How America’s Billionaires Control the Votes of American Voters

10 February 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

It’s a proven fact that America’s Government represents ONLY the political megadonors, NOT the American public. But HOW does this happen? What is the mechanism behind it?

In America, a political Party such as the DNC or RNC is a private membership corporation, or “club,” which has no legal obligation to its voters but only to the individuals who are the Members of the Democratic National Committee, who control the DNC, or else of the Republican National Committee or RNC, who control the RNC. See HERE a law-review article about the 2017 case “Wilding v. DNC Services Corp.” which case concluded that a political Party may, if its Members wish, violate the Committee’s Charter and public promises and even the votes cast by its voters, in order to rig its primaries so as to select ONLY candidates whom its megadonors approve of. That is allowed in the U.S. It’s NOT illegal in America. It is the way that the American Government is run. Of course, the Members self-select each other to become Members, and their obsession is to serve their megadonors who provide the majority of the club’s funding. That motivation drives their decisions regardless of what the voters in their primary elections want or whom they actually voted for. If the club’s Members are dissatisfied with a candidate whom its voters preferred but whom the club’s megadonors refuse to accept, then the club’s members will select a nominee whom its megadonors DO accept. Our primary elections are a total political charade — political theater. Once RFK Jr. knew this, he quit running against Biden.

The article that I linked-to there, is a lengthy analysis of the legal case that was brought against the DNC for its having violated the Party’s charter and the DNC’s public promises by rigging its primaries so that Bernie Sanders would lose to Joe Biden in the allocationing of delegates to the National Convention REGARDLESS of how voters in those primaries had actually voted, and that author rejects the outcome in the Judge’s ruling which said that the owners of the DNC, its Members, have no obligation whatsoever to the club’s voters. The author said on page 25 that “the law should impose on party committee members the fiduciary duties of loyalty and care so that they act in the interest of the entire party.” He thought that the voters for the Party ought to be considered as being members of the club and therefore represented in the club, but no basis for that exists in American law. The author was stating just his sentiment, not U.S. law. (On 7 November 2025, I presented my own recommendation of how the problem can be solved, which would require a new Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.) So, American political contests are actually just contests between two political Parties each of which actually represents ONLY its megadonors — it is just one group of billionaires competing against another group of billionaires. This is the ideal neoliberal, or (as Americans call the ideology) libertarian, political situation, because it guarantees that the Government will represent property (wealth) — not persons — like a corporation represents only its owners, on the basis of one-share-one-vote, except that this is instead one-dollar-one-vote, and those dollars come predominantly from the megadonors not from the mere voters. A donor who contributes below $200 is competing against the Party’s megadonors who each donate (directly and indirectly) in the hundreds of thousands, or better yet, millions ore even hundreds of millions, of dollars. The super-rich will spend whatever they need to spend in order to get their nominees appointed by the club.

Walter Lippmann, on pages 4 and 5 in his brief (120-page) 1920 book Liberty and the News, was the first person to introduce to the public the concept of the “manufacture of [the voting public’s] consent” for ‘their’ ‘democratic’ Government’s policies, the “manufacturing” that he said is being done by the press, but he refused to blame billionaires (the people who, and whose corporations, control and advertise in the major ‘news’-media and academic endowments and professorial chairs and think tanks) for doing this “manufacturing” (warping the public’s political understandings in the ways that serve the interests of those owners) in order for such a behind-the-scenes actual dictatorship by the billionaires to be able to call itself a “democracy” and to be believed by its own population to be such — and ESPECIALLY to be believed so by the populations in foreign countries so that the U.S. Government can then use as an excuse for sanctioning and invading ‘authoritarian’ countries, that this is being done BY a ‘democracy’ against an ‘authoritarian’ foreign Government and is therefore (supposedly) morally okay. Consequently (since Lippmann DIDN’T blame the billionaires), the then rising 31-year-old employee of The Atlantic magazine was able subsequently to become one of America’s biggest stars as a journalist and as a historian during the 20th Century — BECAUSE he never revealed to the public WHOM their actual rulers were, the individuals who were not on the political stage but who actually funded the careers of the individuals who ARE on that stage and who are given by the club to the public as the nominees for the public to choose amongst to become the nation’s Governmental leaders (on behalf of the billionaires who had bought them — not of the electorate).

An example of how this ‘democracy’-by-means-of-lies is done, was discussed in my 23 October 2022 article “Is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine really worse than America’s & UK’s invasion of Iraq was?”. Another example was my 15 August 2025 “Documentation that U.S. and EU Support Ukraine’s Nazis”.

The mega-corporations’ controlling owners are the ultimate employers, and they make the ultimate decisions as to whom to hire and promote, and whom to demote and fire, throughout not only the media and think tanks etc., but into and out from the highest (the electoral) governmental offices. The billionaires ARE the Deep State, and control the minds of the public; and, so, control the nation.

The only way to achieve a stable democracy — one that won’t degenerate into an aristocracy (which is what virtually all nations prior to 1776 were) — might be by means of lottery-selection of all legislators, who then select from amongst themselves the head-of-state.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.