master pulling his strings."
Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch, pointed to the stark contrast in how the Talarico and Paxton campaigns are being funded.
"It’s corrupt Ken Paxton and his sugar daddy oligarch Elon Musk versus Talarico and tens of thousands of people giving $10 to $100," Filipkowski wrote. "Choose your brand of democracy."
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, said the Musk donation shows a desperate need to completely overhaul the US campaign finance system.
"The current state of our campaign finance system allows one billionaire to supply the overwhelming share of a major party’s political funding," Gilbert said. "This is undemocratic and flat-out wrong. America should be a nation where the voices of regular people are heard just as loudly as the ultrawealthy."
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Elon Musk's 'Absolutely Insane' $276 Million Midterm Spending Exposed in New Report
"He's not doing it to make Americans more free. He's doing it to make Americans his serfs," said one critic.
Oct 12, 2026
Far-right billionaire Elon Musk is spending an unprecedented fortune helping the Republican Party maintain its majorities in Congress, according to a Monday report in The New York Times.
The Times used filings made with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to calculate that Musk has funneled at least $276 million to GOP groups and his own super political action committee (PAC) since July alone.
In total, the Times estimated that Musk has given $366 million in campaign contributions during the 2025-26 election cycle, which is even more than the $290 million he gave during the 2023-24 election cycle to return President Donald Trump and the GOP to power.
Much of Musk's giving this cycle has been to help Republicans maintain their majority in the US Senate, as he has donated $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC charged with helping GOP candidates in Congress' upper chamber.
According to the Times, Musk's donation to the fund is "one of the largest political donations in American history, and more than the group’s Democratic rival raised from all of its donors that quarter."
Since July, Musk has also given $76 million to his America PAC, which is building what the Times described as "a sprawling canvassing program to try to turn out hard-to-reach Republican voters" in the coming elections.
The Times emphasized that the $366 million is only the publicly disclosed amount that Musk has given, and one source told the newspaper that the billionaire "has also made some seven-figure donations to support midterm candidates through groups that are not required to disclose their donors."
In a Monday social media post, journalist Daniel Nichanian described Musk's midterm spending as "absolutely insane," and said the billionaire is "single-handedly destroying records and swamping [Democratic] candidates."
Mark Jacob, former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune, said the massive Musk donations should deeply worry Americans who care about democracy.
"He's not doing it to make Americans more free," Jacob wrote. "He's doing it to make Americans his serfs."
Don Moynihan, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, argued that Democrats cannot allow Musk's efforts to buy congressional elections go unanswered.
"Dems should promise to minimize contracts with clearly partisan government contractors and to impose more regulatory scrutiny on Musk," Moynihan wrote. "At this point, nothing to lose."
In addition to concerns about the sheer volume of Musk's donations, election officials have been raising alarms about how the money is being used.
As reported by CNN on Saturday, America PAC has been sending text messages to Colorado voters telling them that their request for a mail-in ballot has been received, then inviting them to "confirm now where and when to return it."
Carly Koppes, the Republican election chief in Weld County, told CNN that these messages have been causing significant confusion among voters, who automatically receive mail ballots without having to file a specific request.
“People were like, ‘Wait a second. I didn’t submit that request. Is something fishy going on? Did someone submit something on my behalf?'" said Koppes.
Josh Zygielbaum, the Democratic election chief in Adams County, told CNN that he'd received dozens of calls asking about the America PAC texts, and emphasized "that volume of phone calls is usually a good indicator for us that something’s a bigger issue because people generally don’t pick up the phone these days unless there’s a bigger concern."
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Can the Billionaire Oligarchs Buy Their Way Out of Populist Outrage?
Working people notice when they're getting screwed but a massive right-wing media infrastructure exists to redirect their anger, probably the oligarchs’ greatest achievement.
Oct 06, 2026
Will the worldwide revolt against oligarchy reach America before the billionaires buy our elections this fall?
