Meeting the DC Special Interests-Part I:

A Guide to Knowing How The People Are Overrun in Government By the Powerful, Wealthy, & Well-Connected.

Feel free to check the entire blog archives from “Political Pulse” & “Salzillo Report” on the 2024 primary cycle, rural outreach, redistricting litigation, base dynamics, campaign organization, the current media landscape, the issues at stake, Project 2025, Build Back Better, the progressive movement, the true story about former 2024 VP contender Gina Raimondo, and much more.

More to come, but what a debate. No wonder Trump wants to chicken out. Maybe it would have been better for him if he chickened out the first time.

Via Flickr-Tammany Hall today.

I must begin with a short follow up on my last post. In the United Kingdom, France, Turkey, and India, the backlash to right-wing isolationism & populism (AKA, worldwide Trumpism) was underrepresented in the polls vs. the actual election results. We should take nothing for granted in our election. Yet this is another real life example of why we risk taking in too much with the polling field.

But let’s set that aside for a second. Our nation needs to have an earnest discussion on special interests and dark money. They are a major problem. Although in many many instances (the vast majority, really) the Republicans receive more special interest money than Democrats, the system in place today impacts and affects both parties. And when special interests take advantage of the process, working families subsequently suffer.

In fact, there is a tale some of you might have heard of from insiders. Donate to both sides, so then you have an equal chance of getting what you want. It is a real phenomenon among corporate Democrats who have privilege, wealth, and power. Like former CVS Executive, Home Depot Board of Directors member, and 38 Studios insider Helena Foulkes, a “Democrat” and close Gina Raimondo ally who donated to Mitch “Kill Bill” McConnell and Rhode Island Republican Donald Carcieri.

This is what rich people do. Play both sides, to try to rot them both out. The special interest swamp takeover has been worsened with two major developments: Citizens United, & the Roberts-Alito-Thomas Court’s crusade against fair maps that have legalized partisan & racial gerrymandering all across the nation. All roads, as they say, lead to our dark money-owned Supreme Court.

The result? Often the most well-funded candidates are the most likely ones to win, and the primaries matter more in many cases anyways. In the end, the status quo allows special interests to meddle in those intra-party contests before everyone’s attention turns to November.

We all know who the key special interest players are. Big Pharma, the fossil fuel industry, Big Business, Wall Street, the Big Banks, Big Insurance, Big Agriculture, the charter school lobby, credit card companies, and predatory lenders, among others. But what are the unknowns starting to shape American politics dramatically? Well, here’s a rundown to the first edition of knowing the DC Special Interests (check out some of the links below for even more information):

1. The Cryptocurrency Industry: Despite the controversies around bitcoin bolstering and funding terrorist groups like Hamas, bringing volatility to the global markets, and even being the subject of criminal fraud investigations (e.g., Sam Bankman-Fried), its power has only strengthened in recent years in the Beltway.

   Its biggest impact so far: in Democratic primaries, attacking those calling for cryptocurrency guardrails, and in support of those who endorse bitcoin at every turn. While I hope this does not influence particular votes, we have to assume it will, with the bitcoin investors being so crucial in a number of races (like MA-Senate, CA-Senate, AZ-03, AL-02, CA-47, MO-01, and NY-16). Big Crypto is not done for November either, getting ready to pour tens of millions of dollars to defeat rivals like Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown, Bob Casey Jr., Colin Allred, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, & Lucas Kunce. It is also seeking to gain special access to congressional leadership for their agenda next year, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, with allies in Cynthia Lummis, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand. Watch out especially if Gina Raimondo is still around come 2025. Keep an eye on your politicians to make sure Big Crypto, with their FairShake PACs and the like, aren’t trying to buy their votes, Republican or Democrat.

2. The Foreign Policy (Netanyahu) Lobby: Effectively, Big Money is also influencing foreign policy egregiously. AIPAC, which was once a reasonably decent, respected organization, has now become the cheerleader for far-right allies to the Israeli government, primarily Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite international opposition to the current course of the Israel-Gaza conflict, it remains vastly unchanged because of foreign lobbying from those types of groups that support a radical far-right government with ultra-nationalists in the style of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The Netanyahu lobby has donated to Donald Trump especially, and applies pressure to the rest of the political spectrum through those efforts.

   Dark money entities like AIPAC, whose donors are primarily Republican and pro-Netanyahu, have also burnished their political capital towards purging lawmakers calling for peace in the Middle East. They tried and failed with Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky, while denying a return for Indiana’s John Hostettler, and unseating Democratic incumbents Jamaal Bowman of New York, and Cori Bush of Missouri. They even went into MD-03 to slander Harry Dunn, a famous Capitol Police officer known for serving on 1/6, and into OR-03 to pummel a Democratic primary candidate solely because of her family name. More special interests trying to buy votes instead of earning them.

