Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Bernie Sanders Is More Democratic Than Fake "Democrats!"

The "Democrats" are constantly complaining because Bernie Sanders isn't a formal member of their party, which they refer to as the Democratic Party even though their leaders aren't chosen directly by the people and are constantly getting caught trying to rig nominations for candidates that oppose issue overwhelmingly supported by the public!

The most obvious example is when they rigged the nomination for Hillary Clinton in 2016 even though she was incredibly unpopular. The standard way of rigging nominations is by simply giving enormous amount of media coverage to candidates they support, while refusing to cover candidates. this is of course done by the media not the Democratic establishment; however, one of the things exposed by leaked E-mails in 2016 is that what we suspected about them colluding with the media was true all along and now we know much more about the details.

Since then the entire media and Democratic establishment has been obsessively trying to tell us that instead of blaming them we should blame Russia, even though, if they did hack the E-mails it's not nearly as bad as what the Democratic establishment and media did, which the E-mails exposed.

We should be thankful for the leaking of the E-mails, only questioning why they weren't released earlier, not blaming those that released them!

And now there are numerous stories about how entire political establishment is trying to rig primary elections again against progressives that support issues that are much more popular with voters than with Wall Street campaign donors. Several of the top leadership people have also been caught red handed reassuring Wall Street executives that they don't really intend to pass some of the progressive legislation they're often promising to pass during campaigns. this practice has gone back at least to the 2008 campaign when both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were caught at this, although it's almost certainly far more common that we realize since these examples are only the times they got caught!

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, has been consistently supporting these progressive issues that are also supported by the majority of the public against Wall Street wishes!

Polls With Citations: Americans Want Bernie’s New Deal For All 07/26/2019

There are also plenty of progressives running for office at the local level all around the country; however, the Democratic Party leadership routinely rigs media coverage and elections so they can't the name recognition they need to get elected and only provide financial support for candidates supporting the Wall Street agenda. This is why the vast majority of the Democratic Party isn't nearly as Progressive as they pretend to be and the leadership is even worse. Part of the reason for this is because leadership isn't isn't directly elected by the vast majority of the public and most people don't base their votes on who they support to lead the party, and by the time the next election comes around they often forget about debate taking place during leadership elections.

Amazingly, one leader after another keeps getting caught rigging the process like several efforts to blackball progressives for any consultants that want to do work with the DNC in the future in both the House and the Senate!

Even when politicians or campaign workers are disgraced by their past corruption like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Hilary Clinton, who both came back as elder statemen or pundits after being disgraced and political establishment keeps trying to convince us we liked them! They do the same thing with Donna Brazile, Neera Tanden and many others, and now a lot of their dirty work is being done by leadership that isn't quite as high profile like Steny Hoyer and Cheri Bustos, but other leaders like Schumer Pelosi, Biden, Warren and many more, have been caught in their part to rig elections unfairly against progressive candidates, despite the fact that they've gone to so much trouble to make Warren look progressive herself!

Over the years there have been dozens of examples where leadership ahs been caught red handed rigging the process to favor their candidates but most of it is given minimal coverage by mainstream media and forgotten very quickly while they repeat the same positive propaganda for the candidates they support over and over again. One of the most recent examples is Cheri Bustos who recently implemented a public policy to blacklist consultants to work with anyone that challenges incombents or anyone the leadership opposes, which typically means progressives!

This was only reported in low profile articles by mainstream media which often spun it and they hardly repeated it at all after the first day or two after it became public. The Intercept reported a little bit more in the following article:

Progressive Caucus Slams DCCC Head for Assault on Primary Challengers 03/27/2019 by Ryan Grim

THE LEADERSHIP OF the Congressional Progressive Caucus has met with the top brass at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and pushed back hard against a new party policy to blacklist consultants who work with primary challengers.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., vice chair of the caucus, was also in the meeting with Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., and said that the turn the DCCC has taken in the 2020 cycle under her reign is worse on a small-d democratic level than previous cycles, when the party was not exactly kind to challengers.

