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How Big Bucks Destroy Democracy
By Shlomo Maital
In democracy, one person, one vote. That’s fair.
But in one democracy, the US, one person, with $277 million, buys massive influence and control over everyone, dismantling worthy government projects with a chain saw.
There ought to be a law, limiting big bucks influence like this. Once there was. But it was changed in 2010, creating and enabling super PAC’s. In the 2024 election cycle, there were 2,458 super PACs that raised $4,290,768,955 and spent $2,727,234,077. Over $4.3 billion. Imagine what could be done, for healthcare, education, poverty, food stamps, … with that money.
“Independent expenditure-only political action committees, better known as super PACs, are a type of political action committee (PAC). …Unlike traditional PACs, super PACs are legally allowed to fundraise unlimited amounts of money from individuals or organizations for the purpose of campaign advertising.” The law was further changed, enabling a single super PAC to actively fund a massive get-out-the-vote pro-Trump campaign in swing states.” (Note: Trump won all seven).
According to Wikipedia: “Because super PACs were able to coordinate with campaigns on canvassing for the first time in 2024, Donald Trump’s campaign relied on Elon Musk’s America PAC, a super PAC, to lead his get-out-the-vote efforts in swing states. By the end of Trump’s presidential campaign, Musk had spent $277 million to elect Trump and allied Republicans, making the largest individual political donor of the 2024 election and the largest individual political donor since at least 2010 outside of candidates funding their own campaigns.”
Now, $277 million is a lot of money. But for Musk? It is one half of one per cent of his $424.7 billion personal wealth. It is not a tax-deductible expense. But what did Musk buy for that $277 million? Possibly, likely — favorable government contracts for SpaceX, and perhaps Tesla and xAI (Grok), and, for sure, the chain saw he wields in running DOGE Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk was given unparalleled power. He got it, by bucks, not by ballots.
It is claimed that many members of Trump’s billionaires Cabinet bought their way into their jobs with massive campaign contributions. NBC noted in December: “Some of the biggest pro-Trump donors of 2024 are lining up for administration jobs “.
(Spoiler: Yup. They got them). Those who didn’t cough up big bucks starred on cable TV (Fox News).
Experts note that “while political donations are a legitimate way of participating in the political life of a country and a necessary means to fund electoral campaigns and political parties, restrictions have been imposed in multiple countries. Most OECD countries limit the amounts that natural and legal persons can donate to candidates and parties. Bans on donations from certain types of donors, such as foreign individuals and entities, public entities and corporations have also been adopted in numerous countries
If you have enough money, you can help elect a President, who appoints Supreme Court Judges, who dismantle restrictions in campaign finance, who then enable people with money to buy influence – and corrupt democracy. We could have seen this coming in the US, when they scrapped the law about campaign contributions.
When will democracy return to the US? When they restore the law that nearly every self-respecting democracy has limiting big bucks’ buying power. But it’s one of those things that seems easy to corrupt, very very hard to disinfect.
America! Open the Windows!
By Shlomo Maital
One of the most annoying things about MAGA Make America Great Again is this:
The basic premise of MAGA is, America is NOT great, at present. Understatement. Poor healthcare. Unaffordable housing. Poor schools. Wealth and income inequality. Racism. Antisemitism. Polarized paralyzed politics… just for a start.
So, how to make America great again? Place a Nazi sympathizer in charge of destroying public services. Smash alliances abroad, suck up to dictators, appoint incompetent loyalists to key positions, engage in vengeance, ….
There is another way. It is found in this new book, Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe. – by Natasha Hakimi Zapata. 2025
The simple, obvious, key point – overlooked by the current Administration. Other countries, far less wealthy, have solutions to America’s problems. Right under our noses. But American exceptionalism means, that is not possible. Because .. well, just because.
Singapore (NOT a leftist socialist liberal country) has extraordinary affordable public housing. I’ve seen it first hand. Check it out, America.
Canada has national health insurance. I was born in Saskatchewan, the first province to implement it, in the 1950’s. Check it out, America. Canadians all have health insurance. So do the British – and most civilized European countries.
Estonia has income tax filing online. Fast, simple, easy. Check it out, America.
Most German public universities (and they are mostly outstanding) charge no tuition. America? Michigan has great state universities – but if you don’t live in the state, you pay $60,000 – $65,000 tuition yearly. Not including room and board.
Schools? America is not among the top scoring countries according to the PISA benchmark. Not even close. Way behind China.
Housing, healthcare, education, public services, ….things that drive our quality of life. America trails, despite high GDP per capita.
Why? Closed windows. Other countries have found wise, pragmatic solutions to key problems. The US refuses to learn from them. Costa Rica? Denmark? Learn from them? Get serious, American politicians spout.
