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The bad guys have faces

scummy Wisconsin billionaires

Fortunately, I’ve completely tuned out of television in this election season, or I’d be even more anxious right now. Minnesota is being flooded with conservative billionaire money. You know who benefits: Republicans.

The Republican nominee for governor, Lisa Demuth, has a super PAC funded mostly by a Wisconsin billionaire — Richard Uihlein, who has spent years bankrolling right-wing candidates and campaigns in other states and nationwide. In 2024, Uihlein and his wife were top Trump donors, spending $59 million to help deliver the White House back to Trump and to support other conservative candidates.

ANow they have turned their eyes to Minnesota. The Uihleins’ dark money super PAC heavily funded the Restore Sanity super PAC, which spent nearly $3 million to ensure Lisa Demuth won her primary — more than five times the amount Demuth herself raised, and about three times more than all of her Republican opponents raised combined.

In the counties where the ads paid for mostly by this single donor didn’t air (mostly outside the Twin Cities), Demuth often lost or underperformed. In the weeks leading up to the Republican primary, Demuth bragged about the work the super PAC was doing for her. She owes her campaign’s survival in large part to one man, and Minnesotans deserve to know what kind of return on investment he’s expecting.

Uihlein is not investing in Minnesota’s elections on a whim. In other states, he and his wife have used their personal wealth to fund extreme causes that they know would be rejected without their enormous outside spending. They have bankrolled efforts to restrict abortion. They have financed organizations committed to repealing the Affordable Care Act and to privatizing Social Security. They have funded efforts to undermine workers’ rights and labor unions and have fought reforms to lower prescription drug prices.

Why are billionaires intrinsically evil? How can anyone look at their agenda and fail to realize that they are not friends of humanity?

We can blame a good part of this villainy on the Supreme Court.

Going forward, the only long-term solution is to get big money out of our politics by overturning Citizens United and passing strong, nationwide campaign finance reform. Until then, Minnesotans can do their part by holding politicians accountable when they allow people like Uihlein to try and rig the system for themselves.

Whoever the next presidential candidate is, they better put a priority on purging the corruption from the Supreme Court.

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Comments

  1. Reginald Selkirk says

    Schlitz: How Milwaukee’s Famous Beer Became Infamous

    … The decisions taken by the brewery’s owners, the Uihlein family, to cope with their rival’s dominance would eventually “salami slice” their company to death.

    The result was that Schlitz was now getting much more beer out of the same amount of plant, with all the boost in margins that meant. At the same time Uihlein instructed his brewers to begin cutting costs by using corn syrup to replace some of the malted barley used to make the beer, and by substituting cheaper hop pellets for fresh hops. The ingredient alterations were meant to be made incrementally, Uihlein’s belief apparently being that drinkers would not notice each slight change to the product. Unfortunately, as commentators later pointed out, the steps from A to B and from B to C might have been tiny and unnoticeable, but the steps from A to M added up to a big leap.
    …
    Back on the mainland, the brewery had attempted to respond to the growing success of Miller Lite, the first successful low-calorie beer, with the launch of Schlitz Light in late 1976. But perhaps because drinkers were already suspicious about what went into ordinary Schlitz, Light was a failure in an otherwise expanding sector.

    Meanwhile Schlitz was running into trouble with its mainstream brand, after an attempt to disguise to consumers what it was putting into its beer. Because it aged its beer less than other brewers, Schlitz had to add silica gel to the product to prevent a haze forming when it was chilled. In 1976 the company began to worry that the United States Food and Drug Administration would compel brewers to list all their ingredients on bottles and cans. Its use of silica gel would show up in harsh contrast to its rivals such as Anheuser-Busch, who aged their beers longer, allowing the protein to settle out naturally, and therefore did not need to use artificial anti-haze products.
    …
    All Schlitz’s problems with its image, caused by Robert Uihlein’s tampering with the quality of the beer, were causing the company to start losing its second place in the American beer market to its Milwaukee rival, Miller. Even though Schlitz had increased its share of the U.S. beer market from 7 percent in 1950 to 14 percent in 1977, Budweiser and Miller had grown faster. Peters and McKeithan pushed Schlitz’s marketing department to go for a new “high impact” advertising campaign featuring an aggressive-looking boxer who demanded, when asked to swap his Schlitz for another brand: “You want to take away my gusto?” Instead of amusing viewers, the ad put them off: Consumers found it “menacing,” and it became known as the “drink Schlitz or I’ll kill you” campaign…

    The article is nebulous about which Uihlein was responsible.