“Pramila Jayapal, Mark Pocan, and I met with Cheri Bustos to make it clear that we strongly oppose her new policy that stifles competition and blackballs any consultant who works for a challenger. We made the point to Cheri that Nancy Pelosi, and Ben Ray Luján never adopted such a heavy-handed policy,” Khanna told The Intercept in a statement. “Ben Ray Luján in particular had a much kinder and more inclusive approach.”

Khanna said that it is such an egregious assault against the progressive wing of the party that even Rahm Emanuel, the hard-knuckled, hippie-punching DCCC chair from 2006, wouldn’t have countenanced it. “This unprecedented grab of power is a slap in the face of Democratic voters across the nation. It’s something even Rahm Emanuel would not have done and is totally tone-deaf to the grassroots activists across our nation. Voters are sick of the status quo holding on to power and stifling new voices. They are sick of D.C. politicians who care more about holding on to power than a true competition of ideas,” said Khanna.

The pressure on Bustos is a rare defense of freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., by her Democratic colleagues. Ocasio-Cortez is most closely associated with the effort to primary incumbent Democrats in safe seats who are not representing their communities. She previously served on the board of Justice Democrats, which is actively recruiting challengers, and remains close with the group. Ocasio-Cortez and Justice Democrats have both made clear that they are only targeting safe Democratic seats, so as not to put the Democratic majority at risk, but paranoia within the Democratic caucus has left that promise to fall on deaf ears. Complete article

Do I have to explain this violates the basic fundamentals of a Democracy where anyone can run for office and get a fair chance of winning so those in office will serve the best interests of the public or be replaced by a challenger? Do I have to explain that this is one of the obvious tactics they use to ensure that incumbents win over and over again, even when they don't serve the best interests of the majority of the pubic?

No, of course not, you figured that out on your own; however, the establishment is relying on the most fundamental principles of propaganda repeating lies over and over again base d on the understanding that many people have a short memory and take fundamentals for granted as long as they're not reminded of it, and this is very effective when it comes to complacent people not accustomed to thinking things through on their own. So, if you're one of those complacent people feel free to pretend you figured it out on your own, and act as it it's only other people that fall for that tactic.

This is part of a pattern of behavior and even those that are accustomed to checking with alternative media probably have a hard time keeping up with it all; I know I can't; and writing this will help remind me of some of it, although I'm sure there's much more that I missed, even though I was able to find quite a few examples. Steny Hoyer also was caught red-handed threatening to black ball a candidate and informed him this was routine.

And Nancy Pelosi clearly indicated that she approved of Hoyer and thought the only thing that was outrageous was that someone exposed his efforts to rig elections against progressive candidates according to the following article:

Pelosi: “I Don’t See Anything Inappropriate” In Rigging Primaries 04/26/2019 by Caitlin Johnstone

The Intercept has published a secretly taped audio recording of one of the most powerful Democrats in America pressuring a progressive candidate to drop out of a Colorado congressional primary race. It hasn’t been getting as much attention as the WikiLeaks drops on the DNC’s sabotage of the Sanders campaign because it’s not about a presidential race, but make no mistake: this is the single most damning piece of evidence ever published exposing the Democratic Party’s war on progressives.

The recording features House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, the second-highest ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, informing primary challenger Levi Tillemann that if he runs, he will be running against not just the chosen establishment candidate Jason Crow, but against Hoyer and the full might of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) as well.

“Which means effectively, Congressman Hoyer,” Tillemann is heard saying toward the end of the recording, “I’m running a campaign against Crow, and against you, and against the DCCC, because you guys are on Crow’s side.”

“Yeah,” replied Hoyer. “You know, frankly, that happens in life all the time.” ......

Nancy Pelosi, the only House Democrat who outranks Hoyer, somehow surpassed the jaw-dropping revelations in the audio recording by giving Hoyer’s actions her full-throated endorsement.

