Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Is Elizabeth Warren A Wall Street Stealth Candidate?

"A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth," or at lest it seems to, especially when it's not subject to reasonable scrutiny from opposing views. This is the most fundamental principle of propaganda; and since the mainstream media has consolidated into six corporations controlling over ninety percent of national media and at least a dozen of the next biggest media outlets also controlled by multimillionaires or billionaires, they've been gradually increasing the use of this method.

This is how they're creating a progressive image for Elizabeth Warren despite fact that the closer I've looked at her record, since 2011, when I first noticed how much obsessive coverage the media gave her, despite the fact that they were ignoring other progressives rising from the grassroots, the less progressive she appears to be!

Fortunately, there's a growing number of people getting media from the internet, where it's much more diverse, although you still have to be careful to sort out the misinformation. But the majority of the public almost certainly gets their information from the mainstream media, especially older people, and complacent people, which is probably the majority.

Occasionally even the mainstream media reports that wealthy people aren't nearly as concerned with her as her propaganda seems to imply like this article from Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren Starts Winning Begrudging Respect on Wall Street. 07/03/2019 However this was only reported briefly and it wasn't repeated in broadcast or cable news where most people get their news so most people aren't even aware of it, and the truth is they never were as concerned about her as they often claimed to be.

For a long time I hesitated to refer to her as a Wall Street puppet because she has come up with some legitimate criticism of them, especially the banks, which she gained her initial fame by criticizing for predatory lending and opposing the repeal of Glass-Steagall. I first took notice of her when mainstream media gave her obsession coverage in 2011 making her look like a progressive, even though they don't provide that kind of coverage fro people from the grassroots. this made me suspicious when I wrote How sincere is Elizabeth Warren? Her rhetoric sounded really good but the closer I looked the clearer it was that it wasn't matched up by her actions.

This article was followed up by close to a dozen more including Elizabeth Warren is NOT a “consumer advocate!!” (My other articles about her, along with more additional sources than most of you can read are listed below) which initially relied on some more subtle ways she supported the mainstream political establishment and fiscal ideology, and one lawsuit where she represented Travelers Insurance against workers with an asbestos claim; but, was later updated to report that she represented at least a dozen Wall street firms including Dow Corning in a breast implant lawsuit, among others all working against the best interests of consumers or workers.

This is why she's so rich! Shew's worth at least two or three times as much as Bernie Sanders, yet the media hardly mentioned this even though they spent an enormous amount of time criticizing him for being a millionaire while campaigning against millionaires!

Bernie Sanders made his money working for decades representing the working class before finally becoming famous in 2016 and writing a best selling book that made him a millionaire, not by defending Wall Street corporations, against the working class while pretending to defend the middle class or poor!

Furthermore, even though the vast majority of the public is just beginning to learn about a small portion of her history the wealthy have known about it all along including some multimillionaires and billionaires that supported her political career from the beginning. According to the following article Paul Egerman was one of her early supporters when she ran for Senate helping to raise funds for Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren from billionaires George Soros, Donald Sussman and Tom Steyer, who were all also top Hillary Clinton Bundlers:

Elizabeth Warren decries big money in politics. Her campaign treasurer embodies it. 05/23/2019

FAIRFAX, Va. — With a sizable American flag as her backdrop and supporters toting signs reading “The Best President Money Can’t Buy,” Elizabeth Warren decried the role big bucks play in politics.

“Corruption, the influence of money, touches every decision that gets made in Washington,” the Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. senator from Massachusetts told hundreds of people attending her May 16 campaign event at George Mason University in Virginia. “Whatever issue brought you here today, I guarantee if there’s a decision to be made in Washington, it’s been touched, pushed, massaged, tilted over, just a little, so the folks with money do better than everyone else.”

Warren’s declaration aligns with her aggressive rejection of traditional sources of campaign cash, from political action committees to lobbyists. Everyone will have access to her, she says, not just wealthy donors. She’s instituted “selfie lines” at rallies. She releases videos of herself personally calling donors who’ve contributed just a few dollars.

But Warren has also selected for her presidential campaign treasurer a man whose contributions run counter to Warren’s statements — among the most emphatic among the more than 20 Democrats running for president — against big money in politics.

