SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
mark cuban
We Need an Anti-Billionaire Party
The way back for the Democratic Party begins with rejecting billionaires and their money.
Nov 16, 2024
Everything feels different this time. In November 2016, there were protests; today, mostly silence. In November 2016, there was a lot of talk about resistance; today, people are talking about stepping away from politics. In November 2016, people clamored for news; today, folks are logging off. In November 2016, there was shock. It has been replaced by numbness. But best to take the words of Joni Mitchell to heart, that “something’s lost but something’s gained, by living every day.”
The warning signs were hiding in plain sight, even at the Democrats’ ecstatic four-day August convention in Chicago that felt more like a warehouse rave than a political confab—a vibe-shift that sent delegates back home convinced that their nominee Kamala Harris was about to vanquish Donald Trump from American political life for good.
But in an election year in which there was fury from the middle class over how much it costs to get by in today’s America, some observers—especially in the party’s left flank—were appalled at the barely hidden embrace of big money. Across the Windy City, in rented venues like the House of Blues, lobbyists for industries like crypto or PACs funded by firms like Cigna or AT&T threw posh late-night private parties for Democratic insiders after the TV lights were turned off.
The current Democratic brand is toxic—especially with working-class voters who have no idea what the party stands for. It’s past time to cast out the money-changers and stop pandering to millionaires and billionaires who may be pro-abortion rights or support the LBGTQ community, but who mainly just want to keep America’s unequal economic status quo.
But one pivotal moment inside the United Center even horrified the seen-it-all investigative journalist and former Sen. Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota, who noted that a line from Illinois governor and Hilton hotel heir J.B. Pritzker—“Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing, stupidity”—caused “raucous applause from an audience overjoyed to have found its newest billionaire idol.”
Sirota and others who heard it knew instinctively that this was not a winning message for the party that once dominated American politics in the mid-20th century by turning out the working class, and Tuesday’s results proved them right. In the flaming wreckage of an election in which Trump won a return ticket to the White House by winning the popular vote for the first time in three tries, while his fellow Republicans were capturing control of Congress, both pundits and Democratic insiders have spent the last week fighting over who to blame.
For these wounded elites, prime suspects include everything from President Joe Biden’s insistence on running and staying in the race until July, to Harris’ failure to reach young men by not going on testosterone-laden shows like Joe Rogan’s podcast, to the party’s collective inability to feel consumers’ pain over the post-COVID spike in prices. But you don’t need to be a rocket scientist or even a political scientist to argue that the biggest blunder was not attacking the billionaire class because Harris was too busy begging for their campaign checks.
If there is one thing that gets working-class Americans across the familiar fault lines of political ideology or race or ethnicity to agree, it’s that the super rich have too much wealth and power and don’t pay their fair share. In March, a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of voters in the seven key swing states found some 69% of voters—including 58% of Republicans and 66% of independents—supported higher taxes on billionaires. That populist fervor is hardly surprising in a nation where the top 10% controls 60% of all wealth, while the bottom half struggles with just 6%.
But while the Harris campaign did pay lip service to raising taxes on the super wealthy, it didn’t give voters the red meat of a soak-the-rich campaign that might have landed emotionally in a nation that most voters believe is on the wrong track. That’s probably because Team Harris, with its ambitious yet eventually reached goal of raising $1 billion in order to outspend Trump on TV ads and getting out the vote, felt it needed to woo Big Business, not offend it with a truly populist campaign.
A New York Times post-mortem on what went wrong with the vice president’s messaging and proposals noted in its headline that she had a “Wall Street-Approved Economic Pitch” that “Fell Flat” with voters, writing that Harris “adopted marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo that both her corporate and progressive allies agreed never coalesced into a clear economic argument.”
It was arguably worse than that. One of the Democrat’s few firm economic proposals was a 28% capital-gains tax plan that was actually lower and thus more friendly to the wealthy than what Biden had been proposing. Much of her economic agenda, according to the Times, was bounced off a key adviser: her brother-in-law Tony West, a corporate lobbyist for Uber—and it showed. Although the Biden administration had been cracking down on abuses in cryptocurrency, Harris signaled support for the scam-plagued, polluting industry, and won over some new donors.
Harris even campaigned with a billionaire—the colorful Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban—who went before a Wisconsin rally to say the Democrat “has an amazing plan for small business,” even after he’d initially lobbied for Harris to dump controversial tough-on-business Federal Trade Commission chief Lina Khan. Watching Harris’ carefully calibrated campaign, it’s also hard not to wonder whether her tepid talk about reining in fossil fuels and even her weak-tea echo of Biden’s Gaza policies—unpopular with many young voters—were meant more for donors than for voters.
