Tag Archives: Debbie Wasserman Schultz

US government drops case against Max Blumenthal after jailing journalist on false charges

Posted on by
Reply

As the mysterious disappearance of Secret Service records and complete absence of evidence supporting its case came to light, the US government dropped its bogus charges against journalist Max Blumenthal.

By Ben Norton

Source: Grayzone

The US government has dropped its bogus charge of “simple assault” against journalist Max Blumenthal, after having him arrested on a 5-month-old warrant and jailed for nearly two days.

The Grayzone has learned that Secret Service call logs recorded during the alleged incident were either not kept or destroyed. The mysteriously missing evidence included print documents and radio recordings that may have exposed collusion between Secret Service officers operating under the auspices of the US State Department and violent right-wing hooligans in an operation to besiege peace activists stationed inside Venezuela’s embassy in Washington, DC.

Blumenthal, who is the editor of The Grayzone, was arrested at his home on October 25 by a team of DC cops who had threatened to break down his door. He later learned that he was listed in his arrest warrant as “armed and dangerous,” a rare and completely unfounded designation that placed Blumenthal at risk of severe harm by the police.

The government’s case rested entirely on a false accusation by a right-wing Venezuelan opposition activist, Naylet Pacheco, that Blumenthal and Benjamin Rubinstein had assaulted her while they were delivering food to Venezuela’s embassy in Washington, DC in the early morning on May 8. (Rubinstein is the brother of journalist and Grayzone contributor Alexander Rubinstein, who was reporting from inside the embassy at the time.)

The Grayzone has reported extensively on the corruption of coup leader Juan Guaidó, whom Washington recognizes as “interim president” of Venezuela, as well as the scandals plaguing Guaidó’s “ambassador” to the United States, Carlos Vecchio.

Vecchio personally presided over the weeks-long siege of Venezuela’s embassy in Washington, DC, stage-managing efforts by a mob of rabid right-wing activists to prevent peace activists from receiving deliveries of food and sanitary supplies.

As The Grayzone reported, the Donald Trump administration has diverted USAID funding originally intended to assist Central American migrants to pay the salaries of Vecchio and his team in Washington.

The US Department of Justice dismissed its case against Blumenthal on December 6. On the same day, it also dropped charges against Rubinstein, who had been arrested on May 8, hours after the food delivery.

“I’m relieved the government has finally decided to drop these phony charges against me. But I’m also disgusted,” Max Blumenthal said, “because I should never have been hauled out of my house and thrown in jail for an obviously politically motivated, false allegation that the police failed to investigate.”

Disappeared Secret Service call logs ‘highly unusual’

Lawyers representing Blumenthal and Rubinstein placed multiple and highly specified discovery requests to the prosecutor for Secret Service call recordings and reports logged on May 8 at the location of the embassy food delivery. The US prosecutor was unable to satisfy the request, verbally confirming that if the documents had existed, they no longer did.

“This is highly unusual and highly notable, almost inexplicable in the ordinary course of operations that these records were not maintained and preserved,” said Carl Messineo, the counsel to Rubinstein and a co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. “Given the false nature of allegations and that they advanced a prosecution based on these it is really questionable that this information was not produced.”

Beyond the mysterious disappearance of the call logs, there was a complete dearth of evidence on the prosecution’s side.

William Moran, who served as Blumenthal’s attorney, wondered why law enforcement trusted Pacheco, an accuser with such clear credibility issues. “The local police advanced a fraudulent case against a journalist on the word of a complainant who told at least six different, increasingly exaggerated stories and made identical accusations that night about at least three other individuals,” he said.

One Venezuelan opposition member whose identity remains under a protective order provided testimony to police attempting to corroborate Pacheco’s claims about Blumenthal and Rubinstein. According to Moran, that person had been convicted for the impeachable offense of writing fraudulent checks.

“The DC police wholly failed to conduct a proper investigation before calling for the arrest and imprisonment of a dissident journalist that they labeled without any cause whatsoever as ‘armed and dangerous,’ placing him in mortal danger,” Moran stated.

A pattern of false assault allegations and police collusion

The arrest of Blumenthal was part of a wider pattern of political persecution of those who resisted the seizure of the Venezuelan embassy by a US-backed coup administration.

On November 13, police appeared at the home of Medea Benjamin to threaten her with arrest, after she too was falsely accused of assault. Benjamin, a co-founder and leader of the anti-war group CODEPINK, had been a prominent figure in the Venezuelan Embassy Protection Collective.

Benjamin was accused by members of the Venezuelan opposition of assaulting Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who had joined Carlos Vecchio for a press conference on Capitol Hill. The police eventually left without arresting Benjamin, because they did not have a warrant.

Video of the incident revealed that it was, in fact, Benjamin who was assaulted by Vecchio’s notoriously violent minions.

During the same press conference, a member of the Venezuelan opposition seized the phone of journalist Wyatt Reed. When Reed complained to a Secret Service officer on site, the officer brushed him off.

Diliana Bustillos, a Venezuelan opposition lobbyist who participated in a May 8 press conference falsely accusing peace activists of violence, threatened Reed after the incident, warning that he would “end up like [Max Blumenthal] and Ben [Rubinstein].”

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a civil liberties lawyer with the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, was present throughout much of the embassy siege. She noticed clear collusion between the right-wing opposition mob outside and the Secret Service, who were operating at the time under the watch of the State Department.

“Throughout the siege of the peace activists at the Venezuelan embassy,” Verheyden-Hillard said, “it was apparent to those on the scene that there was what looked like a facilitated effort between the government and the mob besieging the embassy.”

Mainstream media silence, demonization by regime change activists

The Washington Post reported extensively on the siege of the Venezuelan embassy, presenting the situation largely from the opposition’s perspective. The paper’s correspondent, Marissa Lang, uncritically conveyed Pacheco’s false charges, writing that “she said she was pushed against a wall and kicked by several men, then spent hours at a hospital being treated.”

However, the Washington Post did not report on Blumenthal’s arrest and imprisonment five months later or any of his public comments about the high-profile incident.

