Trump's Dark Money

 

“The evil man is a source of fascination; ordinary persons wonder what impels such extremes of conduct. A lust for wealth? A common motive, undoubtedly. A craving for power? Revenge against society? Let us grant these as well. But when wealth has been gained, power achieved and society brought down to a state of groveling submission, what then? Why does he continue? The response must be: the love of evil for its own sake.”
— Unspiek, Baron Bodissey

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 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 United legalized 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, 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 dollars 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 Yass campaign.

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 United decision blew open the doors to a bizarre new era of dark money-driven oligarchy in America.

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.

In 2010, the year of the Citizens United decision, 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 re-election 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 News tells 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 US 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.

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 GHW Bush’s Willie Horton ads seem tame.

Rightwing 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!  

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-Thom Hartmann