Tag Archives: DNC

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

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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

Proving She Can Do Anything She Wants, Clinton Hires Disgraced DNC Chair for Own Campaign

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By Clair Bernish

Source: The Free Thought Project

A spectacular implosion has beset the Democratic Party following the Wikileaks release of memos and emails proving, well, just about every accusation from independent media and Sanders supporters made throughout the past year — many of which had been mocked publicly as conspiracies by party insiders.

In the latest jaw-dropper over the nearly 20,000-document leak deserving of the title, DNC-Gate, already-loathed Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz — shamed into resignation from decisive evidence of party collusion with corporate presstitutes against Sanders, among multiple other once-conspiracies — has been dutifully scooped up in an act of mordant hubris by none other than her teflon idol, Hillary Clinton.

“There’s simply no one better at taking the fight to the Republicans than Debbie,” Clinton pontificated on her loyal lackey, “which is why I am glad that she has agreed to serve as honorary chair of my campaign’s 50-state program to gain ground and elect Democrats Robby Mooin every part of the country, and will continue to serve as a surrogate for my campaign nationally, in Florida, and in other states.”

Yes, the former secretary of state did, in fact, say exactly what Sanders’ adherents, Republicans, and responsible journalists have been screaming about for months — Wasserman Schultz will continue to serve as a Clinton campaign proxy.

At least one thing is too patently obvious to warrant Clinton-esque deception.

As the daytime drama cum reality show now masquerading as the Democratic Party kicks off its convention in Philadelphia today, complete with tens of thousands of protesters of every stripe, Bernie Sanders issued a statement praising Wasserman Schultz’ scandal-tinged resignation.

“Debbie Wasserman Schultz has made the right decision for the future of the Democratic Party,” the Guardian quoted Sanders, adding party leaders must “always remain impartial in the presidential nominating process, something which did not occur in the 2016 race.”

Such moralizing, however, glistens only with a gilded glint given Sanders’ refusal to withdraw support for the establishment monarch, Hillary Clinton — in fact, the choice to remain loyal in the face of staggering coordination against his own campaign only lends credence to widely-held suspicions he’d been sheepdogging for Hillary for the duration. For Sanders to continue to plead fealty to the party whose insiders secretly denigrated his faith, derided his ardent supporters, and unscrupulously plotted his downfall either betrays his surreptitious role as longstanding Hillary shill, or denotes an ethically-void capitulation to the manufacturers of his demise.

Rendered effectively moot by both the DNC-Clinton alliance and his own lackluster lack of retort, Sanders’ affirmation of Wasserman Schultz’ rightful, humiliating self-removal from the helm merited little more than a footnote in the party’s bizarre damage-control scramble on the eve of its quadrennial main event.

In an apparent attempt to besmirch the legitimacy of the massive document drop — and distract from the telling contents — DNC officials proffered a ridiculous Russian red herring.

“Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, argued on ABC’s ‘This Week’ that the emails were leaked ‘by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump’ citing ‘experts’ but offering no other evidence,” the New York Times reported. “Mr. Mook also suggested that the Russians might have good reason to support Mr. Trump: The Republican nominee indicated in an interview with The New York Times last week that he might not back NATO nations if they came under attack from Russia — unless he was first convinced that the countries had made sufficient contributions to the Atlantic alliance.”

Mook only slightly elaborated on this gelastic allegation for CNN, stating:

“What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump.”

He added, “I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails are being released on the eve of our convention here” in Philadelphia.

Though Mook unsurprisingly failed to provide even a smidgen of evidence — much less names — to back up his claim, apparently the public should rest assured, because, he promised humorlessly:

“This isn’t my assertion. This is what experts are telling us.”

In echo-chamber support of this theoretical Russian plot — which the Trump camp and others have written off to absurd musings of an unraveling party — the Clinton campaign attested in a statement cited by the Guardian:

“This is further evidence the Russian government is trying to influence the outcome of the election.”

A similar accusation of Russian infiltration, dutifully parroted by corporate media in June, cited nameless, unverified DNC and U.S. ‘officials’ and anonymous ‘security experts’ claiming “Russian government hackers” penetrated the DNC’s network and, reported the Washington Post, had “so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they were able to read all email and chat traffic.”

