Thomas Klikauer and Nadine Campbell for BuzzFlash: The German Corporate Campaign Funding Connection to Trump, Who Is of German Ancestry and an Appropriator of Goebbels' Propaganda Techniques
February 7, 2021
The devil you know… (Bild von Ralf Genge)
By Thomas Klikauer and Nadine Campbell.
The fact that German capital supports right-wing politics is nothing new. Historically, German capital has done so in support of Adolf Hitler. More recently, Germany's companies and corporations, through their US subsidiaries, became ardent devotees of Donald Trump. They have shown this by donating lavishly to Trump.
Trump may be gone, but he is not forgotten, and neither is the role of German capital in one of the very few moments of American history where democracy was at a knife's edge. It happened on the 6th of January 2021. Hyped up on Trump's rhetoric and propaganda, right-wing extremists stormed the Capitol in Washington. Five people died in a failed right-wing putsch: the police officer Brian Sicknick, the Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt and three Trump loyalists: Kevin Greeson, Rosanne Boyland and Benjamin Philips.
Beyond death and destruction, it remains a scandal that German corporations like Big-Pharma's Bayer and BASF as well as Germany's Telekom have donated to Trump. This is corporate money that – apart from many other things – made Trump just that little bit more possible. The fact is that the US telecom subsidiary T-Mobile USA and Bayer's Monsanto donated thousands of dollars to the Association of Republican Attorneys General (RAGA). This alone sharply contradicts their carefully choreographed and frequently performed propaganda of being an ethical corporation.
The Republican Party's RAGA was involved in mobilising the 6th of January rally at which Trump incited supporters to invade the US parliament building. RAGA is co-financed by Deutsche Telekom – ranked 69 on Forbes 100 wealthiest corporations. RAGA was also supported by Bayer valued at $64bn – a German corporation with a rather unsavoury past.
RAGA has also championed anti-democratic petitions in US courts seeking to enhance the myth of a stolen election. Beyond myth creation, these claims were designed to change the election outcome. They failed. The two German companies have been sponsoring Trump supporters in the US Congress for years. Some of them have even voted against confirming Joe Biden's election victory.
Bayer's lame-duck excuse – we also supported Democrats – does not cut it. Trump and his supporters wanted to destroy America's democracy – US Democrats did not. It was Trump's thugs who lit up the "bonfire of the insanities at the Capitol building", as a Harvard law professor called it in a recent email to me.
Trump's thugs are enemies of what Alexis de Tocqueville called Democracy in 1835. Trump's henchmen also have a distinct distaste for the democratic constitution. They – not Democrats – are responsible for a violent attack in which five people died.
Donald Trump and his supporters have long gone beyond "normal" political engagement inside what the Greek philosopher Aristotle once described as the polis. German corporations supporting Trump and his willing executors through donations are complicit in an attempted coup against a pluralist-democratic state.
Even after the 6th of January 2021, Bayer never stopped its donations to RAGA. The German corporation simply said it wants to wait to examine the allegations by the association itself. The association itself, i.e., RAGA. Since when can Al Capone investigate himself? It is yet another lame-duck excuse. The facts on what happened on the 6th of January 2021 are already on the table. The whole affair is not only embarrassing. It is a disgrace for German capital and for Germany's claim to be a democratic country.
In the US election of 2020, German companies donated around three million dollars to Democratic and Republican candidates.
BASF is listed with approximately $420,000, Germany's medical supplier Fresenius Medical Care North America with $413,000 and Bayer with more than $300,000. Not long ago, BASF and Bayer were the main actors in a setup known as IG Farben. IG Farben became Germany's Hell's Cartel which was instrumental for Hitler's war machine. IG Farben gave the world Auschwitz and Zyklon B and one of IG Farben's subsidiaries – Degussa – melted down gold from Jewish victims.
Another ex-Hitler supporter – Germany's Allianz AG – invested around $66,000 in the 2020 US election. Opportunistically, Germany's Siemens had a somewhat stronger focus on Democrats in 2020 donating $69,500 to Democrats and $43,500 to Republicans - a meager total of $113,000.
Some German companies' money also flowed into the congressional elections that take place parallel to the presidential election. The German companies do not directly support candidates for the Senate and the House of Representatives. According to US law, companies in the USA and abroad are not allowed to donate themselves. As a consequence, their dark money has to go via stealthy setups.
