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Weather: Mostly sunny. A slight chance of showers in the morning, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs around 90. Chance of rain 40 percent. Wednesday Night: Mostly clear. A chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly in the evening. Lows in the lower 70s. Chance of rain 40 percent.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Bunnell City Hall and Police Station Dedication at 8:30 a.m. at 2400 Commerce Parkway, Bunnell.
Joint workshop of local governments: Flagler County, Flagler Beach, Palm Coast, Bunnell and Beverly Beach governments hold a joint meeting, 5:30 p.m. in board chambers of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunne
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) meets at 9 a.m. at the Airline Room at the Daytona Beach International Airport. The TPO’s planning oversight includes all of Volusia County and the developed areas of eastern Flagler County including Beverly Beach and Flagler Beach as well as portions of the cities of Palm Coast and Bunnell, with board member representation from each of those jurisdictions. See the full agendas here. To join the meeting electronically, go here.
Notably: I stared at Stuyvesant Town, a 20-block subdivision housing 21,000 people and an example of post-war affordable housing, the three years I was at the UN School nearby (on 23rd Street), and visited Mr. Perero (Mariano Perero), my math teacher there, not so much for chess and backgammon as because I had a crush on his daughter, among others who gathered there. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company built Stuyvesant out of Manhattan’s Lower East Side slums in 1943 for $112 million, or $2.1 billion in today’s dollars, based on a design by the imperious Robert Moses (no, don’t give him credit: to build his highways, he’d thrown 250,000 people out of their homes, so the 21,000 of Stuyvesant weren’t enough to parkway his way back into graces) and under the eye of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia: 35 red-brick buildings, 13 to 14 stories each, 8,756 apartments in total, all rent- and race-controlled. The “town” was to replace the tenements and shacks of a neighborhood that Henry Roth had made famous in his Call It Sleep, the tragic story of an immigrant boy and his imperious father and dominated mother. They were Polish whites, so they’d have been allowed in Stuyvesant Town: Frederick Ecker, chairman of Metropolitan Life from 1936 to 1950, forbade Blacks or any non-whites or single people from renting. Courts backed him. You’d have thought it was 2025 all over again. The company changed policy when Eckert died, and the first Black family moved in. These days it’s DEI city, with a waiting list wider than the East River, and it’s still like an echo of Central Park, if with these massive apartment blocks. There are no cars in Stuyvesant Town, just alleys and trees and parks and people. Affordable housing is a decision, not a problem.
—P.T.
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
September 2025
Contractor Review Board Meeting
Flagler County’s Technical Review Committee Meeting
Flagler Tiger Bay Club Guest Speaker: Former U.S. Prosecutor Roger B. Handberg
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
“Conversations in American Democracy” Celebrates Constitution Day
Flagler County Industrial Development Authority Meeting
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Central Avenue Comeback Bash at Barnhill’s Cafe Bar and Grill
Palm Coast Planning and Land Development Board
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
‘Let’s Talk Palm Coast’ Town Halls with Council Members
Palm Coast Democratic Club Recap Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
To build his highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons—more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly places to live, the vital parts of the city that made New York a home to its people. By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions. By making sure that the vast suburbs, rural and empty when he came to power, were filled on a sprawling, low-density development pattern relying primarily on roads instead of mass transportation, he insured that that flood would continue for generations if not centuries, that the New York metropolitan area would be-per-haps forever-an area in which transportation- getting from one place to another-would be an irritating, life-consuming concern for its 14,000,000 residents.
–From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974).
Sherry says
trump administration “SPYING” in Greenland:
Danish media reported that Americans with ties to President Donald Trump had carried out covert influence operations in Greenland.
Danish broadcaster DR reported that at least three U.S. citizens linked to the U.S. government were involved in activities that, reportedly, authorities fear could be used covertly to support Trump’s desire to make Greenland part of the United States.
Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said the U.S. chargé d’affaires — currently its most senior diplomat in Denmark — had been summoned in response. He called any interference in Danish affairs “unacceptable,” and emphasized that Copenhagen “will of course not accept covert operations on our territory,” in a statement emailed by his ministry, according to the AP.