Of course, Russian officials wholly denied the claim, offering a far more sound explanation for the breach:

“Usually these kinds of leaks take place not because hackers broke in, but, as any professional will tell you, because someone simply forgot the password or set the simple password 123456,” mused President Putin’s top Internet advisor, German Kimeko, according to RIA Novosti state news agency cited by the Post. “Well, it’s always simpler to explain this away as the intrigues of enemies, rather than one’s own incompetence.”

Floundering under the weight of leaks revealing its slavish devotion to Clinton and inability to remain neutral while mendaciously claiming the contrary throughout the election season, the DNC might have effectively swindled a rift so broad as to be insurmountable.

As the convention gets underway, Sanders delegates and protesters might be sufficiently enraged to splinter from the Democratic Party so blatantly servile to its establishment darling against the conspicuous will of the people — with or without support from their populist hero, Bernie Sanders, himself.

Hillary and Tim Kaine: a Match Made on Wall Street

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By Eric Draitser

Source: CounterPunch

Earlier this week, Bernie Sanders warned that Hillary Clinton’s eventual vice presidential pick must not be someone from the milieu of Wall Street and Corporate America. And while Sanders is still fighting to win the Democratic Party nomination in what many have argued is a rigged system with a foregone conclusion, it appears that Sanders is also intent on influencing the course of the Clinton campaign and the party itself.

In a thinly veiled demand that Clinton embrace the core principles of the Sanders campaign in order to secure the support of Sanders’s political base, the insurgent Democratic candidate hoped aloud “that the vice-presidential candidate will not be from Wall Street, will be somebody who has a history of standing up and fighting for working families, taking on the drug companies…taking on Wall Street, taking on corporate America, and fighting for a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”

And while that description may sound positive for its sheer idealism, it does not seem to account for the fact that banks and corporations effectively own both major parties, and that nearly every top Democrat is in various ways connected to the very same entities. In any event, it is useful still to examine a few of the potential Clinton running mates in order to assess just what sort of forces are going to be put in motion to help deliver a Clinton presidency.

The Actors on the Playbill

Beltway pundits are fond of remarking that Tim Kaine, the underwhelming centrist Democrat senator (and former Governor) from Virginia, is at the top of the list for Clinton. He’s safe. He’s experienced. He’s safe. He’s a Democratic Party loyalist with experience fundraising. Oh, and did I mention that he’s safe? Such is the general tenor of the conversation around Kaine, a politician with a long track record and a mostly forgettable personality known more to DC insiders than to the general voting public.

What could be better for Hillary Clinton, perhaps the least liked Democratic (presumptive) nominee in decades, than to have a party establishment insider who represents the status quo as her running mate in an election year that will undoubtedly be remembered for the ostensibly anti-establishment candidates and rhetoric on display throughout?

To be fair, Kaine does represent Virginia, a swing state that is crucial for Donald Trump, and which could spell victory for Clinton should she carry it.  And of course, Kaine can also posture as “tough on Wall Street” from his days as DNC Chairman and party mouthpiece during the passage of the so-called “Wall Street reform” bill.  Despite nothing substantive coming out of the bill, Kaine is still able to cash in the political currency derived from that bill, and perhaps meekly shield Clinton from continued attacks vis-à-vis her connections to Wall Street.

Of course Kaine also comes with his own baggage, including his anti-abortion stance which earned him the ire of many pro-choice activists in Virginia when he was Governor.  Considering the shameless droning from Clinton and her backers about being “the first woman president,” it would certainly raise serious questions – and open up an obvious angle of attack for Trump – were she to sport her feminism and focus on women’s reproductive rights by selecting a man with an anti-abortion record.

A look down the list of other potential choices reveals that Clinton truly has very little to choose from.  Both Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julian Castro, as well as Labor Secretary Tom Perez, have both had their names bandied around as Clinton seeks to solidify the Latino vote in an election where the Republican candidate has worked tirelessly to alienate that all-important demographic as much as possible.  But of course, the obvious question to be asked in response to either of these potential selections would be “Who?” Neither Castro nor Perez is well known nationally, nor have either of them won major elections or really done anything of note in their tenure in Obama’s cabinet.  Despite being Latinos, they are utterly forgettable, and unlikely to bring significant returns to Clinton.

While other names such as New Jersey junior senator Cory Booker, as well as Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, have been discussed, both men hail from states with Republican governors, meaning that were they to accept a VP slot, their senate vacancies would be likely filled by Republicans, a scenario that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has already said “Hell no!” to, vowing to “yell and scream to stop that.”

