Money and Political Muscle

Tracking Likely DNC power players behind Biden’s re-election campaign

Our founders fought for a system based on rule of law, ethics and a basic sense of doing right by our nation. Debate, defined as civil disagreement based on fact, is one of our pillars.

However, we have devolved into a country where those with the most money sway government officials to make decisions supposedly on behalf of the people. This gives the super rich an out-sized role in our democracy, and outsider candidates with positions not supported by them doomed at the ballot box. 

In this year’s presidential race, on the Democratic side, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has already picked its horse: President Joe Biden. No primaries, the DNC has proclaimed, and certainly no equal treatment of other Democratic candidates, especially if their name is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

To seal the DNC’s forgone conclusion vis-a-vis President Biden as THE CANDIDATE, a hefty slate of backers has quietly stepped forward to park their money. Who are the likely power players behind DNC causes and President Biden’s re-election campaign? What follows is an attempt to out them and some of their agendas. 

I start with the largest contributors to the DNC primary organization, Democrats.org. Alphabet, the parent company of Google and Youtube, comes in as the #1 donor, according to Open Secrets, with $2,238,832 in donations in 2022. 83% of Alphabet’s total of $14+ million in donations, in fact, went to help (re)elect Senator Raphael Warnock, Majority Leader of the Senate-Charles Schumer, Senator John Fetterman, Senator Mark Kelly, Representative Ro Khanna and many others. It is no wonder that Google and Youtube actively censor candidates like Kennedy who they did not support. 

Colleagues at Kleiner Perkins et al, which has investments in Coursera, Duolingo and Handshake, comes in at #2, with $1.83 million in contributions to the DNC and a total of $3.6 million towards other organizations affiliated with the DNC, like the Democratic Congressional and Senatorial Campaign Committees. Why are they so active in donating to such Democratic institutions if not to influence policy decisions?

The third highest donor to the DNC in 2022 was infamous billionaire George Soros’ Soros Fund Management with $1.59 million in contributions. Individuals there gave a whopping $179,885,784 to a variety of liberal or progressive causes. The fund gave most of this amount, $175 million, to Democracy Pac II, for which I could not find a website, but I did find FEC filings and an Open Secrets declaration for them. Democracy PAC was created in 2019 by Soros himself. In 2021, he created Democracy PAC II. 

If an individual donates a hefty share of your total (re) election drive, would you not feel beholden to them? Are contributors merely generous or are they out to buy political muscle? I suggest the latter. 

Individuals from Arista Networks (an industry leader in data-driven, client-to-cloud networking for large data center, campus and routing environments) rank fourth with $1,586,862 in donations to the DNC. They also donated $1M to American Bridge 21st Century (the largest research, tracking, and rapid response operation in the Democratic Party), and millions to 118 other Democratic candidates and state Democratic parties in 2022. Their Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Development Officer, Andreas von Bechtelsheim, worth $10.4 billion, is a German national, and is therefore not permitted to donate to an American presidential election. No names of specific individual donors can be found. I did find that the CEO, Jayshree Ullal, donated in the 2016 election.

Newsweb Corporation, which owns several television and radio stations and was founded by Fred Eychaner, gave $1,534,500 to the DNC in 2022, to take fifth place. They also gave $16 million to each of the Senate and House Majority PACs that year. Half of that came from Eychaner’s own wealth, despite being listed as retired. Open Secrets has over 1,000 entries of donations from Eychaner in 2022 to many Democratic party candidates; excluding the above donations, they total in the millions. What does financing the campaigns of so many in office buy him, and why donate so much if not to impact policy decisions? 

Michael Bloomberg, number six, is widely known to donate millions to Democrat Affiliates. This year, he gave $5 million to support New York Governor Kathy Hochul “beneath a maze of shell groups and indirection,” according to journalist Nicholas Fandos at The New York Times. In November of last year, he donated more than $10 million to House Majority PAC. His donations across the spectrum of Democratic PACs total $50 million for 2022. He too has helped to elect many Senators and Congressmen.

Before he went to prison, Sam Bankman-Fried, formerly of FTX, donated $37.6 million to Democratic PACs in 2022, making him the seventh most influential billionaire in that election cycle, prior to his bankruptcy. In an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, he poignantly warned, “Everyone should be skeptical” of donors’ motives.

Physician Karla Jurvetson is also a major donor. In fact, she gave $25 million to democratic committees in 2022.

James H and Marilyn Simons rank 18th in the Democratic donor catalog with $21.8 million given in 2022. When not donating to democratic candidates’ election campaigns, they run their own organization, Simons Foundation, which touts itself as “advancing the frontiers of mathematics and the basic sciences.” In partnership with Deerfield Management, they recently launched Harbor Discoveries “to help bring next-generation therapeutics to market,” a drug company with $130 million in backing.

Stephen Mandel, hedge fund manager and founderounder of Lone Pine Capital, along with his wife, donated $18 million to various Democratic PACs in 2022. He founded Lone Pine Foundation to fight poverty through education and Zoom Foundation for innovative change and lasting impact. The couple is also on the board of The Connecticut Project, with a mission to “bring together people, ideas, and resources to improve systems and generate real world outcomes so that all our neighbors can achieve self-directed and prosperous lives.”

Although the founder of Linkedin, Reid Garrett Hoffman, ranks twenty-fourth on the list of donors, he seems highly wired into decision making as a member of The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Despite CFR’s status as an “independent, nonpartisan think-tank,”on August 15th they hosted a trilateral summit at Camp David between President Joe Biden, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kushida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol. They boast a membership roster of over 5,000, including top government officials. 96% of donations went to Democratic orgs in 2022 and 100% in 2018, when Trump was President, but don’t forget they are non-partisan.

Hoffman is also relevant due to his participation in the elusive Bilderberg Meeting, a secretive three-day, annual chat between many heads of state. This year, Biden sent Avril Haines, US Director of National Intelligence, to Portugal’s glorious Pestana Palace in May to convene with the likes of Henry Kissinger, Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Supreme Allied Commander Europe. In 2022, thirteen US government representatives attended the meeting with Hoffman, as did representatives from Facebook and Google. That’s a minimum of three of the biggest democratic donors with the privilege of attending the Bilderberg meeting with government officials. Is it not during private conversation between trusted colleagues that real decisions get made? A lawyer who has spent his career suing officials who fail to act responsibly is unlikely to get a foothold in such an exclusive session, no matter how ethical he is. 

The people trying to reinvigorate the United States’ high moral standing in the world do not have a chance against the pay-to-play billionaires with questionable mores and motives.

I started by talking about the foregone conclusion by the DNC that Biden is the candidate for the 2024 presidential election. Then, I delved into the people who donate millions, even billions, to elect our officials. How can we untangle money from politics and political agendas? Awareness of our current reward system may indeed point to the need for election reform. But, prior to that, and more primal to our existence, to our very thriving, we have the opportunity to return to the right path. 

What can we do? We can demand that the Democratic party act democratically and permit other candidates to debate President Biden. We can also stop name-calling anyone with a different opinion. Alternatively, we can engage in a healthy exchange of ideas.

Please sign this petition calling for the DNC to hold presidential debates. https://p2a.co/gosqkyc 

The United States was conceived of as the antithesis of countries in which the power and wealth of a few impact the many. Restore the voice of the people. Remove billionaires from the election process. Reclaim our democracy through a ballot free from outsized financial influence and corruption. 

The awareness we have just built allows us to see beyond the platitude of the establishment's lies, to not permit a political party to choose our candidate for us (the modus operandi for totalitarian states). Rather, we, the people, still have the power to decide who runs this great country. All we need to do is stand up and claim it.