The NYT weighs in with numbers on the Koch Bros final solution to democracy

When I originally started writing about the vast amount of money very very rich people are putting into political races, i.e., buying their very own politicians, I laid it at the Koch Bros door.

And that door, I said, opened into a quietly notorious villa outside of Berlin, on a lake called the Wannsee. It was in this villa where Hitler commanded a select group of his top lieutenants to figure out what came to be known as The Final Solution, i.e., how to get rid of–kill, that is–European Jews.

Now the New York Times has weighed in with a powerful story by Nicholas Confessore, Sarah Cohen and Karen Yourish, and one scary scroll-down graphic, about what rich men (and a few wives) are spending how much and on whom.

If this doesn’t terrify you about the future of democracy, you must have become numb. There is an antidote, though: every one of us must get out to vote. We are the only bulwark against the very, very rich.

Presidential candidates have grown deeply dependent on the contributions of a tiny slice of the richest Americans as “super PACs” have raised money much more quickly than hopefuls could have on their own.

Source The New York Times: Small Pool of Rich Donors Dominates Election Giving

That was the abstract. Here’s how the article begins (click on the link above, scroll down a bit and you’ll find the graphic):

Fewer than four hundred families are responsible for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign, a concentration of political donors that is unprecedented in the modern era.

The vast majority of the $388 million backing presidential candidates this year is being channeled to groups that can accept unlimited contributions in support of candidates from almost any source. The speed with which such “super PACs” can raise money — sometimes bringing in tens of millions of dollars from a few businesses or individuals in a matter of days — has allowed them to build enormous campaign war chests in a fraction of the time that it would take the candidates, who are restricted in how much they can accept from a single donor.

“The question is whether we are in a new Gilded Age or well beyond it — to a Platinum Age,” said Michael J. Malbin, president of the Campaign Finance Institute, which tracks the flow of campaign money.