ALAN'S LETTER

Guest blog: Larry Ottinger

Large monied interests are corrupting and destroying our democracy as extreme wealth literally skyrockets. Elon Musk gave $288 million to elect Donald Trump last year, including an illegal vote buying scam in Pennsylvania.

What exactly are the co-Presidents planning to cut in order to pay for trillions in tax giveaways to the ultra-rich?! It is somewhat painful to be reminded of Presidents with a different world view. In 1937 Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Did Trump say: Make America Greedy Again?

Trump hopes to appoint 13 billionaires to various positions in his cabinet and government, whose total net assets are approximately $420 billion (depending on which day and hour one uses to calculate)! Bernard Arnault, founder and CEO of LVMH, was also onstage, as were Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, adding another $700 billion on view, for a grand total of $1.1 trillion! Yep, $1,100,000,000,000.

We are about to engage in a major tax fight in 2025 which will hinge on which approach we take to funding our government, including our public investments in Social Security, Medicare, the rule of law, transportation, national parks and more for the common good:

Excessive wealth isn’t just limited to billionaires. Are you sitting down? There are 135,000 households in the U.S. (about 0.1%) with net wealth exceeding $50 million (the ultra-rich), with a combined total wealth of approximately $35 trillion! In jellybean talk, with each one worth one dollar and laid end to end, they would circle the planet 7,500 times.

Every week there is more outrageous news about the ultra-rich taking complete control over our politics, and dare I say, our lives. Last week we saw billionaire owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times defy their editorial boards and refuse to issue endorsements in a Presidential election, breaking with decades of tradition and policy.

This isn’t poker. It’s democracy. And it’s time to take one’s 501c3 chips and put them all on the table to support voter engagement and election protection. The Crises Charitable Commitment’s mission is to encourage donors to simply give more, without specifying a cause, but sometimes the compelling needs of a cause can make it easier for philanthropists to open their wallets. But for the next sixty days that cause is democracy.

Have you been reading the newspaper? What a month! I’m writing this letter on July 27, the one-month anniversary of the Presidential Debate, and I’m asking myself: When was the last time we’ve experienced thirty days like the last thirty?! The debate; the withdrawal pressure; Republican convention; JD Vance; the withdrawal; the Kamala anointment; the ear shot!

A few weeks ago I went north of Ukiah, California, to the Avenue of the Giants, the redwoods….OMG, they are so magnificent. But I realized I couldn’t leave “work” totally behind, because as I looked up hundreds of feet to the trees’ canopy, I imagined that must be where billionaires hang out–a different planet–so far removed from the ground below and indifferent to the fact that the canopy is only possible because of the roots below.

It is college graduation season, and it is hard to think of the occasion as anything but a mixed bag: On the one hand it is a supremely joyous occasion; on the other hand, one can’t help worrying about the future that awaits these graduates.