Schwartz writes: "Two billion dollars, the estimated cost of this year's
presidential election, is big money, but it is not huge money. Two billion
is one-tenth of NASA's annual budget, one-twentieth of the Harvard
endowment, one-thirtieth of the personal wealth of Warren Buffett."
The New York Stock Exchange. (photo: Ben Hider/NYSE Euronext)
More Than 100 Americans Are Rich Enough to Buy the Presidential Election
Outright
By Mattathias Schwartz, The Intercept
06 August 16
More than 100 Americans Are Rich Enough to Buy the Presidential Election
Outright
Two billion dollars, the estimated cost of this years presidential
election, is big money, but it is not huge money. Two billion is one-tenth
of NASAs annual budget, one-twentieth of the Harvard endowment,
one-thirtieth of the personal wealth of Warren Buffett. Buffett is number
two on the 2015 Forbes list of 106 Americans who hold personal fortunes of
$5 billion or more, the Club of 106. These billionaires are rich enough to
pay for the campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and still
have $3 billion left over.
A lot of the money in Club 106 is family money. The Club includes two Kochs,
four Waltons, three Marses, two Newhouses, and three Ziffs. Donald Trump was
also born into big money. With a supposed net worth of $4.5 billion, he is
brushing up against the velvet rope outside of Club 106. The Clintons, both
born to families with ordinary incomes, are now worth around $110 million,
which puts them way off from Club 106 and pretty far from you and me as
well. In the political off-season the Clintons have borrowed private jets
from friends and relied on book advances and speaking fees to maintain two
residences, to summer in East Hampton, and reportedly to help their daughter
and son-in-law purchase a $10 million Manhattan apartment. The Obamas will
soon be devising their own approach to making their way in a billionaires
world with a mere $20 million.
At least four of the members of Club 106 (Buffett, the Kochs, Bloomberg)
have openly voiced their thoughts on who should be president. Five members
(Soros, Simons, Cohen, Ellison, Bloomberg) are among the top 25 donors to
the outside groups that have poured tens of millions of dollars into the
campaign. Seven members (Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin, Murdoch, the
Newhouses, Bloomberg) own large media and internet companies Amazon, the
Washington Post, Facebook, Google, Fox News, the New York Post, the Wall
Street Journal, Condé Nast, Bloomberg with the power to shape public
opinion. (By way of disclosure, an eighth member, Pierre Omidyar, founded
The Intercepts parent company, First Look Media.)
For the Club of 106, elections are a game they can easily afford to play.
One vehicle of choice is the Super PAC. In the 2012 election cycle, the top
100 Super PAC donors accounted for 3.7 percent of the donor population but
gave 80 percent percent of the money, a structure that roughly mirrors the
makeup of U.S. society as a whole, where one percent of the population holds
half of the total wealth. The ratio will likely tilt even further toward the
Club of 106 during the 2016 cycle, thanks to two recent court decisions
McCutcheon and Citizens United that loosened limits on individual donors
and opened the door for Super PACs to raise and spend unlimited amounts of
money.
Trump, borrowing from the rhetoric of Clintons former rival, Sen. Bernie
Sanders, likes to say that the electoral system is rigged by big money,
and that he, a billionaire, is the only candidate wealthy enough to
transcend it. Im self-funding, he said at one point, which isnt exactly
true. No one owns me.
It is easy to lose this Trump brag among his many other provocative
statements. Trump has, for example, called climate change bullshit and a
hoax invented by the Chinese. He has described his anti-ISIS strategy as
knock the hell out of the oil, although, as he told the editorial board of
the Washington Post, I would rather not do it with our troops.
Here is Trump in a primary debate, explaining the basics of campaign
finance:
When they [politicians] call, I give.
When I need something, two years
later, three years later, I call them. And they are there for me. Thats a
broken system.
With Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she
came to my wedding. Do you know why? She had no choice. Because I gave.
Here is Trump anointing himself the lion of campaign finance reform at the
Republican convention in Cleveland:
Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign
of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place.
She is their puppet, and they pull the strings
my message is that things
have to change.
Trump is laying it on thick, but he is essentially right: The system is
rigged. The Democrats are corrupt. So are the Republicans. Jane Mayers
exposé of the Koch Brothers, Dark Money, describes exactly how pools of
private money shape policy on the Republican side. A New Republic story on
the fundraising prowess of Tim Kaine, Clintons vice presidential pick,
shows how deep donor influence runs in the Democratic Partys current
leadership. Judging by their track records and public statements, neither
Clinton nor Trump is up to the task of breaking the hold of money over U.S.
politics, which means that anyone looking to make a White House run in 2020
or 2024 had better make nice with the Club of 106.
The members of Club 106 are not like you and me, but neither are they a
monolith. Some ski at Aspen, others at Davos. Some are pro-choice, others
are pro-life. Some are concerned about a potential 12-degree increase in the
surface temperature of the planet by the year 2100. Some are not. There are,
of course, two monoliths of wealth and power: Democrat and Republican. There
have been years 1968, arguably 2004 when the ideological distinctions
between the two have been as fuzzy as the difference between Pepsi and Coke.
Were Jeb Bush or John Kasich the Republican nominee, 2016 might have been
one of those years.
But Donald Trump won. He burned the traditional mores of his party to the
ground, and filled the Republican platform with his field-tested blend of
anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant xenophobia, law and order fear-mongering at
home, racism, and a confusing posture of swagger and isolationism overseas.
This years Republican platform, now under Trumps sway, is wildly divergent
from the Democratic one.
But Trump does have one thing going for him his big talk about sticking it
to the special interests and the billionaires of Club 106. Would he? Its
hard to say. Trumps day-to-day opinions seem to bubble up from some
internal Magic 8 Ball. I love the idea of campaign finance reform, he said
last year. There is no plan for reform on his campaign website, just two
50-second rants about special interests and the establishment.