  2. Reginald Selkirk says

    Uihleins Shuttled In Workers From Mexico

    Billionaire conservatives Elizabeth and Richard Uihlein are two of the nation’s biggest donors to MAGA Republicans like President Donald Trump and to Republicans in Wisconsin. In the 2024 presidential election, Richard Uihlein’s super PAC, Restoration PAC, supported Trump’s presidential campaign with a TV advertisement attacking his opponent, Kamala Harris, for allowing an immigrant “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border.

    In fact, the Uihleins’ company Uline had for years been shuttling in workers from Mexico to work at its plants in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida, as the Guardian reported in December. “The sources who spoke to the Guardian said Uline pays all the costs for their Mexico-based workers to leave Mexico and fly to warehouse locations in the U.S.,” the story reported.

    The workers were paid far less than their American counterparts, with the company paying these imported workers Mexican wages deposited into accounts in Mexico. “Guardian reporters … observed a dozen Uline workers from Mexico living in a hotel near the company’s Pleasant Prairie headquarters, where the company pays for their lodging, food and rental cars.”

    The workers were brought into this country using tourist visas and visas meant for employees who are entering the U.S. temporarily to receive professional training, known as B1, sources close to the company said. “But instead of being part of a dedicated training program, the Mexican employees stay for one to six months and … perform normal work in Uline’s U.S. warehouses. … Lawyers and immigrants’ advocates told the Guardian they believed the alleged practice is likely illegal and could be exploitative of the workers enrolled in the program.”

    Last week the Guardian did a follow-up story including an interview with a Mexican worker named Christian Valenzuela, who shared a letter from Uline requesting a B1 training visa for him. Valenzuela said the training never happened. “We were just going to work,” he said. “They always gave us the heaviest work,” he said.

    He suffered an accident on the job, which left him permanently disabled, Valenzuela said. Ultimately Uline canceled his contract and refused to provide any benefits or medical care for his problems.
    …

  3. Reginald Selkirk says

    @1

    Let’s Make Snot Beer!

    HOW DO WE COMPETE WITH BUDWEISER?

    Executive: Robert Uihlein, Jr., head of the Schlitz Brewing Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

    Background: in the 1970s, Schlitz was America’s #2 beer, behind Budweiser. It had been #1 until 1957 and has pursued Bud ever since. In the 1970s, Uihlein came up with a strategy to compete against Anheuser-Busch. He figured that if he could cut the cost of ingredients used in his beer and speed up the brewing process at the same time, he could brew more beer in the same amount of time for less money … and earn higher profits.

    Decision: Uihlein cut the amount of time it took to brew Schlitz from 40 days to 15, and replaced much of the barley malt in the beer with corn syrup – which was cheaper. He also switched from one type of foam stabilizer to another to get around new labeling laws that would have required the original stabilizer to be disclosed on the label.

    Impact: Uihlein got what he wanted: a cheaper, more profitable beer that made a lot of money … at first. But it tasted terrible, and tended to break down so quickly as the cheap ingredients bonded together and sank to the bottom of the can – forming a substance that “looked disconcertingly like mucus.” Philip Van Munchings writes in Beer Blast:

    Suddenly Schlitz found itself shipping out a great deal of apparently snot-ridden beer. The brewery knew about it pretty quickly and made a command decision – to do nothing … Uihlein declined a costly recall for months, wagering that not much of the beer would be subjected to the kinds of temperatures at which most haze forms. He lost the bet, sales plummeted … and Schlitz began a long steady slide from the top three.