Ray W, says
By now, at least some, or perhaps even many FlaglerLive readers know that President Trump recently claimed that solar and wind energy was “the scam of the century”; he then blamed renewable energy for a rise in electricity energy costs thus far this year, energy costs that he said were supposed to go down by 50% in his first year in office, a promise he made many times during the 2024 presidential campaign. He also promised that the nation’s supply of usable electricity would double within 12 months of taking office.
Bloomberg News published an article devoted to a 2025 rise, not drop, in wholesale electricity prices. The premise of the article is that President Trump may have a difficult time blaming rising electricity prices on solar and wind sources.
To me, one of the most important parts of the article was a need to upgrade the nation’s aging grid. Transmission costs have tripled over the past 20 years. One approach would be to improve the efficiency of existing transmission lines, via better conduits, sensors and other grid-enhancing technologies. New lines are important, too.
From January through May of this year, wholesale electricity prices are up 10%, according to the EIA. In 2026, EIA projections have wholesale electricity prices rising by another 5.8%.
On a note closer to home, FP&L is in the process of obtaining regulatory approval to raise the money it needs to operate by under $2 billion; it started off by asking for more than $2 billion, and then it negotiated for less overall additional money, but only with some and not all of the interested parties.
But President Trump, since taking office, has halted work on two offshore wind power projects. One of the two projects is in the Northeast, where a shortage of electricity supply has long strained that region’s grid.
President Trump has also rolled back clean energy tax credits, which may or may not delay final buildout of renewable plants. As an economist told the Bloomberg News reporter, “[b]asic economics shows that restricting supply in the face of rising demand drives prices higher. … By slowing clean energy deployment, the administration is directly fueling cost increases.”
Knowing that a certain set of FlaglerLive commenters would not take the word of any economist over the word of a president, I went to an EIA site and looked up the July 2025 statistically-generated utility-scale comparative costs over a lifetime of plant operation for the several forms of generating electricity, based on the EIA’s assessment of the “levelized” costs per kilowatt-hour produced. The EIA assumes for purposes of its evaluation that if applications for permits were to start today, by 2030 all forms of electricity generation could start producing electricity.
This makes sense to me. After all, American demand for electricity, stagnant for some time, has only recently begun to rise, what with the growth in use of data centers and the growth in use of AI software, each of which sector comes with a high demand for more electricity.
The EIA includes multiple factors in its assessment: levelized capital costs, levelized fixed operating and maintenance costs, levelized variable operating and maintenance costs, levelized transmission cost, levelized tax credits, and levelized captured carbon credits. Since solar plants and wind farms do not use fuel, the levelized variable operating and maintenance costs for those sources of power are far less than that category of costs for natural gas and coal-fired plants.
There are three categories of power generation sources: dispatchable technologies, resource-constrained technologies, and capacity resource technologies.
In the dispatchable technologies category, there are five forms of power generation:
1. The average cost per megawatt-hour for an advanced nuclear plant that will start producing electricity in 2030 and continue to produce electricity for 30 years is: $81.45 per MW-hour, on a “simple” average.
2. For a biomass plant: $80.85 per MW-hour, on a simple average.
3. For a combined-cycle gas turbine plant, with affixed steam plant: $67.09 per MW-hour, on a “capacity weighted” average.
4. For a combined-cycle gas turbine plant with affixed steam plant and captured carbon credits: $45.90 per MW-hour, on a capacity weighted average.
5. For a geothermal plant: $37.82 per MW-hour, on a capacity weighted average.
In the resource-constrained technology category, there are five more forms of power generation:
