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.
The Times described “a steady stream of meetings and calls in which corporate executives and donors offer their thoughts on tax policy, financial regulation and other issues,” which had resulted in “a Democratic campaign that is far more open to corporate input than the one President Biden had led for much of the election cycle.”
According to one business executive, the Harris campaign was “definitely giving large corporations a seat at the table and giving them a voice,” in a way that marked “a significant difference from the Biden administration.”
The donors weighed in behind the scenes when Harris promised to ban “price gouging” for groceries and secured an immediate rollback on the pledge: “In the days after, Ms. Harris’s team clarified that the plan would apply only during emergencies and would mirror laws already in place in many states — a narrower concept that would not immediately address rising grocery prices.” Harris might have been left…
Auteur: Daniel Finn
