We Are All Bankrolling Trump
To stop lining the pockets of hard-right billionaires you disagree with, stop buying what they sell. They have a right to their views. You have a right to shop elsewhere
The Uihlein Family — which controls the privately held, multi-billion-dollar packaging-material company Uline — looks to be the picture of prosperous White America. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Nor is there anything (legally) wrong with Uline being the 10th-largest donor to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, with a $10 million gift to the Make America Great Again political action committee.
That’s a sizeable sum, but in fact, the Uihleins are wildly generous donors to right-wing political action committees and conservative groups like Club for Growth and Turning Point, which helped foment the January 6 assault on Capitol Hill. In all, they’ve shelled out more than $126 million this election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, the nonpartisan nonpofit that tracks campaign spending. That makes them the No. 1 MAGA moneybags.
Where do the Uihleins get the dough to spend on furthering their ultra-right views?
They get it from you and me.
Box Populi. The successful cardboard box and paper bag business built by Liz and Dick Uihlein in Wisconsin exploded during the past couple of decades, fueled by online shopping and the Covid crisis that they denied. The push against plastic bags by environmental groups probably helped, too.
That has enabled the family to go whole hog in its quest to spread conservative beliefs that have been the hallmark of its progenitors. The Uihleins are decendants of the Schlitz beer dynasty; it counted at least one member who was a benefactor of Charles Lindbergh’s America First Committee, which opposed U.S. involvement in World War II.
But the Uihleins are not the only radical right-wingers turned into mega-donor/influencers by the U.S. Supreme Court’s anti-democratic Citizens United decision of 2010. As a report a decade ago by the Brennan Center for Justice said: “In a time of historic wealth inequality, the decision has helped reinforce the growing sense that our democracy primarily serves the interests of the wealthy few, and that democratic participation for the vast majority of citizens is of relatively little value.”
Among conservatives, the wealthy few includes Elon Musk, the richest person in the world thanks to Tesla and SpaceX; members of the Walton Family, enriched by their Walmart stakes; Ike Perlmutter, former chairman of Marvel, made super-rich by superheros; Peter Theil, a founder (like Musk) of PayPal, among other hugely successful ventures; and Steve Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone Group, the private-equity firm that controls hundreds of companies.
The list goes on and on and doesn’t leave out fat cats who fund liberal candidates and causes, billionaires such as George Soros, Mike Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer.
Purchasing power. If you are not part of any elite and oppose the MAGA movement’s drift toward authoritarianism, one small way to fight back is to choose not to further enrich those whose views and actions you find abhorrent. That means not patronizing online sellers who package their goods in Uline boxes; refusing to buy a Tesla; never shopping at Walmart; and using your credit card, not PayPal.
Still, it’s not easy to avoid putting your money behind their MAGAphones.
Sure, there is the occasional boycott, such as the one mounted against Goya Foods by Latino groups in 2020 when its CEO, Robert Unanue, praised Trump. But it didn’t last, and Unanue now serves on the board of the increasingly influential America First Policy Institute, which is setting priorities for a new Trump administration.
Groups such as Refuse Uline, which offers a list of packaging alternatives to the Uihliens’ cash cow, are helpful in being vigilant about where your dollars are being spent. But what is really needed — no matter who wins the Election of 2024 — is an easy-to-use national database that consumers who care about democracy can consult before making a purchase.
It would tell you if the retailer you’re about to buy a mattress from uses Uline packaging. It would reveal whether a service company you are considering is in the portfolios of Blackstone or the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, No. 15 on the OpenSecrets roster of major Trump donors. And it would, like Refuse Uline, offer non-political competitors.
The architect of the database could be a nonprofit. Or it could be a money-making enterprise, running ads from companies whose principals don’t traffic in political influence. In fact, being politically neutral could be a selling point.
Until there is legislation that reverses the Citizens United catastrophe, there is little real hope of brushing back bullhorn billionaires besides depriving them of the cash that helps them impose their reactionary views on the rest of us — one nickel at a time.
