When
President Joe Biden said in a phone call to
MSNBC’s Morning Joe recently, “I’m getting so
frustrated with the elites… the elites of the
party. I don’t care what the millionaires
think,” former Labor Secretary Robert
Reich wrote
that, “It was the first time any modern
president has admitted that the elites of the
party are the millionaires (and billionaires)
who fund it.”
While
Biden’s comments were in reference to the
movement to oust him from the 2024 Democratic
presidential nomination, it was an important
admission about who really wields power in our
democracy.
We
may think of elections in terms of one person,
one vote. But, not only do undemocratic
structures such as the electoral
college dilute
our votes, the money that elites flaunt places a
hefty thumb on the scales of who represents us.
Yet, we hear more about the threat of,
say, immigrants than
the threat of billionaires, to our democracy.
Billionaires
have tried very hard to buy influence and
political power. For example, former New York
City Mayor Mike Bloomberg donated $20
million toward
efforts to reelect Biden this year alone. Four
years ago, Bloomberg spent a whopping
$1 billion in
just four months in an attempt to be the 2020
Democratic presidential nominee. In a testament
to the fact that we have a modicum of democratic
accountability left within the system as it
stands, he failed
spectacularly,
as others have
often done. Voters seem to have a distaste for
electing the ultra-rich but have yet to disavow
the de facto proxies that their money helps
elect.
While
billionaires remain influential within the
Democratic Party, the last election for which
spending records exist shows that moneyed elites
overwhelmingly prefer the Republican Party. The
nation’s 465
wealthiest people collectively
donated $881 billion to influence the 2022
midterm elections, most of it to the GOP.
Now,
the richest person in the world—not just in the
United States—Elon Musk, has jumped into the
2024 race. His proxy, Donald Trump, in surviving
an assassination attempt, earned Musk’s endorsement,
as if that was somehow a qualification to run
the nation. Musk has vowed to pour $45
million a month into
a new Super PAC that’s working to elect Trump.
The amount is pocket change for someone
currently worth nearly
$250 billion.
Musk could spend $45 million a
day every day this year and
it would barely make a dent in his bottom line.
According
to a New
York Times analysis,
Musk went from supporting Democrats to
Republicans because he was “[a]ngry at liberals
over immigration, transgender rights, and the
Biden administration’s perceived treatment of
Tesla.” At a meeting earlier this year that
embodied the specter of a secret cabal of
billionaires seeking to buy an election, Musk
reportedly conversed with his fellow wealthy
elites about Republican control of the U.S.
Senate. At that meeting, he reportedly worried
that “if President Biden won, millions of
undocumented immigrants would be legalized and
democracy would be finished,” as per the Times.
He’s
not the only one. The Republican Party as a
whole has decided that undocumented
people voting in
U.S. elections is the single biggest threat
facing the country—not billionaires like Musk
raining down dollars to drown our democracy.
Undocumented
immigrants are human beings, not dollar bills.
And yet they hold far less sway over elections
than Musk’s money. There is no mass amnesty for
undocumented people in the U.S. currently—this
isn’t Ronald
Reagan’s America after
all. And even if there was, there is a long,
complicated path from legal status to the voting
status that citizenship allows.
I
should know, I’ve been there personally, having
entered the U.S. as an immigrant on a student
visa before obtaining legal residency and then
citizenship. My journey was far more
straightforward than that of Melania
Trump and
still, it was 18 years before I could legally
vote after first stepping on American soil.
And
yet every four years, immigrants become
political footballs, flayed at the proverbial
whipping posts of democracy for merely
existing—usually by both political parties.
Right-wing voters waved signs saying “Mass
Deportations Now” at the Republican National
Convention, while Democrats took a less vulgar
approach by appeasing anti-immigrant forces
with asylum
restrictions,
hoping it would garner voter support.
Sean
Morales-Doyle,
writing for the Brennan Center for Justice, asks
us to imagine being an undocumented immigrant in
the U.S.: “Would you risk everything—your
freedom, your life in the United States, your
ability to be near your family—just to cast a
single ballot?” Not only are there harsh
penalties, including prison time, for illegally
casting ballots, but even the rabidly far-right
Heritage Foundation has found only 85
cases of supposed undocumented voters out of
2 billion votes cast
from 2002 to 2023. That works out to a
0.00000425 percent of the vote.
Let’s
compare this to the influence of money on
elections. The nonpartisan group Open
Secrets,
which tracks money in politics, finds that “the
candidate who spends the most usually wins.” In
2022, about 94 percent of the candidates for the
House of Representatives who spent the most
money won their race, while 82 percent of those
running for the Senate who spent the most money
won their seats. Much of their donations come
from Super
PACs,
which bundle high-dollar amounts from wealthy
Americans.
While
billionaires such as Bloomberg have had trouble
getting themselves elected,
they have had little trouble getting others
elected—or unelected as the case may be. Already
this year, moneyed interests in the form of the
pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, defeated
progressive congressional representative Jamaal
Bowman of
New York in his primary election, and have their
sights set on representative Cori
Bush of
Missouri next.
Should
we be concerned about the imagined influence of
undocumented immigrants or the actual influence
of billionaire dollars on our elections? In a
2020 poll,
Pew Research found that most Americans felt
billionaires were neither good nor bad for the
nation. Only about a third felt they were bad
for the nation—roughly the same
percentage that
fears there is an effort to replace U.S. voters
with immigrants for the purposes of electoral
power.
USA
Today writer Marla Bautista captured Musk’s role
succinctly in asking, “Can
Elon Musk buy Trump the White House?” It’s a valid question, one
that we should be centering as election season
heats up.
Think
of the U.S. democracy as an old, large, sailing
ship attempting to cross a vast ocean with all
voters on board working to steer it across to
shore. Every hole in its sail, every shark
circling it, impacts its ability to succeed. In
such a scenario, an undocumented person
attempting to vote is akin to a speck of dust on
the hull. Every million-dollar donation is a
wave buffeting the ship. Enter men like Musk,
whose money becomes a veritable tsunami aimed
directly at democracy to overwhelm and topple
it, destroying everything and everyone on board.
Sure,
we may have sailed successful voyages most of
the time (with the years 2000 and 2016 being
among the worst exceptions). But with
billionaire influence becoming larger
every election,
there’s an ever-increasing chance that democracy
may not reach the shore. Will we be distracted
by the dust on our hull or the massive wave
rising before us?
This
commentary was produced by Economy
for All,
a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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BlackCommentator.com
Guest
Commentator, Sonali
Kolhatkar is
the
host
and producer of Uprising,
a popular,
daily, drive-time program on KPFK,
Pacifica
Radio in Los Angeles and co-
director
of the Afghan Women's Mission,
a US-based non-profit organization that
works
with the Revolutionary Association
of
the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).
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