by Jason Koslowski, published on Socialist Action, September 11, 2024
[Editor’s note/Jeff Mackler: Written five days before the September 10 internationally televised Harris-Trump presidential election debate, we reprint below Jason Koslowski’s insightful Left Voice article detailing the US ruling class’s multi-billionaire backers of the Harris campaign… and Trump’s too. At $10 billion, the 2024 election expenditures far exceed the record 2020 total of $8 billion. Outright lies, distortions and half-truths notwithstanding, the Harris-Trump debate revealed that both ruling class candidates are unequivocally committed to advancing the central interests of the US ruling rich, including their endless imperialist wars, racist and scapegoating mass deportation policies, global warming/environmental destruction and reactionary social policies. The latter include ever deepening cuts in health care, education and other vital social service and a devastating corporate driven price inflation – all the direct result of a crisis-ridden world capitalist-imperialist economic system where human needs must always be subordinated to capitalist profits.]
Harris, Walz, and the Democratic Party tell us this election is a battle over democracy. A glance at who’s funding the Harris campaign shows that the vote is a lover’s quarrel among sectors of the ruling class.
A care economy. Opportunity for all. A future with no child poverty. A battle to save democracy. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have been promising a glorious new era. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) are clapping their hands and giving glowing speeches in support. So is union head Shawn Fain, who says Harris is the candidate the working class deserves. Jacobin keeps on calling her choice of Walz a historic victory for the working class.
But there’s an embarrassing question lingering in the air, like the smell of rotting mice in the walls: Who’s actually payingfor this campaign?
There were clues, if you knew where to look, at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). Just before the event started, some Democratic Party staffers ushered a very well-dressed group — top donors — into free luxury rooms in Chicago’s most expensive hotel, the Ritz Carlton. The group got exclusive tours of Wrigley Field and the best wines and food, then a meet and greet with the anointed: Harris herself. (The next tier down only got to stay free at the Four Seasons.) Like with Joe Biden in 2020, the top donors will probably get sent solid gold campaign buttons to thank them. The real prize, though, is that the biggest donors get to be ambassadors in countries they think they would like. Italy? France? It’s all for sale!
The DNC speeches forgot to mention the solid gold buttons.
Follow the Billions
This election is shaping up to be the most expensive in history — about $10 billion, all told. So, who’s paying Harris’s and Walz’s bills?
The reason it’s even a question is because Harris and Walz are refusing to disclose some of the biggest donors, called “bundlers.” These are the members of the big bourgeoisie — media titans, lords of finance, etc. — who tap their networks to “bundle” donations through exclusive, and very expensive, fundraisers.
There are other problems with following the money. Elections are bidding wars, and Super PACs play a major role. Super PACs are driven above all by donations from the richest of the bourgeoisie, but they only have to disclose donors at intervals of several months. More than this, they’re also very good at hiding the true source of donations. Democratic and Republican campaigns are flooded with “dark money,” meaning funds that are very hard or impossible to trace. The amount of dark money in national campaigns jumped from $5.2 million in 2006 to about $1 billion in 2020. (For anyone keeping score at home, that’s an increase of a little over 19,115%.) That number has, without a doubt, continued its exponential climb this time around.
But like any good mystery, there are clues everywhere.
The first clue is how Harris got to be anointed the candidate in the first place.
One of the death-blows to Biden’s candidacy —maybe the death stroke — was a “donor strike.” Some of the biggest Wall Street supporters organized themselves and promised: no more donations if Biden is the candidate. A few days later, Biden was off the ticket.
Not long after, the Financial Times put out an episode of one of its more obscure podcasts. It’s called Unhedged. It mostly deals with the kind of stock market news that only investors would find very interesting; the episode was easy to miss. It was titled “Why Wall Street Picked Harris.” It begins: “Yeah, the horrifying truth about America: that money and politics are often the same thing.”
In it, James Fontanella-Khan, an FT reporter whose beat is Wall Street, points out an interesting fact. Before Biden was even ousted, a bloc of major Wall Street leaders
already had a plan for Harris to be the person to replace him. They thought the idea of having a mini-primary was like, terrible. They were very scared of potentially the party moving even further left. Like, Wall Street has been complaining for the longest time of Biden’s shift to the left, especially on antitrust and being kind of generally perceived as anti-business.
Host: […] When the money spoke, was the decision made? In other words, was it determinative that Wall Street said, we’ll cut you off unless we have a new candidate?
Fontanella-Khan: I’d like to say 100 percent yes. I’ll say 99.9 because you can never be so definitive. But we went out with the story [about the Wall Street donor strike] on the Friday saying he’s gonna leave this weekend. And he left. And what was fascinating, though, was how capable these guys — mainly guys — on Wall Street were to kind of also plan the next steps, to make sure that Harris would be the candidate, that all the money would flow to her. And they made it clear to, like, also to potential rivals, we are not gonna fund your race.
In other words, this is the truth of this year’s “battle for democracy”: a bloc of Wall Street heads played a key, if not the key, role in tossing Biden and killing any competition to Harris. Then, a few short hours later, Harris was announced as the candidate.
Wall Street’s role wasn’t the only factor in Harris’s anointment, even if it was the main one. Another, of course, was that party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi worked behind the scenes to pressure Biden out. And yet: Schumer is the millionaire senator from New York — the home of Wall Street!
(Let’s come back to Pelosi, and the mystery of why she turned on Biden, in a minute.)
