How Musk Bought Our Government

 And, maybe, how we buy it back.

Earlier this week, I wrote a discouraging, depressing (even for me) essay about how far gone the United States of America’s democratic experiment has fallen, “Can It Be Fixed?.” A lot of that was inspired by an initial, overly simple bit of calculation I did estimating how easily our elected officials could be bribed by the billionaires. The calculation was an attempt put a price on bulk betrayal of the public trust. (Some, of course, didn’t need any incentive at all. Yeah, I’m talking about the Republican House of Representatives.)

After I wrote that piece, I decided to put together a spreadsheet to run a collection of numbers, determining the price range of various elected officials, based on a conservative estimate of the Space Nazi’s net worth. Some of the motivation for that came from an article titled, “Here's the net worth you need in 2025 to rank in the top 25%, 10%, 0.1% of Americans — how do you stack up right now?” The bottom end of that bracket, the 25% group, began at a net worth of about $700,000 and I used that number for my baseline billionaire competitor. That is, roughly, where I stand in the US brackets. My numbers were, initially, depressing as hell. I was depressed because, even if I contributed 1% of my net worth every election, I wouldn’t be making a measurable dent (~4%) in Musk’s 0.0001% bribe level. And bribes they will be, because Republicans are the party of “no consequences” lawlessness and, while they are in charge of all three branches of the federal government, they will be crime’ing constantly.

However, after fooling with the spreadsheet (above) to create a way to “manage” Musk’s bribes, one place where the spreadsheet is significantly oversimplified in that it assumes the “donations” will be evenly distributed across every member of each branch of the government. That is wrong, impractical, and unnecessary. You only have to control every other vote in the House and Senate plus 1 in each group, which means you only have to bribe slightly more than half of each collection of congresscritters. Currently, since Republicans have the majority of billionaires (and the billionaires control all of the major media outlets), working people’s voices are overwhelmed in those venues. Supposedly, Musk spent approximately 1% of his net worth in the 2024 elections, a reported $290M. He obviously expected a return on that “investment” and now that he is rampaging through the US Treasury Department it’s pretty obvious that he is getting it with terrifying interest.

That has to make any reasonable person feel hopeless.

After marinating in that bit of misery for a bit, I decided to add a column at the bottom of the main part of the spreadsheet (Totals for All (75,017,613) Democratic Voters), which was simply my pitiful amount for each percentage calculated times all of the Democratic voters. The first number, $52,512,329, was more than a little stunning. My pitiful 70¢ turned into a weapon of mass democracy. But with the kind of money that my 5 donation brackets illustrated, we could fund elections and our own media outlets. The 0.1% bracket, with $52,512,330,00 to spend, is encouraging, even for me (and that is a high bar for hopefulness).

Of course the real problem is that organizing Democrats and liberals is infinitely harder than herding cats; or even bobcats. But organizing is exactly what will have to happen on the same scale as the fascists who organized to create The Heritage Foundation, Fox News and the rest of the fascist broadcasting propaganda networks, and the MAGA mob. Will Rogers said, “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” That has to change as much as several generations of liberal, independent, and libertarian “special children” will hate it. Regardless, there is no issue that will unite liberals the way abortion united the Christian Right. The main left-wing distraction in 2024 was Gaza and Israel, which promptly vanished into insignificance the moment Trump’s 2025 agenda went into operation in his first week in office as Musk and his child cyber-soldiers invaded the Treasury Department. That bunch of lefties are hiding under the same rocks as the Trump voters who wanted to change their vote the day after the election.

Democratic and left-wing fund-raising needs to be trust-worthy, centralized, and effective.  I get a dozen hands-out emails every day from a variety of possibly-Democratic and I now reflexively flag as junk and delete them in bulk and without a glance. I have a VoIP home phone system and, after November 5, restarted the $10/month “Premium Service” just to have my calls screened so that no one who isn’t in my Contacts list can make my phone ring and it’s way easier to toss a caller into the “Junk Call” folder if they leave a message. (That cuts down on the funeral plot and cremation insurance offers, too.)  Democrats need to have their own “propaganda news network, too, and with the kind of money that could be raised we could have several, including AM radio. Think Tanks like The Heritage Foundation are needed, too. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is fine, but not nearly USA-centric enough or aggressive enough.

And all that is just off of the top of my head. We need a lot more heads involved.