Musk, Bezos, and big money in politics
Polls of voters in the 2024 US presidential election remain largely tied. Hundreds of millions have been spent on political advertising in the past few months. But now, the billionaire class feel they must get more directly involved. To the surprise of nobody, they will be backing the billionaire candidate.
Over and over, it has been shown that political advertising works. Large corporations will spend millions lobbying the public to vote on single ballot items, never mind elections, just to increase profits or hold onto market control. For example, in California in 2016, $109 million was spent to lobby against Proposition 61, a measure to bring down the cost of prescription drugs in the state. $19 million was spent in support of the measure. It was defeated, 54% to 46%.
Opposition to this kind of spending is not, as the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision would have you believe, a free speech issue. A billionaire or corporation has not been denied their freedom of expression just because they cannot spend hundreds of millions on elections. When money becomes involved, you’re not competing for better ideas, you’re just seeing who can purchase the biggest megaphone.
But the way money is influencing elections is beginning to change.
Billionaire Elon Musk, through his America PAC, has set out to register people to vote and sign a petition supporting the US Constitution. The Super PAC, which Musk has donated $118 million to, is holding daily million-dollar giveaways to those who sign on. The Super PAC backs Donald Trump, who received Musk’s endorsement after he was shot at a rally. It aims to sign up voters in swing states.
If someone’s only reason for registering to vote is the prospect of winning a million dollars, and the only information they have is coming from the partisan group signing them up, is that person informed enough to vote?
You must also ask why Musk would want to swing the election towards Donald Trump. When Trump is offering Musk a government position that would be in charge of slashing budgets and regulations, you have to entertain the idea that this activity is primarily motivated by self-interest. Someone giving away a million dollars each day does not make them altruistic if the result of that spending is in service of increasing profits, bringing down wages, and fighting unionization.
Also, this week, the Washington post, a newspaper with a 36-year history of endorsing a presidential candidate, decided not to. And by decided, I mean that the billionaire owner of the newspaper, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, refused to publish the endorsement of Harris which had already been written by the editorial board.
Staff have since resigned from the Post, as they should. The values of a newspaper should never be tainted by big money. When the billionaire presidential candidate is proposing corporate tax rates as low as 15%, and promising to cut regulations, and has shown no evidence of union support, you don’t have to be a cynic to figure out why Bezos didn’t want the newspaper he owned to give flowers to the other side. But if the pages of the Post are now dictated by Bezos, it’s no longer a newspaper. It’s a journal that speaks to millionaires, to borrow from Lenin’s description of The Economist.
Big money already owns most politicians in the US. But these new efforts by Musk and Bezos attempt to use money to buy the electorate directly. Being able to give unlimited sums of money to political causes through the loophole of a Super PAC should be immediately stopped. But in absence of action from government, which is already influenced by big money, it is incumbent on the public to make themselves less susceptible to political advertising and giveaways, and more enamoured by grassroots fundraising and an independent media.
