America's oligarchs lost one, but they'll get over it soon enough.
It's not only Republicans who are subject to complete takeover by our would-be modern aristocracy, although the battle is more pronounced on the red side due to the populist fervor in the GOP grassroots today.
Democrats are filled to the gills with connected elites too, of course. And they are trying to openly purchase elected office in the same shameless way.
Nicholas Kristof, the former longtime columnist at the ruling establishment's paper of record, The New York Times, saw his bid for the Democrat nomination for governor in Oregon squelched by the state Supreme Court on Feb. 17 due to his not meeting residency requirements.
Kristof had voted in New York as recently as 2020 yet apparently believed his chances of grabbing a primo political seat were better in the Beaver State.
One wonders how many Oregonians understand just how deeply tied to the money class, blue division, Kristof is. And just how hostile his machinations were.
Avowed socialist publication Jacobin magazine may be an unusual news source to cull but its expose of Kristof's heavyweight financial backers to a campaign that is now officially toast is informative and compelling.
Branko Marcetic on Feb. 11 revealed the duo Nicholas Kristof is especially close to:
The last time I wrote about Kristof’s campaign, I noted that $50,000 of his impressive fundraising haul (at the end of December 2021, it was $2.5 million) came from billionaire Melinda Gates, before detailing the oddly close relationship that Kristof and his wife developed with Gates and her now ex-husband, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill....
Well, since then, it’s turned out that it’s not just one half. In a filing made near the end of December, we now know that two weeks after Melinda’s own donation, Bill Gates donated the same amount, $50,000, to Kristof’s campaign.
Marcetic makes the key point, which cannot be emphasized enough:For years, Kristof’s columns were strangely aligned with the Gateses and their many dubious ventures, including school privatization, microloans, and genetic modification as a solution to disease and hunger....
In an earlier article, published in November, Marcetic related how Kristof had used his NYT column in 2008 to urge “newly elected Barack Obama create a department of international aid and development and appoint Bill its inaugural head.”In 2018, Kristof could be seen “promoting a Gates-funded livestock service business in Kenya.” That ain't the half of it. Kristof used the enormous platform that was his NYT column to gooily cheerlead for Bill and Melinda much like a teen-age girl raves about her favorite boy band. Here's Kristof in 2019 in a piece embarrassingly titled "The Bill-Melinda Gates Romance Started With a Rejection":
I hugely admire what Bill and Melinda Gates have done to alleviate global suffering. Hundreds of thousands of children now survive each year who wouldn’t have without the Gateses’ money, advocacy and ingenuity. They have also been steadfast in advocating changes in tax laws — raising the inheritance tax, for example — to create a more fair society.
During interviews with Bill and Melinda over many years, I’ve often tried to get them to dish on their relationship, as a way of spicing up discussions about global health and their foundation work. They resolutely resisted my interrogations.
One can't help but think the use of the word "interrogations" is a deliberate slap at readers of this bilge. Kristof knows full well what he is doing here, and he is cognizant of the fact that it has nothing remotely to do with genuine journalism. A 2015 column is even more cringeworthy, oddly obsessing about Bill and Melinda's pillow talk about saving the world. We'll spare you that, and just include this saccharine clip:But first, just a reminder of how historic this [Gates] foundation has been. It has played a central role in a campaign to transform health and nutrition for the world’s poor.
Big-box journalism has been so hopelessly compromised in recent years that apparently it's not even worth pondering the larger implications of Kristof receiving a six-figure combo political donation from Bill and Melinda Gates right out of the chute for his initial foray into elective politics after he spent years writing love letters to the pair in the form of a major newspaper column. Friends of Bill also joined in to lavish cash on Kristof, Marcetic writes:Since then, Kristof has seen his coffers filled by several other figures with Gates connections. One is Connie Ballmer, wife of former Microsoft CEO and fellow billionaire Steve Ballmer, who gave Kristof $50,000. Another is Bill Clapp, whose Seattle International Foundation has received $800,000 from the Gates Foundation over the years, and who donated $10,000 to Kristof. (Oregon is one of only five states that has no limits on campaign contributions.)
