TAT readers,
Today I’m returning to a topic of critical importance to a successful outcome in our midterms, the purchase of our republic by the most dishonest, anti-American billionaires and oligarchs in our nation. It’s crunch time for November 3rd’s midterms and as expected, the GOP has rigged our elections in a wide variety of ways, including buying them. I discussed the “rigging” somewhat in my September 25th essay and today I am adding oligarchy to part of the GOP’s efforts. There’s an extraordinary amount of energy and commitment at the polls for the resistance but if we don’t immediately take the fight to those disgraceful pro-GOP billionaires, we will not succeed as we can and should. It really is that simple. As with many of my essays, some of what follows requires a bit of background, including a short history lesson.
On a personal note, yesterday I stood in line for the first day of early voting here in Texas. I was even interviewed by a local San Antonio news station, only to find out afterwards that it was a FOX News station. Of course they did not air the interview. I don’t watch TV unless it’s on my laptop or a slightly larger monitor, so I didn’t know before-hand that it was a FOX station. I have no doubt that they did not appreciate my answers. Something else of interest I observed while waiting in line with a record number of other enthusiastic voters, was how deeply frustrated and angered we all were, by the billionaires buying our republic and turning it into a hybrid of oligarchical authoritarianism and plutocracy.
Background
Our founders railed against and did all possible to prevent the influence of a elite wealth class having a superior role in our fledgling republic. They intentionally and rigidly opposed such a class, as symbolic of the very type of British aristocracy we were fighting for independence from. Today’s administration and friends, are the same type of aristocracy that our founders were worried about. It would be negligent of me here to not condemn, Chief Justice John Roberts’ Citizens United Supreme Court decision during the Obama administration, that allowed unlimited dark money into our politics, This allows a single donor like Elon Musk and others of his ilk, more say in our government than the rest of us combined. It didn’t stop just with Roberts either. We now have 6 right-wing SCOTUS justices in a super-majority, acting as the spokespersons and personal attorneys for oligarchy. They are not “originalists,” they are sellouts.
"While judicial originalists continue to trumpet the importance of history, they rarely take that history on its own terms. They claim to be wedded to the Constitution’s eighteenth-century meaning, yet they fail to engage in the deeper work of reconstructing the often-unfamiliar understandings of constitutionalism on which that original meaning was based. Justice Gorsuch insisted in Rahimi that originalism was the only thing that could keep judges on the straight and narrow, “seeking to honor the supreme law the people have ordained rather than substituting our will for theirs.”8 Yet in foisting modern constitutional assumptions on an eighteenth-century past that did not share them, jurists like Gorsuch ignore the supreme law those earlier people in fact made. These originalist jurists end up rewriting the constitutional past based on the logic of the legal present. In that respect, their interpretive approach resembles the living constitutionalism they otherwise disparage. A better understanding of early American constitutionalism might not be able to solve all the constitutional problems of today, but it can expose how faithless today’s Supreme Court originalists too often are to the history they claim is the lodestar of our law." - Why is the Supreme Court Obsessed with Originalism? - Yale University Press - Jonathan Gienapp - October 24th, 2024
These oligarchs and their subordinate billionaires, yes there is a difference, have also rigged tax law, created monopolies, regularly price-gouge and all other manner of abuse towards us. They do this by buying congressmen, senators, judges, cabinet officials and as we all now know, a president. Congress makes it legal and unethical judges make it possible. In return, those greedy billionaires make themselves wealthier, while that we struggle painfully to live the once possible, “American dream.”
"It’s one of the most important studies you’ve probably never heard of. Ten years ago, political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University took an extraordinary data set and a small army of researchers and set out to determine whether America could still credibly call itself a democracy. As case studies, they used 1,800 policy proposals over 30 years, tracking how they made their way through the political system and whose interests were served by the outcomes. For small-d democrats, the results were devastating. Political outcomes overwhelmingly favored very wealthy people, corporations, and business groups. The influence of ordinary citizens, meanwhile, was at a “non-significant, near-zero level.” America, they concluded, was not a democracy at all, but a functional oligarchy." - Oligarchy in the open: What happens now as the U.S. is forced to confront its plutocracy problem? - Harvard Kennedy School - Professors Archon Fung of HKS and Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School - February 13th, 2025
One last bit of history before moving on to today’s degenerate oligarchy. It doesn’t take a history scholar to find our founder’s prescient objections to oligarchy and a wealthy elite ruling class. Our War for Independence was not simply about liberty, but about freeing ourselves from a political system where titles and wealth denied all other citizens the full use of that liberty. They were every bit as adamant about keeping Europe’s bloody history of religious wars out of our new republic as they were about defanging wealth as a controlling influence in our nascent republic. They were scholars, strong and ethical men, many of whom were in fact from that wealthy class. Still, most of these remarkable men, adamantly opposed a wealthy ruling class. Some of our most prominent contributors to our founding documents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were passionate opponents of oligarchy. Below I offer you a couple of their quotes.