“I don’t know that a person can tape a person without the person’s consent and then release it to the press,” Pelosi told reporters today. “In terms of candidates and campaigns I don’t see anything inappropriate in what Mr. Hoyer was engaged in — a conversation about the realities of life in the race as to who can make the general election.”

That’s right, instead of blaming this evidence on Russian hackers, Democratic Party leadership has opted to try a brand new approach: they’re openly admitting to knowingly rigging their primaries against progressive candidates and saying that it’s the right thing to do. Because that’s how you win general elections. Complete article

I'm not sure that I like the idea of taping people either; however this is standard operating procedure for the NSA and CIA which Pelosi approved of as long as it wasn't used against her. Furthermore, Democracy is supposed to be done in the open so that the public can have accurate information to make their decisions. Therefore it seems like there are far more mitigating circumstances in favor of the person exposing fraud by political leadership that was only using this tactic on the assumption that they could disregard basic principles of Democracy by doing their rigging of elections in secrecy. And the list of attempts to rig elections keeps going with Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Chuck Schumer working to suppress support for Progressives as well.

Schumer and Masto made it clear that they wouldn't do business with firms that represented progressive candidates as well as exposed by the Intercept in this article:

DSCC Pressuring Consultants Not to Work With Colorado Progressive 08/29/2019

BEFORE THE Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee endorsed former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper in a 2020 Senate race, it pressured consultants from at least five firms not to work with a leading progressive in the race, the candidate told The Intercept.

Andrew Romanoff, who is one of more than a dozen candidates vying for Republican Sen. Cory Gardner’s seat, told The Intercept that multiple consultants turned down jobs with his campaign citing pressure from the DSCC.

“They’ve made it clear to a number of the firms and individuals we tried to hire that they wouldn’t get any business in Washington or with the DSCC if they worked with me,” Romanoff said. “It’s been a well-orchestrated operation to blackball ragtag grassroots teams.”

At least five firms and 25 prospective staff turned down working with his campaign, said Romanoff, who has raised more than $1 million in individual contributions so far. “I spoke to the firms, my campaign manager spoke to the staff prospects,” he said. “Pretty much everyone who checked in with the DSCC got the same warning: Helping us would cost them.”

A consultant who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said that their firm had been far along in talks to work for Romanoff when they got word that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the DSCC weren’t happy. The firm was told by a top DSCC staffer that they “absolutely under no circumstances could work for Andrew Romanoff, so we withdrew our offer to be his consulting firm.” Complete article

Is Chuck Schumer actively trying to blackball progressive candidates? 09/03/2019

The reason this keeps happening over and over again clearly seems to be because they keep getting away with it; although there might be something more to it than that, since these progressive candidates are trying to stop the epidemic levels of environmental destruction which will eventually destroy us all even the oligarchs that are profiting from it temporarily. the clear implication is that they're ideological fanatics or something even stranger; but regardless of the reason for this insane behavior the list of efforts to rig the primaries keeps going on including the now infamous claim that "Look, we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That's not the way it was done," instead they used slightly more sophisticated methods to rig the primaries!

Even people keeping track of alternative media could use an occasional reminder of the news story hardly covered at all by mainstream media about the defense in a lawsuit for rigging the 2016 primaries which the courts rejected in 2017 as described in the following article:

DNC to Court: We Are a Private Corporation With No Obligation to Follow Our Rules 05/02/2017 Independent Voter Project

Update: A federal judge dismissed the DNC lawsuit on August 28. The court recognized that the DNC treated voters unfairly, but ruled that the DNC is a private corporation; therefore, voters cannot protect their rights by turning to the courts:

"To the extent Plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC's internal workings, or their right of free speech — not through the judiciary."

Rather than reflecting on the consternation everyday voters are having over the conduct of the Democratic presidential primary, the Democratic National Committee is doubling down on the assertion that the primary election belongs to the people who control the party -- not voters.

