Who Needs Democracy? Inside America's Billionaires' Brazen Attempt at Fascism - Part 1
America is the only developed country in the world that’s allowed an unaccountable, unelected Supreme Court to hand its political system over to its richest citizens…
The biggest lesson Americans learned this election year is that billionaires basically own half of our political process. In the seven most tightly contested Senate races, billionaire spending on Republican candidates outpaces that on Democratic ones by seven-to-one.
This is not how a democracy is supposed to work. The “demos” in democracy means “the people.” Democracies are supposed to fulfill the will of the people; add the protections for minority groups a republic provides and you have what the Founders called “republican democracy” and we refer to as a democratic republic.
We used to think that if billionaires participated in politics in a big way, they would just try to lower their own taxes. While our experience since Citizens United backed that up, the other thing that we have learned — to our horror — is that many of these billionaires also openly support naked fascism. And they are totally down with suppressing people’s right to vote to get there (more on that tomorrow).
OpenSecrets.org reports that this year’s elections have so far consumed around $16 billion; the final total will almost certainly be much higher.
Ten out of the eleven top billionaire donors are supporting Republicans who have endorsed Trump’s fascism, giving the GOP a clear edge in the dark money wars. A new report from Americans for Tax Fairness finds that just 150 billionaire families have already put over $2 billion into our elections — and that’s just so far and what we know about.
Nearly all of this has been made possible by corrupt, bought-off Republicans on the US Supreme Court, from the Buckley and Bellotti decisions through Citizens United and McCutcheon.
The result is that this year’s election more closely resembles an auction than a sincere effort at democracy. In 2020 over $2 billion was spent by billionaires on elections; this year that amount will almost certainly be at least tripled, and possibly far more.
And the billionaires who own the GOP and wield it to their benefit on a daily basis want to keep it that way.
Back in 2020, Alaskan citizens voted to require a fairly high level of transparency around political donations in their state; since then, big money groups backed by the Kochs and others have repeatedly sued to block the law. While a federal judge and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals have both upheld the law, billionaire-backed groups are now trying to get the US Supreme Court to pick up the case and kill the law.
Similarly, in 2022 Arizonans passed by a 73 percent margin a new law (Proposition 211) that would similarly require groups trying to buy politicians and elections to disclose their expenditures. The billionaire-funded Goldwater Institute is now fighting the law in the courts, arguing that these poor billionaires — if their purchases of politicians, judges, and elections are known — will be subject “to violence, harassment, and the risk of ‘cancellation.’”
Big money like what Elon Musk is publicly spending today, and dark money from unaccountable billionaires, have become a cancer in our body politic. As former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said:
“We must make our choice. We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
It’s metastasized from the federal level all the way down to local races for sheriffs and judges; there’s virtually no part of America where you can’t find billionaire money having a powerful influence.
In this regard, America is truly exceptional. We’re the only developed country in the world that’s allowed an unaccountable, unelected Supreme Court to hand its political system over to its richest citizens.
In Canada, there’s an absolute ban on corporate donations: Only individuals — actual human beings — can donate to political parties and candidates. That nation also exercises a strict donation limit of $1,700 per candidate or party per year, which applies to billionaires as much as to average people.
On the politicians’ and party’s side, both candidates and parties have rigorous restrictions on how much they can spend during Canadian political campaigns, and they must disclose the source — including the donor’s name, address, and contribution amount — of all donations over $200.
Compare that to the $172,003,300 billionaire Timothy Mellon has given American Republicans this year, or Miriam Adelson’s $131,395,000 in cash for Trump and his fellow GOP candidates. And that’s the hundreds of millions that we know of; many billionaires are limiting their contributions to dark money funds where there will never be disclosure of their activities.
Here in America, Republicans have also been aggressively recruiting morbidly rich individuals to run for top offices like the US Senate and House because the Supreme Court also ruled that there are no limits to contributions a candidate can make to their own campaigns. In Canada, candidates are limited to donating a maximum of $1,000 to their own campaigns.
Across the European Union there are similar caps and limits in place, along with public funding of elections and strict limits on the amount of time campaigns can spend money before an election. In the United Kingdom, candidates and campaigns are similarly limited both with regard to amounts collected, disclosure, and the period during which they can campaign.
Back in the 1970s, after the Nixon and Agnew bribery scandals, Congress got serious about regulating big donors and dark money in our elections. Multiple laws were passed at the federal level as well as across dozens of states. They included the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) and the creation of an agency to enforce election law, the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Most of those laws were blown up by the Supreme Court decisions mentioned above, all 100% written and voted for by Republican appointees to the Court. And the FEC has six commissioners, three Republicans and three Democrats, and requires a majority vote to enforce any of our election laws or prosecute politicians or billionaires who violate them; for at least a decade, the three Republicans have blocked every consequential effort by anybody to enforce the laws.
America desperately needs campaign finance reform if we’re to prevent our republic from becoming a full-blown fascist oligarchy.
We must limit both individual and organizational contributions to political campaigns, establish strict disclosure requirements for donations, and close the loopholes that allow coordination between campaigns and PACs. Better yet, we should simply outlaw PACs and SuperPACs; they’re both largely creations of a corrupted Supreme Court and don’t exist in any form in any other advanced democracy.
We should also establish public funding of elections and require “news” media to carry actual debates (not the game shows they currently produce), along with programs that educate the public about issues and candidates.
This will require overturning Supreme Court decisions ranging from Buckley to Bellotti to Citizens United, but that is easily within the power of Congress. Article 3, Section 2 of the US Constitution clearly and unambiguously says:
“[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
As we see today with Arizona and Alaska, rightwing billionaires who want America turned into a third-world fiefdom they and they alone control will do everything they can to prevent any of these outcomes.
We took on the morbidly rich in the nineteen-teens and the 1930s and won; every year until the Reagan Revolution, the American middle class got stronger, larger, and wealthier. But now we’re facing an existential crisis of democracy, largely because of the corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.
The second half of the crisis of democracy we’re facing is the naked suppression of the vote of people who’re most likely to vote for Democratic candidates. I’ll dig into that tomorrow; I’ve written about it extensively, as in my book The Hidden History of the War on Voting and Greg Palast, George DiCaprio, Rosario Dawson, and Martin Sheen (and me) have put together an amazing documentary about voter suppression this year in Georgia.
The billionaires who work so hard to corrupt America are few; we are many. That’s why the biggest advantage we have over them is our individual ability to choose our elected officials.
At least for now; Trump has promised that if he’s elected dictator from day one, his followers will never need to show up at the polls again.
Vote!
The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.
If those monies donated by billionaires to candidates were instead collected in taxes, just think of all the improvements could be made to the lives of ordinary Americans! Affordable healthcare for all, free public colleges, affordable housing, & so much more!
I always say America is a moneycracy, although all successive governments have been trying hard to sell that under the usually well esteemed word of democracy. Anyway... fuck trump amd his billionaires. Vote blue!