In years of teaching managers, I taught them how to define their key operations (marketing, quality assurance, production, innovation) and benchmark which other companies did these things best, how they did them, and – learn from them, adapt and adopt. Pretty simple idea. Best practice benchmarking. Works for nations too. Yes, even for America.
Learn from others.
The most blatant stupidity is Trump’s desire to annex Canada. Why in the world would any Canadian choose to be part of a nation that is hopelessly divided politically and systematically destroying its public services? A country that blindly asserts its superiority, against all evidence, while refusing to learn from others wiser and smarter?
Natasha Hakimi Zapata’s book is MUST reading for MUSK. But don’t hold your breath.
When Oligarchs Rule
By Shlomo Maital
From “X”
Oligarchs? A small cabal of wealthy people who run the country, control its wealth, and dominate its leadership?
Let’s run the numbers.
The US has 813 billionaires. One of them, Elon Musk, has net worth of $359.4 billion. Musk gave Trump an estimated $270 million for his campaign. That is less than one tenth of one per cent of his wealth. It bought him control of the US political system and dominance over Trump. Good deal.
Other US billionaires have shifted rapidly from supporting honesty, truth, and fairness, and equality and inclusion, to the opposite, e.g. Zuckerberg and Bezos.
It has happened before in history. In Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1990/91, the Russian leadership distributed shares to the people, as part of a plan to privatize and revitalize the economy. Oligarchs bought up the shares for pennies, using bank loans – and quickly gained control of Russia’s oil, gas, nickel, steel and other industries. Putin co-opted them, terrorized them – and together, they did a deal – Putin became a dictator, for life, in return for letting the oligarchs retain their wealth – and sharing a big share of it (in secret) with Putin.
India has 200 billionaires. India is said to be the world’s biggest democracy. India does hold elections, free and fair, regularly. But india’s Prime Minister Modi has shown autocratic tendencies, and the amount of abysmal poverty and income and wealth inequality in India is enormous.
China has 400 billionaires. China! The country run by the Chinese Communist Party. As in Russia, the Chinese billionaires are on a tight leash. Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma was reined in by China’s dictator, a chunk of his wealth confiscated, and since then he has almost disappeared. The remaining billionaires are compliant and acquiescent.
How come so many billionaires? The system the US built after WWII, the Bretton Woods Agreement, opened the world to the free flow of money, goods, ideas, people, everything. IT created huge wealth – and enormous abysmal poverty for those unable to participate in the party. This led to a wave of migration – and the rise of far right politics in the West, including, now, in Germany.
The Bible calls for a Jubilee Year – in the 50th year, debts are forgiven, and assets return to their original owners. Restart. We desperately need a Jubilee Year in the world. But, even asking billinaires to pay their fair share of income taxes is today impossible – and Trump is about to gift them with a huge tax cut, ballooning the US deficit that is already alarming. The US already pays more in interest payments on its debt than it spends on defense ($1 trillion!).
You could see this coming. Nothing good can ever come out of extremes of wealth and poverty. It seems that the system has to crash before it can be rebuilt.
Financial markets are already very nervous. I advise carefully weighing how a financial collapse might affect your income and savings – and take steps to protect them.
Getting to the Bottom of Things With 7 Why’s
By Shlomo Maital
There is a method for getting to the bottom of sticky problems. It’s called the method of the seven why’s. It is discovered and rediscovered by six-year-olds – many parents don’t have the patience to get beyond the first four!
Ask why? Get an answer. The answer raises questions. Ask why again, digging deeper. Answer. Why? Answer…. Few sticky problems can endure the seventh why? Without revealing an insightful answer.
Why is the world in such a horrendous mess? Seven why’s. Here goes. That was the first.
Because – of globalization.
Why? Because globalization generated massive wealth, 2,781 billionaires, to be precise.
Why did globalization create billionaires? (#3) By freeing the flow of capital, goods and information, it became possible to scale up (blitzscale, it is called) globally.
Why is this a problem? (#4). Because countries competed for capital by slashing taxes, luring billionaires’ money. Ireland: prime example.
Why are low taxes a problem? (#5) The huge wealth created by globalization could have been shared with the billions of people left behind, through the tax system. But—tax cuts and the billionaires’ purchase of political influence stymied it. (cf. Elon Musk’s massive gift to Trump’s PAC).
Why is the billionaires’ support of far-right politicians and their promised tax cuts such a problem – and such a conundrum? (#6) Because those whom this mess hurts most, low-wage working people, are precisely the ones voting for the far-right politicians and their billionaire backers. (cf. Zuckerberg’s pilgrimate to Mara Lago!).
Why do the low-wage working class people vote for those who harm them? (#7) Because the elitist centre-left, Harvard grads, ignored and denigrated them, impoverished them by exporting factories to China; their votes are protests, and the psychic benefit they gain from bashing the elite Ivy grads is what really matters most.
Every step in this seven-step chain of reasoning could be wrong. Any one wrong answer invalidates the whole syllogism.