Dubbed a “personal PAC man” to politicians by The Boston Globe more than a decade ago, retired software engineer Paul Egerman, 70, has quietly established himself as a key benefactor and rainmaker for Democratic political committees and liberal causes.

Since 1995, Egerman and his wife, Joanne, have given more than $8.4 million to various Democratic candidates and PACs, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Center for Responsive Politics data. .....

Egerman also serves as a conduit between Democrats and big-dollar political donors.

For example, he’s the board treasurer for Democracy Alliance, a network of wealthy Democratic donors that helps support liberal causes and has counted liberal megadonors such as George Soros, Donald Sussman and Tom Steyer among its members. He’s also been an advisory council member to J Street, a political nonprofit and PAC that seeks to promote American leadership in creating a two-state resolution between Palestine and Israel.

Egerman in 2014 also hosted an ultra-exclusive Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser at his Massachusetts home. President Barack Obama attended. The entry price per person: $32,400, according to The Boston Globe. ......

Egerman’s history with Warren began about a decade ago, when he met her on an airplane. He’d later become campaign finance chairman for Warren’s 2012 U.S. Senate campaign. Complete article

For someone who is supposedly always fighting Wall Street corporations or billionaires she manages to get a lot of campaign donations from these same corporations for her political career.

Each of these corporations can be confirmed to have donated to Elizabeth Warren, either for Senate or President, or both, at Open Secrets.org. (NBC Universal is owned by Comcast which donated to Elizabeth Warren.)

Philosophrob has reported at least eight billionaires, listed below, that have donated to Elizabeth Warren, saying that none have donated to Bernie Sanders. He's very good at checking his sources, and one of his most common ones is Open Secrets.

While the mainstream media provided an enormous amount of coverage about her pledge not to accept PAC money during the campaign they didn't provide nearly as much coverage to the fact that this wouldn't extend to the General Election if she got the nomination; and the news that she transferred leftover funds from her Senate campaign, much of which came from the PACs she now says she wouldn't accept was buried in a low profile news article that few saw, or the fact that Paul Egerman is one of the leading PAC organizers, nor did they report widely on several other examples of her cheating on this pledge, some of which are listed below.

Elizabeth Warren also supports numerous foreign interventions abroad including numerous contradictory positions on Venezuela, North Korea and several other countries, often being hawkish, when it suits her political agenda, according to When It Comes to U.S. Militarism, Elizabeth Warren Is No Progressive. 05/17/2019 There are also many times on this subject, and many others, where she caves after being pilloried on line for her positions, often hedging or avoiding the subject.

In 2017, even though she was adamantly opposed to Trump and much of his foreign policy, she still voted for a military budget that was bigger than the one he asked for! she received an enormous amount of heat for that, although it was almost all online, since the mainstream media ignored it; and declined to vote for it again in 2018, but it still passed overwhelmingly, and she didn't speak out against it either, at least not loudly so many will notice!

She has been especially bad on the occupation of Palestinian territories, like the vast majority of the political establishment ignoring the history of this conflict. The mainstream media is also incredibly bad reporting on this. The simple history, for those of you who haven't kept up on it, which is understandable, considering media coverage, the Israelis were thrown out of Jerusalem almost two thousand years ago by the ancient Romans, they were persecuted by Christians for centuries after that especially Catholics, but after the Protestant reformation about five hundred years ago they joined in the antisemitism as well. this didn't change until people were so shocked by the Holocaust which was committed by Christians not Palestinians.

Then instead of taking responsibility for demonizing Jewish people at a time when they had done no wrong they supported their efforts to take over Palestine, which by then was controlled by people that had nothing to do with the original ouster of Jews or the Holocaust. I'm not saying the Palestinians are all perfect but since then the Israelis have been demonizing them to justify stealing their land and oppressing them, yet mainstream media practically never mentions the majority of this history.

Israelis have been subject to an enormous amount of unjustifiable antisemitism in the past and some of it is still going on; however, they're using this as an excuse to classify all criticism of their actions as bigotry, even though some of it comes from Jewish people acknowledging their oppressive activities against Palestinians and how it's clearly inciting constant conflict. Yet Elizabeth Warren has supported the establishment position and Israel while they oppress Palestinians and steal their land insisting on their rights to self defense while denying the Palestinians the same rights to self defense as described in the following excerpt:

Elizabeth Warren Defends Israeli Shelling of Gaza Schools, Hospitals 08/28/2014

The Israeli military has the right to attack Palestinian hospitals and schools in self defense if Hamas has put rocket launchers next to them, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said last week at a local town hall, according to the Cape Cod Times.