Two weeks ago tomorrow, on September 23rd, Madrid’s police had to cordon off a downtown street to carry an 87-year-old woman named María del Carmen Abascal out of the apartment she’d lived in for seven decades. She normally uses a wheelchair, so they carried her out on a stretcher, which provided some truly inflammatory social media video. All because her landlord wanted to raise the rent, which requires a change of tenants.
The pictures of María being carried out of her apartment lit Spain on fire; she’s become the face of the nation’s housing crisis which has seen average rents nearly double in the past ten years. This past weekend tens of thousands marched again, with about a thousand people camped out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol: one banner read “Looking for an apartment, selling a kidney.”
While the pressure campaign worked on the landlord, who backed down and agreed to let her go home, it didn’t work on the “conservative” politicians who dominate the Spanish parliament. When Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government proposed emergency tenant protections, the conservative opposition parties joined forces to kill them in parliament. As a result, Sánchez has pretty much been forced into taking the gamble of calling a snap election for November 29th.
Spain is the microcosm, but this is happening all across the developed world. France is on fire because students are tired of their schools being starved for resources. Populist movements are sweeping the European continent.
Forty-five years of “conservative” neoliberalism and austerity — all specifically designed to make the rich richer at the expense of working class people — have left average citizens furious.
And that fury is driving two parallel movements; the big question before us is which one will prevail both this fall here and over the next few years worldwide.
One movement is reflected in the encampment in Puerta del Sol where people understand that the landlord, land speculators, and the morbidly rich are the cause of their pain. You could call this the New Deal movement, for shorthand.
The other is seen in the far-right parties that have been topping the polls in Germany, France, and Britain by telling those same frightened people that it’s not the billionaires that are the problem; it’s that brown-skinned immigrant with a funny name or the queer kid who lives down the street.
Whichever side wins the argument over who’s the villain in today’s economic crisis for working people will be the one that ends up running these countries, including America.
We’ve seen this movie before here in America, although most people have no memory of it and could only vaguely recognize a quick telling of history.
The last time the morbidly rich held as much of our nation’s wealth and political power as they do today was the Gilded Age from the 1880s to the late 1920s, and popular rage at the oligarchs led to real progressive change:
- Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, and then progressive Republican Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft used it to break up the railroad and oil trusts along with dozens of others.
- The Tillman Act of 1907 made it a crime for corporations to give money or any sort of support to federal candidates for office.
- The income tax arrived in 1913 and the estate tax in 1916, and by the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt was building Social Security, the right to unionize, and the rest of the New Deal on that simple foundation.
- After World War II, democracies around the world copied FDR’s American New Deal formula, and that tightly regulated capitalism along with high taxes on the morbidly rich produced the largest middle class in history.
Then working class people and progressives got complacent, thinking this would be the new normal forever, with a single paycheck being the entrée into the middle class. The oligarchs, however, were just getting started, just like they did during the Industrial Revolution following the Civil War that produced the first Gilded Age.
As I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, the counterattack began in 1971 when a corrupt tobacco lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urging corporate America to step up and use their great wealth to seize control of our courts, campuses, media, low-media-cost low-population states that could be flipped Red, and Congress.
The Heritage Foundation and ALEC followed within two years, as rightwing billionaires started buying radio stations, newspapers, and television networks, while Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan turned the project into government policy.
The regulations and tax rates that had restrained great wealth and political corruption came down, and the money and political power of giant corporations and the morbidly rich have largely controlled both our politics and our economy ever since.
Working people noticed they were getting screwed but by then there was a massive rightwing media infrastructure to redirect their anger, probably the oligarchs’ greatest achievement.
For example, when Bush’s 2008 property- and bank-crash set off real rage at the banks and their oligarch CEOs, Koch-funded front groups organized it into the Tea Party and pointed it at Obama and his attempts to give all Americans healthcare.
It hit its peak of success when Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015, telling voters he didn’t need anybody’s money because, as he put it, “I’m really rich.” Suddenly it wasn’t the rich who were screwing average Americans: it was the rich who’d save us!
To pull it off, he appropriated New Deal and Great Society language, promising to save and even strengthen Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; this is what con men have done throughout history.