So – where did I get it wrong?
Bernie Knows
By Shlomo Maital
I am as tired as you all, of reading the Democrats’ weary post-mortems of why they lost decisively. This blog is the last about this topic, quoting someone who gets it.
Senator Bernie Sanders, Vermont, former mayor of Burlington.
Why are the Democrats surprised that the working class did not support them? He asks. When — for years, the Democrats have not supported the working class. He said this to Michael Barbaro, on the New York Times” The Daily podcast.
Go back to the Clinton administration, when NAFTA shipped America’s factories to Mexico and Canada, $5 an hour labor rather than $25, and free trade brought a flood of cheap Chinese goods into the US, throwing many Midwest factory workers out of a job.
What specifically did the Dems offer working people in this election? Did they propose $18/hr. minimum wage legislation? Uh, no. National health care for all? No. Support for day care? No. Make groceries more affordable? Uh uh.
Virtually every ethnic, racial, and demographic group voted in the majority for Trump. And for the first time in a long time, the Republicans won the majority of votes for President. The Dems warned Trump would bash democracy. Well, he will, and has. But most Americans say, hold on. What did democracy do for me in the past 20 years? Put power in the hands of the educated elites, while I was shut out of a college education, unable to afford the tuition or the steep interest rates on student loans.
Unless the Dems (who spent a billion dollars in ads in the three blue-wall states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, ineffectively) start listening to working Americans, and speaking to them in their language, look for J.D. Vance to become President in 2028.
Yikes.
The Election: Educated Women vs. Uneducated Men
By Shlomo Maital
Einstein said famously, “simplify as much as possible…but not more so.”
This coming Tuesday, voters choose between Trump and Harris.
How will they choose?
According to the New York Times: a recent poll gives the answer. Educated women favor Harris by 43 points (!) over men without college education, who favor Trump. Since half of all voters are women (and women vote more than men), looks like a squeaker for Harris. Some 64% of US men do not have a college degree. For women – over 40% have college degrees, up from 4% (!) in 1940.
But this is truly sad. Men without college education have been left behind and left out in America. Whose fault? Partly the Dems. They gave away their manufacturing jobs to China, under Clinton. But partly the men themselves. It’s not that hard to get into college… many have battled into community colleges, done well and gone on to university, sometimes with partial scholarships and federal assistance.
But, it’s easy for this left-out group to blame the Dems and the system and democracy and the immigrants and… everybody else. Trump sensed this back in 2014 and plays on it incessantly.
It is a terrible shame, an iniquity, that the election is settled on this basis. And much worse – that a President may be elected by those who eschew education, voting for one who panders to ignorance.
On the Nov. 5 Election
By Shlomo Maital
David French is a near life-long Republican, person of faith, Christian, who writes in today’s on-line New York Times about his “Nine Years of Being Never Trump”.
He makes a simple point. I find it worth repeating. As an Israeli, I am reluctant to write about US politics and elections. But French’s insight applies to my own country – and virtually every democratic country.
Basically: When you vote, what is the question?
Is it, hmmm, whom do I hate? Trump hates the Democrats. They are the enemy within. Maybe if he is elected he will sic the US military on them, arrest them all. If you hate Democrats, you must love Republicans. All of them. Including the deranged. And vote for them.
But maybe the question is, whom do I love? Do you love your country, and the people who live in it? Do you love the people of the world, including the poor, the ill, the downtrodden, the oppressed – and are willing to share you incredible good fortune with them? If so, vote for those who share your value.
I belong to a Conservative congregation here in Israel. Our name is drawn from the Bible precept, love thy neighbor as thyself. We try to practice it. It works pretty well. But, I admit, in my country, it is having a rather hard time at present. Hard to love those who want to kill you, even if they are neighbors.
Whom do you hate? Or – whom do you love? I think this is a simple guide to how to vote. Love trumps hate. Always. On Nov. 5, too.
Trump is a Fraud – His Business Failures
By Shlomo Maital
Look… the American people have the right to choose whichever Republican candidate they wish for President. They have every right to shout their disaffection with the incompetent, squabbling politicians in Washington who have led American astray, on both sides of the aisle. They have every right to choose Trump.
But what truly disturbs and angers me, is Trump’s lie.
He says that as a successful billionaire businessman, he can run America better than someone who worked as a community organizer in Chicago.