In order to participate in the US election, however, high-ranking managers in American branches and subsidiaries of German companies and corporations usually set up so-called Political Action Committees (PACs). More often than not, their names make their proximity to the German company extremely clear. Usually, corporate apparatchiks, i.e., top managers, make donations.
A look at the recipients of donations makes it clear that there are often very tangible interests behind the donations of corporate apparatchiks. This is particularly evident at Siemens' PAC. Siemens is known for its dark money, secret accounts, and bribery. Its donations mainly benefit members of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, North Carolina and California. Siemens currently has three major projects underway in all these US states:
1. Siemens has supplied technology for a state-of-the-art power plant in Pennsylvania, including a gas turbine plant;
2. another power plant in North Carolina has been running with Siemens technology since April, built and delivered from the Siemens plant in Berlin; and finally,
3. in Sacramento, California, Siemens operates a plant that builds locomotives.
Last year, the Munich-based company, Siemens that is also active in transportation in the USA, was able to land a major order from the US rail operator Amtrak. The deal is to build 75 diesel-powered locomotives which are to travel through the entire USA from 2021 onwards. The agreement is expected to generate almost €800 million or $970 million.
It seems interesting that candidates benefit from campaign donations that sit on critical congressional committees. For example, Siemens supports Peter A. DeFazio, Chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Meanwhile, Oregon's DeFazio received a puny sum of just $1,000.
Sam Graves, Republican from Missouri, also received $1,000 for his campaign. Beyond that, the subcommittee on Railways, Pipelines and Dangerous Goods, responsible for the US rail operator Amtrak's federal oversight, was not left out by Siemens. Its chairman, Daniel Lipinski (Democrat, Illinois) received $2,000. The Republican Rick Crawford (Arkansas) did better. He got $3,000. For a corporation with 385,000 employees making about $5bn in profit a year, this is truly small change.
Other German corporate PACs seem to be pursuing a similar strategy. Fresenius Medical Care North America's PAC primarily supports senators who sit on the US Senate Committee on Appropriations. The committee ultimately decides on the allocation of funds and is considered very powerful in the US political system.
Meanwhile, chairpersons of subcommittees for both science and health are supported by the pharmaceutical company's PAC, with up to $10,000 per senator. So far, a clear preference whom German companies support more – Republicans or Democrats – cannot be conclusively extracted due to the opaqueness of a system that is deliberately designed to hide such information.
Overall, however, German PACs have donated significantly more than four years ago. In other words, they gave more during Donald Trump's time in office. On an international scale, Germany's tech-giant T-Mobile-PAC is only in second place when it comes to donation. It is still ahead of Japan's Toyota Corp. Only the UBS America's PAC – which is part of the Swiss banking giant UBS which made a $4bn profit in 2019, is ahead of T-Mobile. Germany's T-Mobile donated around $1.5 million.
Generally, for Daimler, Bayer, Siemens, and many other German companies, the USA is an even more important market for its product than Germany. In 2019, Deutsche Telekom generated half of its revenue in the United States. Consequently, which president – Democrat or Republican – governs the world's largest economic power and which politicians sit in Congress affects Germany's companies.
It came as no surprise that Bayer's CEO Werner Baumann was one of the first to visit the newly elected Donald Trump in January 2017. At the time, Germany's Bayer corporation was acquiring the US company, Monsanto, however, Bayer needed the approval of the American authorities.
Corporate lobbying and influence-peddling remain vital not only for German corporations. Nevertheless, American law prohibits foreign companies from making direct campaign donations. Only US citizens are allowed. As a result, wise politicians have installed infamous loopholes so that capitalism's influence over politics runs smoothly.
It demands a little detour for corporate lobbying but aids the public image of having strict laws against influence peddling. Everyone – except the ordinary voter – is a winner. Politicians get money – dark money or otherwise – corporations get preferential treatment, and pro-business regulation is sold to the voter as deregulation, and capitalism runs smoothly. Behind the public relations façade of legality and anti-corruption, PACs play an essential role in the political-business interface. They collect money from companies and corporations, and these funds are pass on to political candidates so that corporations can get the best politicians money can buy.