Who Else Is “Ready for Hillary”?

So that then leaves the two most interesting potential running mates: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders himself. Warren, who conspicuously refused to endorse Clinton over Sanders, has tremendous upside for Clinton as she has been perhaps the Democratic Party’s most vehement opponent of Wall Street, having led many high profile attacks on the major banks in her tenure in the Senate.  From a public relations branding perspective, she is essentially the female Bernie Sanders, a progressive Democrat who presents herself as an ally of working people and an enemy of bankers. For Clinton, Warren would also round out the “First Woman…” card, allowing the Clinton campaign to quite literally become a campaign about breaking the glass ceiling in US politics. The stump speeches almost write themselves.

Finally, there’s Mr. #FeelTheBern himself. His latest comments (mentioned above) certainly do have a subtext that implies his willingness to accept a running mate slot.  Having fashioned himself as the champion of the middle class and threat to the Washington establishment, Bernie would provide much in the way of credibility to a lackluster Clinton campaign which has failed to excite even many ardent Democrats.  Sanders would also guarantee a unified Democratic Party ticket, and provide much needed defense of Clinton’s left flank.  In short, Sanders, like Warren, would give anti-Clinton progressives the pretext many of them need to justify their voting for the much-hated Clinton.

Never mind the fact that neither Sanders nor Warren would actually do anything to combat Wall Street finance capital as Vice President.  Never mind the fact that no one on Wall Street is particularly scared of either politician being given the ceremonial power that comes with the Vice Presidency.  These are just the kind of uncomfortable, but inescapable, facts that progressives must choose to ignore.

The difficulty for either Sanders or Warren is the marketing of their decision to left progressives, some of whom would see collaboration with Clinton and the Clinton political machine as a betrayal and a complete sell-out.  However, aside from driving a some relatively small number of progressives to vote for Jill Stein and the Green Party (or stay home entirely), it is unlikely that the negative impact in the progressive base would amount to anything more than some hurt feelings followed by the usual acquiescence to the Democratic Party line.

If such an analysis sounds cynical and jaded, that’s because it is. Perhaps a better descriptor would be disdainful.  Indeed, as someone who watched with bemused melancholy as progressives lined up to support Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, my position on support for ANY Democrat is the same as Harry Reid’s position on swing state senator VP picks: Hell no!

Indeed, the very notion of collaboration with a war criminal and Wall Street puppet such as Clinton is anathema to everything the left and “progressives” are supposed to stand for.

Of course, there is also the elephant (and donkey) in the room: both major parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of finance capital and the corporations that rule over us. This is the realization that millions of Americans have already made, and which millions more are making.  This is the realization that keeps Democratic and Republican apparatchiks up at night.  And this critical revelation is what Bernie, Liz, & Co. are there to suppress.

Eric Draitser is the founder of StopImperialism.org and host of CounterPunch Radio. He is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City. You can reach him at ericdraitser@gmail.com.

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

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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/

The Corporate Liberal in America

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By Jason Hirthler

Source: CounterPunch

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Whether seated in Congress or exiting a voting booth, a corporate liberal is someone who supports anything progressive that does not challenge corporate power. In practice, this means corporate liberals will fight for progressive identity politics. If it has to do with race, sexual orientation, and gender, it generally doesn’t challenge corporate power. Major corporations support progressive positions on those issues, too. Corporate liberals march for gay rights and the larger LGBTQ community itself. They support feminism. They support reproductive rights. They support African-American protests against police brutality—up to the point where they become threatening to the establishment. (Bill Clinton did initiate the prison industrial complex that unduly incarcerates huge numbers of minorities.)

This support is all to the good. Tremendous progress has been made by popular protest of the devastating prejudices that have for years denied individual rights. But when their elected Democrats undermine economic justice, promote imperial warfare, and refuse to seriously address climate change, corporate liberals just look the other way. As Joe Clifford noted in his piece on Bernie Sanders, being a corporate liberal also means rejecting, “…a ban on fracking, a proposal to oppose TPP, the $15 per hour minimum wage proposal, a call for single-payer health care, and a statement of opposition to the illegal Israeli occupation.” These proposals, courageously put forward by James Zogby, Bill Mckibben, Cornell West and the rest of the Sanders contingent at the recent Democratic Platform Committee meeting in Washington, were all struck down. In a beautiful expression of moral courage, West refused to back the platform in its final iteration, saying,

“[If] we can’t say a word about [Trans-Pacific Partnership], if we can’t talk about Medicare for all explicitly, if the greatest prophetic voice dealing with impending ecological catastrophe can hardly win a vote and if we can’t even acknowledge occupation as something that’s real in the lives of a slice of humanity … it just seems to me there’s no way in good conscience I can say take it to the next stage.”