In the transcript for last week's hearing in Wilding, et. al. v. DNC Services, d/b/a DNC and Deborah “Debbie” Wasserman Schultz, released Friday, DNC attorneys assert that the party has every right to favor one candidate or another, despite their party rules that state otherwise because, after all, they are a private corporation and they can change their rules if they want.

The argument is not without merit. In fact, it is a legally sound argument that has rarely been overcome in the court of law, where courts are extraordinarily hesitant to get involved in the “political thicket.”

The last time the court rejected the “private party rights” argument was in 1944 when, despite the Democratic Party’s objections, the court held that the party had to let African-Americans participate in “their” primary. (See, Smith v. Allwright) .......

But the Democratic Party’s argument remains the same as it did over 70 years ago.

From the transcript:

"The court would have to basically tell the party that it couldn't change [the neutrality rule], even though it's a discretionary rule that it didn't need to adopt to begin with." - DNC attorney Bruce Spiva

"The party could have favored a candidate. I'll put it that way. Maybe that's a better way of answering your Honor's original question. Even if it were true, that's the business of the party, and it's not justiciable." - DNC attorney Bruce Spiva

"[I]f you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I'm gonna take this money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and stole the money, of course that's different. But here, where you have a party that's saying, We're gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we're gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That's not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions." - DNC attorney Bruce Spiva

Complete article

DNC: We Can Legally Choose Candidate Over Cigars In Back Room 05/01/2017

The epidemic levels of corruption is way to much to go into int this articles, which is already long enough, but I went into it much more in many previous articles under the Author tag: 2016 elections. this patterns of behavior was hinted at no later than 2008 when both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were exposed promising Wall Street executives that they didn't mean their promises to the public and Barack said that this was "not true," during the campaign, convincing many people; however after seeing how he government once in office is seems clear that it was true all along! This was mostly forgotten but it was reported in the following book except that came out years later:

McChesney and Nichols "People Get Ready" 2016

When Obama was bidding for the Democratic presidency in 2008, he defined himself as a candidate of "Hope and Change" in a number of ways. He thrilled labor audiences in primary states such as Wisconsin by denouncing policies that had saddled the United States with NAFTA, the permanent normalization of trade with China, and yawning trade deficits. Obama promised to scrap the secretive, “backroom-deal” negotiating style of “Fast Track” agreements that elbowed the Congress and the American people out of the process. He talked about renegotiating NAFTA to add safeguards for the environment and labor rights. If Canada and other trading partners rejected changes, Obama said he was open to exiting the agreements altogether. It seemed as if a new day was dawning when it came to the trade policy – or, at the very least, in the approach of a too-frequently-compromised Democratic Party.

Then came reports that Obama's senior economic adviser, Austin Goolsbee, had quietly assured Canadians that the candidates statements were not to be believed—that his populist appeals in working-class towns battered by trade-related layoffs and factory closings “should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.” When the news broke, before the critical Ohio primary, Obama aides pointed political journalists towards reports that his rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, had apparently had aides provide similar “not to worry” assurances to the Canadians. Reporters who had never bothered to connect the dots between trade policies, shuttered factories, and the righteous indignation of Ohio workers were lapping up the ‘he-said, she-said’ scrap. The controversy grew so intense that Obama had to address it. He told a Cleveland TV station: “I think it’s important for viewers to understand that [the claim that he was saying one thing to workers and another to Wall Street elites and foreign governments] was not true.”

Obama lost Ohio, but he won enough other states to secure the nomination. Then, within days of assembling the delegates he needed, Fortune magazine featured an interview with the candidate headlined ‘Obama: NAFTA Not So Bad after All.’ Reminded that during the primary season he had referred to NAFTA as ‘devastating’ and suggested he might use an opt-out clause in the trade agreement ... Obama replied, "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified."

“Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself," Obama continued. Abandoning the tough talk of just a few months earlier, Obama sounded an awful lot like the free-trader the Canadians had been assured he would be. All that primary season rhetoric about fighting to protect workers, was just, Obama said, another way of "opening up a dialogue." Fortune was satisfied. .... blow up NAFTA after all." Additional Excerpts

This is an ongoing pattern of behavior repeating itself over and over again. In 2016 the leaked E-mails showed that Hillary Clinton said "You need to have a public positions and a private position on policy," and both her and Barack Obama, along with many other politicians repeatedly show with their actions that they mean what they promise behind closed doors to the people financing their campaigns not what they promise to voters falling for their scams! Joe Biden is obviously no better as I went into in Joe Biden Really Was Taken Off The Trash Heap which shows how he's involved in as many scandals as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Before Joe Biden recommended that we check his record, presumably hoping many complacent people would assume he wouldn't invite people to do if he had something to hide and not bother, I checked it and found out that he was involved in an epidemic level of corruption for many reasons this includes the Ukrainian scandal they're now arguing about as reported in the New York Times, Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch 12/08/2015 which said "But Edward C. Chow, who follows Ukrainian policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the involvement of the vice president’s son with Mr. Zlochevsky’s firm undermined the Obama administration’s anticorruption message in Ukraine. 'Now you look at the Hunter Biden situation, and on the one hand you can credit the father for sending the anticorruption message,' Mr. Chow said. 'But I think unfortunately it sends the message that a lot of foreign countries want to believe about America, that we are hypocritical about these issues.'"

Another article reported Did Biden Save This Ukraine Firm Responsible for $1.8B in Missing Aid? His Son is on the Board... 03/21/2018 Of course almost the entire media establishment is now claiming there's nothing to this story; and for all I know it may be exaggerated; however there are a few things we can be certain of. this company was involved in an epidemic level of fraud, his son was paid a lot of money from them, and this isn't an opportunity that the vast majority of the public ever ahs, and there are many more scandals where that one came from including the fact that the same son got special treatment to get into the military and avoid prosecution when he was caught doing cocaine, and his niece also managed to avoid harsh punishment when she was caught hitting a cop and stealing $110,810.04 in a credit card scam and received no jail time in either case.

The Biden family is simply not accountable to the same laws the rest of us are and they're clearly heavily tied to Wall Street, as my previous article indicates the only reason he's considered the front runner is because the mainstream media hardly mentions the vast majority of scandals he's been involved, and there was much more that I reported not to mention more that I missed. It's hard to imagine why they would try to rig the nomination for someone that is so incredibly bad, yet that seems to be what they're doing.

Elizabeth Warren seems like a much more credible candidates; however after taking a closer look at her back in 2011 and more since then it became increasingly obvious that although her propaganda is much more effective she's also working for the same establishment that routinely rigs elections, which is exactly how she got the nomination to the Senate in the first place. The most important method the mainstream media used to rig the nomination for her was to give her obsession coverage starting in 2009 and 2010 when she gradually got more coverage as she worked with the Obama administration then increasing dramatically in 2011, which is when I began looking closer. She had at least three primary opponents before they canceled the primary as one of the describes in the following article:

Sen. Warren: A bully in her own backyard 02/12/2017 By Marisa DeFranco

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the exact wrong poster child for voting rights.

Coretta Scott King wrote in her four-decades-old letter about Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration’s nominee for U.S. attorney general: "Anyone who has used the power of his office as United States attorney to intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot by citizens should not be elevated to our courts." In this regard, Elizabeth Warren is no different than Sessions.

In 2012, Warren used her power as the big-money insider candidate to steal from the voters the choice between two qualified candidates. I know because I was the other qualified candidate. State law requires a candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts to garner 10,000 certified signatures from voters of the commonwealth, within a small window, during the coldest months of the year.

My grassroots campaign secured 14,600 signatures, many more than required. And in any other state, besides Utah, to my knowledge, that would have been enough. My name would have been on the ballot and Democratic Primary voters would have had a choice. But, the Massachusetts Democratic Party does not believe in choice for voters. It only believes in control and manipulating outcomes.