Kristof has several other credentialed super-rich backers, which should raise further questions about just what he was up to at The Times for all those years. Kristof wrote a column at the Times from 2001 to 2021. As Marcetic continues, things get even more problematic:Gates isn’t the only [Jeffrey] Epstein-connected donor in Kristof’s campaign filings, either. Besides neoliberal economist Larry Summers, who gave Kristof $5,000, he’s also received $15,000 from Centerview Partners counselor Robert Rubin, a former official with the Bill Clinton administration who, White House records show, first invited the notorious pedophile to the Oval Office.
There were more deep wells to tap as well:Beyond the Gates and Epstein issues, Rubin is representative of the kind of large donors Kristof has attracted to his campaign. Over the past few months, Kristof has received anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 from a variety of corporate, tech, and finance bigwigs, including: LinkedIn founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman ($50,000); private equity maven Stephen Kaplan ($20,000); Jeff Bezos’s father, Miguel ($30,000); former Disney executive Robert Iger ($15,000); real estate tycoon Michael Hackman ($25,000); and Nike’s Maria Eitel ($20,000) — which is particularly interesting given Kristof’s vehement and committed advocacy for sweatshops over the years. Kristof has also received $50,000 each from Miguel McKelvey, cofounder of the disastrous start-up WeWork, and John Thornton, a mining magnate and alum of Goldman Sachs.
And so now the campaign is a no-go. But here’s the beautiful part for Kristof: he gets to keep all that money anyway to dispense with as he sees fit. The Portland Tribune reported in January:Nicholas Kristof's campaign for governor has already raised more than $2.5 million, even as the Oregon Supreme Court considers whether he can run at all. The court is expected to rule on his eligibility after Jan. 26.
If the answer is no, Kristof will be able to keep the cash in his state campaign finance fund for use on a future race or to dole out to other candidates.
Perhaps this is why the deep pockets-backed Kristof chose to run in Oregon despite his questionable residency status:Oregon has one of the most liberal campaign finance laws in the nation, due to court rulings that determined limits are a violation of the freedom of speech guaranteed in the state constitution.
Any person, company, group or other entity can give an unlimited amount of money, as long as it is reported. Nike founder Phil Knight contributed over $2 million to the unsuccessful 2018 governor's campaign of former Rep. Knute Buehler, R-Bend.
Just imagine the possibilities. Bill and Melinda could have shoveled as much cash as they wanted into Oregon to help one of their favorite pet journalists grasp for the governor's mansion. The sky was the limit. It's a scary thought. Is this the face of elections in America today? Money has always severely tainted the process, but now it threatens to completely dominate it to a point where the term "popular vote" becomes an absurdity.As WorldTribune has repeatedly documented, perhaps the most significant political story of the past couple of years after the rampant election fraud of 2020 and the coronavirus social coercion regime is the oligarchy's move to monopolize major elected offices in this nation. The Republican Wall Street establishment is perversely mimicking President Donald Trump's America First appeal as it uses the sheer power that comes from mountains of cold, hard greenbacks in an attempt to retake the party from a MAGA grassroots that it so clearly despises.
Private equity giant The Carlyle Group has seen its former co-CEO Glenn Youngkin capture the Virginia governorship despite Carlyle's appalling ties to George Soros, communist China, war profiteering, the 2008 housing crisis and much, much more.
Now David McCormick, former CEO of the biggest hedge fund firm in the world, Bridgewater Associates, is running the same posturing populist playbook in pursuit of the GOP nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania. This despite the fact that Bridgewater is so deeply entangled with China that it actually manages state money for the Asian communist superpower. It is interesting to note that, like Kristof, McCormick also has a sketchy claim to state residency in Pennsylvania, having lived in Connecticut until very recently. “I never left Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has always been in my heart, and sure I was in Connecticut, I was leading a great investment firm there, and I’ve lived the American dream, been successful. So I’m going to come back to Pennsylvania in service,”
McCormick says in defense of his electoral terrain-shopping. Kristof's defense of his dubious claim to eligibility was cynical in the extreme. The Associated Press reported Jan. 27:
“There are many peripatetic Oregonians who, for various reasons, live in more than one place and may prefer candidates who understand the experience of living in multiple places or changing residences often,” [his] lawyers wrote [in their appeal to the state Supreme Court], citing “seasonal migrant workers," university students, soldiers and others.
If something is not done soon to change this trajectory, America will become Canada. No free speech, private bank accounts frozen if you voice the wrong opinions. And worse.
Oligarchy is the ugliest stage of democracy. The republic is tottering, and the uber-wealthy believe the time is ripe to wield total control over the manipulated masses.
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