Meanwhile, an assortment of malicious regime-change cheerleaders seized on Blumenthal’s arrest to defame him with false and now-discredited claims on social media:

  • Bellingcat founder Elliot Higgins promoted a Medium post by an anonymous author who has routinely smeared Blumenthal, which featured his arrest warrant and a video of the complainant’s false testimony. He then repeatedly criticized skeptics who expressed doubts about the completely unfounded allegations against Blumenthal. Higgins’ website Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, a regime change arm of the US government, and the UK Foreign Office via the Zinc Network, among other entities.
  • Foreign Policy senior editor and anti-China hawk James Palmer declared without a scintilla of evidence that Blumenthal “assault[ed] people freely.”
  • Freelance journalist and longtime Syria regime-change activist Danny Gold claimed falsely and without proof that Blumenthal “kicked an old woman in the stomach.”
  • Idrees Ahmad, a Stirling University professor of journalism who has obsessively denigrated Blumenthal and even phoned him to threaten him against publishing a factual investigative report on the Syrian White Helmets, falsely accused Blumenthal of “manhandling an elderly woman.”
  • Istanbul-based TRT World contributor Wilson Dizard suggested that Blumenthal was guilty before being proven innocent, insisting that a Grayzone account of his arrest “does not actually provide an alternative version of events.”
  • Oz Katerji, the notorious regime change fanatic who was recently fired from the Daily Mail for denigrating its columnist Peter Hitchens on social media, declared that he would “probably buy the guys who shackled pro-Assad war crimes denier Max Blumenthal to the floor for assaulting a Venezuelan protester a beer or two.” Katerji later insisted without any basis that “there’s video evidence” to support the false charge against Blumenthal.
  • Dutch regime-change activist Thomas van Linge, who fancied himself a Syria expert before moving on to advocate for Western-backed right-wing opposition groups in Iran, Bolivia, Hong Kong, and beyond, denied that Blumenthal’s arrest was political and instead outrageously claimed he was “arrested for kicking a pregnant woman.” Even in the totally fabricated accusations against Blumenthal, no one ever claimed that the alleged victim, right-wing Venezuelan activist Naylet Pacheco, who is 58 years old, was pregnant. As of the publication of this article, van Linge still has not deleted this patently false, defamatory claim.
  • Neil Hauer, a self-described “freelance analyst” who has previously consulted for the European Union and US Marines, called journalist Jeet Heer a “moron” for publicly advocating for Blumenthal.
  • UK liberal interventionist Sunny Hundal also attacked Heer for defending Blumenthal, asserting that “given the person in question I think you should exercise some judgement before accepting his story at face value.”
  • The anonymous right-wing Reagan Battalion Twitter account falsely claimed that Blumenthal was “arrested for kicking a pregnant woman,” misrepresenting the identity of the complainant while not even bothering to frame the non-existent incident as an alleged assault. In a previous spasm of mendacity, the Reagan Battalion declared that Blumenthal “works for” foreign socialist governments and smeared him as “a puppet for every dictator around the globe.”
  • Liberal feminist Mona Eltahawy falsely smeared Blumenthal as a supposed abuser of women and a “piece of shit.”
  • Right-wing pro-Israel lobby group StopAntisemitism.org defamed Blumenthal, who is Jewish, as an “antisemite,” cheered his arrest, and falsely asserted he “assault[ed] a Venezuelan opposition figure.” This pro-Israel organization has also smeared left-wing Jewish activist Ariel Gold and Muslim American progressives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Linda Sarsour as supposed “antisemites.”
  • Joshua Holland, a liberal contributor to The Nation, publicly lashed out at media critic Joe Emersberger and implied the false, totally unsubstantiated allegations could be true.
  • Joshua Frank, an editor of the former-muckraking website CounterPunch, downplayed the attack on Blumenthal, whitewashed the state repression, and called on people “to not blow this all out of proportion, as Max is likely to do for his own gain.” Frank, who has viciously maligned journalists and activists who opposed the international proxy war on Syria, also derided this present reporter, Ben Norton, with superficial ad hominem insults.
  • Sean Davis, a co-founder of the hard-right website The Federalist and a longtime conservative activist who has worked for numerous Republican politicians, spread the fake accusations. Davis’ website The Federalist has been widely criticized for blatant racism (it once had a tag devoted specifically to “black crime“), and it published an article defending far-right Alabama judge Roy Moore after he was accused of dating teenage girls as young as 14.

Asked about the wave of libelous attacks spurred by his arrest on false charges, Blumenthal commented, “The outpouring of support I’ve received from around the world has been more profound and meaningful than any of the smears from the usual suspects. But that does not mean that I will let this campaign of lies go unanswered. This whole episode began with a false, defamatory accusation, and I plan to take the necessary actions to see it ends with a sense of justice.

 

It’s the DNC, Stupid: Democratic Party, Not Russia, Has Delegitimized the Democratic Process

Posted on by
Reply

By Elizabeth Vos

Source: Consortium News

Establishment Democrats and those who amplify them continue to project blame for the public’s doubt in the U.S. election process onto outside influence, despite the clear history of the party’s subversion of election integrity. The total inability of the Democratic Party establishment’s willingness to address even one of these critical failures does not give reason to hope that the nomination process in 2020 will be any less pre-ordained.

The Democratic Party’s bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential nomination, followed by the DNC defense counsel doubling down on its right to rig the race during the fraud lawsuit brought against the DNC, as well as the irregularities in the races between former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova, indicate a fatal breakdown of the U.S. democratic process spearheaded by the Democratic Party establishment. Influences transcending the DNC add to concerns regarding the integrity of the democratic process that have nothing to do with Russia, but which will also likely impact outcomes in 2020.

The content of the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the DNC acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the 2016 Democratic primary. The emails also revealed corporate media reporters acting as surrogates of the DNC and its pro-Clinton agenda, going so far as to promote Donald Trump during the GOP primary process as a preferred “pied-piper candidate.” One cannot assume that similar evidence will be presented to the public in 2020, making it more important than ever to take stock of the unique lessons handed down to us by the 2016 race.

