{"id":34036,"date":"2013-05-16T22:48:08","date_gmt":"2013-05-16T21:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/billionaires-now-own-american-politics\/34036\/"},"modified":"2013-05-16T22:48:08","modified_gmt":"2013-05-16T21:48:08","slug":"billionaires-now-own-american-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/billionaires-now-own-american-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Billionaires Now Own American Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo Credit: tankist276\/Shutterstock.com<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

May 16, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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Billionaires with an axe to grind, now is your time. Not since the days before a bumbling crew of would-be break-in artists set into motion<\/a>\u00a0the fabled Watergate scandal, leading to<\/a>\u00a0the first far-reaching restrictions on money in American politics, have you been so free to meddle. There is no limit to the amount of money you can give to elect your friends and allies to political office, to defeat those with whom you disagree, to shape or stunt or kill policy, and above all to influence the tone and content of political discussion in this country. <\/p>\n

Today, politics is a rich man’s game. Look no further than the 2012 elections and that season’s biggest donor, 79-year-old casino mogul Sheldon Adelson<\/a>. He and his wife, Miriam, shocked the political class by first giving $16.5 million<\/a>\u00a0in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee.\u00a0Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested more than $30 million<\/a>\u00a0in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to block<\/a>\u00a0a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to bankroll<\/a>\u00a0the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative stalwarts (which waged their own campaigns mostly to helpRepublican candidates for Congress). All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012 cycle — nearly four times the previous record<\/a>\u00a0set by liberal financier George Soros. And that’s only the money we know about. When you add in so-called dark money<\/a>, one estimate puts their total giving at closer to $150 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was not one of Adelson’s better bets. Romney went down in flames; the Republicans failed to retake the Senate and conceded seats in the House; and the majority of candidates<\/a>\u00a0backed by Adelson-funded groups lost, too. But Adelson, who oozes\u00a0chutzpah\u00a0as only a gambling tycoon worth $26.5 billion<\/a>\u00a0could, is undeterred. Politics, he told<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0Wall Street Journal\u00a0in his first post-election interview, is like poker: “I don’t cry when I lose. There’s always a new hand coming up.” He said he could double his 2012 giving in future elections. “I’ll spend that much and more,” he said. “Let’s cut any ambiguity.” <\/p>\n

But simply tallying Adelson’s wins and losses — or the Koch brothers’, or George Soros’s, or any other mega-donors’ — misses the bigger point. What matters is that these wealthy funders were able to give so much money in the first place. <\/p>\n

With the advent of super PACs and a growing reliance on secretly funded nonprofits, the very wealthy can pour their money into the political system with an ease that didn’t exist as recently as this moment in Barack Obama’s first term in office. For now at least, Sheldon Adelson is an extreme example, but he portends a future in which 1-percenters can flood the system with money in ways beyond the dreams of ordinary Americans. In the meantime, the traditional political parties, barred from taking all that limitless cash, seem to be sliding<\/a>\u00a0toward irrelevance. They are losing their grip on the political process, political observers say, leaving motivated millionaires and billionaires to handpick the candidates and the issues.\u00a0“It’ll be wealthy people getting together and picking horses and riding those horses through a primary process and maybe upending the consensus of the party,” a Democratic strategist recently told me. “We’re in a whole new world.” <\/p>\n

The Rise of the Super PAC<\/strong><\/p>\n

She needed something sexy, memorable. In all fairness, anything was an improvement on “independent expenditure-only political action committee.” Eliza Newlin Carney<\/a>, one of D.C.’s trustiest scribes on the campaign money beat, didn’t want to type out that clunker day after day. She knew this was big news — the name mattered. Then it came to her<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo Credit: tankist276\/Shutterstock.com May 16, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from\u00a0\u00a0 TomDispatch.com\u00a0here. Billionaires with an axe to grind, now is your time. Not since the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-34036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}