1. For an offshore wind facility, the simple average cost of power generation per MW-hour is $88.16.
2. For hydroelectric plants, the capacity-related cost of power generation is $54.40 per MW-hour.
3. For photo-voltaic-battery hybrid farms, the simple average cost of power generation is $53.44 per MG-hour.
4. For solar photo-voltaic farms, the capacity-weighted average cost of power generation is $28.06 per MW-hour.
5. For onshore wind farms, the capacity-weighted average cost of power generation is $18.90 per MW-hour.
In the capacity resource technologies category, there are two options:
1. For combustion turbine plants, the capacity-weighted cost of power generation is $132.07 per MW-hour.
2. For battery storage facilities, the simple average cost of power storage is $126.20 per MW-hour.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Readers should note that the EIA did not include a category for coal-fired plants. Perhaps that is so because zero coal-fired plants are in any stage of construction today and because the last coal-fired plant to open in the U.S. did so in 2014. Since it takes roughly six or seven years to build a coal-fired plant, start to finish, that means that the last coal-fired plant built in America was conceived in either 2007 or 2008, a time frame that coincides with the beginning of the Shale Revolution. Coal is simply too expensive over time to be worthwhile.
No company today could obtain financing to build a plant, not because of pollutants, but because of comparative costs.
Many years ago, FP&L entered into long-term contracts to buy energy from two coal-fired plants. When the shale revolution hit the American energy sector, natural gas prices fell, making the power made by the two coal-fired plants prohibitively expensive compared to natural gas. Contractually bound to buy electricity from the two coal-fired plants for many more years, FP&L decided to buy the two plants and shut them down, solving its cost problem.
Simply stated, if President Trump wants to lower the nation’s energy costs, he needs to promote solar and onshore wind farms. As data centers multiply all over the country, including one so far in Flagler County, and as AI applications increase, more and more electricity is going to be needed. Both solar and wind farms can be quickly built, compared to nuclear and natural gas plants.
It is true that initial costs for building solar and onshore wind farms are higher than the construction cost of building a natural gas CCNG plant, but you have to buy natural gas during the operating lifetime of a CCNG plant. Solar and wind farms do not have to buy anything for them to produce electricity after they open, so the positive cost difference after opening is gravy.
Jim says
Gerrymandering is just a symptom of the real problem facing the USA now. And that is the way money is deciding who will be elected now. When we allowed PAC’s and unrestricted spending on elections, we put ourselves on the path we’re on now. There was a time (I’m old enough to remember) when many, if not most, voting districts could go either way in an election. Not everywhere and not every state. But, largely, across the USA, elections were almost always competitive. And, as a result, your congressman (person) had to stay on their toes and pay attention to what the voters in their district were saying and thinking. In short, your voice made a difference in the voting pattern of your elected officials. But now, look at where we are. Most congress members are afraid to say anything because if it is perceived wrong by those with money, they’ll likely be “primaried” out of their job! So we end up with people like Randy Fine – his promise was that he’d “support Trump”. I never heard him say one word about anything he would do for the citizens of this district. And he’s been true to that so far in his term.
Unless and until we return to a reasonable approach to election financing, things will just get worse. And this BS gerrymandering effort going on in Texas and California (and soon elsewhere) is just a symptom of the serious infection in our democracy. There should be limits to what anyone can spend supporting a candidate. Instead of Elon’s untold millions spent, it would be more democratic if Elon couldn’t spend any more than any of us! So put a $100/candidate/election limit out there (for example). Get rid of PAC’s or limit them to $100/candidate as well. Actually, just eliminate them; if they are allowed to exist, they’ll just multiple like rabbits to keep outspending the voters. And limit what candidates can spend on themselves. Again, maybe $100 or maybe $10,000. I don’t know for sure but I do know that Rick Scott might have more trouble getting elected if he had to depend on the actual voters to support his re-election. I also think Randy Fine might now even be able to fund a candidacy if there were reasonable rules in place. And – no money from outside the voting district! And(!), treat companies like individuals – the same dollar limits on them as the individual voter.
I’ll bet if these recommendations were actually put into practice, you’d see the tone in this country change for the better. But, that’s not going to happen because why would any congressman or any other elected official want to cut off the hand that feeds them? And that in a nutshell is why we’re seeing this asinine gerrymandering mid-decade. It’s not right; it’s not democratic; but nobody can do a damn thing to stop it. Welcome to today’s “democracy”.
Ray W, says
The Houston Chronicle reports that thus far into the summer months Texas oil and gas field employment levels have dropped as crude oil prices hover just above break-even prices. About 1.5% of the oil and gas sector’s “upstream” labor force lost their jobs in both June (1,500 jobs) and July (1,400 jobs), according to the Texas Workforce Commission.
