Billionaires Want To Destroy Democracy

The richest man in the world is trying to buy the U.S. presidential election in order to bestow it, like a burnt offering, upon his preferred candidate.

Multi-billionaire Elon Musk is not only pouring $75 million of his own money into Donald Trump’s campaign. He is now offering payments to voters in swing states in the form of a “lottery” that skirts, if not violates, U.S. election laws. What started out as $47 for registered voters in Pennsylvania who endorsed his on-line petition has become a million bucks a day from now until the election to some lucky signatory in a swing state. Federal law prohibits such incentives to register to vote, but the penalty is minimal (for Musk) and in any case wouldn’t be assessed until after the election.

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.