3. Big Agriculture: Rural America is being squeezed by large agribusiness monopolies and factory farms. It is a story all too common in places like Iowa, stories replicated across the country over and over again. In truth, the government long-term has supported agribusiness monopolies and factory farmers far more than they do family farms and small farmers, which have declined precipitously in the past 40 years.

   Although there have been bipartisan attempts to address this issue, little action has come through. Past presidential administrations, especially Obama and Trump, failed to utilize opportunities to rein in the power of Big Agriculture. Contributions from Big Agriculture have reached $500 million just in 2024, often to Agriculture Committee chairs and lawmakers who work out each and every farm bill.

   Furthermore, the consolidation of farm businesses, grocery chains, agricultural appliance companies, and the meatpacking industry have resulted in less market competition and higher prices we are seeing today.

4. Pension System Raiders from Venture Capital, Hedge Funds, & Private Equity: One development you might not notice in the states: Corporate Raiders in your state pension systems. If you are in Rhode Island, California, Kentucky, Ohio, or Minnesota, you know this story and have lived it for a while. State retirement boards enter deals with venture capital companies, private equity firms, and hedge funds where taxpayers pay more for those contracts, and money for hard working workers and retirees go to Wall Street and Corporate America, even as those investments are high-risk and most underperform, as Ted Siedle documents in Pension Warriors and elsewhere. That’s not counting the fraud and abuse most likely occurring under that system of secrecy, like the Raimondo Point Judith Capital conflict of interest in Rhode Island.

   The result for keeping pension system contracts secret and putting more pension system money into the private sector is plenty of campaign contributions from people in the Manhattan Institute, executives like Enron’s John Arnold, and dark money Super PACs like Engage RI.

5. Defense Contractors: The US military today has a larger budget now than it did during World War II, or even the Cold War. Nothing wrong with maximum preparedness for foreign policy crises, which are a must.

   But there is something just uniquely wrong when the Pentagon budget increases endlessly despite warnings about waste, fraud, and abuse by defense contractors, who have raised prices inexcusably for war profiteering, as what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, private contractors like Raytheon also play the game of contributing to politicians in hopes of staying in their good graces.

6. Big Technology: Social media companies are killing our children, almost literally, between the mental health crisis we see today, to cyberbullying, political algorithms, and the rest. Congress knows the problem very well.

   And yet, Washington DC fails to put guardrails and basic rules on Silicon Valley and Big Tech, as they lobby every year, including on the airwaves, to kill any bipartisan compromises.

7. The Mini-Interests You Don’t Know About: Privatized water and sewer systems are coming at a cost to our communities, including with skyrocket bills. Find out more here.

   Corporate landlords are devastating the housing market, making it impossible for working class families to afford a home, not much different from how the housing market bubble cost the American middle class in 2008.

   Rail safety legislation has been killed this year at the behest of industry titans like Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific Corporation.

   Don’t ignore utility companies either. They play a big role in state politics, like Dominion Energy does in Virginia.

   The problems of the prison-industrial complex are very real, especially in the Deep South.

   Companies like Uber, Starbucks, Stellantis, Jeep, Hilton, & John Deere take advantage of their workers immensely, which is why we see labor organizing like never before. Furthermore, labor unions have reached record popularity in our generation, despite the wishes of union busters like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, & Howard Schultz.

   Sure, organized labor isn’t perfect, if leadership grow too distant from the rank-and-file which can sow unnecessary mistrust between the two (as late Council 94 President J. Michael Downey confided with me in regards to the 2016 Clinton-Trump election). But what we are seeing today is quite telling nonetheless.

   Not to mention the donor class (people like Reid Hoffman) who want a more friendly ally at the Federal Trade Commission. Seriously, watch this.

And finally, the corporate media (more accurately, corporate media executives). Just look at CEO David Zaslav, whose company owns CNN. He wants a President who will be friendly to corporate mergers & acquisitions (hint, hint, not Biden/Harris, but Trump-Vance). Does anyone seriously think Zaslav is preserving the integrity of CNN by essentially endorsing Trump on his policies? It shouldn't, and it likely doesn’t fly even in the CNN newsroom.

It certainly is a problem if you clock the negative coverage of Biden’s age relative to the coverage of Trump’s age & cognition, almost an obvious discrepancy in plain sight. Trump is being sanewashed, as one article reports.

Project 2025’s leader has confessed extensive and intimate ties to Trump in a damning interview. That fact is and has been vastly under-covered relative to the attention of Harris’s policy positions.

How about the well-connected taking advantage of media institutions to their own advantage (i.e Gina Raimondo)? Not a new thing, though it seems to be a worsening problem with a media run today by private business executives.

And we now have a media ecosystem where the outlets are feeding their audience only the coverage they want to hear, FOX News and all. That, by the way, is partly the result of Ronald Reagan’s 1987 takedown of the Fairness Doctrine. Meanwhile, corporate executives cut down local newsrooms and lay off team staff for profit. The result is a fractured media landscape.

So remember, if you want to take on the special interests, you need a vote, a voice, a team, and a plan. Let’s start by holding back Trumpism and its corporate backers.