When a small number of donors wield such disproportionate influence over the
outcomes of elections, any politician who cannot finance his or her own
campaign is obligated to put to the interests of the wealthy few above the
majority of the U.S. electorate. The electorate is waking up to this, and
they are angry. Trump is, in part, the embodiment of that anger. Trumps
pitch, I will be your voice, is disingenuous but savvy. It tunes in the
frustrations of millions for whom eight years of enlightened Democratic rule
have done little. Real hourly wages have remained flat, as they have for
decades. Despite gains in output, productivity, and CEO pay, wage growth has
been especially slow for lower-level workers, failing to keep pace with the
rising costs of education, health care, and housing. These are the
conditions that enabled Trumps rise. The next demagogue to take advantage
of them will likely be a more convincing and competent one. Unless we find a
way to curb the power of the Club of 106, we may soon wind up with the Club
of One.
Of course, Hillary Clinton has a sensible and detailed plan for campaign
finance reform. It includes overturning the Citizens United decision that
set loose the Super PACs, matching public funds for small donors, and an end
to secret unaccountable money in politics.
But as heartening as Clintons proposals sound, they are belied by her
actions, particularly the current lack of transparency around donors to the
Clintons family foundation.
The basic business model of a political convention seems to be rooms full of
rich people, organized into various tiers, snacking and drinking and talking
about what is to be done for the common good. After Bill Clinton left
office, he replicated this model in the private sector with what is now the
Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, a non-profit based in Harlem.
Founded in 2001, the organization did not disclose the identities of its
donors until 2009, under pressure from the incoming Obama administration,
ahead of Hillary Clintons confirmation as secretary of state. It turned out
that a lot of the $2 billion received by the foundation since 2001 came from
foreign governments.
As of this summer, the Clinton Foundation has received more than $10 million
dollars each from the governments of Australia, Norway, and Saudi Arabia.
More than $5 million each came from Kuwait and the Netherlands. More than $1
million each came from Morocco and the Sultan of Oman. Most of the money
went to good causes cataract operations in Peru, carbon-offsetting trees
in Malawi, a failed-but-well-intentioned effort to rebuild Haiti after the
devastating 2010 earthquake. The foundation has helped rural farmers bring
their crops to market, distributed HIV/AIDS medicine, and given rural
villagers access to clean water. Each year, the foundation holds a
conference to celebrate these and other accomplishments, which reportedly
costs $20,000 and up to attend. Charity Navigator, a watchdog organization
that evaluates nonprofits, offered neither a condemnation nor an
endorsement of the Clinton Foundation due to its atypical business model.
Few can claim to understand the interplay of money, influence, ego, and
genuine good works within the Clinton Foundation. The New Republics 2013
profile of Doug Band, who got his start as Bill Clintons White House valet,
and used his work with the foundation to launch Teneo, his own consulting
company, is one place to start. The writer George Saunders was impressed by
the foundations good works in 2007. Todd Purdum, who covered the Clinton
White House for The New York Times, was less impressed. A memo responding to
Purdums Vanity Fair article, circulated by one of Bill Clintons aides,
criticized the magazines loose relationship with the facts and claimed
that Clinton has helped save the lives of more than 1,300,000 people in his
post-presidency.
As far as this election is concerned, the urgent question is not what the
Clinton Foundation does but where its money comes from. If one takes Hillary
Clinton at her word about seeking an end to secret, unaccountable money in
politics, knowing who has given how much to the Clinton Foundation would be
a step in the right direction. The foundation deserves some credit for
voluntarily disclosing its foreign donors, despite having done so later than
one might have hoped.
Last year, as Hillary Clinton prepared for her presidential run, the Clinton
Foundation announced a new policy. Going forward, it would only accept
donations from six governments: Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands,
Norway, and the United Kingdom. Again, this new constraint represents
incremental progress. This is presumably part of the foundations
commitment to honesty, transparency, and accountability, which is how one
of the foundations vice presidents described the policy shift.
Then there are the donors who are still anonymous. Frank Giustra, a Canadian
billionaire with interests in mining and filmmaking, gave $100 million to
establish the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership. CGEP is technically a
registered Canadian charity. It gives money to a sister organization with
the same name that is part the broader Clinton foundation. The purpose of
having two organizations with the same name, according to CGEPs website, is
so Giustra and other Canadian residents could receive a charitable tax
credit for their donations.
Giustra and Clinton are close enough for Giustra to have co-produced the
former presidents 60th birthday. All my chips, almost, are on Bill
Clinton, Giustra told the New Yorker in 2006. He can do things and ask for
things that no one else can. In a 2008 letter to the Wall Street Journal,
Giustra called himself as a private Canadian citizen with no interest in
U.S. politics. All the same, he seems to have traded on Bill Clintons star
power to obtain a 2005 government concession to mine uranium in Kazakhstan.
The New York Times scolded Bill Clinton for hand[ing] the Kazakh president
a propaganda coup
undercutting American foreign policy and criticism of
Kazakhstans poor human rights record by, among others, his wife, then a
senator.
The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership received at least $25 million in
donations for its initiatives; Giustra has given at least $25 million more
to the Clinton Foundation through a second vehicle. Unlike the Clinton
Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise
Partnership has been less than forthright about sharing the names of its
donors with the public. Last year, Giustra posted a letter stating that his
partnership does not accept money from foreign governments. The names of 30
of the partnerships major donors, each of whom has given $100,000 or more,
many of them mining companies, are posted online. According to CGEPs
website, this group of 30 constitutes a majority of the charitys
$100,000-plus donors. The identities of the remaining $100,000-plus donors
are unknown. Also posted on CGEPs website are two legal opinions explaining
why, due to the privacy laws of Canada and British Columbia, the names of
all other donors must remain secret. (There are more than 1,000 in all, most
of them apparently under $100,000.) We will not share or publicly disclose
our donors information unless we received prior written consent, Giustra
wrote in the letter.