In their operation, PACs often appoint treasurers and administrators who themselves are corporate lobbyists. The whole setup is a charade, but the façade works very well when channelling corporate money to politicians. For example, T-Mobile’s so-called "Vice President for Government Relations" is really a corporate lobbying position. It is very safe to assume that PACs use money in the companies' interest under whose roof they operate.
To camouflage the entire charade, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) oversees campaign finance to add a bit of legitimacy to the sham. Disempowered, underfinanced and deregulated, the FEC serves as the infamous fig-leaf. With the support of the entire setup, German corporate money – a mere $3 million – is only a fraction of the $14bn spent on US elections. Perhaps this indicates that capital-to-politics lobbying works rather well even with indirect money. Almost instinctively, many politicians seem to know what to do.
Overall, PACs run by Germany's companies and corporations listed on the "DAX" – Germany's stock exchange – distributed their money to the two known political camps. In 2016, German corporations lent significantly more support for Republican candidates. Two–thirds of corporate donations went to Republicans. By contrast, in 2020, more money went to Democratic candidates. Perhaps Germany's corporate lobbyists were smelling the imminent demise of Donald Trump.
Nonetheless, some German corporations remained loyal supporters of Republicans. Heidelberg Cement's PAC, for example, was one of them. In 2016, its top-apparatchik Bernd Scheifele announced that his corporation would benefit from Trump's anti-migration "concrete" wall on Mexico's border. The corporation's behaviour caused protests in the German city of Heidelberg at that time. By 2020, the company again distributed most of its donations to Republicans.
Strangely and unlike in past years, Deutsche Bank's PAC withheld direct donations in 2020. However, in 2016, the banking giant also supported predominantly Republican candidates. By 2020, the bank leaned towards Joe Biden donating a meagre $65,000 to the Democratic candidate. This was about one-tenth [1/10th] of the sum they had given to incumbent Donald Trump. In other words, the value of Donald Trump for German banking corporation is 10-times higher than that of Joe Biden.
Yet, no German company has donated more money to Donald Trump than Bayer. The Big-Pharma corporation provided Republicans with around $400,000: $182,000 paid directly and $218,000 transferred by its subsidiary Monsanto. Monsanto produces the cancer-causing chemical Roundup. In second place is Deutsche Bank, followed by BASF with 69% of its money going to Trump & Co. and only 31% went to the Democrats. The political preferences of the German capital became clear. Since 2004, German corporation's political donations went to the Republicans:
· 100% of corporate money of a BASF offshoot called LANXESS;
· 94% of Heidelberger Cement; and
· 70% of Deutsche Bank.
In the case of Bayer, pro-Trump donations are within the corporation's historical tradition. After all, Bayer welcomed Adolf Hitler in 1933 and not much later financed Auschwitz. Bayer also welcomed the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Pinochet not only liked to torture people he also liked the free market.
Free market ideologue, Hayek was one of Pinochet's most ardent supporters – a man who replaced democracy with fascism and torture centres like Villa Grimaldi, today a site of dark tourism. Whenever and wherever democracy is to be replaced by fascism – Hitler, Pinochet, the 6th of January 2021 in Washington DC – Bayer is at hand to support it.
Bayer's 2016 pro-Trump backing came with the arrogant hope that its candidate would increase profits, bring tax cuts, and reduce environmental regulations. Bayer was right, and Trump delivered. Bayer's public relations reformulated its support for Trump as, in the USA, we expect higher dynamics than in the previous year. Just as Adolf Hitler and Augusto Pinochet before him, Donald Trump has fulfilled Bayer's expectations in terms of deregulation and profits.
Donald Trump also relaxed or scrapped 46 environmental regulations. More recently, Trump entrusted a former Monsanto manager with an important position in a field euphemistically labelled natural conservation. Just like Donald Trump, capital also knows how to put up a smokescreen. The Bayer/Monsanto lobbying organisation is beautifully labelled Citizenship Fund.
To hide the truth of supporting right-wing extremists like Pinochet and Donald Trump, Monsanto's Citizenship Fund says, the fund supports candidates who are consistent with our policy goals without considering the personal political preferences of the company. This is how propaganda works.
Thomas Klikauer teaches MBAs at the Sydney Graduate School of Management, Western Sydney University, Australia. He has over 600 publications including ten books.
Nadine Campbell (also at WSU) is the founder of Abydos Academy.
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