Social Media Meddling

Election meddling via social media did take place in 2016, though in a different guise and for a different cause from that which are best remembered. Twitter would eventually admit to actively suppressing hashtags referencing the DNC and Podesta emails in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Additional reports indicated that tech giant Google also showed measurable “pro-Hillary Clinton bias” in search results during 2016, resulting in the alleged swaying of between 2 and 10 millions voters in favor of Clinton.

On the Republican side, a recent episode of CNLive! featured discussion of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which undecided voters were micro-targeted with tailored advertising narrowed with the combined use of big data and artificial intelligence known collectively as “dark strategy.” CNLive! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan noted that SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations “worldwide,” specializing in behavior modification. Though Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018, related companies remain.

The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding for the creation of an online “troll army” under the name Shareblue. The LA Times described the project as meant to “to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical.” In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign.

In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found broke federal law. Despite this, no prosecution for the breach was ever attempted.

Though the purge was not explicitly found to have benefitted Clinton, the admission falls in line with allegations across the country that the Democratic primary was interfered with to the benefit of the former secretary of state. These claims were further bolstered by reports indicating that voting results from the 2016 Democratic primary showed evidence of fraud.

DNC Fraud Lawsuit

The proceedings of the DNC fraud lawsuit provide the most damning evidence of the failure of the U.S. election process, especially within the Democratic Party. DNC defense lawyers argued in open court for the party’s right to appoint candidates at its own discretion, while simultaneously denying any “fiduciary duty” to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the impression that the DNC would act impartially towards the candidates involved.

In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC’s defense counsel argued against claims that the party defrauded Sanders’ supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders’ supporters knew the process was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC’s lawyers argued that it was the party’s right to select candidates.

The Observer noted the sentiments of Jared Beck, the attorney representing the plaintiffs of the lawsuit:

…“People paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee —nominating process in 2016 were fair and impartial, and that’s not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that’s what the Democratic National Committee’s own charter says. It says it in black and white.”

The DNC defense counsel’s argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party’s right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was protected by the First Amendment. The DNC’s lawyers wrote:

“To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to selecting the party’s nominee for public office.” [Emphasis added]

The DNC’s shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic.  This no indication that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race,

Tim Canova’s Allegations

If Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn’t enough, serious interference was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida’s 23rd congressional district. Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election in which Canova ran as an independent.

Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal ballot destruction, improper transportation of ballots, and generally shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time:

“[Canova] sought to look at the paper ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months later when her office hadn’t fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in September, signing a certification that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending.”

Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies. Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms.

Republicans appear no more motivated to protect voting integrity than the Democrats, with The Nation reporting that the GOP-controlled Senate blocked a bill this week that would have “mandated paper-ballot backups in case of election machine malfunctions.”

Study of Corporate Power

A 2014 study published by Princeton University found that corporate power had usurped the voting rights of the public: “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

In reviewing this sordid history, we see that the Democratic Party establishment has done everything in its power to disrespect voters and outright overrule them in the democratic primary process, defending their right to do so in the DNC fraud lawsuit. We’ve noted that interests transcending the DNC also represent escalating threats to election integrity as demonstrated in 2016.

Despite this, establishment Democrats and those who echo their views in the legacy press continue to deflect from their own wrongdoing and real threats to the election process by suggesting that mere discussion of it represents a campaign by Russia to attempt to malign the perceptionof the legitimacy of the U.S. democratic process.

Hillary Clinton’s recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being “groomed” by Russia, and that the former Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a “Russian asset”, were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments externalize what Gabbard called the “rot” in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet.

Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled: “Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent,” Jamali argued:

“Moscow will use its skillful propaganda machine to prop up Gabbard and use her as a tool to delegitimize the democratic process.” [Emphasis added]

Jamali surmises that Russia intends to “attack” our democracy by undermining the domestic perception of its legitimacy. This thesis is repeated later in the piece when Jamali opines: “They want to see a retreat of American influence. What better way to accomplish that than to attack our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of our elections.” [Emphasis added]

The only thing worth protecting, according to Jamali and those who amplify his work (including former Clinton aide and establishment Democrat Neera Tanden), is the perception of the democratic process, not the actual functioning vitality of it. Such deflective tactics ensure that Russia will continue to be used as a convenient international pretext for silencing domestic dissent as we move into 2020.

Given all this, how can one expect the outcome of a 2020 Democratic Primary — or even the general election – to be any fairer or transparent than 2016?

 

Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter, co-host of CN Live! and regular contributor to Consortium News. 

Wikileaks Emails Bring New Attention to Hillary Victory Fund “Money Laundering” Charges

Posted on by
2

index

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Source: Wall Street on Parade

The problem with conspiracy theorists is that, quite frequently, the theorists lack adequate imagination. That seems to be the case when it comes to the Democratic National Committee’s behind-the-scenes machinations to muscle Hillary Clinton into the White House while plotting against her main challenger, Bernie Sanders. That conclusion stems from the trove of 20,000 DNC emails dumped into the public sphere by Wikileaks last Friday.

The leaked emails have cost Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job as Chair of the DNC but other top DNC officials captured in devious plots against Sanders in the email exchanges still have their jobs – or at least no official firings have been announced. This makes the conspiracies seem more like a DNC business model.

The DNC’s own charter demands that it treat all Democratic primary candidates fairly and impartially, but top DNC officials made a mockery of that mandate. In addition to conjuring up ways to smear Clinton challenger Bernie Sanders during the primary battles, the leaked emails show a coordinated effort to cover up what the Sanders camp called “money laundering” between the Hillary Victory Fund and the DNC.

Despite the fact that the Sanders campaign had no such active arrangement with the DNC, the DNC agreed to participate in the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that sluiced money to both Hillary’s main candidate committee, Hillary for America, as well as into the DNC. To a much tinier degree, funds also went to dozens of separate State Democratic committees.

On May 2 of this year, the Sanders campaign released a statement charging Clinton with “looting funds meant for the state parties to skirt fundraising limits on her presidential campaign,” and exploiting “the rules in ways that let her high-dollar donors like Alice Walton of Wal-Mart fame and the actor George Clooney and his super-rich Hollywood friends skirt legal limits on campaign contributions.”

