American democracy is about to be put to another test. Can it be bought? Or rather, can American voters be persuaded that the chaos of the last 10+ years is what we want? Can this warped vision of ‘anything goes if you can get away with it’ they keep trying to push down our throats be achieved simply by throwing enough money to make it so?
We’re about to find out.
Elon Musk et al are spending vast fortunes to bend us to their will.
Musk was the largest donor to any political committee in the 2024 US elections. Putting around $290M into the 2024 election to help elect Donald Trump and Republicans.
On August 28 Politico reported that Musk was planning to meet with Speaker Johnson as he considers investing at least $100M to elect Republicans in the midterm elections.
Musk is also funding an advertising campaign encouraging people in swing states to check their voting registration status at a different website than the one run by the Election Assistance Commission, which is an independent agency of the US government.
Instead, Musk’s misdirection campaign urges people to go to “votesafe . org,” which collects their full name, home address, date of birth, email address, cell phone number, IP address and location (which identifies city and zip code), every link clicked, every page looked at, and voter registration status…among other information.
Reporting has said that the privacy policy of the website “allows [Musk’s super PAC] America PAC to ‘share’ or ‘sell’ personal information ‘with our business partners,’” including “whether you are registered to vote” and “how you submit your vote… where permitted by law.”
America PAC can also sell “inferences” it makes about a user, including “psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitude.”
We’re about to see an election, and voters, besieged by every form of AI known to man.
And we might wonder why the world’s richest man needs even more money, and the power that goes with it.
But yet…
Government contracts flow to Musk’s businesses. He has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer dollars in history, taking in at least $38B in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the course of more than 20 years.
Political payola worked. Once Musk was in power in Trump 2.0, government investigations into those businesses ended.
If we ever needed an example of the corrupting power of money…
But, maybe, hopefully, surely the very public nature of Musk’s heavy-handed influence peddling has helped to wake us up to the fact that our current system is skewed toward billionaires.
In July a poll by UMass Amherst found that 58% of Americans think billionaires are a threat to democracy. 45% say the US is an oligarchy. Only 28% of those polled disagreed.
We see that immense wealth has been concentrating at the top of the US economy for decades. And the growing wave against that concentration of wealth is driven by those like Musk. And by our own president, who has flaunted his use of taxpayer money for his own interests. While trying to convince us that any economic pain we might be feeling isn’t actually real.
The public nature of these attempts to subvert our democracy exhibits the hubris of the rich and powerful. They don’t feel the need to keep nefarious behavior behind closed doors. They believe themselves irreproachable, untouchable, in thought in deed.
They are wrong. Their big mouths and deep pockets are showing us a future we don’t want.
They’re just another bunch of golden idols waiting to be toppled.
And they think we’re stupid.
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