That is where things stand today. The voters who must decide one way or the
other on Hillary Clinton in November, and whether to trust her promise to
get rid of secret unaccountable money in politics, will do so without a
complete accounting of where the money in her own family foundation came
from. Why? Because of the privacy laws of Canada and British Columbia.
Unless the Clinton Foundation decides to revise its policies between now and
the end of the year, the U.S. could wind up with a sitting president whose
active family foundation, run in part by her daughter, will be receiving
anonymous non-governmental donations through its Canadian partner as well as
donations from six foreign governments. All six governments are U.S. allies,
but the interests of allies are not always in perfect alignment. For
example, the U.S. may find itself negotiating terms for the lease of its
base on the island of Diego Garcia, a British possession in the Indian
Ocean. It may be called upon by Germany or Australia to chip in for the
costs of housing asylum seekers. It may have petroleum interests that clash
with those of the Norwegian national oil company, dividends from which go
into the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, worth nearly $1
trillion. If one of these allies were to make a multimillion-dollar donation
to the Clinton Foundation in the midst of a negotiation with the United
States, how would President Hillary Clinton ensure that it had no impact on
the outcome, if not through her own behavior, then through the perceptions
of her 15 agency heads and 2 million subordinates throughout the executive
branch?
If Hillary Clinton were running against anyone but Donald Trump, this might
be a question that the Democrats would have already answered.
In June, Bill Clinton hinted that the foundation might step up its efforts
around transparency, though not until after the election. You have to be
careful to avoid actual potential conflicts, he said at a gathering of the
Clinton Global Initiative in Atlanta. I dont believe in counting your
chickens before they hatch. Lets see how the election unfolds. There will
clearly be some changes in what the Clinton Foundation does and how we do
it, and well just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
It remains unclear what those changes might be, or whether voters will be
made aware of them before the election.
Last week, I spoke by phone with Craig Minassian, chief spokesperson for the
Clinton Foundation. He referred me back to Bill Clintons June statements as
the most current information on these questions. By email, CGEP Canadas
media office said they were unable to provide any donor information beyond
what had already been published on its website.
In 2008, President Obama instituted a new rule for the Democratic Party:
lobbyists and corporations would no longer be allowed to contribute money to
pay for the partys convention. At a $40-a-head convention-week fundraiser
for 21st Century Democrats, I ran into Martin OMalley, the former governor
of Maryland who made a brief run for president against Hillary Clinton and
Bernie Sanders. OMalley, the former chair of the Democratic Governors
Association, suggested that the 2008 rule change was partly responsible for
the electoral drubbing that the Democrats received at the hands of the
Republicans over the next eight years, which, he said, crippled the full
potential of the presidents administration.
Between 2008 and 2015, the Democrats lost 10 governors and 16 statehouses.
On Capitol Hill, they lost five seats in the Senate and 45 seats in
Congress, ceding control of both chambers to the Republicans. OMalley, who
described his position on campaign finance reform as agnostic, likened the
competition with the other party to an arms race. Its hard to unilaterally
disarm, he said.
Obamas rule was repealed in time for 2016, a change that Bloomberg Politics
attributed to Clintons campaign. And so Ed Rendell, former mayor of
Philadelphia, former governor of Pennsylvania, former chair of the
Democratic National Committee, set about raising the roughly $60 million it
took to put the Philadelphia convention on. He did it through PHL 2016, a
corporation with access to a $15 million line of credit from a public
authority to cover any shortfalls. The identities of the donors who gave
Rendell the $60 million are not yet known. PHL 2016 has been fighting to
keep the sources of its money a secret for as long as possible. A chunk of
the $60 million must have come from Facebook, judging by the vastness of the
Facebook lounge on the ground floor, with its miniature Oval Office photo
booth, good for a tongue-in-cheek Instagram, although one does wonder who
the joke is on.
The price of access to the Victory Lounge, a well-guarded chamber high above
the Democrats convention floor, is often greater than the cost of the
average American wedding. The food that I ate was a cut above average
American wedding food. Uniformed waiters circulated among curved banquettes
and glass-walled rooms with platters of hors doeuvres: seared tuna on rice
crackers, roast beef on toast, potato-stuffed pierogies in keeping with the
menus Philadelphia theme. The dinner hour was approaching. Tall men in
their dark suits and gingham shirts were gathering in clusters along the
bar. Their exchanges of business cards and trade knowledge made it hard to
hear what was happening on the other side of the glass, where, down on the
star-encircled stage, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York was saying something
about the minimum wage. On this side, the caterers were setting up their
stations: steamed asparagus, roast split potatoes, tortellini alfredo, and
an impressive South Philly-style porchetta, sliced by the inch off an
umber-colored hock.
This years conventions embodied the twin American cultures of money and
politics, with money flowing one way, and favors and credentials flowing the
other. The preferred term, used by Rendell, the Democrats convention chair,
and other Philadelphia-bred politicians, is access, access to special
rooms and special people, more than whats available to an ordinary delegate
but less than an explicit quid pro quo. At the extreme end, access can
become what is known in Philadelphia as pay-for-play, which has led to the
conviction of several Philadelphia politicians over the past two decades,
most recently former Congressman Chaka Fattah. On Friday, the FBI searched
the Philadelphia home and union headquarters of John Johnny Doc Dougherty,
another Philadelphia kingmaker.