It can’t be a coincidence that Democrats’ decades-long embrace of the donor class in an era of big-money politics has disabled its potential populist message to working folks who elected FDR, JFK and Bill Clinton. The Democrats need radical change in a hurry if the party wants to retake the House in the 2026 midterms and start the search for a new leader who can replace Trump in the 2028 election—assuming that we’re still having those by then.
That won’t happen under the current Democratic leadership or its consultants, who owe their status to the party’s wealthiest supporters. Any serious political movement to reinvent the anti-MAGA left will have to start from the bottom-up—with meetings and phone calls and rallies by community activists and environmentalists and ministers and everyday folks. The goal must be finding a new breed of candidates who will reject all billionaire and corporate contributions. That can help remake Congress and eventually boost a presidential candidate truly committed to taxing the rich, waging a new war on poverty, cutting the wasteful Pentagon budget and expanding the Supreme Court to protect these gains.
Sound crazy? Such a movement happened in this century, when the Tea Party emerged in 2009-10 to challenge established Republicans with new grassroots organizations that met regularly, staged boisterous protests and primaried GOP incumbents, pushing their party furtherto the right. That short-lived counter-revolution set the stage for Trump, and for last week’s big victory.
The current Democratic brand is toxic—especially with working-class voters who have no idea what the party stands for. It’s past time to cast out the money-changers and stop pandering to millionaires and billionaires who may be pro-abortion rights or support the LBGTQ community, but who mainly just want to keep America’s unequal economic status quo. Build a new Democratic Party that bans big money, because elections are won with votes, not dollars. The next Democrat who brags about how obscenely rich he is should be booed out of the arena.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Did Plutocrats Like Mark Cuban and Tony West Help Sink Harris?
"We could see it happening in real-time, right after the convention, when the party consultants and the big donors got their hooks in," said one critic. "They'll be fine though."
Nov 07, 2024
While much ink has been spilled on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's relationship with the world's richest person, tech billionaire Elon Musk, the Republican's electoral victory this week has also provoked conversations about how the very wealthy plutocrats behind Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris may have contributed to her loss.
After Trump's win, The Atlantic's Franklin Foer reached out to folks in the inner circle of President Joe Biden—who passed the torch to Harris after a disastrous debate this summer—for their postmortem. The staff writer reported Thursday that although Biden advisers "were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign."
According to Foer:
One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump's oligarchical allegiances. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, "We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends."
While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber's chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.
Responding on social media, Drop Site News' Ryan Grim said: "Reporters always heard that Tony West was functionally one of Kamala's most important advisers. Still galling to read this. I wonder who West even voted for."
Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, declared that "we could see it happening in real-time, right after the convention, when the party consultants and the big donors got their hooks in. They'll be fine though. They're already onto their next contracts, or their next vacation home. And that should piss you off."
Progressive organizer Aaron Regunberg argued that "if we want to get out of this wilderness we need to purge every one of the Tony West crony corporatists in this party. Democrats need to be able to point to and talk about villains. Tony West is one of those villains."
Revolving Door Project founder and executive director Jeff Hauser put out a lengthy statement in response to the reporting that, as he summarized, "West convinced Vice President Harris to ratchet down her populist messaging lest it upset the Silicon Valley and Wall Street elites he was courting on her behalf."
Hauser highlighted that Foer's article also came after Cuban last month "bragged about his role in exiling a Harris surrogate" and former staffer of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) "for the sin of supporting a wealth tax during a television appearance."
Harris on Tuesday "ran far stronger in the states that she saturated with television ads than the ones she did not. Those TV ads were, as Semafor's David Weigel observed, 'grinding on this economic message (anti-price gouging, Medicare covering home care, etc),'" he noted. "It's impossible to know whether the additional two points or less needed by Harris in the pivotal states would have been secured by basing her public 'earned media' and social media messaging on the same populist economic platform which informed her television ads."
"However, it is clear that the more successful paid media message was more populist and less informed by plutocrats like Cuban and West," Hauser continued. "Further, it seems exceedingly likely that downballot Democrats outside the swing states would have benefited from an ecosystem featuring the type of messaging we heard at the Democratic Convention."