Wait. Successful businessman? Here is the lie. According to TIME magazine, Trump has a very very very VERY long string of business failures to his ‘credit’, after inheriting millions from his dad. Here is the list:
- Trump Airlines
- Trump Vodka
- The Bankruptcies
- The Hair
- The Marriages
- Trump Mortgage
- Trump: The Game
- The China Connection
- Trump Casinos
In his recent victory speech he displayed Trump Steaks…which went out of business in 2007. And his casinos??? The Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City went broke. Here is the story: (from TIME):
Donald Trump’s gambles don’t always go as planned. Especially when that gamble is gambling itself. In February 2009, Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the third time in a row — an extremely rare feat in American business. The casino company, founded in the 1980s, runs the Taj Mahal, the Trump Plaza and the Trump Marina. All three casinos are located in Atlantic City, N.J., where the gambling industry has faced a decline in tourists who prefer gambling in Pennsylvania and Connecticut instead. Trump defended himself by distancing himself from the company, though he owned 28% of its stock. “Other than the fact that it has my name on it — which I’m not thrilled about — I have nothing to do with the company,” he said. He resigned from Trump Entertainment soon after that third filing, and in August of that year he, along with an affiliate of Beal Bank Nevada, agreed to buy the company for $100 million. The company reported it emerged from bankruptcy in July 2010.
I think what Trump is doing is running for President, to enhance the brand value of his name, which he sells at exorbitant prices to legitimate businesses.
So, if you want to help Donald Trump pay for his private jet by ‘branding’ himself, vote for him.
If you want someone who really understands business – well, Bloomberg does, parlaying his $10 m. in severance pay into a multi-billion dollar business he created, but he withdrew, precisely because he did not want to pave the way for a Trump presidency.
How ironic.
A failed businessman defeats a highly successful one, because people just don’t seem to get it and are happy and willing to be duped.
Make America Great again? Dump Trump.
Why Honey Bees Are Smarter Than People
By Shlomo Maital
My blog has been silent for some time; I was unable to upload blogs to WordPress.com during a 10-day visit to China. I’ve returned with many ideas for blogs in my suitcase, and will soon catch up and zero the deficit.
On the long flight from Hong Kong to Tel Aviv, 12 hours, I reread Thomas Seeley’s wonderful book Honeybee Democracy. Seeley is a biology professor, passionate about understanding bees, and his research has revealed startling insights into bees.
One of those insights is that bees, which have tiny tiny brains, are smarter than humans, when it comes to making decisions – because they do so cleverly, as a ‘swarm’ or group. Bees’ brains are about 20,000 times less massive compared to human brains. It is the size of one sesame seed. The honey bee brain is actually ten times denser compared to a mammal’s brain. It can do amazing things, like calculate distance and angles and direction and return to a nest site or flower site miles away.
Bees, sometimes 10,000 of them, gather in a ‘swarm’, a mass of bees hanging together in one spot. Scout bees travel far and wide, often several kilometers, and return to report to the ‘nation’ of bees on prospective sites. Seeley tells how these scouts report on their findings, by doing a dance. The dance tells the other bees whether the site is great (big, 40 liters, small entrance) or just adequate (15 liters, big entrance). If great – the dance is rapid, vigorous, compelling. If adequate – the dance is, well, a slow waltz. Several such scouts dance. The other bees watch.
Then – little by little, the other bees join the dance they favor. Eventually, and it doesn’t take long, the swarm reaches a whole-swarm consensus on the prospective site and then, as if on a signal, takes off, in just 60 seconds, and flies to the new site, where the nest is built, honeycombs erected, honey stored, and the queen bee sets up her throne and baby factory.
But why are the bees smarter than humans? Two reasons. First – dissent, then commit. That actually is a widely-used mantra at Intel Corp., where fierce debate is cultivated (like the scout bees), but then – everyone must commit to the final decision, wholeheartedly.
But even more important – the dancing scout bees convey information to the other bees, that includes intensity. That is, here is where a new site is, here is what it looks like, and here is how enthusiastic I am about it. Other bees join in, to show THEIR enthusiasm, by the rapidity of their dance. Human democracy is a zero-one process, where you vote for a candidate. But what aobut how much you like the candidate? Is it a “1”? a “5”? or a 10? Who knows? No way to tell. Bee democracy includes intensity, not just zero-one choice.
The bees use intensity of emotion. Humans do not. How many times do we vote for a candidate while holding our nose, because he or she is the best of a really bad lot of losers. What if we could indicate this in the democratic process? What if we voted for a candidate, and added 1-10 how much we liked him or her? Then added up both the intensities and the votes, perhaps by weighting?
Humans retain their views, after the election, and as the Republicans, do everything possible to sabotage the elected Democratic President and his plans. Bees always form a consensus; they have a process that usually ensures it. In rare occasions where swarms split into two, and go off to two different sites, they often don’t survive.
Seeley writes, “one valuable lesson we can learn from the bees is that holding an open and fair competition of ideas is a smart solution to the problem of making a decision, based on a pool of information dispersed across a group of individuals.”
I watched the Republican Presidential debate while in China. Open competition of ideas? Ideas? Not one. Donald Trump? Ted Cruz? Dispersed across a pool of individuals? Tea Party? Makes one yearn for the little dancing bees, waggling their behinds.
TIMnovate 