Warren, in defending her vote to send funds to Israel in the middle of its war with Hamas, said she thinks civilian casualties are the "last thing Israel wants."

"But when Hamas puts its rocket launchers next to hospitals, next to schools, they're using their civilian population to protect their military assets. And I believe Israel has a right, at that point, to defend itself," she said.

Israeli tanks shelled schools and hospitals during the most recent conflict in Gaza. The Israeli government claimed at the time that rockets and militants had been located nearby. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency condemned militants for hiding rockets in two schools, and also sharply criticized Israeli attacks on other schools as. Complete article

Anyone not familiar with the situation in Israel, which for decades, included me, might want to check out "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" By Jimmy Carter and "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" By John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, one of whom is Jewish.

On top of that her "plan for that" slogan sounds great and has been a massive propaganda success, at least to those that haven't checked the facts, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, as I pointed out in some of my past articles (listed below), and the following article also points out some additional examples:

She's got a (borrowed) plan for that: The media myth of Elizabeth Warren the wonk 06/11/2019

Elizabeth Warren is a policy wonk in the same way Donald Trump is a builder.

Neither of them is in the business of actually creating things. Both are very good at slapping their names on something and calling it their own.

A branding natural, Warren has issued campaign T-shirts that say “I have a plan for that.” Warren has successfully donned the mantle of a policy genius, with the happy cooperation of a media eagerly seeking labels and pigeonholes for each of the 25 Democratic candidates.

“Warren’s nonstop ideas reshape the Democratic presidential race,” the Washington Post declared in a typical headline.

But it’s a stretch to call these all her ideas. The Post provided a sampling of “Warren’s nonstop ideas.” The list began with “new ethics rules on Supreme Court justices.” Notably, her proposal here comes from a bill written and introduced by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. Warren signed on as a co-sponsor. ..... Complete article

Amazingly even though she's collected an enormous amount of money for her campaign she appears to be taking some of her own unpaid volunteers for granted, trying to force them to pay their own way when traveling to other states to help with the campaign, and even making them sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent them from speaking about their grievances as indicated in the following article:

Warren Fellowship Applicants: Campaign Program Was a ‘Great Scam’ 07/26/2019

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has built much of her political career as a champion of workers and consumers against the deceptive and exploitative practices of corporations and employers.

But as she navigates the latest chapter of that career arc—a run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency—the Massachusetts Democrat faces criticism from several of her own supporters who said the lowest tier of her campaign structure doesn’t match the image she projects.

Two early converts to Warren described the process for entry into her campaign’s volunteer fellowship program as deceptive and at times exploitative in interviews with The Daily Beast. They said they were pushed toward unpaid positions over paid ones, misled over the availability of financial assistance, and asked to sign highly restrictive nondisclosure agreements that worker advocacy groups concede are irregular. Both applicants verified their accounts with emails and text messages from the Warren campaign.

The complaints from those offered unpaid fellowships could raise new questions for Warren as she seeks to put her lengthy history of advocating for consumer and worker rights at the center of her rising campaign.

“What was sold to me was very different than it actually was,” said Jonathan Nendze, a rising senior at Seton Hall University who was offered a volunteer fellowship position on Warren’s campaign. “It was kind of a great scam of getting people to show up and work in the capacity of volunteer, but to function as a paid intern in the amount of work they’re doing,” he said. ......

Ultimately, Nendze was offered a position as a volunteer fellow. As part of the on-boarding process, he was sent a mandatory non-disclosure agreement—to sign upon accepting the offer and passing the campaign’s vetting process—stating that volunteer fellows would “not communicate with any member of the press” or “make any statement that may impair or otherwise adversely affect the goodwill or reputation” of Warren for President Inc., among other provisions.

The Campaign Workers Guild, a group focused on improving working conditions on campaigns, said providing NDAs to unpaid volunteers on campaigns is not a common practice, though it occasionally happens in large-scale races. Former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the only Democratic 2020 campaigns to offer a similar unpaid fellowship program, does not require volunteer fellows to sign NDAs, a campaign official confirmed.