Should crude oil prices continue their “recent downward trend”, the industry is expected to face a “reckoning,” writes the Chronicle reporter.
Active or working drilling rig counts are down over the past few months as are issuances of drilling permits, said the president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, Karr Ingham.
There had been a trend of job growth in the sector, dating from 2023, including during the early months of 2025. And two months of job losses do not mean that such losses will continue.
According to the reporter, oil and gas companies have begun to outsource labor to other countries, such as jobs in the accounting and information technology areas.
Recent energy company consolidations have also led to layoffs. After Chevron absorbed Hess earlier this year, it announced the layoff of 575 Hess employees. After Encino Energy acquired EOG Resources, it too announced its intent to lay off 121 workers.
Wrote the reporter:
“If prices average far lower in 2025 than they did in 2024, and rig counts continue to be generally relatively weak, layoffs would historically be expected to follow.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Drill, baby, Drill! was never expected to come true by the major players in the American energy industry. The political goal of one of our two political parties was to persuade the more gullible among us to dream of a fantasy world that would never come to exist absent a major economic shock to the world’s economy, such as what happened during the pandemic.
American oil companies cannot make money when crude oil prices drop to around $60 per barrel. Yesterday, they were at roughly $63 per barrel, up slightly from $62.17 per barrel in May. Fewer wells are being drilled. Of those that are being drilled, fewer wells are being completed. Overage average oil production on a monthly basis is down, albeit slightly, from the record high set last December, before Donald Trump took office on January 20th.
National gasoline prices, on average, are still higher than they were when President took office on January 20, 2025, though regional or state average prices may vary from the national average.
It’s been eight months now since President Trump took office. During the 2024 presidential campaign, he promised to cut gasoline prices in half by the end of his first year in office. He has four months to go and average gasoline prices are barely higher than they were eight months ago. All of the executive orders that he signed to reduce regulation on the industry increased oil company profits, i.e., the money saved from the executive orders is not trickling down to the consumer.
No doubt, President Trump will continue his lying about gasoline prices at the pump being below $2 per gallon. It will be an untruth the next time he says it, just as it was an untruth the first time he said it, and just as it was an untruth the 10th time he said it.
Let’s face facts. OPEC member states voted in March to begin the unrolling of a long-standing 2.2 million barrel per day voluntary constriction on production; the process is just about complete. Guianan crude oil production is increasing, as is Brazilian production. Oil fields off the coast of Baku in the Caspian Sea are producing more and more oil. Oil production in Kurdish Iraq is ramping up. Worldwide supply chains have been disrupted due to tariffs shocks. Worldwide GDP growth is less than anticipated. There is a glut of supply in the international crude oil marketplace and not enough demand.
American energy extractors have been drilling wells but capping them for use at a later date when oil prices are higher. The number of oil well completion documents filed with the Texas Railroad Commission is lower than the number of permits that have been issued to drill for oil.
I marvel at the number of people who continue to believe that gasoline prices are going to drop by 50% to $1.56 per gallon by the end of the year, as promised to them during the campaign. The evidence is all around them at each and every gas pump in the county, yet they believe the opposite is true.
This wholesale ignorance of the most basic concept of supply and demand is astounding.
If Chevron can make more money pumping oil out of the Gulf of Mexico in a field located off the coast of Guyana than it can by drilling for oil in the Permian Basin, guess which field Chevron will exploit first, American or Guianan? If pumping too much oil costs Chevron profit, guess whether Chevron will reduce its pumping efforts. And if Chevron reduces its drilling efforts in the Permian Basin due to low crude oil prices, guess whether Texas oil field workers will be hired or laid off.
Ray W, says
Newsweek just published an article titled “MAGA rages over Trump’s Chinese student numbers: ‘Should never allow that.”
According to the article, Trump commented on Monday that it was “very important” to allow 600,000 Chinese students into the country, a number significantly higher than the previous record of 372,000 Chinese student, set in the 2019-2020 academic year. According to the article, during last year’s 2023/24 academic year, some 277,000 Chinese students were studying at American higher education facilities.