"To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy." - Thomas Jefferson
"If all power be suffered to slide into hands not interested in the rights of property which must be the case whenever a majority fall under that description, one of two things cannot fail to happen; either they will unite against the other description and become the dupes & instruments of ambition, or their poverty & independence will render them the mercenary instruments of wealth. In either case liberty will be subverted; in the first by a despotism growing out of anarchy, in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption." - James Madison
From a February of 2025 article in The Atlantic, author George Thomas sums up our founders fears nicely, as can be seen in the quote below.
"The founding generation’s fear of demagogues is well known. Alexander Hamilton insisted on the problem in Federalist No. 1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” The Founders’ concern was really two fears combined: fear of an unscrupulous leader and fear of an unreflective people. What is less well known is that they also feared a third source of power that could damage their grand experiment in popular government: extraordinarily rich Americans whose aims did not align with democracy. With America’s most prominent billionaires lining up to pay homage to Donald Trump at his inauguration, and in particular with the power granted to Elon Musk to make the government more “efficient,” the country is witnessing these three fears come together: a demagogue who unites the self-interested rich with the politically ignorant." - The Other Fear of the Founders - The Atlantic - George Thomas - February 12th. 2025
Now to our midterms and the purchase of our republic
I’ll begin with a story I know well from here in Texas. Not more than two weeks or so ago, the resistance and other democratic candidates here in Texas were showing close but winning poll numbers. “Hot wheels” the pejorative most Texans use for Governor Greg Abbott had already spent roughly a hundred million dollars for what he believed to be another easy, blood-red opportunity to win another term. He was either tied or behind a state representative of nearly a decade, Gina Hinojosa, who is generating mountains of excitement, along with now nationally famous, James Talarico and others. Then, along comes Elon Musk and the rest of our most infamous oligarchs, with over a hundred million dollars of rescue dollars, including the oil and data center industries. Abbott began this election with a war chest that already had over $100,000,000 in it and raised another $20 million through last December. It had been a waste of money and hadn’t moved him any closer to winning… until Musk showed up.
Both Hinojosa and Talarico do not take PAC money and are being outspent by their Republican challengers. Talarico, with the most campaign funding in senatorial history without PAC money is still being outspent 2-1 and Hinojosa 5-1. Now within the last week or so, the polls are considered a tossup. What’s the difference? Oligarchy! Musk alone chipped in between $158M - $190 million more to Ken Paxton’s Senate run, in just the past couple of weeks. In total so far, he has officially spent $369M on Republicans across the nation. This does not include the help he gives via X where he controls content, visibility and access via a myriad of tactics and technology, including algorithmic bias. Like the other GOP oligarchs, much of his support goes uncounted, thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts and his merry band of oligarchy supporting Republican Associate Justices. The bottom-line to this Texas story is that the so-called resistance, is better described as a David vs. Goliath story. It is no different in every other state in the union, especially those with close senatorial races, like Ohio, Maine, Georgia etc.
Now let’s apply some good ole’ common sense or what I call these days, “uncommon-sense.” As of recent reporting, some $10B has already been spent on the midterm elections. By the time this election is complete, we’ll see at least another billion or so spent. In a nation where most Americans are suffering from the Republican-imposed affordability crisis. There are roughly 174,000,000 million American voters. There is no way that our rapidly declining economy can support $10B in donations via voters alone. Oligarchs and the other selfish billionaires, are providing the rest. As we discussed in the background section, this is the furthest thing from the intentions of our founders. Tragically, this cancerous obsession with money in our elections is malignant and surgically removing it is the only way to save the patient, our republic.
Here’s the problem as we approach election day, this election has been “rigged” for decades by a self-imposed wealthy oligarchy. It wasn’t just rigged for wealth, but to subjugate the American people. Congress has been paying back their oligarchical donors by legislating our subservience to the billionaire class for so long, few citizens alive today can remember things being different. Should this continue without our voting intervention, American democracy will die an unpleasant but foreseeable death in the near future, if it hasn’t already. This election may be one of our last chances to stop the downward and mortal spiral. It won’t be easy, no matter what the polls say.
Buying “white space”
During my years deployed to combat zones in the Counterterrorism effort, killing or capturing HVTs or high value targets provided what we called, white space.” In other words, simply removing an HVT only gave other troops the chance to intervene in the target’s region or neighborhood in order to provide the support to local populations that would make it far more difficult for the target’s subordinates a chance to recover their dominance in that area of operations. This election is no different. Winning in on November 3rd only gives us an opportunity to start dismantling the system that rewards the corruption and money that denies we-the-people, a say in our government equal to oligarchs.