"In a populist moment in which the candidates were battling for the mantle of change, the sitting vice president had to be identified as clearly against some powerful institutions," he added. "Her campaign showed early signs of an aggressive message, arguing that her record as California attorney general included taking on crooked big banks and shady student loan servicers."
"While VP Harris stuck to a comparably anti-plutocratic message in her television ads, she did not in her interviews and public appearances. This divergence appears to have been based on the advice of plutocrats," Hauser concluded. "Hopefully future candidates will learn from this, and oppose plutocrats consistently."
Appearing on CNN this week, Kate Bedingfield, Biden's former White House communications director, suggested the issue is not confined to Harris.
"I think Democrats across the board clearly have a challenge connecting with working-class voters. This is not unique to Vice President Harris' campaign," she said. "This is a demographic shift, a realignment in this country that's happened over the course of the last 10 years."
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who ran for president as a Democrat in 2016 and 2020 but spent this cycle campaigning for Harris—said Wednesday that "it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
Sanders also asserted that "the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control" the party are unlikely to "learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign" or "understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing."
Proving his point, Jaime Harrison, a former lobbyist for giant companies who now chairs the Democratic National Committee, claimed Thursday that Sanders' analysis was "straight up BS" and listed achievements of the Biden-Harris administration.
Responding to Harrison on social media, Michael Sainato, a labor reporter with The Guardian, said that "being pro-worker means being clear about who and what is anti-worker and the Democratic Party has failed miserably at that."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Mark Cuban Is Wrong': Bernie Sanders Defends Lina Khan as 'Best FTC Chair in Modern History'
"By taking on corporate greed and illegal monopolies, [the FTC chair] is doing an exceptional job preventing large corporations from ripping-off consumers and exploiting workers," said the U.S. Senator from Vermont.
Oct 09, 2024
After billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban this week said publicly that he would get rid of Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan if he had the chance, Sen. Bernie Sanders pushed back Tuesday by calling her the best person to hold the powerful regulatory post in a long time.
Speaking at a luncheon event hosted by the health policy news outlet KFF in California, Cuban—the outspoken billionaire known for his appearances on the television show Shark Tank and who has endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president—responded to a question about retaining Khan if Harris won November's election by saying, "If it was me, I wouldn't."
While Khan has been championed by progressives for her aggressive efforts to curb corporate greed and the relentless monopolistic consolidations that have harmed consumers and the broader economy, Cuban criticized her antitrust actions as counterproductive.
"By trying to break up the biggest tech companies, you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence," Cuban claimed, according to reporting by Semafor. "The bigger picture," he added, is that Khan is "hurting more than she's helping."
Following Cuban's reported comments, Sanders—who recently traveled with Khan in Texas to talk with voters about the threat of corporate power and how the working class can better confront it—came to her defense.
"Mark Cuban is wrong," Sanders tweeted Tuesday night in response. "Lina Khan is the best FTC Chair in modern history."
"By taking on corporate greed and illegal monopolies," Sanders continued, the current FTC chair "is doing an exceptional job preventing large corporations from ripping-off consumers and exploiting workers."
Other progressives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell, also weighed in.
"Let me make this clear," Ocasio-Cortez declared Wednesday, "since billionaires have been trying to play footsie with the ticket: Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl. And that is a promise. She proves this admin fights for working people. It would be terrible leadership to remove her."
Last month, Fortunereported that many "billionaire donors" of Harris' presidential campaign—including Cuban and Barry Diller, chairman of IAC—were lobbying behind the scenes to have Khan replaced if she takes the White House.
In July, Common Dreamsnoted the backlash many of these same billionaire donors—who also include LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Netflix's Reed Hastings—received for going after Khan.
In an August column, progressive activist Jim Hightower warned about the billionaires within the Democratic coalition who had "knives out" for Khan.
"Khan is the first real antitrust champion America has had in years," wrote Hightower at the time. "But will leading Democrats have the guts and integrity to defend her? Or will the business-as-usual powers be ushered back in?"
In a statement from an unnamed spokesperson released to Semafor, the FTC responded to Cuban's remarks by saying Khan believes "extreme consolidation" of large companies is damaging to U.S. economic progress.
"Chair Khan believes choosing competition over centralized corporate control of markets is the path to letting the best ideas win," the spokesperson said.
Sanders concluded his Tuesday rebuke of Cuban by thanking Khan directly for "what you are doing."
Update: This piece has been updated from its original to include new public comment from Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular