Are the wealthy buying influence?
Over the past month, I have read numerous postmortems about the Democrats’ loss in the last election. While some were more constructive than others, almost none of them made mention of the millions and millions of dollars poured into the Trump campaign and the Republican Party by about a dozen billionaires: More than $330 million from Elon Musk, $132 million from Miriam Adelson, $133 million from Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, $100 million from Ken Griffin, etc.
Their primary goals seem to be avoiding regulation of the social media companies (way overdue), avoiding regulation of the crypto currency industry (a scam looking for unwary victims) and, most important, avoiding paying taxes (shifting the burden to the rest of us).
We will never know if this massive amount of money changed the outcome of the election, however, it certainly appears that the billionaires have rented the White House and Congress. Clearly, this is not the way a democratic republic is supposed to work.
Jim Olson