Then, why is he so obsessed with Greenland which has an increasingly strategic benefit as the ice caps melt and new shipping routes are created? Yes, there are lots of strategic minerals in Greenland, but that’s true of many central African countries and we’re not threatening to invade those poor, land-locked nations. No, Donald is a real estate guy through and through and he believes that oceanfront condos in Greenland might be more valuable someday than underwater condos in Miami. He’s smarter than you think and he’s a wily fox, for good and for bad, depending upon what you think of him.
But, the bigger concern is that America is for sale as evidenced by who was sitting behind Trump at the Inauguration last week: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai, and Tik Tok’s Shou Chew. As someone who believes in the market economy, I appreciate that some of the smartest capitalists will be advising our new President, but this is more like “courtesan capitalism” in which you show allegiance to the emperor by currying favor, or especially shoving money in his coffers. How else do you explain Amazon paying Melania $40 million for the rights to make a fawning documentary about her? Or, Trump postponing the TikTok ban after one of its largest shareholders gave $100 million to Trump-friendly groups last year?
We shouldn’t be surprised. The U.S. has been on this road since the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which took limits off campaign spending by corporations and other groups. The court held that existing restrictions violated the First Amendment, equating the ability to spend money on campaigns with the right to free speech. The result has been a deluge of corporate cash into our elections. Any small inhibitions or shame politicians may have felt about selling themselves to the highest bidder disappeared. Trump is doing loudly what other politicians do quietly. Now that he’s been reelected he’s not even pretending. Some admire him for that. Others despise him.
Canada limits individual donations to political parties and prohibits corporate and union contributions altogether. Candidates and parties also have strict spending limits, and their elections are significantly shorter, reducing overall costs. German political parties are heavily financed by public funds, which are distributed based on election results and private donations are capped. The same is true in all kinds of other democracies: Sweden, Norway, France, the U.K., Chile and many other countries.
In a world with an alarmingly accelerated wealth gap (a topic that was virtually never mentioned by the Harris Presidential campaign, for some inexplicable reason), giving wealthy people and companies (as well as unions) the ability to have undue campaign influence creates a dispiriting influence on the average American. Getting this fixed as well as breaking the tyranny of the two-party political system and gerrymandering that has polarized our elections could lead to power moving more to the people and could encourage more alliances across multiple parties. I hope that’s in our future.
Thanks for being on this policy journey with me this week. I’ve heard from many of you – most who appreciated this departure from my typical daily content and others who said, “Chip, stick to what you know and butt-out of politics.” All I can say is that if we all butt-out of politics, we’ll be in a lot of trouble.
-Chip