Now we start to get a clearer view of how Harris and Walz’s multi-billion-dollar push for the White House is being funded. The leadership is coming from a bloc of finance capital, exercising hegemony among the capitalists.
That bloc of capitalists is convinced, it seems, that Harris and Walz offer more secure and stable support for profit-reaping. It seems clear, for example, that Harris plans to free big capital of Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is widely loathed on Wall Street for her push against monopolies (as that same FT podcast notes).
Not all of Wall Street is convinced, though; another bloc has broken for Trump. It seems spooked by the fact that Harris might — like Biden — call for a new tax on investments. But even on this last point, we have to be careful. In the last few days, Harris’s donors started flexing their muscles, openly rejecting her plan for a new tax on investments.
It didn’t take them long to get results. Six days after The New York Times ran the story about donors pushing back against Harris’s tax plan, her campaign suddenly announced it was all a big misunderstanding. Now she is calling for a tax on investment far lower than Biden did. The headline: “Harris Tells the Business Community: I’m Friendlier Than Biden.”
Silicon Valley is playing a central role too. Harris is helping lead many big capitalists from that region back into the Democratic fold. It seems some of Harris and Walz’s biggest reported donations have been from tech leaders like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
As Politico reports, Silicon Valley was increasingly hesitant with Biden for a few reasons. The first was his stance against cryptocurrency, in which many in Silicon Valley still have substantial investments. Another was his push for greater regulation of social media and AI. Harris, though, is from California, and built connections with donors there for her own 2016 Senate campaign. More than this, Harris’s brother-in-law was recently senior vice president and lead lawyer at Uber (until he took a break to help lead her campaign).
It didn’t take very long for Harris’s new campaign to reach out to major cryptocurrency capitalists and promise them she would “reset” the party’s relationship with them. (Of course, not all of Silicon Valley is convinced, with Elon Musk and others trying to organize dissenters for Trump.)
This fresh support for Harris helps solve another mystery. Why was Nancy Pelosi, one of Biden’s key allies, helping to force him from the race? The mystery starts to disappear when we remember a key fact: Pelosi is the House representative from California’s 11th district — 45 minutes north of Silicon Valley, and a home to many of its barons, including Mark Zuckerberg.
A Lover’s Spat Among the Ruling Class
The more we follow the billions, the more absurd it seems to call this election a battle for democracy. It is a contest between competing blocs of the ruling class. Harris is holding out to her main backers, especially on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, a vision of restored “stability” coming out of the pandemic.
Harris and Walz’s vision for their main funders includes the promise of some concessions to the working class — like a call for paid family leave, increased taxing of the super rich, and measures against price gouging in groceries.
But we have to see just how tenuous these promises are. Keeping them would probably require total Democratic control of the House, Senate, and White House, a remote possibility at best. Even if that happened, remember how easy it was for Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to gum up the works a few years ago; it will not be hard for others to do the same this time around.
The fact that these concessions are only a remote possibility is — almost certainly — a key reason that Harris’s bourgeois backers are not protesting too much. But only to a point, as shown by their opposition to her capital gains tax.
But there are far deeper problems for these promises, even if Harris and Walz win, and even if they could force them through Congress.
I’ve already said a lot about how capitalism is suffering from twin, grinding crises of low productivity growth and low profitability. The ruling class is desperate to restore higher levels of profit; and that means it needs to minimize disruptions to the economy, like strikes. ( a very negative perspective, to say the least – why not increase purchasing power -editor ) Harris seems to be selling her bloc of capitalists, led by Wall Street, on the idea that some promised concessions to the working class could help secure that “stability.”
But the desperation of the ruling rich for profits in these times of crisis brings with it catastrophic costs. The first: ever sharper imperialist conflicts. The Israeli genocide against Palestinians is only the latest example where the interests of the imperialist core of the global economy require propping up the brutality of the Israeli state. Harris’s vision of a “care economy,” even if it could come to pass, would be bought at the price of U.S.-made bombs dropping on Palestinian hospitals. In other words, Harris’s potential concessions are being held out to secure the global “order” our rulers desire. They’re a bid to buy off any potential opposition — in order to continue the horrors imperialism breeds.
The second cost can’t be separated from the first: ecocide. The “order” Harris wants to secure for the ruling rich comes at the price of a burning planet. At the DNC, Harris and Walz waved a hand vaguely at the problem of climate change. In the days after, Harris started racing backwards to embrace fracking. But climate change isn’t just continuing — it’s speeding up.
The imperialist war machine is a main driver. The United States military is the biggest polluter in our species’s history — needed to secure worldwide investments of the ruling class and to hold off the economic threats posed by China. Harris and Walz’s promises don’t even mention that driving force of ecocide.
All of this means that this election is a lover’s quarrel between different segments of the ruling class. This embarrassing fact hasn’t been mentioned by Harris, Walz, Bernie, or AOC either. A lot like the gold buttons.
The question now is: Will the working class and the oppressed once again be marshaled behind Harris — will we be led, again, by the ruling rich? Putting our hope in the people, in the class, that profit from the death of a planet is a dead end. The real hope lies with us.
The more we are told to support Harris, the more the global imperialist machine churns on, and the more the top-down class war continues. There is an alternative: our own organizing, our own politics — we must reject not just Harris, but the entire rotten system she wants to perch on top of. For that we’re going to need to build our own party, a party by and for working-class and oppressed people, to organize ourselves to win a whole new world. The real hope is revolution.
Jason Koslowski is a contingent college teacher and union organizer who lives in Philadelphia.
Reprinted from Left Voice, September 5, 2024.