Yada Yada Yada

Words like these have no effect on the corporate liberal. If there’s a centimeter’s difference between their Democratic platform and the diseased corpus of Republican anarchism, the corporate conscience is salved. A corporate liberal is the one that puts “occupation” in quotes. A corporate liberal never makes the perfect the enemy of the good. A corporate liberal believes in reform, in humanitarian warfare, in the responsibility to protect, and in The New York Times front page. A corporate liberal supports all of this, though reform may be glacial, though good wars may slay millions, though interventions may undermine sovereignty, and though The Times may be rife with half-truth. It makes no difference, so long as reform is better than rollback, Barack’s slaughter is numerically less than Dubya’s, and The Washington Post is marginally more truthful than FOX News. As long as you can trust Erin Burnett more than Bill O’Reilly, it makes no difference that we will move further and further to the right, picking up steam until we barrel straight into corporate fascism. So long as the corporate liberal sits to the left of the patrician publican, he has some claim on the progressive mandate. Or so he says. Yet the best way to repel fascism, and realize that progressive mandate, is by joining a movement headed left, rather than a party moving right.

Nothing Forbidden

As Alan Nasser elucidates, there is nothing intolerable in the lesser evilism of the corporate liberal. He will endure—or more likely, watch others endure—intolerable realities while maintaining the unblinking rectitude of the blind ideologue. Author Chris Hedges writes that capitalism is “plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war, ecological disaster, and a dystopian nightmare.” But this, too, is not intolerable. We must accept it in order to ensure that the real nightmare—whomever happens to be running on the Republican ticket—is barred from the White House forever.

We must tolerate whatever Democrats do because they are better than Republicans. Even if that means, as it surely has and surely will, for all the identity groups corporate liberals support, a deteriorating quality of life. Lower incomes, higher unemployment. Bigger debts, bullshit jobs. Higher infant mortality, higher heart disease. More inequality, less social support. Less social support, more incarceration. More suicide, more alcoholism, more drug abuse, more debt, more stress, more unhappiness. And, if one is aware enough, the consciousness of having—perhaps unwittingly at the time—for more slaughter of brown people abroad, and the deliberate aggression against nuclear powers that will raise the prospect of nuclear extermination for millions. The Democrats have no such mandate, but the corporate liberal gives them the power to pretend they do. These are the wages of neoliberalism and imperialism, enabled by the logic of the lesser evil.

Like Dr. King, Karl Marx understood the major threat was not the fanatic on the fringe, but the moderate in the middle. The real threat is not the extremist, who will burn out by necessity if not already burned down by the moderate herd. It is the moderate herd that threatens to permit the intolerable through gradualism. Incremental genocide. Slow-motion regime change. The soft coup. The generational heist of millions of working class jobs. The decade-long liquidation of working class home equity. The century-long evisceration of labor rights. The hidden decades of disinformation campaigns that conflate freedom with free markets. Marx said, “Our task is that of ruthless criticism, and much more against ostensible friends than against open enemies.” He understood what King did, which is part of the reason why they are two of the most revolutionary figures of the last couple of centuries of Western civilization.

Too Much to Lose

Corporate liberals rehearse Manichean pieties about good and evil locked in a dualistic embrace, fighting to the death. There are no third parties in this vision. It is a necessary dualism. Hence the occasional need to undermine democracy to save it, as Hillary’s campaign demonstrated through repeated voting irregularities and financial chicanery engineered through her DNC front. It’s just simpler that way. For a political party of millionaires backed by billionaires, it just doesn’t do to disturb the status quo, rock the boat, upset the apple cart, shake the foundations, incite protest, disturb our creature comforts, move us out of our comfort zone, spark rebellion, overthrow the system, or change the world.

