Big businesses buy politicians too...
We are now at a point that billionaires openly make unilateral decisions about foreign and defence policy with little discussion in public eyes, let alone checks and balances.
Billionaires in the USA are completely and totally beholden to the military-industrial complex, for the most part. Look how they all scrambled for JEDI, for example.
The US military alone spends the entire net worth of the richest private person in 17 weeks, wealth it took him 30-ish years to accumulate; that's not counting the rest of government spending. There's an argument that any senator is "richer" than the richest private person in the country. It's not even the same ballpark.
Did you have specific instances in mind?
We need anti-Establishment players who are already willing to confront these billionaires by cutting off their influence completely, rather than taxing them more — which is useless, and conveniently replaces their contributions with tax dollars that can be used for the same manipulation strategies.
The bad news is, any criticism of these particular billionaires results in synthesized media campaigns crying wolf about anti-Semitism or anti-science, which causes the public to become distracted over manufactured culture wars, while the root issues go unchecked and the politicians willing to confront these billionaires are smeared, drawn, and quartered by the same media and voters who wouldn't dare to think outside their box.
Who’s the billionaire you have in mind? Also remember that he also has his own self-interests and will toss you under the bus if it furthers his interests, too.
I will say, I encourage anyone interested in understanding this better to spend some time researching: to who known billionaire individuals (and families) are donating funds to, or investing heavily into, whether that be corporate/legacy media companies, video game publishers, farms, as a few examples — you name it. Follow the money, and you will find power and influence causing rapid changes to policy, hiring, and public relations that all closely align to known political agendas.
I'll leave it at that. :)
>Also remember that he also has his own self-interests and will toss you under the bus if it furthers his interests, too.
Yes, precisely. It's human nature, but even easier as someone with nearly unlimited funds and quite likely, power.
Also IE was the dominant browser back then, which it is not today, but windows itself is on the desktop. So I think it is abusing monopoly, but instead of trying to regulate it, EU should make a push for open source. Maybe fund it with a big fine for Microsoft. That would be EU politics I could engage with.