After signatures, the party requires candidates to go through a Soviet-style convention, wherein party insiders gather and usurp the choice from the voters. There, they demand that a candidate get 15 percent of the delegates, even though voters already declared their desire to have that person on the ballot. It is the quintessential, "I know better than you" elitism that doomed us to a Trump victory in the U.S. presidential race.

But it wasn't always this way. Michael Dukakis created this disqualifying, rigged convention in 1982 to shut down his competition in his race for governor. The Massachusetts Democratic Party convention is for one thing only: to shut down outsiders. It is not for democracy. And, 14,600 voters said my name should be on the ballot, but a mere 3,261 party insiders said the voters should be denied a choice on the ballot. And so they were.

Those 3,261 apparatchiks obliterated the will of 14,600 voters and decided the race for approximately 2 million actual voters. What does that say about Democrats’ commitment to democracy?

Elizabeth Warren used this process to stomp on another woman, with her paid lobbyists on the convention floor. She didn't have to. She could have called for a nomination from the floor for both of us. She could have honored the voters' declared wishes in having me on the ballot and committed to a competitive primary. Instead, she chose the low road of exclusion and voter choice denial. Complete article

Marisa DeFranco also supported Single Payer during this campaign but the media hardly gave her any coverage to explain it to the public. Elizabeth Warren opposed it at the time; and didn't officially support it until she announced that she was running for president, but has hedged a few times saying that she doesn't want to end private insurance. There are also numerous opponents of Medicare for All, including lobbyists for the insurance industry, the Center for American Progress and the Third Way, some of whom previously opposed her, but now look at her as a good alternative to Bernie Sanders. Both the Third Way and Center for American Progress are heavily funded by Wall Street firms & oppose Medicare for all and many of the other progressive positions that Elizabeth warren has been speaking out in support of, although she often sends contradictory messages, which is part of a pattern of behavior for establishment politicians.

Many might think this article is from a sore loser; however she was the last of the ones to drop out and none of them could get more than a token amount of media coverage to get their views across while Elizabeth Warren was getting obsession coverage. I first started looking closer at her during this campaign when I wrote How sincere is Elizabeth Warren? At that time she was supposedly running against money corrupting politics yet she was breaking records collecting funds for the most expensive senate campaign from both sides. Her first opponent in 2011, Alan Khazei, challenged Warren to reject lobbyist, PAC money in Senate fight, yet she declined, despite her rhetoric about getting bog money out of politics.

The biggest problem isn't necessarily that they eliminated the primaries so that Marisa DeFranco, Alan Khazei, and a handful of others that they gave modest amount of coverage to at the local level couldn't get their name on the ballot; it's that the media is controlled by a fraction of one percent, and they refuse to give the vast majority of the public any coverage at all, including many well informed activists exposing corporate fraud. They give obsession coverage for their favorites, burying scandals where few can see it, and never allow honest candidates to get name recognition, so we don't even know who the best candidates are we're not hearing from!

This is another pattern of behavior for establishment politicians; both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ran as outsiders speaking out against money in politics but once in office they showed they were establishment politicians. In both Obama's and Clinton's case there were hints that they would do this during the campaign but they were buried among an enormous amount of propaganda to make them look good or at least confuse the issue; and now the same thing is happening with Elizabeth Warren, who establishment may push as the front runner after Biden's campaign falls apart which is virtually guaranteed with his horrendous record.

