Trump vs Harris: Who are the Big Money Players Supporting the Candidates and What’s Soros' Game?
15:00 GMT 30.10.2024 (Updated: 18:21 GMT 30.10.2024)
© AP Photo / Alex Brandon
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As the federal election cycle races toward becoming the most expensive in US history, both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are being backed by staggering sums. But how do the financial forces and interests stack up between the two?
Fifty megadonors have collectively poured over $2.5 billion into political committees and other organizations supporting Democrats and Republicans, according to The Washington Post. Individual megadonors have played "an outsized role" in the 2024 presidential race, Axios reports.
"What the donors expect in return is influence," Jim Rogers, renowned investor, chairman of Beeland Interests, and co-founder of Quantum Fund, told Sputnik. "And if they need something or think they need something from the government, they think that they will be able to contact the government, contact someone and get what they need. If you pay a lot of money, you expect to get something in return."
Billionaires Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg gave $50 million each to support Kamala Harris, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk has given almost $75 million to PACs supporting Trump. Businessman Timothy Mellon poured a whopping $125 million into the super PAC Make America Great Again. Nonetheless, Harris is leading Trump by over two-to-one in terms of fundraising and spending.
"In the period 1988 to the present, the emergence of unregulated globalism has created an opportunity for big investors to really not just curry favor with big governments, but to basically pick and choose leaders and key officials in these governments, either to protect themselves from prosecution or to put themselves in a position where they can reap large financial rewards off of their government connections," Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel told Sputnik.
Referring to the Biden and Clinton families' suspected influence peddling schemes, the analyst noted that "it's relatively cheap to send $20 million, $100 million, even $250 million towards a politician, if that politician can turn around and help a big company turn $2 trillion into $4 trillion."
TRUMP VS HARRIS: WHO IS MEGADONORS' FAVORITE AND WHY?
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) October 30, 2024
Fifty megadonors have collectively poured over $2.5 billion into political committees and other organizations supporting Democrats and Republicans, according to The Washington Post. The ongoing election cycle "is poised to… pic.twitter.com/5LcbuuZAUQ
Kamala Harris has raised around $1 billion since July, when she was endorsed by George and Alex Soros, BlackRock co-founder Ralph Schlosstein, and Evercore founder Roger Altman. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon also expressed his full support for Kamala in private, according to The New York Times. BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has long played a substantial role in Democratic administrations, with the company's employees serving in the US government under both Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
"One of the biggest games, the easy money games in America and in the West right now is promoting this unregulated globalism where there is no power strong enough to obstruct a multinational company or investors or multinational companies from profiting off of their ties to these various government actors," Ortel stressed.
What Companies Support the Candidates?
Alphabet Inc., Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Meta top the list of Kamala Harris' campaign donors, according to OpenSecrets. Silicon Valley tycoons have also flocked to support Harris: Facebook* co-founder Dustin Moskovitz gave $30 million to the Harris campaign while co-founder of Opsware Ben Horowitz donated $2.5 million.
"The Republican Party is no longer the party of the rich," Ortel noted. "The Democratic Party out of Silicon Valley and the neo-monopolies created there – they have the money, which is very different than it was in the 1980s under Reagan and under Bush."
While Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Hollywood have thrown their weight behind Harris, US industries and defense contractors have largely supported Donald Trump, according to OpenSecrets and financial tech startup Quiver Quantitative. Trump is famous for huge military spending and benefits to domestic industrial giants. In 2018, he signed what at the time was seen as the largest military budget in US history, worth $700 billion. Still, Boeing reportedly provided Harris with a bigger chunk of donations.
TRUMP VS HARRIS: WHAT COMPANIES HAVE THROWN THEIR WEIGHT BEHIND THE CANDIDATES?
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) October 30, 2024
Alphabet Inc., Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Meta top the list of Kamala Harris’ campaign donors, according to OpenSecrets. Silicon Valley tycoons also flocked to support Harris: Facebook… pic.twitter.com/tUTWpCVulB
"President Eisenhower warned in his farewell speech of the threat posed by the military-industrial complex," Ortel continued. "Trump was very much in favor of investing a lot of money in the military. Republicans are very much generally in favor of doing that. And I think what you're going to find when you dig a little bit more deeply into defense contractors, they support both parties. I mean, they're in this to make sure that they can get as much money out of the taxpayer through these military programs as possible. And both parties are in supporting that swamp really to the grievous outcomes that have occurred since 1988 and 1989 in particular."
Is Soros Poised to Pull the Strings of a Potential Harris Administration?
George and Alex Soros were quick to endorse Kamala Harris once the vice president announced her bid in July. Tesla CEO Elon Musk mockingly thanked the Soroses at the time "for not keeping everyone in suspense about who the next puppet would be."
"George Soros, you know, I have a hard time being objective about the guy," Ortel said. "He has, as you rightly point out, these various charities, and they're massive, and they exclusively donate to quote, 'progressive' causes. Now, Soros has historically – remember, he broke the Bank of England in [1992] – he's in the business of pushing for and against different governments around the world. And when you do that, you can make a lot of money as a speculator on the side."
Soros appeared to have played in cahoots with corrupt politicians, donating tens of millions to their causes and getting much more in return, according to the analyst.
"The cost of getting on the right side of a government is probably $10 million to $100 million per government," Ortel pointed out. "So there are a lot of nefarious, I would argue, speculators. Soros is chief among them. And my review of some of the Open Society filings, which I have spent a fair amount of time in that field trying to understand which charities do good work and which don't, they're deeply suspicious."
TRUMP VS HARRIS: WHICH CANDIDATE IS FINANCIAL SPECULATORS SOROS' DARLING?
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) October 30, 2024
George and Alex Soros were quick to endorse Kamala Harris once the vice president announced her bid in July. Tesla CEO Elon Musk mockingly thanked the Soroses at the time "for not keeping everyone in… pic.twitter.com/xmBGRGjzMe
Remarkably, Soros' endorsement of Harris coincided with that of Hillary and Bill Clinton, whose foundation seems to be the largest unprosecuted fraud ever, according to the Wall Street analyst. It also turned out in July that Alex Soros is engaged with Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's longtime confidant.
"We don't need a new set of laws and regulations. The ones that are on the books are not enforced. They go after the small people, not the big people. And the crooks get it. So they use charities to route sums to crooked politicians," Ortel concluded.
*Facebook is banned for extremism in Russia.
