Oligarchy and the Media

**Paul Krugman** (0:01)
Good news, the second richest man in America might be prevented from taking over CNN.
That's the good news. The bad news is, aside from the fact that he probably will manage to pull it off anyway, the bad news is that that would be only a small piece of the on-going takeover of US media by oligarchs. And in turn, the media takeover is just part of the extraordinary exercise of power by the extraordinary wealthy small number of men who have been reaching so much havoc with America as we know it. Hi, I'm Paul Krugman. Doing a video today, because I didn't feel like doing a usual chart heavy, analytics post, but very much on a topic I have been writing about and will continue to write about, which is the rise of oligarchy in America. Now I know some people balk at that name, at the word, because it sounds extreme, but then the reality is extreme. We're not talking about some kind of hidden conspiracy. We're not talking about the protocols of the elders of PayPal. We are talking instead about stuff that's largely out in the open, but not fully understood, which is the way that an incredibly wealthy small group of men, mostly men, is able to commandeer a lot of the political life of a country that is still nominally a democracy. And that is a fundamental story for our time, maybe the fundamental story.
How does that take over work? Well, there is what I think of as kind of the middle level, which is the place where it's most easily quantified, tends to get most of the attention, which is campaign finance. American campaigns are very money intensive and have become more money intensive because we've opened the floodgates with Citizens United and a lot of that money comes from a very small number of incredibly wealthy people. According to the New York Times analysis, about 20% of all campaign contributions in 2024 came from 300 billionaires and their families. That's a pretty big impact. You know, a country of more than 300 million people and 300 billionaires are a fifth of campaign finance and surely more strategic, more targeted than the average donor. So that's really a very, very large role, just in that direct sense of who pays for campaigns.
But that's not the only level. There is a lower level, which is just plain lower in the sense of morally lower, I guess, which is just plain buying politicians, buying policies, paying for the policies you want with cash or crypto on the barrel. There has always been some of that in our system, but it was normally discrete, indirect, deniable, the revolving door. It was the case even more than 20 years ago that when the Bush administration pushed through a Medicare bill that was very favorable to pharmaceutical interests, that the then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who basically engineered and steered the bill through Congress, then promptly retired and became the chief lobbyist for the pharma lobby. So this kind of thing has been going on for a very long time. But now it's just blatant out in the open and the sums are massive. So we just have literally billions of dollars thrown at the president and his family. No doubt large sums to other government officials, large sums to at least some members of Congress. So just plain buying the policies you want, which is something, not just that a large share of wealth is held by a small number of people, but that those are the people who are best positioned to really deploy their wealth to corrupt the system.
There is also something, I guess you can call it a higher level, which is what military strategists call shaping the information space, which occurs at a couple of levels.
One of them is the, is this sort of promotion of ideas and ideology that serve the interests of the very wealthy. You see that on many issues. You certainly see it very much on economic policy. If you ask, why do people still go out there saying that tax cuts pay for themselves and that tax cuts on the rich are an enormously powerful tool for stimulating economic growth when we have, you know, that's been tested to destruction and it just ain't so. But it's a zombie idea. Keeps shambling along, eating people's brains, even though it should be dead. And the reason is, well, there's a lot of money in it. If you, if you Google one of my, you know, something I've written on, more often than not, when I do that, the top sponsored post at the top of the search page is an attack on me sponsored by some right-wing organization. And if you ask me, you know, who supports those right-wing organizations? Well, guess, guess who? So then that's, it's equally or worse the case in climate science. There have been studies, to the extent, scientific journals have been pretty good at not publishing climate disinformation. But when they do publish things that are somehow as skeptical, or usually not outright denial, but, but, you know, attempting to sow discord about climate change, what percentage of those studies have received financial backing from fossil fuel interests? The answer is 100 It's all about the money.