This will require accountability for every single person or organization responsible for rigging out elections via donations or any of the other standard tactics. So long as we tolerate congress writing laws that put billionaire wants over the needs of the people, and judges like Chief Justice John Roberts and his Republican SCOTUS cronies bless them with their legal decisions, we might as well just surrender our democracy now. Repairing and strengthening our republic will be a lifelong project if we are to succeed. We must fully commit to this and charge our children and grandchildren with the same task. The dream of our founders is worth saving, protecting and evolving so long as our republic exists. Human nature and the human quest for power won’t change, so we must perpetually defend our democracy from those obsessed with power at all costs.
So what do we do about the oligarchs and their favorite billionaire buddies? Painful as it is for some of us during this era where so many Americans are struggling to survive, we must take the fight directly to the oligarchs. There are some approaches that hold promise, if enough of us can commit to them. For those who read history, there are some powerful examples of successful tactics and strategies although sadly, they take time that we don’t have for the next two weeks… except for one. That is take the fight directly to the homes, hometowns and businesses of the most offensive and immoral oligarchs like Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Adelson and more.
As you can see by the donors and organizations on this chart, the money spent is roughly two weeks behind and does not include PAC money and “quiet” or masked contributions. There are also countless donations from those like defense contractors that Senator Susan Collins is accused of accepting bribes from. At Trump’s inauguration sat his tech broligarchs, Musk, Zuckerberg of META, Tim Cook of Apple, Bezos of Amazon, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, tech billionaire Peter Thiel and David Oliver Sacks, a South African-American investor in internet technology firms. These men have more influence over our lives than anyone could imagine, and they were all sitting there celebrating the sleaziest politician in American history. Take the fight to them for starters.
If there were ever opportunities for “No Kings” rallies to make a big difference, it would be in loudly and peacefully boycotting these tech broligarch’s homes and business interests. Good, bad or indifferent, these men must learn that we are furious with their government funded research boondoggles that benefits them and not the American people. It’s our money and with the threats to us and the nation via AI, surveillance technology, crypto markets, money laundering via tech and an endless list of other activities their tech supports, we must demand a say to offer input before they risk our wellbeing and lives. They are all part of the covert campaign to impose data centers on all of us without notice or citizen input.
Then take the protests to every single monopoly or trust in the country. For example, the four primary meatpacking monopolies responsible for the high cost of meat on the family table. Don’t forget the protection racket of healthcare and their CEOs, Oil supermajors like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, British Petroleum, Eni, TotalEnergies and ConocoPhillips, Airlines, big tech, retail and the list goes on and on and on. These entities are exclusively focused on their bottom lines, regardless of the impact on all of us. I saved my personal favorite worst offender for last, the media industry giants who control what we experience and are perpetually involved in “selling” oligarchical narratives disguised as something helpful for us. Now, most US media tiptoes around Trump and his oligarchs so as not to offend them, rather than reporting truth to us, their consumers.
Historically, tax boycotts and general strikes have provided some relief, but when most are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, this is more difficult. Throughout history, the wealthy have fought unions and organized labor to deny us the opportunity to take time off to strike. This is a specialty of the Republican Party. They give us just enough to get by and have hope, but never enough to wage war against their pitiful wages and benefits. As I recommended shortly after the last presidential election, take the fight directly to the source of our woes, including the Republican elected officials who’ve sold us out to their patron saints of campaign donations.
It’s well past time to wrap this essay up. We’ve covered a lot of turf on this one, from a history lesson to fighting back against those who buy and sell our elections for their own selfish needs, and at our expense. At risk of being accused of hyperbole with the warnings offered in this essay, I can assure you that this is a most serious threat to our republic and with an absence of any histrionics. Several scholars already believe us to be living under oligarchy now and for the past decade or two. I stubbornly believe that even if they are right, it’s not a death sentence for American democracy and that with enough unified effort, we can cure the malignant cancer of American oligarchy.
Step one is to recognize that we are up to our ears in this threat and agree to unify to stop it. The people we are fighting, use partisan politics to keep us at each other’s throats instead of theirs. It’s well past time to turn the tables on them. With so many Americans suffering from oligarchical abuse, we need each other if we are to succeed in recovering the liberty our founders envisioned. Now that we understand that hyper partisanship is intentional and that we are not each other’s enemies, it is simply a matter of free will to throw off the chains imposed on us by abusive elite wealth. We’ve been through tough times before and not terribly dissimilar to what we are currently experiencing. We succeeded then and can surely do so again. For once, let’s come together and put the American train of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all back on the tracks, so that it can carry us and our grandchildren into a better future. Step 1. remove this government, 2. hold the abusers accountable, including the oligarchs and finally, 3. put in place the guardrails required to keep billionaires accountable so that they do not transform into oligarchs.
Godspeed success for the resistance in the midterms.
Paul