The voters wanted their New Deal back with its middle class security on a single paycheck, but, true to Republican form, what they got instead was trillions in tax cuts for billionaires like Trump and his cabinet, paid for with almost a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid, an experimental program in six states to further privatize Medicare, and threats to cut Social Security.
One of the most interesting laboratories for finding out whether billionaire money can still buy public opinion the way the Kochs did with the Tea Party is Prop 40 in California, the 5 percent one-time tax on that state’s roughly 230 billionaires that will cover the healthcare shortfall the state will experience because of the Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill’s cuts to Medicaid.
A billionaire-backed group has gathered more than $187 million to stop it, while the measure’s backers have only pulled together an estimated $31 million. Google’s Sergey Brin alone has put in over $100 million.
The billionaires’ group even succeeded in getting two decoy measures, Props 41 and 42, on the same ballot, written so that if either one gets more votes than Prop 40, the billionaire tax dies even if a majority of Californians vote for it.
And the ads for the “No on 40” campaign is featuring teachers, firefighters, and the head of the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliates while the “Yes on 40” side says in the official voter guide that actual teachers, nurses, and Planned Parenthood workers support the tax.
It’s the same kind of phony grassroots campaign Reagan used when he promised cutting taxes and killing unions would increase prosperity, and when the Tea Party and GOP warned against “communism” in Obamacare, forcing the end to the possibility of a public option.
This same billionaire and corporate money is now pouring into the Senate races nationwide, using tools the robber barons of the late 19th century could have only dreamed about.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee released a deepfake of Texas Democrat James Talarico in a dress with a disclosure so small and faint that Berkeley digital forensics expert Hany Farid said most people wouldn’t immediately know it was fake. Another group produced a phony “Daisy” ad portraying him as a doctor performing gender surgeries on children.
In Michigan, Republicans greeted Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win with ads built around his full name and the Muslim Brotherhood, and their main super PAC has committed $51 million to that one race. On Sunday, I watched MS NOW play two of the newest deceptive Republican deepfakes, one putting Talarico in a makeup chair and another inventing “terrorists” in El-Sayed’s family.
Spending just on Senate races is projected to pass $3.4 billion this cycle, and most of the big money is just now starting to hit the airwaves and, thus, tightening the races that had seemed were in the bag for Democrats.
And if the lies don’t work, there’s always the power of our currently-billionaire-run government to insert itself in ways that can spin an election out of control. Last September Trump signed a national security memorandum called NSPM-7 that directs the FBI, the Treasury, and the IRS to go after the networks and funders behind what it calls domestic terrorism, and it lists among the “indicators” of that terrorism:
“anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”
By that standard, María’s Spanish neighbors camped in a public square to protest a greedy landlord could find themselves under investigation. Add the masked, anonymous, trigger-happy ICE thugs already working our streets with their new electric shock gloves, and the machinery of a “papers, please” society is right here right now.
There’s no way this one single election will settle all this. During the first Gilded Age, it took 45 years to go from the Sherman Act to Social Security — with quite a few lost elections along the way —and the people who won that fight went through it never knowing if they’d prevail or not; the biggest intervention was probably the Republican Great Depression.
But this November is a hinge moment in history. A Congress that can check Trump, a billionaire tax passed in the biggest state in the union, and senators like Talarico and El-Sayed who explicitly have run against the Epstein billionaire class would tell every Republican and the oligarchs who own them that their old trick of pointing at immigrants and trans kids has stopped working.
On the other hand, if the deepfakes, decoy ballot measures, massive rightwing media penetration, algorithmic manipulation on billionaire-owned social media platforms, and billions in ads win out instead, they’ll be used in every election from here on.
The easy lesson here is that if Spain’s protesters got an 87-year-old woman back into her home by showing up, we can do the same for our democracy that’s been so badly battered by 45 years of Republican con men and Democratic neoliberals.
The next No Kings day of action is Saturday, October 17th, and “No Kings” has always meant “No Oligarchs,” too.
Check your registration at vote.org, call your members of Congress through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you want deepfake political ads outlawed, and if you live in California, vote yes on 40 and no on 41 and 42.
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