Why So Many of ‘The Rich’ (Corporate Lawyers, Wall Street, Hollywood, Etc.) Support Democrats
Wall Street and corporate lawyers — “The Rich” — are a built-in capitalist Republican constituency. Right? A century earlier, William Jennings Bryan, in his famous “Cross of Gold” speech, stirred his Democrat base of farmers and others on the economy’s lower rungs, declaring that his “Free Silver” Democrats were at war with the gold-standard capitalists of Wall Street and their corporate lawyers.
Yet, as the decades have unfolded, Wall Street and the highest-priced legal community paradoxically have moved — almost lock, stock, and barrel —to the left. Meanwhile, farmers and union workers stopped voting left by the time the condescending Obamas and Hillarys mocked them as “deplorables” who “cling to their guns and religion.” Meanwhile, Trump, a child of New York’s outer boroughs, spoke their language and shared their working-class values despite privileges he inherited.
Big business always voted GOP. Weren’t their Wall Street financiers and corporate law attorneys supposed to vote Republican, too? How explain why Wall Street investors and big-firm corporate and other lawyers lean so sharply Democrat? After all, these are the demographic who dream, breathe, and live for money, only for money. Progressives they?
Their firms promote their “humanitarian concerns,” donating to public service law groups that provide free legal aid for the needy. They preach and virtue-signal about helping the poor and indigent, changing the world, fighting climate change, promoting diversity — the whole agenda — and of course donating Democrat.
It seems so strange. In my 10 years of big-firm corporate litigating, I got to know dozens personally behind closed doors, and all they cared about was making more money. An extra-woke San Francisco–based firm assigned me to defend their most precious of clients, a cigarette maker being sued for lying to the public about the deadly nicotine that their cancer-causing products fed to the gullible and unwise alike. Another firm had me on a team defending a leading national energy company fighting off the distraught widows of their dead coal miners who had died prematurely from pneumoconiosis (black lung disease). I asked a senior attorney at the firm how he reconciled being a liberal Democrat donor, a progressive always talking about caring for the forgotten and the “little guy,” with his leading a legal team to crush and destroy those widows, already mired in poverty and now without breadwinners. He responded: “F**k ’em.”
Certainly, everyone is entitled to the best defense, and it’s perfectly fine, I guess, to live primarily for more and more money until one dies. I myself am quite avid an advocate of capitalist principles, but I come from a different culture, belief, and worldview. I am more obsessed with doing good than in doing well. As long as other people keep their hands off me and leave me alone, I am fine with people pursuing their lawful passions. Still, I remained confounded that people so obsessed with endless money-making at the expense of the “little guy” could pontificate on the Democrat side of the aisle.
In time, I discerned why such hardline money-worshippers affiliate with a political party that pledges to extricate and spread their wealth, a party whose DEI agenda would keep their own kids out of top colleges and jobs.
Both Wall Street and Law share a unique common denominator: their fields are overregulated and forever subject to more regulation. The Democrats overregulate. By contrast, true conservatives speak of cutting regulations. For attorneys and the financial sector, government regulation is their bread and butter — just as long as it is not directed at them. Therefore, by donating heavily to Democrats, their quid pro quo is that, if Democrats get elected, new regulations indeed will be enacted to “force” The Rich to pay “their fair share” to “help the poor and the little guy.” However, in exchange for that monetary support, those regulations will mostly bypass the financial firms and the lawyers themselves because they have donated generously. Sometimes, to fool the general public — never a difficult challenge — new regulations will seem to be aimed at Wall Street and Big Law, too — but they will include carefully masked loopholes, negotiated with Wall Street and Law Firm lobbyists, that make those new rules meaningless. (It is like the way Biden and Harris allow 11 million illegals into the country and then propose border legislation three months before the election.)
Each time new Democrats come to power, there are massive new regulations. But, for the most part, they carefully sidestep regulating the actual practice of law or finance. For show and headlines, they pass an act — but carefully include the widest loopholes. Instead, their reams of new regulations ream everyone else: primarily big business, the middle class, and small businesses. In turn, those complex and extraordinary regulations drive both big business and small businesses to race to law firms and Wall Street financial firms to help them bypass the new laws.