Is lesser evilism an elaborate rationale for preserving the status quo? Lenin said you can’t make a revolution in white gloves, and there are plenty of corporate liberals paying lip service to progress while glad-handing its well-heeled antagonists. That is why, in the end, corporate liberals are anti-revolutionaries. They would rather save capitalism than endure a potentially messy transition to socialism. Leave the revolution to Universal Studios and stubble-cheeked Third World rebels in hand-knitted berets. Social reforms in capitalist countries seem to happen like they did in South Africa, where identity politics achieve astounding successes, and calls for economic justice are swallowed up in the celebratory din. This is because corporate power cares deeply about economic power, but couldn’t care less about your sexual identity. For corporations—even if the executive board morally supports it—the gay community is ultimately another target market, a rich source of disposable income to be mined.

The least oppressed in any electorate always seem to be the greatest obstacle to change. Always willing to put justice on layaway. Always arguing for incrementalism, which strikes me as a luxury of the leisure class. Social progress will have little impact on them anyway, but paying lip service to its values will burnish their reputation. The discomfiting appearance of Bernie Sanders disturbed the polished script rehearsed by the Hillary camp for years. It was her turn, the first female president, upholding the rights of the vulnerable and achieving hard-won incremental gains through patience, hard work, and political acumen. For a moment, the Hillary faithful looked harried, wrong-footed, and exposed to the will of the mob. But now that the dodgy primaries are done, and Bernie has scampered back to the warmth of the herd, we can return to the language of compromise and the lesser evil. Had Bernie broke with the party he refused to technically join for 40 years, joined Jill Stein on the Green ticket, garnered support from voices like Kshama Sawant and movements like Socialist Alternative and Black Lives Matter, he could have founded a serious alternative to the mercenary duopoly. But he fell for the ruse of internal reform. But not everyone does. King continued in his Birmingham letter to discuss the white moderate, saying he was the one,

“… who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

Sound familiar? King’s white moderate and Marx’s ostensible friend is our corporate liberal. Same spin, different decade. The corporate liberal is an embodiment of the idea that political parties are the graveyards of movements. Hedges himself wrote a book called, “Death of the Liberal Class” five years ago. It should’ve been the elegy before the interment of the Democratic Party as a serious option in electoral politics. Yet here we are, about to anoint another corporate liberal to the highest seat in the land. In that case, consider this article yet another epitaph awaiting its headstone. Let’s hope it’s not a long wait. Voices like Sawant’s and the momentum of movements like BLM give us reason to think it won’t be.

Jason Hirthler is a veteran of the communications industry and author of The Sins of Empire: Unmasking American Imperialism. He lives in New York City and can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.

Latest Guccifer 2.0 Leak Reaffirms Primaries Were Rigged for Clinton

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And, of course, a dodgy DNC blames Russian hackers

By Michael Sainato

Source: Observer

On July 18, hacker Guccifer 2.0 released a new batch of documents obtained from DNC servers. Among the files given exclusively to The Hill is a DNC memo to Clinton political operatives on March 24, 2015—before she formally announced her candidacy—outlining how to legally solicit pro-Clinton super-PACs. “The memo was sent to political consultant John Podesta, now Clinton’s campaign chairman; Clinton fundraising guru Dennis Cheng; and campaign manager Robby Mook,” reported The Hill.

The memo is just one of several documents released by Guccifer 2.0 proving the Democratic National Committee rigged the system for Clinton. Before the primaries began, DNC strategies were developed with Clinton in mind as the presidential nominee. The leak affirms claims by Bernie Sanders’ supporters that the Democratic primaries were not an election, but rather a coronation for Hillary Clinton.

Because many of the documents implicate mainstream media outlets in their complacency to adhere to the DNC’s strategy, the Guccifer 2.0 hacks have gone largely unreported. Some of the documents even unveil how the Clinton campaign fed specific stories to the media in order to boost their political agenda.In May 2015, The Intercept alluded to similar strategies, when it discovered that a CNN op-ed published under Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s name had actually been written by a Clinton lobbyist, edited by a Clinton super-PAC, and sent directly to CNN from the super-PAC. In June, Daily Beast reporter Olivia Nuzzi tweeted that she might lend some credence to the Bernie Bros narrative if the Clinton Campaign hadn’t pitched her Bernie Bros stories to write. In refusing to cover how the DNC and the Clinton campaign united, mainstream media has rewarded corruption.