Trump said:
“I hear so many stories about we’re not going to allow their students. We’re going to allow their students to come in. We’re going to allow. It’s very important, 600,000 students. It’s very important. But we’re going to get along with China.”
And the reporter wrote that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, during a The Ingraham Angle appearance on Fox News, said:
“[I]f Chinese students were not allowed to attend U.S. universities, ‘you’d empty them from the top. All of the students would go to better schools, and the bottom 15 percent of universities and colleges would go out of business.'”
One MAGA influencer, Chase Geiser, posted on X:
“Did Lutnick really just argue that Trump is letting 600,000 Chinese students into America so that Americans will go to worse schools and keep them from closing?”
MAGA influencer Lara Loomer posted to X:
“If we are only mass deporting 1,000 illegals each day but allowing 600,000 Chinese spies to come to our country, how can we call them mass deportations? Do the math. We will never get rid of the millions who came in under Biden. It’s basic math.
Conservative attorney and commenter Marina Medvin wrote:
“I don’t know a single Trump voter in favor of this.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
There are a lot of different reasons for the American economy to need more and more immigrants over the past five years. In the case of higher education, foreign students commonly pay full freight for tuition, which helps American universities. And many of the student’s never leave, driving American innovation at labs and in business. I have read studies about how the children of these students, born on American soil, are productive. But the grandchildren of these students are the most productive of all, even more productive than the native-born.
I deplore that an entire political movement is based on a lie. We needed all the immigrants we could get to drive the American recovery from the massive structural damage inflicted by the pandemic.
Ray W, says
The Wall Street Journal published on Wednesday its current take on today’s jobs market.
Here are some bullet points from the article:
– The story starts as follows:
“Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the U.S. labor market has entered ‘a curious kind of balance.’ The demand for workers has cooled, yet the unemployment rate has held steady because the supply of labor has slowed abruptly.
“Behind that slowing in the labor supply is a dramatic swing in immigration, from one of the biggest waves in U.S. history to almost none. Economists say that could have subtle but lasting consequences.”
– In the short-term, that abrupt slowing of the labor supply won’t push up the unemployment rate. But in the long-term, a slowing labor supply could limit potential economic growth and generate larger budget deficits.
– The last time annual net immigration was as consistently low as it is today was in the 60s, but back then Baby Boomers were entering the workforce in great numbers. In effect, the surging number of Boomers were powering the economy, despite the dearth of immigrant labor. Today, the Boomers are leaving the workplace, with no one to replace them. In effect, the nation’s labor force now is more heavily dependent on immigrant labor. And today’s fertility rate is near a record low. The Congressional Budget Office projects that deaths will outpace births by 2033.
Economist Tara Watson, from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told the Journal:
“Certainly economies can function with very low population growth … There’s just less dynamism and less income per capita usually in the long run.”
– “Economists and demographers say immigrants already account for the vast majority of growth in both the population and labor supply. With zero net immigration, Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok estimates the U.S. economy would be able to sustainably add only about 24,000 nonfarm jobs a month, compared with an average 155,000 from 2015 to 2024.”
– Because no U.S. agency tracks the number of immigrants who return home, it is impossible to accurately measure the actual flow of immigration. Add to this the fact that the Trump administration has stopped releasing deportation data, and the picture becomes even more muddled. With this type of records keeping, undocumented immigrants could enter and later exit the country without ever “leaving any statistical trace.”
– “While the decline in net immigration can’t be measured precisely, it is nonetheless being felt. Between May and July, the economy added just 106,000 nonfarm payrolls, or 35,000 per month, the lowest three-month stretch since the Covid-19 pandemic. The fact the unemployment rate didn’t rise at the same time suggests fewer people were entering the labor force in search of jobs, evidence of the immigration crackdown.”