It's becoming increasingly obvious that many of these so-called progressive groups like the Third Way and CAP are funded by corporations and cater to them with their positions, and they often start funding new progressive groups that previously had a good reputation before showing they now support watered down positions, like the Working Families Party seems to have done with their latest endorsement of Elizabeth Warren. the mainstream media has reported on this as a major endorsement for her boosting her popularity, however they're ignoring the controversy surrounding it which is down right bizarre, and is being reported on the internet as shown in the following couple of articles, which explain how Twitter is blocking comments for Bernie Sanders supporters. I saw this first hand and couldn't access them unless I wasn't signed into my account and it get's weirder as the following shows, along with some of the tweets reported on it listed below:

A strange Twitter glitch is censoring the left — and no one knows if it's a bug or a feature 09/19/2019

Twitter is mum about a well-documented "bug" that seems to prevent verified accounts from getting ratioed

The Working Families Party, a New York-based progressive political party, has a reputation befitting its name as a left-populist political organization. So when the organization endorsed the center-left Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren — who was once a hardcore Republican and has emphasized her capitalist credentials — over the explicitly democratic socialist candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sanders (I-Vt.) supporters were understandably disappointed. After all, the party overwhelmingly endorsed Sanders in the previous presidential election. What had changed?

It turns out that the organization isn’t telling.

That’s because the Working Families Party (WFP) voting process was not fully democratic, by a sort of hybridized process: part of the vote to endorse came from members itself. The other part came from the leadership.

The WFP is not releasing the tallies of either the leadership vote, nor the membership vote, nor is it releasing how they were weighted. (WFP members voted overwhelmingly to endorse Sanders in 2016, with 87.5% of members voting to endorse him.)

That suggests that the WFP is hiding something. Many Sanders supporters agreed, and went to vent on the only public forum that functionally exists anymore: Twitter. But on the Working Families Party’s Twitter thread announcing the vote, many found something bizarre: they couldn’t actually comment on, “like,” or see other comments on the thread.

“I can’t see the comments or reply to the Working Families Party tweet,” Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, the National Director of Move to Amend, who is personally supporting Sanders, told Salon. “I was never able to, I got the text from them and went to Twitter from there, but I couldn’t see the comments.” ......

This wasn't an isolated experience; one enterprising Twitter user even began documenting the cases of people who were unable to reply to the thread, and quickly amassed dozens of screenshots of what was termed "The Left Twitter Blackout." ......

“When I go to my non-political account, for a nonprofit I work for, I can see all of the [replies] — and the difference is that account is not in anyway identified with me, and it never participates in political discussions because [it] explicitly has nothing to do with electoral politics,” Graziano said. Complete article

The Math of the Working Families Party Endorsement 09/17/2019

I was slightly amused and slightly annoyed yesterday when I saw the Working Families Party endorse Elizabeth Warren for president and then subsequently refuse to release vote tallies and clearly lie about why they aren’t releasing them.

The WFP endorsement process works by tallying up party member votes and party leader votes. The member votes are given 50 percent of the vote weight while the leader votes are given the other 50 percent of the vote weight. To win the endorsement, you have to get the majority of the weighted vote.

The WFP revealed that Warren received 60.9 percent of the weighted vote on the first ballot. Naturally one might wonder: how much of this vote came from the members and how much of it came from leaders? Surely WFP should release the member vote tally and the leader vote tally to answer this question.

But when Dave Weigel asked them about this, National Director Maurice Mitchell told him that the WFP will not be releasing separate vote totals, explaining that “for there to be one true vote, and to maintain the nature of secret ballot, all of that went into the back end.”

The claim here, as far as I can tell, is not only that the WFP refuses to release separate vote totals but also that they cannot do so because their secret ballot process makes it impossible to distinguish between member votes and leader votes.

This of course is an obvious lie. They released the membership vote in 2015 when Sanders won 87 percent of it. They also put out a press release this time that said 80 percent of their members listed Warren and Sanders as their top choices for president. So they clearly have separate access to the member tally. It is not lost in the “back end” or obscured to maintain the “secret ballot” or any other bullshit like that. Complete article

Elizabeth Warren secured endorsement from far-left 'Working Families Party' after think tank where her daughter is chairwoman gave it $45,000 09/24/2019

For the first four or five days after their endorsement the only thing many of us could see was the following:

If we went to their web page we could see it at the top pinned for a few days and if we tried to load it the only one that would load was the same one without the comments; however, if we tried to go to the same tweet following someone that had retweeted it or replied to it even the top one wouldn't load. After seeing others say that they could access it if they weren't logged in or used accounts unrelated to politics I tried it and found the same results, although some of the stories I saw varied for one reason or another. Now a week after this was posted, and presumably most people aren't checking on that Tweet anymore, I can finally access it, at least temporarily, while signed in.