Despite Clinton’s promise to rein in tax dodges by hedge funds, Wall Street On Parade reported in April that major hedge fund titans were also big donors to the Hillary Victory Fund. We wrote at the time:

“Federal Election Commission records show that S. Donald Sussman, founder of hedge fund Paloma Partners, gave $343,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund while also donating $2.5 million to Priorities USA, the Super Pac supporting Hillary. Hedge Fund billionaire George Soros donated $343,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund while sluicing a whopping $7 million into Priorities USA to enhance Hillary’s efforts to move into the Oval Office.”

Today, reporters Ken Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf of Politico have provided significant new details from the leaked emails to show how the DNC worked behind the scenes to control the media’s handling of revelations involving the Hillary Victory Fund.

Vogel was criticized by some media outlets when the Wikileaks emails revealed he had allowed a DNC official to review one of his articles critical of the joint fundraising operation prior to publication. Erik Wemple of the Washington Post has provided some necessary clarity to that issue here.

The Clinton camp and the DNC had attempted publicly to defend the joint fundraising operation as providing critical help to State Committees in order to help down-ticket candidates. But today, Vogel and Arnsdorf report the following:

“Between the creation of the victory fund in September and the end of last month, the fund had brought in $142 million, the lion’s share of which — 44 percent — has wound up in the coffers of the DNC ($24.4 million) and Hillary for America ($37.6 million), according to a POLITICO analysis of FEC filings. By comparison, the analysis found that the state parties have kept less than $800,000 of all the cash brought in by the committee — or only 0.56 percent.”

Vogel and Arnsdorf also detail how the DNC attempted to stonewall reporters on the topic, writing:

“The emails show the officials agreeing to withhold information from reporters about the Hillary Victory Fund’s allocation formula, working to align their stories about when — or if — the DNC had begun funding coordinated campaign committees with the states.”

The Politico reporters also note that Hillary Clinton’s campaign attorney, Marc Elias of law firm Perkins Coie, also appears in a Wikileaks email suggesting media strategy to the DNC:

“ ‘The DNC should push back DIRECTLY at Sanders and say that what he is saying is false and harmful to the Democratic party,’ Marc Elias, an attorney who advises the DNC and the Clinton campaign, wrote in an email to DNC officials. [DNC] CEO Amy Dacey responded ‘I do think there is too much of this narrative out there — I also worry since they are emailing to their list (which has overlap with ours!)’

“In another email, Miranda, the [DNC] communications director, suggested that the campaign tell other journalists seeking to follow POLITICO’s story that “Politico got it wrong.” But the rest of his email failed to indicate any errors in POLITICO’s story, nor did the DNC or the Clinton campaign seek a correction.”

Politico’s latest revelations build on the allegations in the class action lawsuit that has been filed against the DNC and Wasserman Schultz by Sanders’ supporters. One document submitted in that lawsuit came from a previous hack of the DNC server by an individual known as Guccifer 2.0. That document shows that even after Bernie Sanders had announced he was entering the race on April 30, 2015, the DNC was brainstorming on how it could advance Hillary Clinton to the top of the ticket. The memo is described as follows in the lawsuit:

“Among the documents released by Guccifer 2.0 on June 15th is a two-page Microsoft Word file with a ‘Confidential’ watermark that appears to be a memorandum written to the Democratic National Committee regarding ‘2016 GOP presidential candidates’ and dated May 26, 2015. A true and correct copy of this document (hereinafter, ‘DNC Memo’) is attached as Exhibit 1. The DNC Memo presents, ‘a suggested strategy for positioning and public messaging around the 2016 Republican presidential field.’ It states that, ‘Our goals in the coming months will be to frame the Republican field and the eventual nominee early and to provide a contrast between the GOP field and HRC.’ [HRC means Hillary Rodham Clinton.] The DNC Memo also advises that the DNC, ‘[u]se specific hits to muddy the waters around ethics, transparency and campaign finance attacks on HRC.’ In order to ‘muddy the waters’ around Clinton’s perceived vulnerabilities, the DNC Memo suggests ‘several different methods’ of attack including: (a) ‘[w]orking through the DNC’ to ‘utilize reporters’ and create stories in the media ‘with no fingerprints’; (b) ‘prep[ping]’ reporters for interviews with GOP candidates and having off-the-record conversations with them; (c) making use of social media attacks; and (d) using the DNC to ‘insert our messaging’ into Republican-favorable press.” [Read the full memorandum here.]

The response to all of this from Hillary Clinton has further enraged Sanders’ supporters. After the emails were leaked and written about in the media over the weekend, Hillary Clinton made Wasserman Schultz the honorary chairperson of her 50-state program and President Obama praised Wasserman Schultz in a statement that can only be described as bizarre, given the contents of the leaked emails. Obama said on Sunday:

“For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful. Her leadership of the DNC has meant that we had someone who brought Democrats together not just for my re-election campaign, but for accomplishing the shared goals we have had for our country.”

Apparently, missing from those “shared goals” is allowing a fair primary process within the Democratic party or a challenge to the political machine that controls Washington.

 

Related Article: IRS Will Investigate Clinton Foundation ‘Pay-to-Play’ Corruption Accusations

New Hillary leak: Wikileaks releases 20K DNC emails; reveals anti-Sanders bias, pro-Clinton collusion among top officials

Posted on by
1

110505_hillary_clinton_situation_room_522_regular

Source: RT

A WikiLeaks dump of nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails, the supposedly neutral governing organization of the Democratic Party, indicates that the committee strategized with the Clinton campaign and plotted against Bernie Sanders.

Collusion with Clinton and the media

A communication from late May laid out the pros and cons of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz accepting an invitation to CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’, and indicated that the DNC was plotting its moves based on what would be amenable to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“Clinton campaign is a mess, they’re afraid of their own shadow and didn’t like that we engaged,” DNC communications director Luis Miranda wrote. “But they’ll be unhappy regardless, so better to get out there and do some strong pivots and land good punches on Trump. They can’t tell us NOT to do TV right now, we shouldn’t pull ourselves out until they actually do.”

