Corporate Donors Guided Kamala Harris to Defeat
Rich donors like Mark Cuban boasted about their success in shaping Kamala Harris’s campaign and inducing her to ditch progressive economic policies. We shouldn’t let them shrug off responsibility for a disastrous defeat.
Billionaire Mark Cuban boasted that he had inundated Kamala Harris’s campaign with “a never-ending stream of texts and calls and emails,” urging them to support various economic policies that would benefit his class. (Bing Guan / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
There’s a memorable scene in the film The Big Short involving the lightly fictionalized hedge fund manager Mark Baum. Baum is listening in horror as some real estate bros describe all the shady practices that have fueled the housing bubble in Florida. Halfway through the conversation, he brings his team aside and demands to know why the crooks would give up their secrets so easily.
“They’re not confessing,” his colleagues explain to him. “They’re bragging.”
A few weeks before the presidential election, the New York Times published an article about the influence of big donors over the Kamala Harris campaign based on not-so-humble bragging from the heights of corporate America. Now it reads much more like a confession. While Harris refused to distance herself from Joe Biden over the carnage in Gaza, she had no problem signaling her intention to scrap parts of his economic agenda that benefited working-class Americans but went down badly with the very rich.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.