Governments, organisations and wealthy individuals anywhere in the world can use money to influence what happens elsewhere; it can be classified as a political use of economic power (3.3.7.2). They can offer funding with varying degrees of transparency: US aid to Israel is overt, but Russia influence has been more secretive:
· As reported in a Guardian article, Tech giants face Congress as showdown over Russia election meddling looms, Facebook, Twitter and Google were all used as covert channels to influence the 2016 US Presidential election: “All three companies have admitted that Russian entities bought ads on their sites in an effort to skew the vote.”
· Leonid Bershidsky’s article, Russia's Big Bet on the French Far Right, described Russian connections to a loan made to France’s far-right Front National party led by Marine le Pen. The loan cannot be directly traced to Russia’s President Putin but, as the article noted: “If Le Pen breaks through, Putin will have a formidable fifth column inside the EU.”
Democracies are unwise to allow unlimited political campaign contributions. The money can come from anywhere, including hostile foreign governments.
(This is an archive of a page intended to form part of Edition 4 of the Patterns of Power series of books. The latest versions are at book contents).