Peak billionaire: a billionaire tries to purchase a party nomination to outflank anti-billionaires so he can run against another billionaire

The past two years have seen a tremendous shift in the public perception of capitalism and socialism, the character of philanthropy as reputation-laundry rather than generosity, and the nature of wealth as an indicator of sociopathy, not virtue or cleverness.

The "Overton Window" -- the slate of policies that politicians are willing to discuss and propose in public -- has shifted quickly and profoundly to the left, with the likes of Bernie Sanders anchoring a new outer bound as to what can be said in polite society, reinforced by other Democratic Socialists like AOC -- opening the political space for the likes of Elizabeth Warren to sounds like a relative moderate when she insists that capitalism is good, but needs extensive reform.

How did Overton Window come to shift? Writing in Time, Anand Giridharadas (previously) persuasively argues that capitalism discredited itself, starting with the 2008 crisis. More recently, it was Trump insisting that he was capitalism's flagbearer and explicitly linking capitalism to corruption, ignorance, belligerence, greed, cruelty, xenophobia, racism, sexism and homophobia; Jeff Bezos pulling out of his plan to build a second HQ in NYC because "in a city where a significant number of people struggle to keep up with rising costs and stagnant pay, many werent excited by the idea of the state and city giving his company a few billion dollars in tax breaks that wouldnt be available to a regular Joe starting a business."

Then there was the college bribery scandal in which the inventor of "impact investing" (using capitalism to make the world a better place) stands accused of bribing college officials to get his mediocre loin-fruit into an elite university at the expense of the kind of person whom "impact investing" was supposed to benefit. Read the rest