The Epstein Class Bought 16 Years of Your Elections for Pocket Change
40 billionaires, split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, spent 1.57 billion dollars steering American politics. It cost them 0.09% of their wealth. The left-right fight you are watch
40 billionaires put 1.57 billion dollars into American elections since 2010. That is the top line of a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund. It is a big number, until you read the second one. That 1.57 billion is 0.09% of what these people are worth. Not even a tenth of one percent. For the median American household, the same slice of net worth is about 180 dollars. A week of groceries.
40 Epstein-Tied Billionaires Have Injected $1.6B Into US Elections, Report Finds | Truthout
So 16 years of elections, courts, tax fights, and wars got shaped by 40 checkbooks, for less than what you spend on food in a week.
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The report is being read one way: 84% went to Republicans. True. That framing is the trap. It makes this a story about the other team instead of a story about you.
Here is what the 84% hides. The billionaires themselves split almost evenly between the parties. Several of them wrote checks to the Clintons for years. And the two political families America is trained to fight over, the Trumps and the Clintons, both turn up in the same dead man’s birthday book. Trump’s page, the one with his signature that the House Oversight Committee released last year, is one he says is not his. He sued the Wall Street Journal over it. A judge threw the suit out in April. Bill Clinton has a page in there too.
At the top there is no left and no right. There is a donor class that funds the whole show and does not care which actor is on stage.
Look at who they are. The Adelson family, casino money, spent 745 million dollars, all of it to the right. Elon and Kimbal Musk, 365 million. Trump’s own campaigns and the super PACs behind him pulled 282 million out of this single pool of Epstein-tied money.
That 84% skew is not tribal loyalty. The money runs right because the right cuts their taxes hardest. The report says as much. Even the partisan number is not about ideology. It is a return on investment.
Then there is Epstein himself. He was worth around 600 million dollars, and that money bought him a sweetheart deal in 2008 and years of freedom he should never have had. The same class now buys the same immunity at scale. Senator Ron Wyden and the Senate Finance Committee found 4,725 wire transfers, about 1.08 billion dollars, moving in and out of a single one of Epstein’s accounts between 2003 and 2019. Some of it went to women and girls. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is sitting on those records right now, and Senate Republicans blocked the bill that would pry them loose.
They do not fear the law. They price it.
This is the divide that matters, and it is not left against right. It is the people who own the machine against the people who feed it. You paid your 180-dollar share of net worth into nothing. They paid their 0.09% and got two Trump tax laws that handed this same class back many times over what they spent. That is not corruption in the movie sense, with a briefcase in a parking garage. It is a subscription. The rules are a service, and they are the customers.
They know the elections are a market. They know your vote is priced in. They know the fight over borders and pronouns keeps you busy while they close on the tax code. And they are doing it anyway.
None of this is new. In the last century of the Roman Republic, the rich bought offices and juries in the open, everyone knew, and the Republic held elections right up until it was a corpse in a toga. The forms outlived the thing they were meant to protect.
America’s myth is that its billionaires are private citizens who got lucky, not rulers. In China the arrangement is explicit. When Jack Ma criticized the state’s financial regulators, they pulled his company’s public offering and he went quiet for months, then came back smaller and careful, lesson learned. The billionaire there does not cross the state. Here the state answers to the billionaire.
This is what the slide toward authoritarian rule looks like. You don’t even need tanks in the street. A government of the people that keeps running the ceremony while answering to 40 checkbooks. The mask is not slipping by accident, and both parties are staffed by the same hands. The cost lands where it always lands. Your wage that has not moved in years, your premium that keeps climbing, your rent, all of it downstream of a tax code written by the people who bought the writers.
Excellent, Neil. However, the remaining 98% either have no clue who runs the country or pretend it doesn't bother them. Most Americans believe in the land of Freedom, and China is ruled by an iron fist. Who rules whom? All governments are managed by society. The United States most recently staved off bankruptcy in 2008, at the end of the Bush 2 administration. Now, a fire sale is going on like there is no fire. A house can burn down even if no one sees it. The house still burns whether anyone is inside or not.
Infuriating!! And citizens United will be our destruction