The old, white, rich men who are buying this election.
Excerpt:
Though the sugar daddies do differ on some issues—in some surprising cases departing from conservative orthodoxy on immigration, same-sex marriage, and abortion—those anomalies are trivial next to the convictions they share with one another and with Romney. Indeed, the sugar daddies fill in the vacuum of core beliefs that so many have found elusive in the Etch-a-Sketch candidate. Many of them have in common the practice of “vulture capitalism”—to use the term Rick Perry wielded when attacking Mitt’s record at Bain Capital. The fundamental principles of vulture capitalism, whatever the respective business arenas or prey, are inviolate: Anything and anyone is expendable in pursuit of a profit, starting with the powerless, and any brushes with the law along the way, not to mention civil or criminal financial penalties, are simply the price of doing nasty business. Like corporate donors, sugar daddies tend to seek favors to serve their particular special interests (notably the golden oldies of oil and finance) and dedicate themselves to fighting and avoiding taxes. But their ethos departs from the corporate model. Precisely because they are lone wolves responsible to no one but themselves—not independent shareholders, let alone the communities they plunder—they can be “more ruthless than Wall Street,” as the Newt Gingrich super-PAC put it in its ad attacking Romney’s Bain career. Vulture capitalists are throwbacks not so much to the relatively modern bankers and industrialists whom FDR set out to police in the Great Depression as to the more primitive titans and robber barons of the Gilded Age that Teddy Roosevelt took on a generation earlier.
As many have noted, it was ludicrous of Perry and Gingrich to pillory the man from Bain when their own campaigns were backed by sugar daddies whose ruthlessness (and fortunes) far surpassed Romney’s. Adelson, who with his family showered more than $16 million on Newt, is not only an entrepreneur in the business that wrote the Ur-text of vulture capitalism—gaming—but runs a company that is under scrutiny from both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission over bribery accusations in his casino outposts in Macao. Simmons, a career-long Perry backer, was not only a pioneer in the corporate sport of hostile takeovers just as Romney was getting in the game, but then went on to become the “king of Superfund sites.” His greasing of Texas legislators earned him the right to dump nuclear toxins wherever he damned well pleases. Another sugar daddy—a home-construction tycoon named Bob Perry (unrelated to Rick except by donations)—leveraged millions in political contributions to influence the creation of a Texas Residential Construction Commission, a sham state “regulatory” agency that shielded shoddy home builders from lawsuits until the Texas legislature finally killed it in 2009. Bob Perry is only the 24th-biggest home builder in America, but he has had the means to donate some $72 million to political causes since 2000. You have to wonder what mischief some of the 23 ahead of him might be up to.
Full article: Sugar Daddies.