Nendze said he did not sign the agreement. The emails sent to Nendze were reviewed by The Daily Beast. .......

In one email exchange, Cole asked Smith about the ease of getting around Des Moines without a car, which he made clear he would not have for the program. He was told that it was not necessary but “may require a fair amount of Ubers” and that he could “probably snag a good amount of rides from other fellows and/or staff here and there,” according to internal emails. Cole said he immediately became concerned with the potential costs associated with taking frequent Uber rides when he was not being paid.

Like Nendze, Cole was also concerned about the availability of housing while he volunteered for the Warren campaign. Those fears were assuaged somewhat when Anna Kucher, the campaign’s regional organizing director based in Iowa, sent an email sent to interns and fellows introducing herself on May 26. Complete article

This is truly stunning, especially since she's raised an enormous amount of money, indicating that she may be out of touch with what's going on at the grassroots. taking her own supporters for granted like this is guaranteed to backfire, and we'll probably hear more about it in the future. Even though the maltreatment of volunteers is outrageous one of the most important aspects we should be worried about is the use of non-disclosure agreements, which the media almost never discusses, although they're clearly far more common than most people realize.

This should especially concerning when there's a chance that campaign workers, reporters, or government officials may routinely sign some of these. In an open democracy the public needs to have access to information they need to participate in decisions, yet these agreements are designed to deprive them of that information, including how they may be manipulating voters, or in this case abusing campaign workers. this has recently been discussed when they disclosed that Trump had a history of requiring them, even from unpaid volunteers which the media said was almost unprecedented, although we may have no idea how common they are, since one of the conditions might be that they not even tell us they sign them in the first place.

The leaks of Podesta and DNC E-mails shows that they do far more to deceive voters than most people realize, yet they came up with an enormous amount of propaganda to convince us that instead of worrying about the fact that the Clinton campaign has been manipulating us, and that this appears to be standard operating procedure, we should blame the Russians for disclosing their manipulation.

We should do much more to demand to know just how common these non-disclosure agreements are; and the fact that they don't come out with a clear denial and admission that they shouldn't be used at all for campaigns or for many if any other reasons, should be a further indication to show they believe they should be able to act in secrecy?

They can't keep everything secret, and there's clearly an enormous amount of research available to the public scattered in locations where most people don't look to raise additional doubts about both traditional politicians and the media, which is all the more reason to doubt them, demand a much more diverse media and enable all candidates to be heard, not just those collecting massive amounts of money from corporations.

Elizabeth Warren also has plenty of financial ties to the health care industry including through Paul Egerman, Gary Cohn, who wants to stop medicare for all, and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi who helped found United Health Group a for-profit insurance company, which may help to explain her position on single payer for years. She was originally opposed to Single payer in her Senate run, although she avoided discussion of it and when one of her primary opponents supported it the mainstream media hardly gave her any coverage at all while giving Elizabeth Warren obsession coverage, almost all positive, enabling her to get a massive lead in the polls, since few knew who else was running. this enabled the establishment to use her massive lead in the polls as an excuse to cancel the primary so her opponent never got the chance to finish making the case for Single payer.

Although she claimed to support Bernie Sanders medicare for all plan she's recently hedged on it refusing to say whether she still supports it or not and as the following article shows she's avoided discussing this and doesn't seem to "have a plan for that:"

Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan for Everything — Except Health Care 06/11/2019

Elizabeth Warren has come out strong for a slew of progressive policy proposals. So why hasn’t she come out strong for Medicare for All?

In a recent MSNBC town hall, Elizabeth Warren put her policy platform on full display. Through emotional, personal anecdotes and with a depth of understanding, Warren gave the impression of a candidate well-aware of the problems faced by working Americans and armed with the policies needed to solve them. She detailed her plans to achieve universal childcare, cancel the bulk of existing student debt, and create over a million green jobs by progressively taxing the richest Americans. She boldly criticized Joe Biden’s conservative record and decried the greed of large corporations.

The performance supported Warren’s reputation as a candidate with a “plan for everything” — a reputation emphasized repeatedly by MSNBC moderator Chris Hayes throughout the event. Taken as a whole, however, the town hall revealed an alarming gap in Warren’s policy repertoire, one that has gone mostly ignored to this point in the campaign: she has no plan for fixing the broken US health care system.

