By John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus
A billionaire, in other words, has gone all in to support a billionaire on behalf of billionaires the world over.
This billionaires-for-billionaires approach certainly has precedents in the United States. Right-wing plutocrats famously rallied behind Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. But it’s Trump that billionaires have really glommed onto. For instance, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam were key donors in Trump’s earlier runs. Trump’s current transition co-chair, Howard Lutnick, is a billionaire financier.
A comparably blatant effort to buy an election has been on display in Moldova. In this tiny country sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, billionaire Ilan Shor sent $15 million to 130,000 citizens in exchange for their pledge to vote against pro-EU leader Maia Sandu and a referendum on enshrining the goal of EU membership in the country’s constitution. In a particularly unappetizing form of repatriation, some of that payola comes from the billion dollars that Shor stole from three Moldovan banks in 2014.
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