– “Since economic output depends on the number of workers and their productivity, lower immigration mechanically lowers the growth rate. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal las month expect Trump’s immigration policies to subtract around 0.2 percentage point from growth in 2025 and 0.3 point in 2026.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I happen to agree with the conservative economist who says that an economy suffering from a low population growth rate will be less dynamic and provide less in per capita income over the long term. There are some among us who believe that immigrants are a drain on the economy. They are wrong. They would be right if they argued that certain individual immigrants are a drain on the economy. In a market-based economy, immigrants as a whole are a positive force in our economy.
Economist after economist say the same thing. In order to effectively grow an economy, we need to improve the productivity of each worker, and we need to grow the size of the labor force. But we can no longer add to the size of our labor force through native-born workers.
According to the reporter, as a nation, we added 3.3 million immigrants to our population base in 2023 and another 2.7 million immigrants to our economy in 2024. That happens to be pretty close to the 5.2 million new jobs that were added to the labor force during those two years, assuming that some of the incoming immigrants are homemakers or caregivers. We just don’t have the incoming native-born anymore to cover that number.
Ray W, says
Newsweek reports that the president and CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, Chris Swonger, thinks it positive that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has agreed to lift tariffs on American wine liquor and beer. “But until all provinces put American spirits back on their shelves, it won’t have much of an impact.”
At issue? The fact that individual Canadian provinces installed outright bans on the sale of American wine, beer and liquor products and those bans remain in place, despite the Prime Minister removing tariffs.
According to the Distilled Spirits Council and Spirits Canada, sales of American spirits in Canada are down 66.3% between early March of 2025 and the end of April 2025, when compared to sales for the same period in 2024. Over the first six months of the year compared to 2024, sales are down 62%.
Make of this what you will.
Terrible says
The current regime is revoking citizenship of people with legal status . Let that sink in. The treasonous fools make everything worse through division, racism, and straight up highway robbery, forced price increases, it’s totally ridiculous evil and illegal.
Subtract covid and 2008 rescue act. Over 90% of the “national debt” is tax breaks for our billionaires! Gut those food stamps though!
Sherry says
While trump orders “redistricting/gerrymandering” in Texas in order to “RIG” the midterms for the Maga Republicans. . . yet in Utah, trump is fighting against their “court ordered” redistricting because it may weaken the Maga Republican hold on that state. Just what more “proof” do you need that trump is actively “rigging” the next election? Take a good read:
By Aaron Pellish
08/27/2025 07:29 PM EDT
President Donald Trump attacked the Utah judge who ordered the state to redraw its congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms — a decision that could result in less favorable districts for Republicans in the deeply red state.
Trump, who sparked a redistricting battle after demanding that Texas redraw its political boundaries to favor Republicans ahead of the midterms, called Monday’s ruling “absolutely unconstitutional” and urged his party to preserve the state’s four GOP-majority districts.
The president accused Judge Dianna Gibson of political bias for ruling that the state can no longer use its current maps and must draw new lines in compliance with an independent commission.
“How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?,” Trump wrote on social media. “All Citizens of Utah should be outraged at their activist Judiciary, which wants to take away our Congressional advantage, and will do everything possible to do so.”
Gibson was appointed to the district court by former Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, in 2018.
Joe D says
In expansion to Jim’s post on Gerrymandering:
There USED to be hard and fast election finance rules governing election donations. There were individual and corporate LIMITS.
Then came the Supreme Court ruling on the CITIZENS UNITED lawsuit ( in my opinion there is no “citizens” benefit to the group at all…it’s BIG MONEY influencers, who use their VAST WEALTH to sway … and frequently outright BUY primary and regular elections) even the results of a LOCAL Election ( who can fight against a donor or donors putting MULTIMILLION DOLLARS into a local primary or regional election).
At the time the TRUMP ALIGNED Supreme Court took off all the financial guardrails from election donations, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said something to the effect that this lone Supreme Court decision was going to go down in history as one of the WORST DECISIONS in the course of American Democracy, because it put elections in the hands of of the BIG DONORS, drowning out competition from other less well funded ( but entirely competent ) political candidates.
So a few years later…here we are…mega millionaires influencing elections with OUTRAGEOUS DONATIONS, and then frequently being gifted powerful roles in the next ADMINISTRATION, despite their having ABSOLUTELY NO QUALIFICATIONS for their appointed positions of power!