What do donors get for their money? It is not always a specific piece of
legislation. Sometimes it is just a sympathetic ear, a phone call returned,
or even just an envelope of name tags that grant access to cushy VIP
gatherings walled off from the partys rank-and-file. In Cleveland, the
Republicans wouldnt let me off the elevator to walk around the levels of
the Quicken Loans Arena where these parties were happening. I knew only the
names of the rooms: the Founders Room, the 45 Club, the Grand Old Party
Suite. In Philadelphia, with the right credentials hanging from my neck, I
saw the inside.
Earlier that week, in the lobby of the Loews Philadelphia Hotel, I ran my
qualms about the Clinton Foundation by a communications consultant
affiliated with the Clinton campaign. Is it illegal? he asked. I said that
wasnt my point. I made it clear that I didnt plan to cast my vote for
Trump, and that I didnt plan to stay home on Election Day. Good, he said.
Thats all we want.
The Victory Lounge was more exclusive than the Loews bar. I did not run
across any members of Club 106, just some mid-to-upper echelon lackeys,
outer-perimeter friends of the Clintons, and friends of the Pennsylvania
Democratic Party. I met a former senior Hill staffer turned lobbyist, and a
Western delegate who held a key post on the conventions credentials
committee. There was a cluster of young suits in their early 20s who
resembled extras from American Psycho. The painter Chuck Close rolled
through towards the end of the evening, as did Rendell himself.
The wealthy ones were Clinton wealthy, not Trump wealthy. After all, the
Victory Lounge was just one of several VIP lounges included as part of the
Democrats donor convention packages. The highest level, named
Rittenhouse Square for a tony Philadelphia neighborhood, required donors
to raise at least $1.2 million or give $467,600 to the party over 18 months.
One self-described friend of the Clintons, who had brought along his spouse
and children to the Victory Lounge, was gracious enough to engage me in a
vigorous 40-minute debate about the propriety of the Clinton Foundation. He
said the foundations work was good work. What, poor people should give
them the money? he said. I wish they would. Rich people are the ones who
have got the money. By this time I had finished my free glass of Johnnie
Walker Black. My interlocutor refilled it with a slug from his own
Budweiser, one of the conventions sponsors. He compared my questions to
those of Sean Hannity and other conservative journalists who mercilessly
went after the Clintons in the 1990s, accusing them of everything short of
the Kennedy assassination. I said that I agreed with him in part the
airtime given to such conspiracy theories was an abuse of the First
Amendment but the questions about the foundation were worth asking. He
said that he didnt care where the foundations money came from, so long as
it went to a worthy cause. If Vladimir Putin wanted to give the Clinton
Foundation money during a Hillary Clinton presidency, he said, then Putin
ought to be allowed to do so. On this point, we agreed to disagree.
Hillary Clinton appeared onstage in her white suit. She was moving toward
the circle of stars. I could have walked through a glass door out to the
stadium seats, just above the press boxes, where her speech could be heard
more clearly. But I did not have the required green wristband. Clinton said
a line about putting Main Street before Wall Street. There was some polite
clapping in the Victory Lounge.
I left the Victory Lounge. I wandered down the hallway, waited a few minutes
for an elevator that did not come, and then walked up several flights of
stairs, skipping over Suite to the highest level, Balcony, where (I was
told) the Clintons had their skybox. Security was loose. Bill and Chelsea
were down on the floor for Hillarys speech. I found myself in conversation
with another hallway wanderer, a Colorado delegate in a bright yellow Bernie
Sanders shirt. To wear such a shirt on the Balcony level on the last day of
the Democratic convention was bold. His name was Raffi Mercuri. He was in
his mid 20s and had worked as an AmeriCorps volunteer and a public school
teacher. Now he was employed as a full-time organizer working with Latino
voters in Denver. Someone had lent Mercuri a Balcony-level credential, which
he wore on a lanyard with a Black Lives Matter sticker and a Colorado
Democrats pin. At the door of the skybox connected to Mercuris borrowed
credential, we were stopped by a party official who questioned Mercuris
right to be there. She was eventually convinced by the text messages on
Mercuris phone. Inside, we found a fridge full of Amstel Light in cans,
open bottles of Grey Goose and Johnnie Walker Black, and good sandwiches on
marbled rye bread.
I did not recognize any of the 20 or so skybox VIPs who had pressed
themselves against the rail to watch Hillary speak. I thought of a concert
that I had attended that afternoon in Camden, New Jersey, another VIP event,
closed to press, with live performances by Lady Gaga and Lenny Kravitz.
George Norcross III, a local political boss and Democratic superdelegate,
was the host. The advance press had the Obamas, Clintons, and Bidens as
invited guests. None of them showed. Wandering about the grassy slope above
the stadium, I met a man smoking a cigar. My brother-in-laws a bigwig
at, he said, adding the name of a multinational corporation. He donated
40 grand to put this thing on. He got us good seats down in front. This is
whom one meets in the VIP area. One does not meet or even see Norcross, let
alone the members of Club 106. One meets the brother-in-law of a five-figure
donor.
There was no room on the rail of the skybox at the Wells Fargo Center, so
Mercuri and I watched Hillary Clintons speech on the skybox TV. Mercuri
told me about working for AmeriCorps, and volunteering for the Sanders
campaign. He said that earlier that night he had wandered into another
skybox, empty except for one young woman. She seemed to have been tasked
with guarding the skybox until the rest of its occupants returned. People
paid for this, Mercuri remembered her saying, to explain why he could not
be there. I felt bad for her, he told me. It was a shitty box. She was
just a midlevel staffer.
This culture of money and privilege, Mercuri said, musing about his
Balcony-level surroundings. This difference between them and us. You can
see it in the way I was treated at the door. I knew that they didnt want me
in. So I really wanted to get in.
Clinton had spoken with some nervousness in the beginning, but her speech
was going well. She was opening up the throttle now, her caution giving way
to confidence.
Are you going to vote for her? I asked Mercuri.