Warren had several opportunities in the town hall to address the health care crisis. Instead, she avoided the topic almost entirely. Even when discussing issues directly related to health care like repealing the Hyde Amendment and improving access to hearing aides, she neglected to propose a comprehensive policy solution.

Unfortunately, this was not a simple case of forgetfulness. In fact, it continues a disturbing trend with the Warren campaign. Check her website: in a long and thorough issues page full of bold plans to alleviate Americans’ suffering, Warren makes no mention of health care. View her campaign materials: Warren has yard signs dedicated to several of her major policy proposals, but not a single one about health care. Follow her campaign appearances: you’ll hear the usual platitudes (“health care is a human right;” “everyone deserves access to care”), but you won’t hear her endorse a specific policy. Complete article

This is just a small fraction of her problems; I went into much more in past articles. One of the issues I went into previously was her support of Charter Schools as expressed in her book the "Two Income Trap." Even at the time it was published those in the education trade knew this was a disaster and they let her know by the time she ran for Senate. for the most part she avoided discussing the subject since then; and according to Diane Ravitch, she voted against them a few years ago, presumably under pressure form the grassroots who knew how bad they were. However since then Diane Ravitch has had more doubts about her since she's surrounded herself with advisers from Teach For America, which is a pro-charter organization that Ravitch has been exposing for epidemic levels of fraud, some of that is listed below and I'll update the previous article about it.

I have tried to avoid the subject of her claims to be an Indian, since for the most part I haven't considered it that important and it says far more about Trump and Scott Brown's racism or political pandering than it does about Elizabeth Warren; however one exception is the fact that she used this to advance her career justifiable or not and ignored the plight of native Americans for a long time saying nothing, until the protest at the XL pipeline received an enormous amount of attention and she felt she had to say something in support of them. This is a very common political tactics many politicians, including Elizabeth Warren, routinely do and when they finally do get some positive attention there are always some activists that try to make the best of it and others that call it out for what it is, without giving them the brownie points they clearly didn't deserve.

When the Washington Post broke the story about Dow corning breast implant case and a dozen other examples where she represented Wall Street firms, someone on Twitter said it should be the end of her campaign, and he should have been right, and may still be right; however, the rest of the mainstream media ignored it and continued giving her an enormous amount of positive propaganda. This is why she is still able to rise in the polls, at least for now. This is a common tactic by mainstream media, they don't completely suppress a lot of news but relegate it to a relatively low profile location, even the Washington Post has limited readership compared to cable and network news. Then they repeat the propaganda they want to promote candidates of their choice over and over again counting on the public to forget, assuming they read the low profile articles at all.

But it's still six months before the primaries begin, and there's plenty of time to report on her history. It may be necessary to report on a lot of this at the grassroots level, since the media is clearly unwilling to do a good job.

They do the same thing with Joe Biden but his record is so bad, and his support from the grassroots so weak despite the polls that say he's still in the lead that it's virtually guaranteed that he'll lose an enormous amount of support before the voting actually begins. Many of the other so-called top-tier candidates, except for Bernie Sanders are even worse, or at least they seem to be worse; however they don't do nearly as good a job coming up with positive propaganda or burying many of the negative stories as Elizabeth Warren, which makes her the leading establishment candidate when Biden falls apart, although they pretend she's anti-establishment.

In addition to my own past articles I complied a long list of articles, which I may add to, below about her record. Many of these were pointed out to me by people in social media, mostly Twitter, with a few from Facebook or other sources. In many cases I didn't keep track of the ones pointing it out to me but below are some strings from some of those who did.

Bernie Sanders has a much stronger grassroots base than any of the other candidates, which he got by being consistent for decades. Occasionally many of his supporters, including me, check his facts as well, and he does a far better job addressing legitimate concerns, which is why he has so much support.

We don't want to be cult followers; we want a leader that's accountable to the public and since his record holds up far better than anyone else he's the clear choice, at least compared to other candidates the media is willing to cover. He's going to need this grassroots support to elect progressives to congress to get his agenda passed; and we'll also have to push for election reform enabling grassroots candidates get more coverage the next time from the grassroots, even if Bernie doesn't do enough on this.