Instead of confirming or denying the validity of the documents, the DNC has reverberated the same tired excuse, claiming Russian hackers are responsible: “Our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April and we believe that the subsequent release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians. We’ve deployed the recommended.”

While the DNC and Clinton campaign have called for party unity, Clinton has continued the politically-expedient tactic of adopting several of Sanders’ popular ideas. Even though Clinton claimed to support a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizen’s United, she has profited off of the decision in the past—receiving millions of dollars from super-PACs and wealthy billionaires, including George Soros, James Simons and Haim Saban. Her highly-publicized support to overturn Citizens United comes shortly after Sanders’ formal endorsement for Clinton resulted in a wave of backlash and resentment against Clinton—rather than the increase in favorability her campaign had hoped to generate.

Although Hillary Clinton’s coronation may have widespread Establishment support, the Democratic Party has disenfranchised millions of voters—hurting Democrats’ chances not only in the upcoming general election, but for years to come.

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

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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.

Bernie Sanders Endorses the World’s Greatest (Presumptive) Evil

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Bernie Sanders ran an extraordinary race, making lots of noise and causing great consternation, but never daring to leave the corporate duopoly. Now his job is to deliver the bulk of his sheep into Hillary Clinton’s enclosure. This final mission will require lots of lying, but Bernie got off to a good start with his surrender speech. “The Clintons have an infinite capacity for lying, and now they’ve got Bernie Sanders lying for them, too.”

By Glen Ford

Source: Black Agenda Report

“Sanders’ job is to shepherd his flock into a little leftwing corner of Hillary’s Big Tent, right next to the latrine and alongside her loyal Black Democrats.”

Bernie Sanders this Tuesday consummated his sheepdog agreement with the Democratic Party, delivering a formal endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president.  The capitulation script that Sanders read in New Hampshire, with the cackling Banshee of War at his side, could have been written back in the spring of last year, when he formally threw his hat into the race. From the very start, Sanders was firm in his allegiance to the Democratic wing of the corporate duopoly, and any indications to the contrary were purely products of his supporters wishful imaginations.

Bernie Sanders did not lie to his followers; they deceived themselves, just as most of them – the ones that were old enough – had fooled themselves into believing that Barack Obama was a peace candidate and a political progressive back in 2008, although Obama’s actual record and policy pronouncements showed him clearly to be a corporate imperialist warmonger – a political twin of his principal primary election opponent, Hillary Clinton and her philandering, huckster husband.

Back then, phony leftists like Bill Fletcher and Tom Hayden swore on their mothers’ honor that Obama’s campaign was really a people’s movement, a prelude to revolution – as if the Democrats, a militarist corporate political party, could give birth to an anti-corporate, anti-militarist people’s revolution.

Real Fascist vs. Trump Cartoon Version

Bernie Sanders threw around the word “revolution” quite a bit. He was still using it in his surrender speech on Tuesday, assuring his flock that the revolution would continue as he marched arm in arm with the most dangerous person in the world, today – far more dangerous than Donald Trump, who will be buried in a landslide of historical proportions in November by a multi-billion dollar mountain of campaign contributions from Hillary Clinton’s Democratic and Republican friends on Wall Street. Sanders’ job is to shepherd his flock into a little leftwing corner of Hillary’s Big Tent, right next to the latrine and alongside her loyal Black Democrats, who are so meek in the presence of power that they won’t even complain about the smell.

In his kow-tow to the Queen of Chaos, Sanders put words in Clinton’s mouth that she never really said, and that would be lies if she did say them. Hillary “feels” this, Hillary “believes” that – it was as if he could read Hillary’s mind.  Hillary “knows,” said Sanders, “that something is very wrong when the very rich become richer while many others are working longer hours for lower wages.” Maybe she does know that, but she has no intention to do anything about it – just as she had no intention of allowing the Democratic Party platform to oppose TPP, although she claims she’s against it. As for those compromises Clinton did make on the platform: she was lying. The Clintons have an infinite capacity for lying, and now they’ve got Bernie Sanders lying for them, too.

If only 5 percent of Bernie Sanders’ 13 million voters formed or joined a party of the 99 percent – let’s say, the Green Party – that party would have nearly twice as many members as the British Labor Party. which would be one helluva start. Or, they can crawl along with Bernie into Hillary’s stinking Big Tent, where the real fascists live – the ones with actual experience in regime change, nuclear brinksmanship and mass Black incarceration.