Yeah, he said. Sometimes theres stuff that you just gotta do.
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https://theintercept.com/2016/08/06/more-than-100-americans-are-rich-enough-
to-buy-the-presidential-election-outright/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/0
6/more-than-100-americans-are-rich-enough-to-buy-the-presidential-election-o
utright/
More Than 100 Americans Are Rich Enough to Buy the Presidential Election
Outright
By Mattathias Schwartz, The Intercept
06 August 16
More than 100 Americans Are Rich Enough to Buy the Presidential Election
Outright
wo billion dollars, the estimated cost of this years presidential
election, is big money, but it is not huge money. Two billion is one-tenth
of NASAs annual budget, one-twentieth of the Harvard endowment,
one-thirtieth of the personal wealth of Warren Buffett. Buffett is number
two on the 2015 Forbes list of 106 Americans who hold personal fortunes of
$5 billion or more, the Club of 106. These billionaires are rich enough to
pay for the campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and still
have $3 billion left over.
A lot of the money in Club 106 is family money. The Club includes two Kochs,
four Waltons, three Marses, two Newhouses, and three Ziffs. Donald Trump was
also born into big money. With a supposed net worth of $4.5 billion, he is
brushing up against the velvet rope outside of Club 106. The Clintons, both
born to families with ordinary incomes, are now worth around $110 million,
which puts them way off from Club 106 and pretty far from you and me as
well. In the political off-season the Clintons have borrowed private jets
from friends and relied on book advances and speaking fees to maintain two
residences, to summer in East Hampton, and reportedly to help their daughter
and son-in-law purchase a $10 million Manhattan apartment. The Obamas will
soon be devising their own approach to making their way in a billionaires
world with a mere $20 million.
At least four of the members of Club 106 (Buffett, the Kochs, Bloomberg)
have openly voiced their thoughts on who should be president. Five members
(Soros, Simons, Cohen, Ellison, Bloomberg) are among the top 25 donors to
the outside groups that have poured tens of millions of dollars into the
campaign. Seven members (Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin, Murdoch, the
Newhouses, Bloomberg) own large media and internet companies Amazon, the
Washington Post, Facebook, Google, Fox News, the New York Post, the Wall
Street Journal, Condé Nast, Bloomberg with the power to shape public
opinion. (By way of disclosure, an eighth member, Pierre Omidyar, founded
The Intercepts parent company, First Look Media.)
For the Club of 106, elections are a game they can easily afford to play.
One vehicle of choice is the Super PAC. In the 2012 election cycle, the top
100 Super PAC donors accounted for 3.7 percent of the donor population but
gave 80 percent percent of the money, a structure that roughly mirrors the
makeup of U.S. society as a whole, where one percent of the population holds
half of the total wealth. The ratio will likely tilt even further toward the
Club of 106 during the 2016 cycle, thanks to two recent court decisions
McCutcheon and Citizens United that loosened limits on individual donors
and opened the door for Super PACs to raise and spend unlimited amounts of
money.
Trump, borrowing from the rhetoric of Clintons former rival, Sen. Bernie
Sanders, likes to say that the electoral system is rigged by big money,
and that he, a billionaire, is the only candidate wealthy enough to
transcend it. Im self-funding, he said at one point, which isnt exactly
true. No one owns me.
It is easy to lose this Trump brag among his many other provocative
statements. Trump has, for example, called climate change bullshit and a
hoax invented by the Chinese. He has described his anti-ISIS strategy as
knock the hell out of the oil, although, as he told the editorial board of
the Washington Post, I would rather not do it with our troops.
Here is Trump in a primary debate, explaining the basics of campaign
finance:
When they [politicians] call, I give.
When I need something, two years
later, three years later, I call them. And they are there for me. Thats a
broken system.
With Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she
came to my wedding. Do you know why? She had no choice. Because I gave.
Here is Trump anointing himself the lion of campaign finance reform at the
Republican convention in Cleveland:
Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign
of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place.
She is their puppet, and they pull the strings
my message is that things
have to change.
Trump is laying it on thick, but he is essentially right: The system is
rigged. The Democrats are corrupt. So are the Republicans. Jane Mayers
exposé of the Koch Brothers, Dark Money, describes exactly how pools of
private money shape policy on the Republican side. A New Republic story on
the fundraising prowess of Tim Kaine, Clintons vice presidential pick,
shows how deep donor influence runs in the Democratic Partys current
leadership. Judging by their track records and public statements, neither
Clinton nor Trump is up to the task of breaking the hold of money over U.S.
politics, which means that anyone looking to make a White House run in 2020
or 2024 had better make nice with the Club of 106.
The members of Club 106 are not like you and me, but neither are they a
monolith. Some ski at Aspen, others at Davos. Some are pro-choice, others
are pro-life. Some are concerned about a potential 12-degree increase in the
surface temperature of the planet by the year 2100. Some are not. There are,
of course, two monoliths of wealth and power: Democrat and Republican. There
have been years 1968, arguably 2004 when the ideological distinctions
between the two have been as fuzzy as the difference between Pepsi and Coke.
Were Jeb Bush or John Kasich the Republican nominee, 2016 might have been
one of those years.
But Donald Trump won. He burned the traditional mores of his party to the
ground, and filled the Republican platform with his field-tested blend of
anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant xenophobia, law and order fear-mongering at
home, racism, and a confusing posture of swagger and isolationism overseas.
This years Republican platform, now under Trumps sway, is wildly divergent
from the Democratic one.
But Trump does have one thing going for him his big talk about sticking it
to the special interests and the billionaires of Club 106. Would he? Its
hard to say. Trumps day-to-day opinions seem to bubble up from some
internal Magic 8 Ball. I love the idea of campaign finance reform, he said
last year. There is no plan for reform on his campaign website, just two
50-second rants about special interests and the establishment.