“It’s clear that Bernie messed up and that we’re on the right side of history,” Miranda wrote in another bullet point, referring to the Nevada convention.

“Let’s take this offline,” Wasserman Schultz said in response. “I basically agree with you.”

Wasserman Schultz and Miranda brainstormed ideas to attack Sanders’ position on the Israel/Palestine conflict with her communications team in one thread, with Wasserman Schultz saying that “the Israel stuff is disturbing” in reference to Sanders’ platform committee appointees attempts to include language denouncing the occupation of Palestinian territory in the Democratic platform.

The chairwoman says that the idea “HFA,” or Hillary For America, originally proposed the idea of using Israel/Palestine as “an ideal issue to marginalize Sanders on,” suggesting that the DNC were exchanging communications about anti-Sanders strategies with the Clinton campaign.

The DNC also appears to have made a secret “agreement” with Kenneth Vogel, an influential report for Politico.

An email from late April with the subject line “per agreement… any thoughts appreciated” shows that Vogel sent an advanced copy of a story about Hillary Clinton’s fundraising to the DNC even before his editor even saw it.

“Vogel gave me his story ahead of time/before it goes to his editors as long as I didn’t share it,” DNC press secretary Mark Paustenbach wrote to  Miranda. “Let me know if you see anything that’s missing and I’ll push back.”

The published version of the story did not appear to have any significant edits from and was not favorable to the Clinton campaign, but the sending of a full, advanced copy to the subject of a story is considered to be a violation of journalistic ethics.

A source with familiar with the interaction between Politico and the DNC told RT America that the message was sent to officials to ensure accuracy in the story, and that it would have been difficult to ask for piecemeal clarifications due to its complexity. The “agreement,” in fact, referred to the DNC promising not to pass the story to a more favorable news outlet who might publish before  Politco.

Another email released in the Friday leak indicates that the DNC was in close contact with news websites on articles related to the Democratic Party.

A Real Clear Politics article said that Sanders supporters were causing a lack of unity at the Nevada Democratic Convention.

“This headline needs to be changed,”  Wasserman Schultz wrote to Miranda.

“We need to push back… Patrice, what happened, DNC had nothing to do with this, right?” Miranda replied, referring to DNC Director of Party Affairs Patrice Taylor.

Taylor responded saying that the article should be changed the event was run by the state party and the disorder “sounds like internal issues amount [sic] Sanders supporters.”

“Walter, please connect with Stewart and get him to push back,” Miranda wrote. The last email on the thread says: “Done. Article has been updated.”

Plotting against Sanders

In a May 5 email, two top DNC executives plotted a smear against Sanders by drawing his Jewish faith into question and painting him as an atheist in strongly religious states.

READ MORE: New Hillary leak: Wikileaks releases 20K DNC emails

“It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief,” DNC Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall wrote. “Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”

“AMEN,” DNC Chief Executive Officer Amy K. Dacey replied.

In an email that concerned Sanders out-polling Clinton in Rhode Island, where the state reportedly only had a fraction of voting stations open, one staffer took a contemptuous tone of Sanders’ supporters,  speaking about them more as a nuisance than an arm of the party.

“If she outperforms this polling, the Bernie camp will go nuts and allege misconduct,” the staffer writes, “They’ll probably complain regardless, actually.”

Another email shows similar ‘us and them’ language being directed at Sanders supporters.

“We have the Sanders folks admitting that they lost fair and square, not because we ‘rigged’ anything,” the email said. “Clinton likely to win the state convention with a slim margin and we’ll send a release with final delegate numbers.”

An email titled ‘Bernie narrative’ sent by DNC National Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach to Miranda indicates that top officials in the party were trying to find an angle to disparage the Vermont senator in the media.

“Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” Paustenbach wrote in the May 21 message. “Specifically, [Debbie Wasserman Schultz] had to call Bernie directly in order to get the campaign to do things because they’d either ignored or forgotten to something critical.”

“It’s not a DNC conspiracy, it’s because they never had their act together,” Paustenbach suggested.

Writing off Bernie

Wasserman Schultz seemed to have already counted Sanders out of the race in a May 21 email, when there were still nine primaries to go.

“This is a silly story,” the chairwoman said. “He isn’t going to be president.”

In another email, Paustenbach informed her that Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said the candidate should continue to the convention, Wasserman Shultz said: “He is an ASS,” referring to Weaver.

The chairwoman made her opinion clear about Sanders in an message concerning the candidate alleging that the party hadn’t been fair to him.

“Spoken like someone who has never been a member of the Democratic Party and has no understanding of what we do,” she said.

Search the DNC Email Database: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/

DNC Caught Accepting Money from Union-Busting Companies in New Leak

Posted on by
1

hillary-clinton-wall-street-640x340

By Tom Cahill

Source: U.S. Uncut

A new set of documents leaked by hacker Guccifer 2.0 allegedly shows the Democratic National Committee has no qualms about asking for donations from some of the most evil corporations in America — even the corporations whose values are directly in opposition to the Democratic Party’s stated goals.

The spreadsheet, which can be viewed in its entirety here, shows that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and others within the DNC contacted several dozen corporate lobbyists to secure donations for the 2016 election cycle, soliciting four, five, and six-figure donations from their clients. The same spreadsheet shows the DNC asking for and receiving large sums of money from labor unions, environmental groups, and other advocates of progressive causes who may have likely given more thought to their donation had they known the DNC was asking their biggest opponents for money as well.

On a tab labeled “YesCommits,” meaning donors that said yes to the DNC’s requests for money, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) committed to a $45,000 donation for 2016. Just four slots below, Walmart’s PAC for Responsible Government is shown having donated $15,000 to the Democratic Party in 2015.

Walmart has always been openly anti-union and is known nationwide for forcing employees into captive-audience meetings, in which anti-union propaganda videos are shown to new hires. Nonetheless, at the same time the DNC asked Walmart for money, it also asked for and received a $45,000 donation from the United Food and Commercial Workers union, one of the unions leading and sponsoring protests and strikes at Walmart stores nationwide for the corporation’s opposition to raising wages and displays of open hostility toward unions.

