MILLIONAIRES AND
BILLIONAIRES
“In the current
election cycle [2016], both Donald Trump
and Bernie Sanders seem to be profiting
from public distrust of shadowy big money influencing elections—Trump’s racism has gotten most of the attention,
but his message that no one can buy him may be resonating at least as
effectively. (Last August he tweeted “I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers. Puppets?”) The brothers’ apparent
favorite candidate Scott Walker dropped
out after finding virtually no support, and though Ted
Cruz has appeared at many Koch functions,
Charles Koch signaled in January that he
didn’t necessarily support his plans to “carpet-bomb” ISIS. (It would, he pointed out in a
genial interview with the Financial Times, be difficult to bomb every Muslim nation on earth.) Even before his strong
third-place showing in Iowa, there were at least subtle signs that the Kochs and others in their donor networks were
beginning to rally around Floridian Marco Rubio
as the most electable “establishment” GOP candidate.
As for Sanders, if every American were
to somehow decide to devote the coming months to reading [Jane Mayer’s book [Dark
Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical
Right (2016)], it seems a safe bet his argument about ‘the millionaires and
the billionaires’ would find even more adherents.”