When a small number of donors wield such disproportionate influence over the
outcomes of elections, any politician who cannot finance his or her own
campaign is obligated to put to the interests of the wealthy few above the
majority of the U.S. electorate. The electorate is waking up to this, and
they are angry. Trump is, in part, the embodiment of that anger. Trumps
pitch, I will be your voice, is disingenuous but savvy. It tunes in the
frustrations of millions for whom eight years of enlightened Democratic rule
have done little. Real hourly wages have remained flat, as they have for
decades. Despite gains in output, productivity, and CEO pay, wage growth has
been especially slow for lower-level workers, failing to keep pace with the
rising costs of education, health care, and housing. These are the
conditions that enabled Trumps rise. The next demagogue to take advantage
of them will likely be a more convincing and competent one. Unless we find a
way to curb the power of the Club of 106, we may soon wind up with the Club
of One.
Of course, Hillary Clinton has a sensible and detailed plan for campaign
finance reform. It includes overturning the Citizens United decision that
set loose the Super PACs, matching public funds for small donors, and an end
to secret unaccountable money in politics.
But as heartening as Clintons proposals sound, they are belied by her
actions, particularly the current lack of transparency around donors to the
Clintons family foundation.
The basic business model of a political convention seems to be rooms full of
rich people, organized into various tiers, snacking and drinking and talking
about what is to be done for the common good. After Bill Clinton left
office, he replicated this model in the private sector with what is now the
Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, a non-profit based in Harlem.
Founded in 2001, the organization did not disclose the identities of its
donors until 2009, under pressure from the incoming Obama administration,
ahead of Hillary Clintons confirmation as secretary of state. It turned out
that a lot of the $2 billion received by the foundation since 2001 came from
foreign governments.
As of this summer, the Clinton Foundation has received more than $10 million
dollars each from the governments of Australia, Norway, and Saudi Arabia.
More than $5 million each came from Kuwait and the Netherlands. More than $1
million each came from Morocco and the Sultan of Oman. Most of the money
went to good causes cataract operations in Peru, carbon-offsetting trees
in Malawi, a failed-but-well-intentioned effort to rebuild Haiti after the
devastating 2010 earthquake. The foundation has helped rural farmers bring
their crops to market, distributed HIV/AIDS medicine, and given rural
villagers access to clean water. Each year, the foundation holds a
conference to celebrate these and other accomplishments, which reportedly
costs $20,000 and up to attend. Charity Navigator, a watchdog organization
that evaluates nonprofits, offered neither a condemnation nor an
endorsement of the Clinton Foundation due to its atypical business model.
Few can claim to understand the interplay of money, influence, ego, and
genuine good works within the Clinton Foundation. The New Republics 2013
profile of Doug Band, who got his start as Bill Clintons White House valet,
and used his work with the foundation to launch Teneo, his own consulting
company, is one place to start. The writer George Saunders was impressed by
the foundations good works in 2007. Todd Purdum, who covered the Clinton
White House for The New York Times, was less impressed. A memo responding to
Purdums Vanity Fair article, circulated by one of Bill Clintons aides,
criticized the magazines loose relationship with the facts and claimed
that Clinton has helped save the lives of more than 1,300,000 people in his
post-presidency.
As far as this election is concerned, the urgent question is not what the
Clinton Foundation does but where its money comes from. If one takes Hillary
Clinton at her word about seeking an end to secret, unaccountable money in
politics, knowing who has given how much to the Clinton Foundation would be
a step in the right direction. The foundation deserves some credit for
voluntarily disclosing its foreign donors, despite having done so later than
one might have hoped.
Last year, as Hillary Clinton prepared for her presidential run, the Clinton
Foundation announced a new policy. Going forward, it would only accept
donations from six governments: Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands,
Norway, and the United Kingdom. Again, this new constraint represents
incremental progress. This is presumably part of the foundations
commitment to honesty, transparency, and accountability, which is how one
of the foundations vice presidents described the policy shift.
Then there are the donors who are still anonymous. Frank Giustra, a Canadian
billionaire with interests in mining and filmmaking, gave $100 million to
establish the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership. CGEP is technically a
registered Canadian charity. It gives money to a sister organization with
the same name that is part the broader Clinton foundation. The purpose of
having two organizations with the same name, according to CGEPs website, is
so Giustra and other Canadian residents could receive a charitable tax
credit for their donations.
Giustra and Clinton are close enough for Giustra to have co-produced the
former presidents 60th birthday. All my chips, almost, are on Bill
Clinton, Giustra told the New Yorker in 2006. He can do things and ask for
things that no one else can. In a 2008 letter to the Wall Street Journal,
Giustra called himself as a private Canadian citizen with no interest in
U.S. politics. All the same, he seems to have traded on Bill Clintons star
power to obtain a 2005 government concession to mine uranium in Kazakhstan.
The New York Times scolded Bill Clinton for hand[ing] the Kazakh president
a propaganda coup
undercutting American foreign policy and criticism of
Kazakhstans poor human rights record by, among others, his wife, then a
senator.
The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership received at least $25 million in
donations for its initiatives; Giustra has given at least $25 million more
to the Clinton Foundation through a second vehicle. Unlike the Clinton
Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise
Partnership has been less than forthright about sharing the names of its
donors with the public. Last year, Giustra posted a letter stating that his
partnership does not accept money from foreign governments. The names of 30
of the partnerships major donors, each of whom has given $100,000 or more,
many of them mining companies, are posted online. According to CGEPs
website, this group of 30 constitutes a majority of the charitys
$100,000-plus donors. The identities of the remaining $100,000-plus donors
are unknown. Also posted on CGEPs website are two legal opinions explaining
why, due to the privacy laws of Canada and British Columbia, the names of
all other donors must remain secret. (There are more than 1,000 in all, most
of them apparently under $100,000.) We will not share or publicly disclose
our donors information unless we received prior written consent, Giustra
wrote in the letter.