In the “Active” tab, under which active requests that are awaiting a reply are filed, the DNC is seen asking the National Restaurant Association PAC for $45,000, and asking for an undisclosed amount from McDonald’s.

This is particularly ironic, as the National Restaurant Association is one of the leading opponents of a national minimum wage hike, and the SEIU has been leading and funding the Fight for $15 minimum wage campaign since 2012, with McDonald’s as one of its key targets. The Democratic Party has had a $15/hour minimum wage in its official platform since August 2015, when party activists passed a nonbinding resolution, which became official last weekend when the minimum wage hike was approved by the Platform Drafting Committee.

The DNC also received $15,000 from Verizon and $105,000 from Comcast despite also asking the Communications Workers of America (CWA) for funding. The union is currently actively fighting companies like Verizon and Comcast for better wages and working conditions for its workers.

The spreadsheet also shows the DNC has no problem soliciting organizations that have actively fought the Democratic Party’s key legislative fights over the years. While the Affordable Care Act is widely seen as President Barack Obama’s chief legislative victory throughout his two terms in office, the DNC nonetheless asked for a donation from the American Medical Association, which was one of the earliest opponents of healthcare reform, dating all the way back to 2009. The DNC also asked for money from health insurance giants Anthem, Cigna, and UnitedHealth group, despite all three of those companies donating to Republicans campaigning on a promise to repeal Obamacare.

Another key legislative victory for the Obama administration was the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, which was written with the aim of reining in abuse on Wall Street in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Some of the big banks and financial institutions that opposed Dodd-Frank also received fundraising asks from the DNC, including Wells Fargo, Citigroup, HSBC, Capital One, UBS, and Morgan Stanley. The DNC also asked Wall Street lobbyists for money in 2016, including the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) PAC and the American Bankers Association PAC. Bloomberg once referred to SIFMA as “Wall Street’s largest trade group.”

Other opponents of the Democratic Party’s agenda to regulate the prices of pharmaceutical drugs have been pursued by the DNC. Pharmaceutical kingpin Pfizer committed to a $15,000 donation for 2016 after being asked for a stunning $150,000, while Merck and Eli Lilly were both asked to donate. In January, Pfizer increased the prices of more than 100 different drugs, some by as much as 20 percent. Eli Lilly jacked up the price of its Humalog insulin by 20 percent, while Pfizer increased prices on the anticonvulsant Dilantin, angina drug Nitrostat, hormone therapy drug Menest, and irregular heartbeat medication Tykosyn by 20 percent each.

Merck, which makes the type 2 diabetes drug Januvia, increased the drug’s price by 20.8 percent in 2015. Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, who is also the head of Big Pharma’s chief lobby, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), defiantly defended the price increase in a Wall Street Journal interview in February.

“Merck has increased the prices of its drugs on a yearly basis, but we’ve tried to be constrained in how we’ve done it, in a way we think doesn’t prevent people from affording our drugs,” Frazier said.

Other donors the DNC solicited are notorious household names for much of the Democratic Party’s base. Weapons manufacturers BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon were all targeted for donations in the 2016 cycle. Fossil fuel companies Duke Energy, Murray Energy, Peabody Energy, and Valero were also on the list. The DNC list also featured universally loathed companies like News Corp, parent company of Fox News, and Monsanto, which is reviled for monopolizing American agriculture with genetically modified food and mob-like legal tactics to subdue farmers into submission who save their seeds.

Pfizer lobbyist Julie Idelkope and News Corp lobbyist Joanne Dowdell, who are listed as points of contact on the DNC spreadsheet, did not immediately respond to interview requests. Walmart spokesman Greg Hitt responded to an email request asking what the money was for, to which he responded that they “[d]on’t have specifics on how the DNC will use the money, but it is intended to support the convention.”

He also wrote, “We gave $15,000 to the DNC’s convention fund; same as we’ve given to the RNC’s convention fund.”

 

Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact him via email at tom.v.cahill@gmail.com.

Sanders Supporters Vindicated: Proof DNC Used Media to Rig Election for Hillary

Posted on by
4

 

Hillary-Clinton-shadows-Getty

By Claire Bernish

(AntiMedia)

While Bernie Sanders’ supporters and independent media outlets have exhaustively pointed out that corporate media’s fatuous prattling over Hillary Clinton likely tipped the elections in her favor, we now have solid proof — leaked emails show the DNC colluded with mainstream outlets to heavily favor Clinton.

“Our goals in the coming months will be to frame the Republican field and the eventual nominee early and to provide a contrast between the GOP field and HRC,” reads an email dated May 26, 2015, referencing the former secretary of state by her initials, posted by “Guccifer 2.0” — after the Romanian hacker who allegedly accessed Clinton’s private email server multiple times.

One of the strategies listed for “positioning and public messaging” states, “Use specific hits to muddy the waters around ethics, transparency and campaign finance attacks on HRC.”

https://twitter.com/MatthewKick/status/743418063937220608

As the mainstream largely directed attention to the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s strategy to oppose Donald Trump, this collusion to steer the narrative in Hillary’s favor appears to have gone unnoticed, as US Uncut reported. But this series of leaked emails show a meticulously plotted coordination between DNC narratives touting Clinton, rather than Sanders, as if she had been the presumptive nominee from the outset — precisely as activists and fair elections advocates had suspected.

Under the heading “Tactics,” the document states, “Working with the DNC and allied groups, we will use several different methods to land these attacks” — including, under the subheading, “Reporter Outreach”:

“Working through the DNC and others, we should use background briefings, prep with reporters for interviews with GOP candidates, off-the-record conversations and oppo pitches to help pitch stories with no fingerprints and utilize reporters to drive a message.” And under “Bracketing Events,” the email states: “Both the DNC and outside groups are looking to do events and press surrounding Republican events to insert our messaging into their press and to force them to answer questions around key issues.”

https://twitter.com/WNC4Bernie/status/743420416295763968

Most revealing in this particular document is its conclusion, which reads, in part, “Our goal is to use this conversation to answer the questions who do we want to run against and how best to leverage other candidates to maneuver them into the right place.”