    Schlitz finally caved in and recalled 10 million cans of the snot beer. But their reputation was ruined and sales never recovered. In 1981, they shut down their Milwaukee brewing plant; the following year the company was purchased by rival Stroh’s. One former mayor of Milwaukee compared the brewery’s fortunes to the sinking of the Titanic, asking “How could that big of a business go under so fast?”
    …

  5. Akira MacKenzie says

    Whoever the next presidential candidate is, they better put a priority on purging the corruption from the Supreme Court.

    Just like prosecuting Trump after 2024, the Democrats would deem that “too political.”

    “We just have to trust the process.”

  7. says

    Why are billionaires intrinsically evil?

    Maybe they’re not – or, alternatively, the vast majority of humans are?

    Here’s a short PBS segment on the seminal research (Piff et al) finding that the trappings of wealth privilege – randomly assigned and artificially induced – very quickly make us ruder, more dominating, louder, greedier, more unethical (e.g. willing to lie, and break rules and laws), less charitable, and far more likely to attribute our success to our own skills and smart decision-making, rather than to the enormous structural advantages conferred by a (literal) coin toss.

    The researchers (and others) have gone on to expand their studies of inequality with national and international subjects, and more recently done some interesting work exploring what can be done about it.

  8. raven says

    No doubt, huge amounts of money help in political campaigns.
    The USA has the best government (from the billionaire’s standpoint), that money can buy.

    But it isn’t magic and doesn’t always win.
    Sometimes the voters see through the ads and vote for their own well being.

    Elon Musk likely broke the law by promising voters $1 million … (the state Supreme court election in Wisconsin)
    ap.org https://www.ap.org › News Highlights › Elections
    Jul 14, 2026 — The tech titan and groups he supported spent at least $20 million on the candidate. Spending on the election topped $100 million, making it the …

    In the last election for a judge on the Wisconsin Supreme court, Elon Musk spent $20 million including bribing the voters for his candidate.
    They still lost.
    “However, he lost by 10 percentage points to Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford.”

    The equivalence, billionaires = evil oligarchies is becoming more and more well known.
    That is going to diminish their money’s influence in elections or at least, so I hope.

  9. raven says

    Schlitz beer?
    I remember it was everywhere and then suddenly it was gone
    So that is what happened to it.

  10. says

    There is no such thing as a truly benevolent billionaire. Our organization got lots of huge office supply catalogs from Uihlein’s company. Everything was poor quality and very overpriced. These two are just two more rtwingnut aholes; part of the pestilence destroying what’s left of this country. Vote progressive or face more repugnantcant death squads roaming the streets.

  11. Richard Smith says

    Then there was the unfortunate downfall of Shotz beer which, oddly enough, appeared to be somehow related to a couple of employees putting gloves on bottles on the line.

  13. lotharloo says

    @7:

    Well that’s the point. Definitely almost all billionaires and most likely all of them are fucking scumbags because that’s what having so much wealth and power does to humans. It also doesn’t help that the system is biased towards rewarding the most shameless, greedy, abusive, and exploitative individuals with massive wealth.

  14. numerobis says

    shermanj: I ran a small company and yeah, we’d get those U-line catalogs. I never actually ordered from them, they were offering me a lot more than I would ever need for my scale. The price was better than retail, but quality looked awful.

  15. StevoR says

    @12.. birgerjohansson : “I assume dinosaurs like Chuck Shumer still oppose adding judges to SCOTUS.”

    There’s also a few Trumpist traitors on SCOTUS that need to be subtracted from that court and arguably even sentenced by other courts too..

  16. drmarcushill says

    This definitely makes me glad that, imperfect as they are, at least the UK has some laws to prevent elections being bought, especially by foreign interests. Laws which, it appears, Farage and his gang of reprobates are about to get smacked with. I love a bit of righteous schadenfreude.

  17. NitricAcid says

    Billionaires are evil because it requires one to be evil to accumulate multiple millions of dollars (I would have mentioned some authors as exceptions, but they’ve proved themselves as evil as the rest of them).

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