Plata o plomo is a Colombian Spanish slang phrase notoriously used by Pablo Escobar, dubbed the 'King of Cocaine' and one of the wealthiest conventional criminals in history, having amassed an estimated net worth of US$30 billion by the time of his death. A person who says the phrase 'plata o plomo' is telling the listener to either accept a bribe (plata, meaning 'silver') or lose their life (plomo, a metonym for a 'lead bullet'). There is nothing novel about money shaping politics. What is new is that you can buy the government for pennies on the dollar with enough cash and (crucially) a ruthless will to deploy it as a weapon. Why have the four wealthiest people in America (and most of their fellow billionaires) become Trump supporters' It is not because of the price of eggs. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison'like Musk'run companies with tens of billions of dollars in government contracts and hundreds of billions potentially affected by government regulations. In years...
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