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michael bloomberg
Billionaire Grandson of Gilded Age Plutocrat Gives Trump Super PAC $50 Million
Timothy Mellon is one of at least a dozen billionaires backing Donald Trump's bid for another four years in the White House.
Jun 21, 2024
Billionaire businessman Timothy Mellon, the grandson of Gilded Age plutocrat Andrew Mellon, made a $50 million donation to a pro-Donald Trump super PAC last month, a day after the former president was convicted by a New York jury on 34 felony counts.
Mellon had previously donated $25 million to super PACs backing both Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent presidential candidate. The New York Timesnoted late Thursday that Mellon, a reclusive GOP megadonor who has described safety net programs as "slavery redux," is "now the first donor to give $100 million in disclosed federal contributions in this year's election."
"The grandson of Andrew Mellon peering out from behind a shrubbery to drop $50 million on an effort to defeat the strongest anti-monopolist element in government in decades is poetic," The American Prospect's David Dayen wrote in response to Mellon's donation, alluding in part to the Lina Khan-led Federal Trade Commission's bold efforts to fight corporate consolidation.
Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, wrote in his book on monopoly power and American politics that Andrew Mellon used his corporate empire and appointment as U.S. treasury secretary "to fuse government and business to make the world safe for monopolists."
"Unlike other tycoons, he did not specialize in one area. At one point, five Fortune 500 companies owed their lineage directly to Mellon: Alcoa, Gulf Oil, Mellon Bank, Carborundum, and Koppers. He controlled a network of ninety-nine banks. He had interests in coal, steel, chemicals, oil, sleeping cars, railroads, building construction, utilities, magnesium, and airplanes," Stoller wrote. "Mellon even commandeered the use of an entire element of earth—aluminum—through his control of the monopoly aluminum producer Alcoa."
Timothy Mellon's donation to the Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC was the largest single campaign contribution this election cycle and accounted for most of the roughly $70 million that the pro-Trump outfit raised last month.
The Times reported that "within days of the contribution," the super PAC "said in a memo that it would begin reserving $100 million in advertising through Labor Day."
Mellon is one of at least a dozen billionaires supporting Trump's bid for another four years in the White House. The former president has solicited donations from fossil fuel executives and hedge fund investors, promising to deliver regulatory rollbacks and more tax cuts if he defeats President Joe Biden in November.
Trump has also actively courted casino billionaire Miriam Adelson—his biggest 2020 donor and a fervent supporter of Israel—with apparent success: Politicoreported last month that Adelson is "planning to play a major role in funding Preserve America, a pro-Trump super PAC founded during the former president's 2020 reelection campaign."
"How much Adelson will donate to the super PAC is not clear, though the person familiar with her plans said the group was expecting to spend more than it did four years ago when Adelson and her late husband, Sheldon, donated $90 million to Preserve America," the outlet noted. "Their funds accounted for about 85% of what the organization raised in total."
Biden's campaign, meanwhile, has received roughly $20 million in donations from billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The Washington Postreported Thursday that "the transfer of funds includes a $19 million check to FF PAC, an independent pro-Biden group also known as Future Forward, and a max-out donation of $929,600 to the Biden Victory Fund, an amalgamation of Biden campaign and Democratic Party committees."
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RFK Jr.’s Choice of Running Mate Shows How Money Distorts Politics
The unlimited spending of self-funding candidates helps drive up the costs of campaigns, making them too much of a rich person’s game and limiting the choices available to voters.
Mar 29, 2024
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday that his pick for vice president is Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy tech entrepreneur and lawyer. Shanahan’s prior political activity seems to be limited to giving money, including a $4 million donation to a pro-RFK Jr. super PAC to help fund a Super Bowl ad.
Kennedy’s campaign has raised far less than the 2024 front-runners, and he may see a running mate with the ability to self-fund as necessary to keeping his bid afloat.
In addition to the super PAC donation, Shanahan had given Kennedy’s campaign the maximum contribution of $6,600, but as a member of the ticket she can put up however much she wants. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United, rich people, corporations, and other special interests can make unlimited donations to super PACs. But since super PACs are not supposed to coordinate their activity with campaigns, there are big advantages to Kennedy’s campaign having its own big-money spigot.
Politics should be open to all, not just a privileged few.
Kennedy’s choice highlights the crushing pressures of fundraising in today’s elections. Campaign costs have soared in the Citizens United era of unlimited donations to super PACs and “dark money” groups that keep their donors secret due to a boom in spending by the richest donors, making bigger and bigger donations increasingly essential to running for office.
The richest Americans increasingly throw their own hats in the ring, even though self-funders rarely win. In the 2022 congressional elections, 44 candidates each spent more than $1 million of their own money on their bids, and only six won. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, spent $1 billion on his own 2020 presidential campaign, which lasted just three months.