Obviously they're not explaining it since they offered their lame excuse for keeping the tally secret, but even if it was public there's no justification for having leadership decide 50% of the weighted vote, especially since Sanders won 87 percent last time and there was no need to keep it secret then. Well guess what? Elizabeth Warrens daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, is Chairman of Demos, a prominent progressive think tank, which apparently donated $45,000 to the Working Families Party, $15,000 to the NJ office and two more payment of the same size to Brooklyn offices. It doesn't take much to figure this out, this money clearly seems to have corrupted the process, but the bigger question might be why they didn't do a better job covering it up.

They're now being flooded with complaints about this a week after the fact, virtually guaranteeing that there reputation as a progressive organization is gone, except for the complacent people getting news from mainstream media.

Edit 09/26/2019: Working Family Chapters in Colorado have dissented, as a result of their refusal to release the voting totals. This endorsement has turned into an disaster; however the mainstream media is almost completely ignoring the scandal with only a handful of articles about it on the internet, and a few low profile statements trying to spin it, but any one that checks the facts can see it wasn't democratic at all!

She was also caught by surprised when asked indirectly if there's was any legitimate concern about Biden's son working for a foriegn company that happens to do business with the government and be involved in epidemic levels of corruption even if they claim he's not involved in it. Senator Elizabeth Warren appears uncharacteristically flustered... way too often, particularly when ethics come in to question like Demos Board Chair Amelia Warren Tyagi and the $45,000 to the WFP in 2018 09/26/2019 FLAG: Senator Elizabeth Warren appears uncharacteristically flustered when asked if her ethics plan would allow her Vice President's son to serve on the board of a foreign company: "No," she said. "I don't know. I mean I’d have to go back and look at the details."

This is class warfare; and the ruling class literally has dozens if not hundreds of "think tanks," allegedly "non-profit organizations" and other political organizations where college educated people study how to manipulate the masses and recruit candidates to compete against each other while refusing to provide any fair coverage for those that represent the Grassroots!

Bernie Sanders is one of the rare exceptions that has been developing a good reputation consistently defending the working class for decades. There are other good grassroots candidates but they only have name recognition at the local level, and in most cases, even then only by a small percentage of the public. Bernie is far better on the vast majority of issues, but some things we're still going to need to push from the grassroots, to give him the support he needs in congress to pass his agenda and to ensure that in the future we don't have to deal with a rigged system by enabling us to hear from all candidates as I went into in Modern "Poll Taxes": Voter ID & Campaign Contributions and More Censored Candidates From The Underground

Many of us predicted months ago that Biden's campaign would fall apart before the primaries began; he may still be patched together for a few comebacks, at least in the media coverage, but there's little or no doubt that he doesn't have a lot of support at the grassroots level. Elizabeth Warren has far more help from the mainstream media creating a fake progressive image but a close look at her shows she's not much more progressive than the vast majority of establishment politicians and like Obama if elected we can expect her to cave over and over again unless under and enormous amount of pressure from people protesting in the street in large numbers. My latest in a series of about a dozen or so articles about her, Is Elizabeth Warren A Wall Street Stealth Candidate? shows how she's been an establishment shill and provides plenty of outside sources, as well as links to my previous articles about her.

The real work is going to have to be done at the grassroots level, which, in the long run, will have to include creating new institutions that are accountable directly to the public. These institutions will avhe to include media outlets, organizations to interview all candidates running for office, not just those supported by Wall Street, and other educational organizations that inform all members of the public about major issues.