Guccifer 2.0 also leaked a two-page list titled “HRC election plans,” which, as US Uncut noted, includes a talking point that later appeared word for word in Clinton’s video announcement of her bid to run for president:

“Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times but the deck is still stacked for those at the top.”

Not only does this show a carefully-orchestrated spoonfeeding of vapid Clinton-isms to the ostensibly unsuspecting public, the irony of the former First Lady pontificating on ‘stacked decks’ for the elite bears a startling degree of hypocrisy in this context.

Prior to the release of these hacked documents, an analysis of election coverage by Neal Gabler, published in Truthout, evidenced startling favoritism for Clinton by the mainstream media throughout the 2016 election season thus far. While not entirely overt, the media’s fondness for Hillary often comprised propagandic semantic gymnastics to avoid showing Sanders in a rosy light.

Even as Sanders experienced growing success, the media downplayed its extent through comparisons with Trump — characterizing the two as ‘outsider’ candidates — thus creating a psychological parallel between the Vermont senator’s popularity and the demagoguery of the contentious billionaire.

Eventually, as Sanders continued to experience success despite a veritable media blackout, a few mainstream outlets resorted to outright hostility to achieve a pro-Clinton message. As Anti-Media previously reported, Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald published a scathing hit piece on not only Sanders, but his supporters, titled “Get Control, Senator Sanders, or Get Out.”

“So, Senator Sanders,” Eichenwald patronizingly penned, “either get control of what is becoming your increasingly unhinged cult, or get out of the race.”

To say the corporate, mainstream media has been complicit in a coordinated effort to grant Hillary the nomination would be an egregious understatement of reality. Though irate voters and journalists with actual integrity across the country immediately called out the Associated Press’ premature announcement Clinton had won the nomination as farce, it’s clear — particularly with these leaked emails — that had been the end game from the outset.

US Uncut reported neither the DNC nor the Clinton campaign returned request for comment.

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’ even rebuffed claims Sanders had not received fair treatment in the press during an April interview with the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah:

“You know, as powerful as that makes me feel, I’m not doing a very good job of rigging the outcome, or … blocking anyone from being able to get their message out.”

Evidence, however, would beg to differ.

 

Leaked list of Clinton Donors (h/t to Zero Hedge):

hillary donors 1_0

hillary donors 2_0

Related Video:

Wasserman Schultz Has a Change of Heart, but Too Little, Too Late

Posted on by
Reply

debbie-wasserman-schultz

Just follow the money on this one.

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Source: Alternet

Return with us now to the saga of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the soul of the Democratic Party.

First, a quick recap: Rep. Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), chair of the Democratic National Committee, also has been an advocate for the payday loan industry. The website Think Progress even described her as the “top Democratic ally” of “predatory payday lenders.” You know — the bottom-feeding bloodsuckers of the working poor. Yes, them.

Low-income workers living from paycheck to paycheck, especially women and minorities, are the payday lenders’ prime targets — easy pickings because they’re often desperate. Twelve million Americans reportedly borrow nearly $50 billion a year through payday loans, at rates that can soar above 300 percent, sometimes even beyond 500 percent. Bethany McLean at The Atlantic recently reported that the government’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) studied millions of payday loans and found that “67 percent went to borrowers with seven or more transactions a year and that a majority of those borrowers paid more in fees than the amount of their initial loan.”

Yet when the CFPB was drawing up new rules to make it harder for payday predators to feast on the poor, Rep. Wasserman Schultz co-sponsored a bill to delay those new rules by two years. How, you ask, could the head of the party’s national committee embrace such an appalling exploitation of working people?

Just follow the money. Last year, the payday loan industry spent $3.5 million lobbying; and as we wrote two weeks ago, in Wasserman Schultz’s home state, since 2009, payday lenders have bought protection from Democrats and Republicans alike by contributing $2.5 million or so to candidates from both parties, including her. That’s how “Representative” Wasserman Schultz, among others, wound up representing the predators instead of the poor.

That position became a major issue in her campaign for reelection to the House this year — she has a primary opponent for the first time since she entered Congress — and was even threatening the prospect of her continuing as DNC chair and presiding over the Democratic National Convention next month in Philadelphia. More than 40,000 have signed a petition calling for her removal from that post.

She had become a symbol of the failure of Democratic elites to understand that there is an uprising in the land. Millions of Americans are rebelling against the leadership of both parties. They are fed up with inside-the-Beltway politicians who pay only lip service to the deep needs of everyday people and the country; fed up with incumbents who ask for their votes, are given them in good faith, and then return to Washington to do the bidding of the donor class and its lobbyists.

Donald Trump gets it. He has roiled and humiliated and conquered an out-of-touch Republican establishment in Washington that also ignored the popular uprising against corporate domination and crony capitalism, and now GOP titans such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, spear carriers for Big Money, are being hauled around the talk-show circuit in Trump’s tumbrel, eating crow and swearing fealty to the misogynistic, bigoted and pathologically lying brute who bestrides their party.

Democratic insiders like Wasserman Schultz, however, continued to whistle past the graveyard, believing that the well-funded and well-connected Clinton machine — and general fear of a Trump regime — were enough to carry them to victory in November, despite the grass-roots disgust with a party that reeks of rot from the top. Once the champions of people who came home from work with hands dirty from toil and sweat, too many establishment Democrats went over to the dark side, taking up the cause of the well-manicured executives (think: Goldman Sachs) who write the checks and the mercenaries who deliver them (for a substantial cut, of course).

The lust for loot, which now defines the Democratic establishment, became pronounced in the Bill Clinton years, when the Clinton-friendly Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) abandoned its liberal roots and embraced “market-based solutions” that led to deregulation, tax breaks, and subsidies for the 1 percent. Seeking to fill coffers emptied by the loss of support from a declining labor movement, Democrats rushed into the arms of big business and crony capitalists.

Another case in point (and, alas, there are many): the Democratic governor of Connecticut, Dan Malloy, who seems to treat his state’s corporate residents far better than the 1 in 10 of his citizens who live at or below the poverty line.