Oddities & Ends
Musk Ask: So will Elon Musk, the self-described, free-expression “absolutist” stand between Liz Cheney and the rifle barrels Trump wants aimed at her for speaking her mind about “an unstable man who wants to be a tyrant”?
Whither CBS? Oracle founder Larry Ellison, along with Redbird Capital, was the main backer of son David’s winning bid for Paramount Global, a deal slated to close in the first half of 2025. But according to a revised filing with the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday, David Ellison, CEO of Skydance Media, “will hold 100% of the Ellison family’s voting interest” in Paramount. That may allay concerns that Larry, a GOP mega-donor (though he has not endorsed Trump), might influence the political direction of CBS, a Paramount property. For what it’s worth, David Ellison gave almost $1 million to the Biden Victory Fund in April before President Joe stepped out of the race.
The Apprentice? Da! The film about the schooling of young Donald Trump by the Machiavellian fixer Roy Cohn — and denounced by the former president as a “hatchet job” by “HUMAN SCUM” — was surprisingly scheduled to open on 800 screens across Russia on Friday with only “modest cuts,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. No word if one of those screen is in a Putin dacha.
My Book Report
By Deidre Depke
Under the Covers with Elizabeth Strout
How freaked out are you? Yeah, me too. You know what’s good for stress? Reading.
Here’s my advice for how to spend the next couple of days: Take a trip to Crosby, Maine, with America’s most empathetic writer, Elizabeth Strout.
Best known for her Olive Kitteridge books, Strout’s latest is Tell Me Everything, her tenth novel. In it, her best-known characters gather up their individual story lines and convene — it’s a sort of literary version of Marvel’s The Avengers.
The Burgess Boys (2013), Jim and Bob, are there. The iconic Olive Kitteridge shows up, of course — her eponymous debut in 2011 won Strout a Pulitzer. Lucy Barton, last seen in 2022’s Lucy by the Sea, returns with her ex-husband, William. Even Isabelle Goodrow from Strout’s 1988 debut novel, Amy and Isabelle, makes an appearance, albeit off stage.
Tell Me Everything is nominally a crime story. There has been a mysterious murder. A lonely, oddball son is suspected of having killed his widely disliked mother. There’s an official protagonist as well, the author informs us. “This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall heavy-set man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time we are speaking of him. Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.”
Tell Me Everything is structured as a collection of interconnected tales — “stories of loneliness and love,” as Strout describes them. The book is also awfully close to a summing up for characters. They now are people looking back on their lives and reconsidering — taking a measure of themselves and their relationships. Olive is 90 and resides in a retirement community. Isabelle lives in the same place, but in the dreaded nursing home end of the operation. Jim Burgess’s wife is dying. Lucy must choose between new love and the comfort of a familiar relationship.
As always, Strout’s writing is almost comically matter of fact. “Winter comes early to Maine.…” But, as in past work, she sometimes tosses out a sentence so evocative and unpredictable that it stops you in your tracks. “How do you know what people think about in the dark when they wake up in the middle of the night?”
This isn’t Strout’s best book; it can’t compete with the sometimes brilliant novels that have come before it. But if you’re a fan, Tell Me Everything is a comfort — a warm blanket on a chilly night. Or a distraction while the world outside is consumed by anger, anxiety, and the uncontrollable.
Dump, The (Short) Musical
We ran this 20-odd-minute film last week, but we are doing so again in case — as we said before — you have any lingering doubts about your choice for President on November 5
In the run-up to the Election of 2024, The Constant Tribune has been posting dialogue and songs from Dump, The Musical — a two-act show in which a tabloid clown unexpectedly becomes President and takes America on a crazy, careening ride. This animated short captures the essence of Act Two, when the laughs stop as the daffy demagogue desperately tries to cling to power.
Shit beer descendants still brewing garbage. Nice reminder Ciro. Restacking.