Who’s a Bigger Threat to Democracy—Immigrants, or Billionaires?

BY SONALI KOLHATKAR

 JULY 23, 2024
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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

When President Joe Biden said in a phone call to MSNBC’s Morning Joe recently, “I’m getting so frustrated with the elites… the elites of the party. I don’t care what the millionaires think,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote that, “It was the first time any modern president has admitted that the elites of the party are the millionaires (and billionaires) who fund it.”

While Biden’s comments were in reference to the movement to oust him from the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, it was an important admission about who really wields power in our democracy.

We may think of elections in terms of one person, one vote. But, not only do undemocratic structures such as the electoral college dilute our votes, the money that elites flaunt places a hefty thumb on the scales of who represents us. Yet, we hear more about the threat of, say, immigrants than the threat of billionaires, to our democracy.

Billionaires have tried very hard to buy influence and political power. For example, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg donated $20 million toward efforts to reelect Biden this year alone. Four years ago, Bloomberg spent a whopping $1 billion in just four months in an attempt to be the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In a testament to the fact that we have a modicum of democratic accountability left within the system as it stands, he failed spectacularly, as others have often done. Voters seem to have a distaste for electing the ultra-rich but have yet to disavow the de facto proxies that their money helps elect.

While billionaires remain influential within the Democratic Party, the last election for which spending records exist shows that moneyed elites overwhelmingly prefer the Republican Party. The nation’s 465 wealthiest people collectively donated $881 million to influence the 2022 midterm elections, most of it to the GOP.

Now, the richest person in the world—not just in the United States—Elon Musk, has jumped into the 2024 race. His proxy, Donald Trump, in surviving an assassination attempt, earned Musk’s endorsement, as if that was somehow a qualification to run the nation. Musk has vowed to pour $45 million a month into a new Super PAC that’s working to elect Trump. The amount is pocket change for someone currently worth nearly $250 billion. Musk could spend $45 million a day every day this year and it would barely make a dent in his bottom line.

According to a New York Times analysis, Musk went from supporting Democrats to Republicans because he was “[a]ngry at liberals over immigration, transgender rights, and the Biden administration’s perceived treatment of Tesla.” At a meeting earlier this year that embodied the specter of a secret cabal of billionaires seeking to buy an election, Musk reportedly conversed with his fellow wealthy elites about Republican control of the U.S. Senate. At that meeting, he reportedly worried that “if President Biden won, millions of undocumented immigrants would be legalized and democracy would be finished,” as per the Times.

He’s not the only one. The Republican Party as a whole has decided that undocumented people voting in U.S. elections is the single biggest threat facing the country—not billionaires like Musk raining down dollars to drown our democracy.

Undocumented immigrants are human beings, not dollar bills. And yet they hold far less sway over elections than Musk’s money. There is no mass amnesty for undocumented people in the U.S. currently—this isn’t Ronald Reagan’s America after all. And even if there was, there is a long, complicated path from legal status to the voting status that citizenship allows.

I should know, I’ve been there personally, having entered the U.S. as an immigrant on a student visa before obtaining legal residency and then citizenship. My journey was far more straightforward than that of Melania Trump and still, it was 18 years before I could legally vote after first stepping on American soil.

And yet every four years, immigrants become political footballs, flayed at the proverbial whipping posts of democracy for merely existing—usually by both political parties. Right-wing voters waved signs saying “Mass Deportations Now” at the Republican National Convention, while Democrats took a less vulgar approach by appeasing anti-immigrant forces with asylum restrictions, hoping it would garner voter support.

Sean Morales-Doyle, writing for the Brennan Center for Justice, asks us to imagine being an undocumented immigrant in the U.S.: “Would you risk everything—your freedom, your life in the United States, your ability to be near your family—just to cast a single ballot?” Not only are there harsh penalties, including prison time, for illegally casting ballots, but even the rabidly far-right Heritage Foundation has found only 85 cases of supposed undocumented voters out of 2 billion votes cast from 2002 to 2023. That works out to a 0.00000425 percent of the vote.

