Billionaire Tom Steyer replaces Soros as prominent leftist funder
In a recent column, “Billionaires Battle to Get Your Vote,” I documented leading funders for the right side of the political spectrum in the 2016 election as the Koch brothers, Charles and David. Those on the left side of the political spectrum were David Rockefeller (recently deceased) and George Soros. A new billionaire, Tom Steyer, has emerged outpacing both the right and the left in funding elections. But influence from the wealthy is nothing new.
The “rich” have been involved in directing public opinion for over a hundred years, first noted in our history textbooks when Mark Hanna, who made his fortune in the iron business, paid off Congressman William McKinley’s personal debt of $100,000 and elevated him onto the stage for president. He next “shook down” the giants of the Industrial Revolution — banking, oil, steel, railroads, etc. — that wanted markets and “spheres of influence” overseas.
Capitalizing on their fear that they would lose their influence over government and money to someone like William Jennings Bryan, who would actually represent the common people, Hanna raised an enormous slush fund, the largest in U.S. history, of $16 million to Democratic opponent William Jennings Bryan’s mere $1 million. This enabled the giants of the Industrial Revolution to unite to “buy” the presidency for McKinley in 1896.
With Mckinley’s successful conquest of much of Spain’s colonial holdings (Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam), colonialism and world influence became the Republican Party’s foreign policy. When it became much less popular due to its needing to be defended by American troops, Wall Street influence went underground.
President Woodrow Wilson spoke of this hidden force in his book “The New Freedom” when he wrote, “Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and others later united the class of wealth into the Institute of International Affairs in 1919, then two years later changed the name to the Council on Foreign Relations, thereafter providing the leadership and foreign policy of both major political parties, and globalism took root in each. Rockefeller’s nephew David in 1973 spread the Wall Street influence over Japan, Western Europe, and North America in an effort to unify those three regions in his Trilateral Commission. This was the foreign policy of both major political parties and much of the West and Japan until Donald Trump’s election in 2016.
Although David is recently deceased the CFR is the most influential political organization in the United States and will be for decades to come. Moreover, the leadership of The New York Times and Washington Post, like the government, is filled with its members ensuring a wide dissemination of their globalist messages, a message emulated by hundreds of other newspapers.
Enter CFR member George Soros, the leading funder of far-left causes and elections the past two decades, who is said to have spent $25 million on Hillary Clinton and other democratic candidates in 2016 and so far another $15 million in the present midterms. His specialty is not gradual influence toward the left and world government as has been the influence of the CFR but rather hardcore socialism and globalism. No one has as many organizations as combat ready and as highly financed as does George Soros. These include ACORN, the Tides Foundation, Sojourners, The Quantum Fund, Media Matters, The Open Society Institute, Friends of the Earth, The Center for American Progress, The Apollo Alliance, The American Constitution Society and, MoveOn.org.
Enter San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer, who promised to spend at least $30 million to elect progressives [a popular synonym for “socialists”] this campaign season, making him the most important Democratic donor in the United States. Steyer is openly urging the president’s removal through impeachment, even funding a video to that effect, and has with Soros bankrolled far-left Andrew Gillum’s Florida campaign for governor, hoping to flip the state from red to blue and anticipating that the resulting electoral count increase could sway the nation for decades. Steyer funneled about $800,000 into the Get Out the Vote initiative prior to the Gillum run.
The 100-plus year generational influence of the Rockefellers, John and David, and their organizations, principally the CFR together with that of Soros money and organizations and now Steyer’s money, easily dwarf that of the Koch brothers, said to be funding most of the right side of the political spectrum. The billionaire club easily favors the Democratic Party and the far-left side of the political spectrum. What is far worse is that Soros and Steyer seem not to be promoting rank-and-file Democrats but instead radicals who want to upend our political system. It appears that the rich who initially controlled the Republican Party, then both major parties for over 100 years, now has much greater dominance over the Democratic Party. Should they succeed, we will become a socialist country.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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