That is where things stand today. The voters who must decide one way or the
other on Hillary Clinton in November, and whether to trust her promise to
get rid of secret unaccountable money in politics, will do so without a
complete accounting of where the money in her own family foundation came
from. Why? Because of the privacy laws of Canada and British Columbia.
Unless the Clinton Foundation decides to revise its policies between now and
the end of the year, the U.S. could wind up with a sitting president whose
active family foundation, run in part by her daughter, will be receiving
anonymous non-governmental donations through its Canadian partner as well as
donations from six foreign governments. All six governments are U.S. allies,
but the interests of allies are not always in perfect alignment. For
example, the U.S. may find itself negotiating terms for the lease of its
base on the island of Diego Garcia, a British possession in the Indian
Ocean. It may be called upon by Germany or Australia to chip in for the
costs of housing asylum seekers. It may have petroleum interests that clash
with those of the Norwegian national oil company, dividends from which go
into the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, worth nearly $1
trillion. If one of these allies were to make a multimillion-dollar donation
to the Clinton Foundation in the midst of a negotiation with the United
States, how would President Hillary Clinton ensure that it had no impact on
the outcome, if not through her own behavior, then through the perceptions
of her 15 agency heads and 2 million subordinates throughout the executive
branch?
If Hillary Clinton were running against anyone but Donald Trump, this might
be a question that the Democrats would have already answered.
In June, Bill Clinton hinted that the foundation might step up its efforts
around transparency, though not until after the election. You have to be
careful to avoid actual potential conflicts, he said at a gathering of the
Clinton Global Initiative in Atlanta. I dont believe in counting your
chickens before they hatch. Lets see how the election unfolds. There will
clearly be some changes in what the Clinton Foundation does and how we do
it, and well just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
It remains unclear what those changes might be, or whether voters will be
made aware of them before the election.
Last week, I spoke by phone with Craig Minassian, chief spokesperson for the
Clinton Foundation. He referred me back to Bill Clintons June statements as
the most current information on these questions. By email, CGEP Canadas
media office said they were unable to provide any donor information beyond
what had already been published on its website.
In 2008, President Obama instituted a new rule for the Democratic Party:
lobbyists and corporations would no longer be allowed to contribute money to
pay for the partys convention. At a $40-a-head convention-week fundraiser
for 21st Century Democrats, I ran into Martin OMalley, the former governor
of Maryland who made a brief run for president against Hillary Clinton and
Bernie Sanders. OMalley, the former chair of the Democratic Governors
Association, suggested that the 2008 rule change was partly responsible for
the electoral drubbing that the Democrats received at the hands of the
Republicans over the next eight years, which, he said, crippled the full
potential of the presidents administration.
Between 2008 and 2015, the Democrats lost 10 governors and 16 statehouses.
On Capitol Hill, they lost five seats in the Senate and 45 seats in
Congress, ceding control of both chambers to the Republicans. OMalley, who
described his position on campaign finance reform as agnostic, likened the
competition with the other party to an arms race. Its hard to unilaterally
disarm, he said.
Obamas rule was repealed in time for 2016, a change that Bloomberg Politics
attributed to Clintons campaign. And so Ed Rendell, former mayor of
Philadelphia, former governor of Pennsylvania, former chair of the
Democratic National Committee, set about raising the roughly $60 million it
took to put the Philadelphia convention on. He did it through PHL 2016, a
corporation with access to a $15 million line of credit from a public
authority to cover any shortfalls. The identities of the donors who gave
Rendell the $60 million are not yet known. PHL 2016 has been fighting to
keep the sources of its money a secret for as long as possible. A chunk of
the $60 million must have come from Facebook, judging by the vastness of the
Facebook lounge on the ground floor, with its miniature Oval Office photo
booth, good for a tongue-in-cheek Instagram, although one does wonder who
the joke is on.
The price of access to the Victory Lounge, a well-guarded chamber high above
the Democrats convention floor, is often greater than the cost of the
average American wedding. The food that I ate was a cut above average
American wedding food. Uniformed waiters circulated among curved banquettes
and glass-walled rooms with platters of hors doeuvres: seared tuna on rice
crackers, roast beef on toast, potato-stuffed pierogies in keeping with the
menus Philadelphia theme. The dinner hour was approaching. Tall men in
their dark suits and gingham shirts were gathering in clusters along the
bar. Their exchanges of business cards and trade knowledge made it hard to
hear what was happening on the other side of the glass, where, down on the
star-encircled stage, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York was saying something
about the minimum wage. On this side, the caterers were setting up their
stations: steamed asparagus, roast split potatoes, tortellini alfredo, and
an impressive South Philly-style porchetta, sliced by the inch off an
umber-colored hock.
This years conventions embodied the twin American cultures of money and
politics, with money flowing one way, and favors and credentials flowing the
other. The preferred term, used by Rendell, the Democrats convention chair,
and other Philadelphia-bred politicians, is access, access to special
rooms and special people, more than whats available to an ordinary delegate
but less than an explicit quid pro quo. At the extreme end, access can
become what is known in Philadelphia as pay-for-play, which has led to the
conviction of several Philadelphia politicians over the past two decades,
most recently former Congressman Chaka Fattah. On Friday, the FBI searched
the Philadelphia home and union headquarters of John Johnny Doc Dougherty,
another Philadelphia kingmaker.