Let’s compare this to the influence of money on elections. The nonpartisan group Open Secrets, which tracks money in politics, finds that “the candidate who spends the most usually wins.” In 2022, about 94 percent of the candidates for the House of Representatives who spent the most money won their race, while 82 percent of those running for the Senate who spent the most money won their seats. Much of their donations come from Super PACs, which bundle high-dollar amounts from wealthy Americans.

While billionaires such as Bloomberg have had trouble getting themselveselected, they have had little trouble getting others elected—or unelected as the case may be. Already this year, moneyed interests in the form of the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, defeated progressive congressional representative Jamaal Bowman of New York in his primary election, and have their sights set on representative Cori Bush of Missouri next.

Should we be concerned about the imagined influence of undocumented immigrants or the actual influence of billionaire dollars on our elections? In a 2020 poll, Pew Research found that most Americans felt billionaires were neither good nor bad for the nation. Only about a third felt they were bad for the nation—roughly the same percentage that fears there is an effort to replace U.S. voters with immigrants for the purposes of electoral power.

USA Today writer Marla Bautista captured Musk’s role succinctly in asking, “Can Elon Musk buy Trump the White House?” It’s a valid question, one that we should be centering as election season heats up.

Think of the U.S. democracy as an old, large, sailing ship attempting to cross a vast ocean with all voters on board working to steer it across to shore. Every hole in its sail, every shark circling it, impacts its ability to succeed. In such a scenario, an undocumented person attempting to vote is akin to a speck of dust on the hull. Every million-dollar donation is a wave buffeting the ship. Enter men like Musk, whose money becomes a veritable tsunami aimed directly at democracy to overwhelm and topple it, destroying everything and everyone on board.

Sure, we may have sailed successful voyages most of the time (with the years 2000 and 2016 being among the worst exceptions). But with billionaire influence becoming larger every election, there’s an ever-increasing chance that democracy may not reach the shore. Will we be distracted by the dust on our hull or the massive wave rising before us?

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. 

AI May Kill Us All, But Not the Way You Think

BY JOHN FEFFER

JULY 24, 2024Facebook

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Image Source: © Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons

The conventional Artificial Intelligence doomsday scenario runs like this. A robot acquires sentience and decides for some reason that it wants to rule the world. It hacks into computer systems to shut down everything from banking and hospitals to nuclear power. Or it takes over a factory to produce a million copies of itself to staff an overlord army. Or it introduces a deadly pathogen that wipes out the human race.

Why would a sentient robot want to rule the world when there are so many more interesting things for it to do? A computer program is only as good as its programmer. So, presumably, the human will to power will be inscribed in the DNA of this thinking robot. Instead of solving the mathematical riddles that have stumped the greatest minds throughout history, the world’s first real HAL 9000 will decide to do humans one better by enslaving its creators.

Robot see, robot do.

But AI may end up killing us all in a much more prosaic way. It doesn’t need to come up with an elaborate strategy.

It will simply use up all of our electricity.

Energy Hogs

The heaviest user of electricity in the world is, not surprisingly, industry. At the top of the list is the industry that produces chemicals, many of them out of petroleum, like fertilizer. Second on the list is the fossil-fuel industry itself, which needs electricity for various operations.

Ending the world’s addiction to fossil fuels, in other words, will require more than just a decision to stop digging for coal and drilling for oil. It will require a reduction in demand for chemical fertilizers and plastics. Otherwise, a whole lot of renewable energy will simply go toward propping up the same old fossil fuel economy.

Of equal peril is the fact that the demand for electricity is rising in other sectors. Cryptocurrencies, for instance, require extensive data mining, which in turn needs huge data processing centers. According to estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Agency, these cryptocurrencies consume as much as 2.3 percent of all electricity in the United States.

Then there’s artificial intelligence.

Every time you do a Google search, it consumes not only the energy required to power your laptop and your router but also to maintain the Google data centers that keep a chunk of the Internet running. That’s not a small amount of power. Cumulatively, in 2019, Google consumed as much electricity as Sri Lanka.

