Buying politicians in the Land of the Free

It’s election season in the US again this month, with midterm House and Senate contests likely to see a strong backlash against Donald Trump’s MAGA cult. Elections in the US are never free and fair—for one thing, they’re enormously expensive—but the overt threats from the current administration against election officials seem reminiscent of events at the denouement of Trump’s previous term in November 2020 to January 2021..

Nonetheless, the ubiquity of money in politics in the Land of the Free is a constant. Eighteen years ago in the presidential election that brought Barack Obama into office, our friend Louis Further covered the extent to which rich donors sought to evade campaign finance rules with great success. Since then, times have changed for the worse. The infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2010 treated corporations as people, and struck down limits on what corporations could spend in elections (ironically overturning a law on campaign finance restrictions sponsored by Obama’s 2008 rival John McCain).

Since then the only way has been up in terms of what corporations can and do spend to make sure they get as little scrutiny as possible, or that suitable candidates can be elected who can be expected to shamelessly do their bidding. And of course now—in the wake of twenty years of financial and social perma-crisis—we are presented with the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, funnelling half-a-billion dollars into the congressional elections. Unsurprisingly, Musk’s preferred candidates are ones that share his own prejudices and bile, not least Ken Paxton in his Senate race against the Democrat James Talarico in Texas.

As anarchists, we can never be anything but critical of electoral politics, and the Paxton-Talarico race is a case in point. Paxton as Texas Attorney General has pursued policies designed to drive transgender people out of existence, with a particular focus on transgender youth, including policies similar to those employed by the transphobic UK Labour government. Talarico, a much-vaunted hero of the Democrats, in the face of Paxton’s attack lines, reneged on his previous support for trans athletes and described comments he had made earlier stating ‘God is non-binary’ as ‘cringey’.

In all likelihood, the Democrats will ‘win’ these elections, given the sheer unpopularity of Trump and the impact on US citizens’ cost of living sparked by his disastrous economic policies and pursuit of the war against Iran. That’s in spite of the spending of those such as Musk. But whether Democrats win or Republicans do, the money matters.

Looking more closely at campaign finance spending, US gambling companies such as Draft Kings and FanDuel, well-known for partnerships in US sport, are committing funds to races where candidates may loosen state-level prohibitions. The UK’s own Bet365 is also involved. This is against a background of numerous scandals involving athletes and gambling since the area became deregulated at federal level in 2018.

Sports are a big deal in America as elsewhere, and whereas the UK long ago under New Labour decided to embrace sports betting with all the social consequences that has since involved, the US is now catching up. And of course, gambling in America is no longer limited to sports – with ‘prediction markets’ such as Polymarket being linked to influencing major political events (NBA star LeBron James is a Polymarket ambassador).

Over the past eighty years the US has been keen to export its version of ‘democracy’ to all parts of the globe, whether you wanted it or not, at the cost of millions of lives. And yet its version is, as it always has been, simply a game where the rich pay to play.

In a year which has seen genuine atrocities committed by the US at home and abroad, it is staggering, depressing, and unsurprising to see the extent to which many US liberals – as opposed to the brave US citizens who have confronted ICE on the streets – outsource their responsibility for change to politicians. But it isn’t a shift.

Just as eighteen years ago when liberal darling Barack Obama took office to then pursue a campaign of drone strikes and extrajudicial killing, the more things change, the more they stay the same. And then, as now, the wealthiest spend a lot of money to ensure it remains just so.

From Freedom, vol. 69 no. 20, 8 November 2008

Notes from the United States

A recent report has explained how rich supporters of both Obama and McCain are successfully circumventing campaign finance laws by giving tens of thousands of dollars to fund-raising committees which benefit the candidates as well as the parties they represent. Many donors gave upwards of $25,000 (£13,000) to the candidates’ main joint fund-raising committees. The largest amounts of money (for both candidates) has been from the financial sector – including from the bosses at various firms involved in the current financial crisis such as Bear Stearns,Lehman Brothers and AIG. In total each candidate had received 2,000 contributions of $25,000 or more into his joint fund-raising committees. These sums far exceed what the law allows an individual to contribute.

More specifically, the recently ‘nationalised’ mortgage company, Freddie Mac, paid a Republican consulting firm, DCI of Washington, $2m (£1lm) to oppose legislative rules and regulations that would have limited the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae’s, ability to do the harm they have in the sub-prime mortgages crisis.

DCI’s chief executive, Doug Goodyear, was subsequently hired by McCain’s campaign to manage the Republican National Convention this last September. Goodyear later resigned from that post after it was revealed that he had lobbied for the military junta in Burma.

Outside dodgy campaign donations, as was evident at the last two elections, rigging the vote is also widespread. Early voting began in mid October. On the very first day there were reports of electronic voting machines reversing voters’ choices. New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy comments: “This is something that we saw in at least eleven states in the 2004 election, hundreds and hundreds of people coming forward to say, ‘I pushed the button for Kerry, and the button for Bush lit up’.”

• Meanwhile the State’s grip on any kind of dissent tightens. The Maryland State Police has now confirmed its classification of 53 non-violent activists as terrorists. Their names and personal information have been entered into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects. And all in the open: Maryland state police superintendent, Terrence B. Sheridan, admitted that a surveillance operation, which targeted opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war, was far more extensive than was known when its existence was disclosed in July.

The former state police superintendent who authorised the operation, Thomas E. Hutchins, defended the programme in a recent testimony, saying the programme was a “bulwark against potential violence” and called the activists “fringe people … I don’t believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government”.

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