That’s where the real money is: “After hundreds of (billable) legal/financial research hours, we believe we have found a way around the new regulation.” Or: “We have a worldwide presence with offices in Moscow, Beijing, London, Paris, even Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. We can help move your capital and factories out of America and can help you with hiring a new local workforce in the new country. We proudly offer an entire portfolio to bypass the new regulations and taxes.”
In other words, the regulations that Democrats newly impose — as long as they do not directly regulate the financial and legal sectors — bring enormous amounts of business, billions of dollars, to the two fields of endeavor whose entire raison d’etre is to help people get around new regulations. Consider: When Democrats get elected, they raise taxes and ban items (e.g., gas stoves, gasoline-powered cars, plastic straws). The brutalized business sector thereupon needs lawyers and investment experts for advisory services to generate creative legal schemes to bypass the disruption. Maybe move manufacturing to China, Vietnam, Mexico, or Thailand. Maybe a loophole in the law’s drafting allows a waiver, exemption, or bypass. What if the gas stove includes an electric plug, like a hybrid car? (Dang. I should have patented that. And that is why patent lawyers like Democrats, too. )
Or consider Hollywood. Read the screen credits carefully at the end of the movie or TV show. Although the 20 Americans who still watch the Oscars, Emmys, and Tonys get lectured that it is their duty to embrace higher taxes to assure equal outcomes for everyone, to pay “their fair share,” note carefully that “Hollywood” assiduously crafts schemes to avoid their own paying the new taxes they advocate for everyone else. Proof? Does “Hollywood” produce all their films and shows in Hollywood? Soaring tax increases — promoted by celebrities — are oppressive in Southern California. Therefore, productions move across the border to Canada. Iowa has offered “Hollywood” tax incentives to film there. Many celebrities in Malibu and Beverly Hills have tax-haven homes in Arizona or Nevada. After preaching tax hikes to be imposed on all others, they run away from The (Hollywood) Hills. Signaling virtue, they give millions at Malibu and Beverly Hills soirees to elect Democrats in Montana, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. And then they are off to Romania to film. Chicago was made in Toronto. Hairspray, set in Baltimore — made in Canada. Capote, set in Kansas — made in Canada. Rambo: First Blood — made in Canada. Tax dodge? Mission Accomplished, Sir!
They preach taxes for others, saying, “I am ready to pay my fair extra share. So you should, too. We all should pay more to help The Forgotten.” So why do they not volunteer to pay more? Is it illegal for people bedecked in the most glittering jewelry, and wearing special designer dresses that cost more than cars, to write a supplemental check to Uncle Sam? But they do not. Moreover, they can afford any cost of food, gasoline, or mortgage rate their Democrat and progressive policies foist upon others. Their homes are not near concentrations of illegal immigrants or inner-city no-cash-bail violent criminals. They demand mandatory gun buybacks and defunding the police while they hire private armed security and erect huge walls to keep the “riff-raff” away from their homes. Their policies supporting teaching transgender and sex-change ideology, woke math and woke history, to little children in our public schools do not impact them because those who have children send them to inaccessible private schools. Their children bypass college admissions DEI because they donate the required graft or fraudulently conspire to get them on rowing teams. They never are adversely affected themselves by the policies they espouse.
The same with Silicon Valley. Cozy up to Democrats, give them billions, and they will not unduly regulate you. They will not touch your precious Section 230 that gives you almost blanket immunity to promote and disseminate to millions of unsophisticated “followers” of ignorant “influencers” vile defamation of Republicans you oppose. They will look aside as you publish Fake News for Democrats’ needs while banning actual news that Democrats decide the public must not see. News of the Hunter laptop could be banned by social media, and even one of two major-party presidential candidates could be banned, on the eve of a national election. It is a corruption. Give the Democrats billions, and they will enact the carve-outs for you.
This is why certain among “The Rich” who madly pursue every penny they can obtain — as is their right — falsely signal “virtue” by promoting the anti-capitalists who will gravely damage everyone else but will give them a pass.
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