At International Business Times last week, investigative reporter David Sirota analyzed the proposed merger of Cigna and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, a deal that would create the biggest health insurance company in the country. Cigna is based in Connecticut and Katharine Wade, the state’s insurance commissioner, appointed by Governor Malloy, is a former Cigna lobbyist with deep family ties to the company.

Sirota reported, “Malloy’s decision to appoint Wade to such a powerful regulatory post on the eve of the merger was not made in a vacuum,” Sirota reported. “It came after employees of Cigna, its lobbying firm Robinson & Cole and Anthem delivered more than $1.3 million to national and state political groups affiliated with Malloy, including the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), the Connecticut Democratic Party, Malloy’s own gubernatorial campaign and a political action committee supporting Connecticut Democrats [our italics].

“Since Malloy’s first successful run for governor in the 2010 election cycle, donors from the insurance companies and the lobbying firm have given more than $2 million to Malloy-linked groups, according to the figures compiled by PoliticalMoneyLine and the National Institute on Money In State Politics. Almost half that cash has come in since 2015, the year the merger was announced.”

Sirota now reports that since his investigation first was published, the state has “formally denied open records requests for information about their meetings with Cigna and Anthem, and declared that ‘any’ documents about the health insurance companies’ proposed merger that haven’t already been made public will be kept secret.” His FOIA request was turned down “one day after Anthem requested [state insurance commissioner] Wade approve an average 26 percent increase in health insurance premiums for individual plans.” So much for transparency.

And while we’re in Connecticut, let’s also take a look at what Malloy is doing for the world’s biggest hedge fund — Bridgewater Associates, based in his state, with an estimated worth of $150 billion. The founder of the firm, Ray Dalio, is the richest man in Connecticut, by one estimate weighing in at $14.3 billion.

Dalio made $1.4 billion in 2015 alone, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine. That same year, his top two executives pulled in $250 million each. Yet as part of Connecticut’s campaign to keep companies from leaving the state, Malloy is taking $22 million of the public’s money and giving it to Dalio to stay put.

You might think a Democratic governor would have thrown down the gauntlet and told Bridgewater’s top three, “Get outta here! You guys made almost $2 billion among yourselves. Shake your piggy bank or look under your sofa cushions for the $22 million; we’re not milking the public for it.”

But no, Malloy and his fellow Democrats buckled. Buckled to the one-tenth of the one-tenth of the one-hundredth percent of the rich. Ordinary taxpayers will now ante up.

So given all of that, guess who’s the chairman of the platform committee for the upcoming Democratic National Convention? Right: Dan Malloy, governor of Connecticut, subsidizer of billionaires. Guess who named him? Right again: Wasserman Schultz, “top Democratic ally” of “predatory payday lenders.” We’re not making this up.

Not only will Malloy be presiding over the priorities of the Democratic platform at the convention next month, he doubtless will be making the rounds with Wasserman Schultz and other party elites as they genuflect before the corporate sponsors and lobbyists she has invited to pay for the lavish fun-and-games that will surround the coronation. Many of those corporate sponsors and lobbyists have actively lobbied against progressive policies like health-care reform and a Wall Street cleanup and even contributed large sums to Republicans. Yes, we know, shocking.

So take the planks in the platform and the platitudes and promises in the speeches with a grain of salt. It’s all about the money.

Except when it’s not. Except for those moments when ordinary people rise up and declare: “Not this time!”

Which brings us back to predatory lenders and their buddy, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Look around: There’s an uprising in the land, remember, and it isn’t going away after Hillary Clinton, now the presumptive nominee, is crowned. This year even Wasserman Schultz couldn’t ignore the decibel level of an aroused public. Unaccustomed to a challenge in the Democratic “wealth primary” where money usually favors incumbents, she now finds herself called to account by an articulate opponent who champions working people, Tim Canova. Across the country tens of thousands of consumer advocates — and tens of thousands of other progressives angry at her perceived favoritism toward Hillary Clinton — have been demanding that Wasserman Schultz resign as the party’s chair or be dumped before the convention opens Philadelphia.

So last week the previously tone-deaf Wasserman Schultz perked up, did an about-face and announced she will go along with the proposed new rules on payday lending after all. At first blush, that’s good; the rules are a step in the right direction. But all that lobbying cash must have had some effect, because the new rules only go so far. A New York Times editorial calls them “a lame response” to predatory loans and says the final version of the new regulations “will need stronger, more explicit consumer protections for the new regulatory system to be effective.”

Nick Bourke, director of small-dollar loans for the Pew Charitable Trusts, is a man who closely follows these things and got to the heart of the matter: Not only do the proposed new rules “fall short,” they will allow payday lenders to lock out attempts at lower-cost bank loans.

His judgment is stark: “As drafted, the CFPB rule would allow lenders to continue to make high-cost loans, such as a line of credit with a 15-percent transaction fee and 299-percent interest rate, or a $1,250 loan on which the borrower would repay a total of $3,700 in fees, interest and principal,” Bourke wrote. “These and many other high-cost payday installment loans are already on the market in most states, and they will thrive if the regulation takes effect without change.”

Nonetheless, the new rules were improvement enough for Allied Progress, an organization that has taken on Wasserman Schultz in Florida’s late August primary, to declare victory. And they were enough for Wasserman Schultz to do a 180-degree turn which she clearly hopes will not too dramatically reveal her hypocrisy. “It is clear to me,” she said, “that the CFPB strikes the right balance and I look forward to working with my constituents and consumer groups as the CFPB works toward a final rule.”

All well and good, but if she survives her primary to return to Washington, be sure to keep the lights on in those rooms where the final version of the rules are negotiated. A powerful member of Congress with support from a Democrat in the White House could seriously weaken a law or a rule when the outcome is decided behind closed doors and money whispers in the ear of a politician supplicant: “I’m still here. Remember. Or else.”

But the times, they really may be a-changing, as the saga of Wasserman Schultz reveals. You can be deaf to the public’s shouts for only so long. The insurgency of popular discontent that has upended politics this year will continue no matter the results in November. For much too long now it’s been clear that money doesn’t just rule democracy, it is democracy.

Until we prove it isn’t.