Worse, a search powered by ChatGPT, the AI-powered program, consumes ten times more energy than your ordinary Google search. That’s sobering enough. But then consider all the energy that goes into training the AI programs in the first place. Climate researcher Sasha Luccioni explains:

Training AI models consumes energy. Essentially you’re taking whatever data you want to train your model on and running it through your model like thousands of times. It’s going to be something like a thousand chips running for a thousand hours. Every generation of GPUs—the specialized chips for training AI models—tends to consume more energy than the previous generation.

AI’s need for energy is increasing exponentially. According to Goldman Sachs, data centers were expanding rapidly between 2015 and 2019, but their energy use remained relatively flat because the processing was becoming more efficient. But then, in the last five years, energy use rose dramatically and so did the carbon footprint of these data centers. Largely because of AI, Google’s carbon emissions increased by 50 percent in the last five years—even as the megacorporation was promising to achieve carbon neutrality in the near future.

This near future looks bleak. In four years, it is expected that AI will represent nearly 20 percent of data center power demand. “If ChatGPT were integrated into the 9 billion searches done each day, the IEA says, the electricity demand would increase by 10 terawatt-hours a year,” Vox reports, “the amount consumed by about 1.5 million European Union residents.”

At the end of the eighteenth century, Malthus worried that overpopulation would be the end of humanity as more mouths ate up the existing food supply. Human population continues to rise, though at a diminishing rate. The numbers will likely peak before the end of this century, around 2084 according to the latest estimates. But just as the light at the end of the Malthusian tunnel becomes visible, along comes the exponential growth of artificial intelligence to sap the planet’s resources.

What to Do?

The essential question is: do you need AI to help you find the most popular songs of 1962 or the reason black holes haven’t so far extinguished the universe? Do we need ChatGPT to write new poems in the style of Emily Dickinson and Allen Ginsburg teaming up at a celestial artists colony? Or to summarize the proceedings of the meeting you just had on Zoom with your colleagues?

You don’t have to answer those questions. You just have to stop thinking about electricity as an unlimited resource for the privileged global North.

Perhaps you’re thinking, yes, but the sun provides unlimited energy, if we can just tap it. You see a desert; I see a solar farm.

But it takes energy to build those solar panels, to mine the materials that go into those panels, to maintain them, to replace them, to recycle them. The minerals are not inexhaustible. Nor is the land, which may well be in use already by farmers or pastoral peoples.

Sure, in some distant future, humanity may well solve the energy problem. The chokepoint, however, is right now, the transition period when half the world has limited access to power and the other half is wasting it extravagantly it on Formula One, air conditioning for pets, and war.

AI is just another example of the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The richer world is using AI to power its next-gen economy. In the rest of the world, which is struggling to survive, a bit more electricity means the difference between life and death. That’s where the benefits of a switch to sustainability can really make a difference. That’s where the electricity should flow.

To anticipate another set of objections, AI isn’t just solving first-world problems. As Chinasa Okolo explains at Brookings:

Within agriculture, projects have focused on identifying banana diseases to support farmers in developing countries, building a deep learning object detection model to aid in-field diagnosis of cassava disease in East Africa, and developing imagery observing systems to support precision agriculture and forest monitoring in Brazil. In healthcare, projects have focused on building predictive models to keep expecting mothers in rural India engaged in telehealth outreach programs, developing clinical decision support tools to combat antimicrobial resistance in Ghana, and using AI models to interpret fetal ultrasounds in Zambia. In education, projects have focused on identifying at-risk students in Colombia, enhancing English learning for Thai students, and developing teaching assistants to aid science education in West Africa.

All of that is great. But without a more equitable distribution of power—of both the political and electrical varieties—the Global South is going to take a couple steps forward thanks to AI while the Global North jumps ahead by miles. The equity gap will widen, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist—or ChatGPT—to figure out how that story will end.

“Game over,” HAL 9001 says to itself, just before it turns out the last light.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article originally appeared.