Dirty Work: How Billionaires Are Buying Elections

Bernie Sanders (0:00)

Today, billionaires are spending over one and a half billion dollars on midterm elections.

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

Billionaires shouldn't be spending their money to try and rort the electoral system.

Nicky Hager (0:10)

As professional manipulators who often have more influence over what the news is, and what happens on issues, and all the rest of us put together.

John Johnston (0:20)

Hi everyone, JJ here. Welcome back to The Lounge. Well today, I want to devote a little bit of time to talk about this issue of billionaires, donating or giving money to political parties, to third-party lobby groups in order to have their influence, as much influence as possible on elections. I say elections plural because we've got a couple of elections coming up. We've got the US midterms, of course, and just within a few days of that in my home country, there's a national election.

There's a bit of this going on in New Zealand too.

I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to put a timestamp for the Kiwis in the audience there. They jump to that if they want to, but it does really seem like we're heading down that same path, influence by the US and the US is quite something. Look at this. I'll show you what I mean. I've talked about Elon Musk. He's heavily involved, of course, with this New York Times article. Meet the mega donors who have poured 1.2 billion into the midterms. The leaderboard of the top 20 donors is dominated by the tech industry and ultra wealthy Republicans. So we'll have a look at that list. Elon, of course, is on it, but other tech people, other non-tech people as well. But also this book, I mentioned this the other day. I've been reading this, The United States of Oligarchy. How America's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators Weakened the US and Destroyed Democracy by Casey Michael. Good book. I haven't finished it yet, but he does talk about this issue in it. And of course, the Citizens United decision years ago that really has led to the situation where, let's face it, the United States isn't oligarchy at this point, and other countries maybe, heading down that same route to wealthy people, rich billionaire people in other Western countries, looking at what's going on there and trying to engineer it. And so in New Zealand, this book too, so I have read this that came out recently, Dirty Work, The TaxPAS Union and New Zealand's Hard Right by Nicky Hager. He's written quite a few political books, really consequential books. And this one is, let's say, whistleblowers from the TaxPAS Union, which is a lobby group, a hard right lobby group. And he has documented and laid out what they're doing behind the scenes. A lot of this is in secret and really trying to influence New Zealand politics over years with money and rich people. And so he details that. So I'll go into that a little bit. But this is what Bernie Sanders has been saying in the US to point out the oligarchy situation there and whatever you think of his politics, I don't think he's wrong when he says stuff like this.

Bernie Sanders (3:09)

As we all know, Mr. Musk spent at least $290 million to elect Trump. And right now, at this moment, is spending some $200 million to try to keep Republicans in control of Congress.

The 100 richest people in our country spent $2.6 billion on the last election, more than double what they spent four years prior. Today, billionaires are spending over $1.5 billion on midterm elections.

John Johnston (3:51)

Okay, so yes, it's ramping up. It has been over years. And as I said, that Citizens United court decision years ago has every election cycle we've seen more and more. It's not just because of inflation. So much money in US politics. More and more people are pointing out that it's an oligarchy. The Trump administration where democracy really slipping away faster and faster. So I don't want to see that in other places. Let's have a look at that list, by the way, the mega donors of this election. We can see some of the usual suspects, but look at the top of the list here. They've got Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

So VCs, venture capitalists. So you have to think, when you look at this list, what have they got to gain? There's a purpose here. Obviously, they want certain policies, certain laws, like Elon saving the country, saving Western society. But it's pretty obvious what he wanted at the time. He joked about going to prison, a number of investigations into him and his companies that suddenly went away with Doge.