What It's Worth?

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday. Numerous states will vote in the presidential primaries -- and it's the first one where former Mayor Bloomberg will appear on the ballot. How well he performs on Super Tuesay (namely, how many votes translated into delegates he gets) will determine if his campaign is viable enough to keep going -- or if this will have a been a two month, nearly $500 million folly.

Bloomberg is worth $60 billion, a sum so vast that even rich people can't really comprehend how rich he is. His net worth is practically the GDP of some countries and he's attempting to use the force of that money to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency.

Bloomberg is basically trying, as close as one can, to buy the American presidency.

After all, he did buy the NYC mayoralty back in 2001, 2005 and 2009. In fact, he shouldn't have been allowed to buy it in 2009 but he got the law changed so that he could run again. Changing laws in their self-interest is the kind of thing that rich people can do! 

But so ghastly and horrible is the presidency of Donald Trump that the idea of yet another rich guy from NYC buying the presidency away from him seems almost worth it to a lot of people, including me!

The thing is, as stomach-churning as this is, the idea of rich people essentially buying things that  are supposed to be precious and sacred, is nothing new. 

Look at the college admissions scandal. Being admitted to a top college should be an honor bestowed on those students who have worked hard in school and achieved great grades, awards, and extracurriculars. But, as we've seen, for the right price and by pulling the right strings, parents can get their kids into great schools even if they don't really merit it.

Right now there's a new book about the movie Chinatown, the classic film about how developers bought huge swaths of Southern California land for next to nothing by starving it of water -- and then getting tax payers to sponsor a new dam to irrigate it, exponentially increasing the value. Even though the movie is fiction it exposes how rich people use their money and power to warp government resources for their own private benefit. "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" is the short-hand way of saying, "We all know this is corruption but the forces behind it are so powerful that it's best not to ask questions or challenge it."

But you can go even further back into history and see how people like Rodrigo Borgia bought the papacy by paying bribes and granting favors to his fellow cardinals -- and by threatening violence against anyone who might challenge his plans. 

In all honesty, everyone and everything has a price, even though we like to pretend they don't.  Nothing really is sacred unless you make it sacred -- and other people might not agree that it's scared.

So forget it, everyone, it's politics!

More than 30 years ago, a book was written about presidential politics called What It Takes? Today the matra should be "What It's Worth" -- and this is something in American life that goes far beyond presidential politics.