Even though they often lose, self-funders distort politics. Their unlimited spending helps drive up the costs of campaigns, making them too much of a rich person’s game and limiting the choices available to voters. In the 2018 Illinois gubernatorial election, voters faced a choice between two wealthy self-funders, each of whom spent tens of millions on their bids. Many otherwise promising candidates never even run, for fear of being unable to secure financing.
Some have suggested that self-funding candidates can’t be corrupted by special interests, because they are too rich to bribe. But that misses the reality that wealthy candidates typically already represent a special interest: the business and industry that got them (or their parents) rich. More generally, studies show that the affluent have different policy views than most Americans. For example, they unsurprisingly tend to oppose higher taxes on the wealthy.
Politics should be open to all, not just a privileged few. One key reform is public financing through small donor matching, which allows candidates without wealth or big donors to run people-powered campaigns. We should heed the warning of the first RFK to make a mark on American politics, who said, “we are in danger of creating a situation in which our candidates must be chosen from among the rich… or those willing to be beholden to others.”
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Why Can't Inner-Ring Democrats Just Say 'No' to Billionaires?
The problem runs even deeper than Donor Class donations.
Nov 13, 2020
ave you heard the latest about the strategic political genius of billionaire Michael Bloomberg?
The political brilliance, you might skeptically ask, of Michael Bloomberg?
The same Michael Bloomberg who had to spend a record $99 per vote to get himself elected mayor of New York in 2001, another $112 per vote four years later to get himself re-elected, and even more -- $174 per vote -- to win a third term?
The same Michael Bloomberg who sunk over $900 million into a bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and won only American Samoa before dropping out as "a billion-dollar flop"?
The same Michael Bloomberg who rushed into Florida this fall with a $100-million plan to get that state behind Joe Biden -- and again flopped royally?
Yes, the strategic brilliance of that Michael Bloomberg, at least according to Democratic Party apparatchiks in Florida. Earlier this week, they held a statewide conference call to proudly proclaim that their disappointing failure to carry Florida had actually been a brilliant political "feint" that, with Bloomberg's help, had scared the Trump campaign into plowing resources into Florida -- a state Trump figured to win handily -- instead of the much more competitive upper Midwest.
A brilliant "feint"? Really? Did former president Barack Obama know about the "feint" plan when he agreed to spend the election's precious final days campaigning in Florida? Was having Obama, Biden's best campaign surrogate, spend so much time in a we-know-we're-going-to-lose state part of the ruse?
This whole "feint" notion appears little more than a face-saving exercise on the part of Democratic Party operatives who burned through millions of Bloomberg's dollars. All quite understandable, of course. Political insiders within the Democratic Party -- and that galaxy of pollsters, consultants, and media buyers who circle around them -- have a vested personal interest in keeping billionaires like Bloomberg looking brilliant. They make big bucks helping billionaires realize their political fantasies.
But the problem here goes beyond a political insider class that's engorging billionaire dollars and flattering billionaire egos. These political insiders appear to buy into the core assumption behind plutocracies everywhere: that our wealthiest have something truly special to offer. The super rich, that core idea goes, must be super smart. How else could they have become so rich? Brilliance, in effect, both explains the existence of our billionaires and justifies that existence.
Bloomberg's foray into Florida, CNBC reports, actually had Democratic Party leaders in the state "privately becoming more convinced that they were going to defeat Trump." How could they not? They had a brilliant billionaire on their side.
In real life, billionaires don't bring any exceptional brilliance into the political process. They bring their billions. They bring outsized stashes of cash that can distort election outcomes and safeguard their fortunes. Witness the $200 million our tech giants spent this fall on a ballot initiative to kill protections for gig workers.
And these dollars, even worse, drop a suffocating ideological wet blanket over the campaigns that Democratic Party candidates run. In this fall's presidential contest, for instance, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were formally running on a platform many analysts considered "the most progressive document to come out of a major national party in US history." The ideas in that platform -- everything from a $15 minimum wage and ending tax breaks for capital gains to making public colleges and universities "tuition-free" for most students -- had come out of joint task forces that brought together the party's left and moderate wings.
But the campaigns Democratic candidates up and down the ticket actually ran essentially ran away from anything that might overly discomfort the nation's most comfortable -- and let Donald Trump and his pals pose as champions of average people against America's overbearing elites. Trump came unnervingly close to winning. Many of his endangered pals did win.
Various national pundits are now savaging Republican movers and shakers for indulging Donald Trump, post-election, at his every narcissistic turn. But Democratic Party insiders remain largely free to indulge their super-rich benefactors. That has to change.
"Acquiescing to an unpopular and timid agenda that further entrenches the wealthy and the well-connected," as Senator Elizabeth Warren puts it, "will lead us to more division, more anger, more inequality and an even bigger hole to climb out of.
"Unless Biden unites the people against the oligarchs who dominate the nation," addsGuardian analyst George Monbiot, "the people will remain divided against each other."
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