Opinion | Oliver Wells
The Democrat campaign raised over $6 million within 3 hours of announcing Harris’s running mate Tim Walz. By the end of the day that number jumped to over $41 million, further signaling the support of the ultra-rich for the supposedly working class progressive. A few billionaires openly announced their support for the decision, including co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, and Mark Cuban.
Hoffman, who stated that Walz has “fostered a pro-business climate, attracting substantial investment and positioning the state as a top contender for business development” (read: Walz provided tax-funded state bribes to billionaires), has already donated millions of dollars to the Harris campaign while openly demanding that she fire the current Federal Trade Commission chair who has been utilizing state bureaucracy to go after certain monopolies for the benefit of others. Monopoly media outlet CNBC predicted that if Harris were to win the presidency, she would carry out the orders of her handler and fire the FTC chair along with the head of the antitrust division at the Justice Department.
Behind all the talk from both campaigns about how many small donations they receive, a significant amount of their funds come from a handful of billionaires. Like stocks, those who contribute larger proportions of the funding of candidates exert greater influence over their actions and decisions. Regardless if, for instance, the stocks of Apple or Amazon are spread over a thousand people or a million, ultimately it is the top few people that hold significant percentages of stocks that make the decisions.
The donations of a handful of billionaires play a critical role in the outcome of a race: for House seats, over 90% of campaigns that spend more than their opponents win. JD Vance’s successful 2022 congressional campaign was a clear example of this, as he was trailing behind his opponents until receiving a significant monetary boost by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who also talked Trump into an endorsement. Now, Thiel and fellow tech billionaire Elon Musk are funneling millions into the Trump-Vance campaign, which has resulted in a notable shift in Trump’s position to becoming favorable toward electric vehicles, which he has long opposed.
Just as competition among the imperialists intensifies over time, spending on elections to out-compete one another continuously increases. The 2024 presidential election alone is anticipated to have a record bill of $10.69 billion, a roughly 20% increase from the last presidential cycle. This reflects the open bribery of politicians that ties politics to economics on the one hand, and the need to increasingly invest in the elections to get buy in from the population on the other.
This is the true nature of bourgeois democracy, and while it is on naked display in the economy—few workers would be so delusional to think that they have any say in the decisions of the company they toil for—it is obscured in bourgeois politics, where the charade of democracy plays a critical tool of low-intensity counterinsurgency by persuading wage slaves to see their interests as aligned with their masters.
Despite the emphasis on Walz being a “normal” high school teacher from rural Nebraska, Democrats and their mouthpieces ignore the fact that normal people do not have the backing of billionaires. Like Trump’s vice presidential pick JD Vance, both candidates and their parties have emphasized the identities and fables about their nominees in order to better market them to consumers—the US electorate. Having proven themselves as capable representatives of the imperialist class, the VP nominees along with the presidential nominees now contend for legitimacy through the popular vote by a contest of personality, a multi-millionaire “hillbilly” vs a billionaire-backed Midwestern “progressive”.
