Far Worse Than Any Robber Baron In History
Anyone regularly reading DWT knew by the end of the summer that, based on our review of Musk’s spending patterns, a total GOP contribution well north of a quarter billion dollars was in the pipeline, figures that shocked the mainstream media last week. Unlimited wealth pointed to unlimited spending. Media: just incredibly lazy!
On Friday, Dan Rather wrote that when Musk appropriated the title “first buddy” it was anything but innocuous. The richest man in the world, whose wealth is largely dependent on government contracts “now has unchecked access” to Señor Trumpanzee. He’s a regular fixture at Mar-a-Lago, sats in on calls with world leaders and has met with the Republican leadership in Congress. Trump has given Musk and junior partner, Vivek Ramaswamy, also a billionaire, the green light to implement “drastic” reforms in the federal government. All that access is what Musk bought for at least $277 million, “more than any individual has ever spent on a single election,” including notorious robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie. J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon (whose largely untaxed fortune was employed to help elect Trump this year), Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, Henry Frick and E.H. Harriman. (It’s very much worth keeping in mind that the political manipulation from those bums spurred angry calls for campaign finance reform and fueled public outrage that eventually led to progressive-era reforms like the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Federal Corrupt Practices Act. Many of the practices by the worst of the robber barons mirror modern concerns about the influence of criminal billionaires like Musk, Timothy Mellon, Charles Koch, Israeli operative Miriam Adelson, Ken Griffin, Peter Thiel, Harold Hamm, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the Walton family and neo-Nazis Dick and Liz Uihlein. Heavily guarded at all times, none of these world-class monsters will, alas, ever meet the same fate that Brian Thompson just met.
And, at least in Musk’s case, “for all that money, you too could be co-president. The Trump campaign claimed it was all about lifting up average Americans. Here’s the reality: So far Trump has packed his administration with at least a dozen billionaires. Musk [a notorious drug abuser], the electric car maker, rocket builder, Twitter owner, and richest person in the world is a private citizen. He is also unelected. He has not been vetted by the FBI, nor will he have to be confirmed by the Senate… He will be unconstrained by conflict of interest rules that normally govern civil servants. The fox isn’t just guarding the proverbial hen house, he bought it— chickens, coop, and all.”
Musk only became a U.S. citizen in 2002, after working here illegally on an expired student visa, a hypocritical irony for someone who claims undocumented immigrants are destroying America…
The Trump-Musk bromance is a bit unexpected. Historically, the two men with super-sized egos have had a frosty relationship. It thawed quickly in July when Musk endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Then the floodgates opened, and Musk’s money poured in.
Musk is prohibited from running for president since he was born in South Africa, so he has bought his way into power in a very big way. The more than a quarter of a billion dollars he invested in Trump amounts to less than 1% of Musk’s net worth. It’s paid off big time. Musk’s personal bottom line has grown by more than $100 billion since Election Day, as the value of stock in his various companies has skyrocketed. Musk certainly can be credited with seizing a great financial opportunity.
Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s closest advisers, credits Musk with Trump’s election victory. “He [Musk] came in with the money and the professionals. To be brutally frank, it’s the reason we won,” said Bannon in an interview with Puck.
You might wonder how it is possible for one person to give so much money to a single candidate. You need to go back 14 years to the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which changed everything. It eliminated any restrictions on campaign fundraising and spending. Individuals, corporations, and labor unions could now give as much as they want— not to the candidates directly, but to “super PACs.” [Most are surreptitiously, albeit illegally, controlled by the candidates.]
These political action committees have allowed billionaires to dominate politics and steer politicians. The American Bar Association, in a piece about Citizens United, described super PACs as a necessary evil of the political process. “In the arms race of political fundraising, super PACs are nuclear weapons; candidates who lack them are at a fundamental, and typically insurmountable, disadvantage.”
Citizens United has unintentionally, or perhaps not so unintentionally, turned our democracy into a plutocracy, a government ruled by the wealthy.
The Supreme Court did apply a few guardrails, but many campaigns have flouted those rules. The justices’ insistence on the disclosure of donors’ names begat the advent of “dark money.” Dark money is spent to influence elections without disclosing the funding’s source. The uber-wealthy give to super PACs anonymously by funneling their donation through third parties like nonprofits or corporations created expressly for this purpose. Though the practice is illegal, the Federal Election Commission has thus far not enforced the law.
The Supreme Court also sought to require super PACs to act independently of the campaigns they support. The PACs and the campaigns are not supposed to have any contact or coordination.
According to David Plouffe, senior adviser to the Harris campaign, the Democrats play by this rule, while the other side does not. “We have to stop playing a different game as it relates to super PACs than the Republicans,” Plouffe told “POD Save America.” “We cannot be at a disadvantage.”
The only chance for any kind of campaign finance fix is the U.S. Congress. You might expire holding your breath waiting for those who benefit from the unfettered flow of dark money to do anything to stem it.
As for Musk, he may outstay his welcome. He has promised that as the “efficiency czar,” he will significantly tighten the federal budget belt, warning that this will cause average Americans financial “hardship.” That won’t go over well with an electorate who chose Donald Trump specifically to improve their economic status.
At the same time Rather and his team was writing about Musk and plutocracy, so was Jay Kuo, noted that “Given how close the election was, especially in the key Blue Wall battleground states, we shouldn’t dismiss the idea that Musk’s support for Trump may have been outcome determinative, especially when we take a closer look at how the money was deployed and what other things Musk apparently did to tip the scales… A dark money group called ‘Building America’s Future,’ which Musk has funded for some $100 million, ran highly deceptive, micro targeted ads to push down Harris’s numbers among her base of voters… Musk’s 11th hour, $20 million, secret contribution to the ‘RBG PAC,’ which falsely yet effectively claimed that Trump and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg saw eye to eye on the question of a federal right to abortion… [A]fter buying Twitter, Musk put his finger on the scale for Trump [which] amplified right-wing messaging by increasing the virality of tweets by Republican politicians and influencers.
Twitter has been disproportionately amplifying Republican influencers and politicians, according to two separate investigations:
One analysis, published by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, found that the platform appears to serve new users large amounts of right-leaning political content, even if they indicate no interest in politics. A second report, this one by the Washington Post, found that Republican politicians are now vastly more likely to go viral on Twitter, and that over the past 15 months, many Republicans have seen huge follower gains compared with Democrats.
Assuming this is true, Musk was handing Republicans an in-kind contribution of immeasurable value on one of the most important public platforms now owned by him. Indeed, his purchase of Twitter, could be seen itself as a way to take over the public political dialogue and distort it to Musk’s own ends.
Never mind that Musk’s replatforming of white nationalists and hate speech has driven away advertisers, resulting in a loss of nearly 75 percent of the original $44+ billion he paid for Twitter. Musk has used his social media platform and his vast wealth to gain access to power; he now sits beside Trump on a regular basis, even awkwardly over the holidays. And he now serves as co-chair of a government commission, where he has promised to slash trillions from the federal budget including deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Meanwhile, Musk’s cronies are gaining positions of power within the government that could have a direct impact on his businesses. This includes his billionaire pal Jared Isaacman, whom Trump has named to head NASA. And Trump’s threatened tariffs could wind up benefitting Tesla directly as Chinese imported electric vehicles get priced out of the U.S. market.
Seen in this light, Musk’s $250 million investment into Trump is already paying huge dividends.
Commenti