Right now if we look up donors we see massive pacs and private equity as the chief donors. But with enough research and effort, people can still unravel that thread. It's like TOR, it tries to obscure your actions on the internet but it only makes it harder and your actions are still your actions and if they crack encryption they have your actions.
Now imagine instead of Bain Capital being the top donor for Joe Kennedy and giving him $60k, its just a $1000 low level employees at companies that bain works for each donating $600. Right now we know who Joe Kennedy works for, Bill Bain and Mitt Romney and thats why their company is on top of his donor list. But in 4 years that same kind of 60k donation will be atomized and it will be impossible to track donors agendas and see how shit really works.
While TOR just tried to "hide your actions" bit torrent breaks your actions up into thousands of little bits and then reassembles them later. With this kind of influence peddling we will no longer have an idea what a politicians agenda is until they are legislating. Right now you can actually tell exactly what any politician will do based on their donors.
You can launder money and peddle influence but the hardest thing to hide is an agenda. Here are the 400 or so politicians that Bain bought this cycle. I honestly think Mitt might change parties and finally let the DNC admit they're just the party of private equity and abandon performative workers' rights..
https://ibb.co/N9JSDLJ
https://ibb.co/fdT1cgG
https://ibb.co/VNybJ77
https://ibb.co/9G6MjSJ
You might think that corporations will get wise and try to smurf their donations but they are incapable of giving up their control and will insist on micromanaging their workers donations. That's why every corporation has their own pac and solicit their workers to donate through them. But if you peruse the FEC donations by employer you'll see they even fail at that and these corporate pacs currently only function as vehicles for the c-suite to funnel unlimited funds to republicans and corpo-dems. Currently at most corporations the employees give directly to democrats for the most part if they give at all. (That's not to say they have class consciousness though, since they give to neolibs and grifters more often than to leftists.)
will insist on micromanaging their workers donations
You're actually describing exactly what I'm talking about but you're confusing the optics and the tactics. Just because a donation is the name of some small business owner doesn't mean that donation was not entirely micro-managed by an agency. Consultancies are exactly what you're talking about, weaponized micromanagement. They mostly exist to launder their influence through a bunch of companies that aren't legally defined as subsidiaries but its really just an anti-competitive structure that connects all the businesses that contract their consultant services. For example, Mayor Pete helped fix bread prices for the McKinseys.
I don't think people realize that once you contract a consultant, they don't work for you. When you pay a consultant, you're buying into a mob family and that's your way of showing you're an earner. But i just think we've been short sighted in our views on consultants. We all know they're an anti-competitive measure for corporations but I actually think their real profit center is influence peddling and political engineering.
Basically I think just like a company can wedge itself into a supply chain, then expand to the other parts of that chain vertically and also expand to adjacent industries, I think consultancies are that kind of wedge for politics. I think consultancies got themselves into the supply chain for politicians and have been secretly expanding their marketshare and may actually have bought the whole thing. If you think "what do Bain and McKinsey want?" then all modern politics. All of it, down to every single flawed piece of legislation and local school board election, makes sense. There are no outliers to this theory of influence.