What do donors get for their money? It is not always a specific piece of
legislation. Sometimes it is just a sympathetic ear, a phone call returned,
or even just an envelope of name tags that grant access to cushy VIP
gatherings walled off from the partys rank-and-file. In Cleveland, the
Republicans wouldnt let me off the elevator to walk around the levels of
the Quicken Loans Arena where these parties were happening. I knew only the
names of the rooms: the Founders Room, the 45 Club, the Grand Old Party
Suite. In Philadelphia, with the right credentials hanging from my neck, I
saw the inside.
Earlier that week, in the lobby of the Loews Philadelphia Hotel, I ran my
qualms about the Clinton Foundation by a communications consultant
affiliated with the Clinton campaign. Is it illegal? he asked. I said that
wasnt my point. I made it clear that I didnt plan to cast my vote for
Trump, and that I didnt plan to stay home on Election Day. Good, he said.
Thats all we want.
The Victory Lounge was more exclusive than the Loews bar. I did not run
across any members of Club 106, just some mid-to-upper echelon lackeys,
outer-perimeter friends of the Clintons, and friends of the Pennsylvania
Democratic Party. I met a former senior Hill staffer turned lobbyist, and a
Western delegate who held a key post on the conventions credentials
committee. There was a cluster of young suits in their early 20s who
resembled extras from American Psycho. The painter Chuck Close rolled
through towards the end of the evening, as did Rendell himself.
The wealthy ones were Clinton wealthy, not Trump wealthy. After all, the
Victory Lounge was just one of several VIP lounges included as part of the
Democrats donor convention packages. The highest level, named
Rittenhouse Square for a tony Philadelphia neighborhood, required donors
to raise at least $1.2 million or give $467,600 to the party over 18 months.
One self-described friend of the Clintons, who had brought along his spouse
and children to the Victory Lounge, was gracious enough to engage me in a
vigorous 40-minute debate about the propriety of the Clinton Foundation. He
said the foundations work was good work. What, poor people should give
them the money? he said. I wish they would. Rich people are the ones who
have got the money. By this time I had finished my free glass of Johnnie
Walker Black. My interlocutor refilled it with a slug from his own
Budweiser, one of the conventions sponsors. He compared my questions to
those of Sean Hannity and other conservative journalists who mercilessly
went after the Clintons in the 1990s, accusing them of everything short of
the Kennedy assassination. I said that I agreed with him in part the
airtime given to such conspiracy theories was an abuse of the First
Amendment but the questions about the foundation were worth asking. He
said that he didnt care where the foundations money came from, so long as
it went to a worthy cause. If Vladimir Putin wanted to give the Clinton
Foundation money during a Hillary Clinton presidency, he said, then Putin
ought to be allowed to do so. On this point, we agreed to disagree.
Hillary Clinton appeared onstage in her white suit. She was moving toward
the circle of stars. I could have walked through a glass door out to the
stadium seats, just above the press boxes, where her speech could be heard
more clearly. But I did not have the required green wristband. Clinton said
a line about putting Main Street before Wall Street. There was some polite
clapping in the Victory Lounge.
I left the Victory Lounge. I wandered down the hallway, waited a few minutes
for an elevator that did not come, and then walked up several flights of
stairs, skipping over Suite to the highest level, Balcony, where (I was
told) the Clintons had their skybox. Security was loose. Bill and Chelsea
were down on the floor for Hillarys speech. I found myself in conversation
with another hallway wanderer, a Colorado delegate in a bright yellow Bernie
Sanders shirt. To wear such a shirt on the Balcony level on the last day of
the Democratic convention was bold. His name was Raffi Mercuri. He was in
his mid 20s and had worked as an AmeriCorps volunteer and a public school
teacher. Now he was employed as a full-time organizer working with Latino
voters in Denver. Someone had lent Mercuri a Balcony-level credential, which
he wore on a lanyard with a Black Lives Matter sticker and a Colorado
Democrats pin. At the door of the skybox connected to Mercuris borrowed
credential, we were stopped by a party official who questioned Mercuris
right to be there. She was eventually convinced by the text messages on
Mercuris phone. Inside, we found a fridge full of Amstel Light in cans,
open bottles of Grey Goose and Johnnie Walker Black, and good sandwiches on
marbled rye bread.
I did not recognize any of the 20 or so skybox VIPs who had pressed
themselves against the rail to watch Hillary speak. I thought of a concert
that I had attended that afternoon in Camden, New Jersey, another VIP event,
closed to press, with live performances by Lady Gaga and Lenny Kravitz.
George Norcross III, a local political boss and Democratic superdelegate,
was the host. The advance press had the Obamas, Clintons, and Bidens as
invited guests. None of them showed. Wandering about the grassy slope above
the stadium, I met a man smoking a cigar. My brother-in-laws a bigwig
at, he said, adding the name of a multinational corporation. He donated
40 grand to put this thing on. He got us good seats down in front. This is
whom one meets in the VIP area. One does not meet or even see Norcross, let
alone the members of Club 106. One meets the brother-in-law of a five-figure
donor.
There was no room on the rail of the skybox at the Wells Fargo Center, so
Mercuri and I watched Hillary Clintons speech on the skybox TV. Mercuri
told me about working for AmeriCorps, and volunteering for the Sanders
campaign. He said that earlier that night he had wandered into another
skybox, empty except for one young woman. She seemed to have been tasked
with guarding the skybox until the rest of its occupants returned. People
paid for this, Mercuri remembered her saying, to explain why he could not
be there. I felt bad for her, he told me. It was a shitty box. She was
just a midlevel staffer.
This culture of money and privilege, Mercuri said, musing about his
Balcony-level surroundings. This difference between them and us. You can
see it in the way I was treated at the door. I knew that they didnt want me
in. So I really wanted to get in.
Clinton had spoken with some nervousness in the beginning, but her speech
was going well. She was opening up the throttle now, her caution giving way
to confidence.
Are you going to vote for her? I asked Mercuri.
Yeah, he said. Sometimes theres stuff that you just gotta do.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
