Elizabeth Warren – Strategic Culture Foundation

DNC Scrambles to Change Debate Threshold After Gabbard Qualifies

A A — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 13:00:08 +0000

Caitlin JOHNSTONE

On a CNN panel on Monday, host John King spoke with Politico reporter Alex Thompson about the possibility of Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard qualifying on Super Tuesday for the party’s primary debate in Phoenix later this month.

“I will note this, she’s from Hawaii,” King said of Gabbard. “She’s a congresswoman from Hawaii; American Samoa votes on Super Tuesday. The rules as they now stand, if you get a delegate, you’re back in the debates. As of now. Correct?”

“Yeah, they haven’t, I mean, that’s been the rule for every single debate,” Thompson replied. “And the DNC has not released their official guidance for the March 15 debate in Phoenix, but it would be very obvious that they are trying to cancel Tulsi, who they’re scared of a third party run, if they then change the rules to prevent her to rejoin the debate stage.”

And indeed, as the smoke clears from the Super Tuesday frenzy, this is precisely what appears to have transpired.

Watch it til the end.https://t.co/SMU5NhCDUo

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 4, 2020

“The Gabbard campaign said it was informed that it would net two delegates from the caucuses in American Samoa, which will allocate a total of six pledged delegates,” The Hill reports today. “However, a report from CNN said that the candidate will receive only one delegate from the territory on Tuesday evening.”

“Tulsi Gabbard may have just qualified for the next Democratic debate thanks to American Samoa,” reads a fresh Business Insider headline. “Under the most recent rules, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii may have qualified for the next televised debate by snagging a delegate in American Samoa’s primary.”

“If Tulsi Gabbard gets a delegate out of American Samoa, as it appears she has done, she will likely qualify for the next Democratic debate,” tweeted Washington Post’s Dave Weigel. “We don’t have new debate rules yet, but party has been inviting any candidate who gets a delegate.”

Rank-and-file supporters of the Hawaii congresswoman enjoyed a brief celebration on social media, before having their hopes dashed minutes later by an announcement from the DNC’s Communications Director Xochitl Hinojosa that “the threshold will go up”.

“We have two more debates — of course the threshold will go up,” tweeted Hinojosa literally minutes after Gabbard was awarded the delegate. “By the time we have the March debate, almost 2,000 delegates will be allocated. The threshold will reflect where we are in the race, as it always has.”

“DNC wastes no time in announcing they will rig the next debates to exclude Tulsi,” journalist Michael Tracey tweeted in response.

We have two more debates– of course the threshold will go up. By the time we have the March debate, almost 2,000 delegates will be allocated. The threshold will reflect where we are in the race, as it always has.

— Xochitl Hinojosa (@XochitlHinojosa) March 4, 2020

This outcome surprised nobody, least of all Gabbard supporters. The blackout on the Tulsi 2020 campaign has reached such extreme heights this year that you now routinely see pundits saying things like there are no more people of color in the race, or that Elizabeth Warren is the only woman remaining in the primary. They’re not just ignoring her, they’re actually erasing her. They’re weaving a whole alternative reality out of narrative in which she is literally, officially, no longer in the race.

After Gabbard announced her presidential candidacy in January of last year I wrote an article explaining that I was excited about her campaign because she would severely disrupt establishment narratives, and, for the remainder of 2019, that’s exactly what she did. She spoke unauthorized truths about Syria, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, she drew attention to the plight of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and said she’d drop all charges against both men if elected, she destroyed the hawkish, jingoistic positions of fellow candidates on the debate stage and arguably single-handedly destroyed Kamala Harris’ run.

The narrative managers had their hands full with her. The Russia smears were relentless, the fact that she met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was brought up at every possible opportunity in every debate and interview, and she was scoffed at and derided at every turn.

Now, in 2020, none of that is happening. There’s a near-total media blackout on the Gabbard campaign, such that I now routinely encounter rank-and-file liberals on social media who tell me they honestly had no idea she’s still running. She’s been completely redacted out of the narrative matrix.

All candidates of color are out. An openly gay married candidate is out. 2 women left. The rest? 70+ old white men fighting for the future of America in 2020. Because of course.

— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) March 1, 2020

So it’s unsurprising that the DNC felt comfortable striding forward and openly announcing a change in the debate threshold literally the very moment Gabbard crossed it. These people understand narrative control, and they know full well that they have secured enough of it on the Tulsi Problem that they’ll be able to brazenly rig her right off the stage without suffering any meaningful consequences.

The establishment narrative warfare against Gabbard’s campaign dwarfs anything we’ve seen against Sanders, and the loathing and dismissal they’ve been able to generate have severely hamstrung her run. It turns out that a presidential candidate can get away with talking about economic justice and plutocracy when it comes to domestic policy, and some light dissent on matters of foreign policy will be tolerated, but aggressively attacking the heart of the actual bipartisan foreign policy consensus will get you shut down, smeared and shunned like nothing else. This is partly because US presidents have a lot more authority over foreign affairs than domestic, and it’s also because endless war is the glue which holds the empire together.

And now they’re working to install a corrupt, right-wing warmongering dementia patient as the party’s nominee. And from the looks of the numbers I’ve seen from Super Tuesday so far, it looks entirely likely that those manipulations will prove successful.

All this means is that the machine is exposing its mechanics to the view of the mainstream public. Both the Gabbard campaign and the Sanders campaign have been useful primarily in this way; not because the establishment would ever let them actually become president, but because they force the unelected manipulators who really run things in the most powerful government on earth to show the public their box of dirty tricks.

medium.com

The Democrats’ Narrative Of Gloom Won’t Fly In 2020

A A — Sat, 29 Feb 2020 19:00:14 +0000

Telling people their lives suck is no way to win an election. As James Carville says, they’re losing their damn minds.

Peter VAN BUREN

The chaos of the primaries, the lack of a clear party vision in the last debate—are Democrats a progressive party, a party of moderates, a plaything for billionaires, or just people sniping each other for virtue points? It is time for concern.

Politics is always about the biggest story you tell and how voters see themselves in that story. If the Democrats lose in November, one of the main reasons—and the competition is strong—will be that they’ve gotten trapped inside a set of false narratives. Or they’re, in the words of James Carville, “Losing our damn minds.”

Think how powerful the narratives of “Morning in America” and “Hope and Change” were, and contrast those with the Dems’ “things suck more than you realize, people,” and you see where this is headed.

At the top of the list is the economy. The Democratic narrative is that the economy is bad, with a recession just around the corner (or maybe the corner after that, keep looking). Yet outside the debate hall, 59 percent of Americans say they are better off than they were a year ago. Overall quality of life is satisfactory for a massive 84 percent. Unemployment is at historic lows. Wages are up a bit.

The reality is bad enough for Dems. But the narrative problem is that they’re confusing a strong economy with economic inequality. The economy does benefit everyone, but it benefits a small percentage at the top much more. They have not gotten this message across to an electorate that is happy to have any job, content with some rise in wages, and, for the half of Americans who own some stock, want to see just enough growth in their 401(k) to suggest at least part of retirement won’t be dependent on canned soup being on sale. The Dems are running on a narrative that the economy is failing; Americans believe that if it is failing, it’s failing less than it did before, and that’s good enough.

Holding Democrats back is their false narrative of all-you-can-eat white privilege. Economic inequality across America is not primarily racial, though it does have a racial component. But Dems are still telling the same old story, as if whites across the Midwest have the same union factory jobs that raised them and blacks never did. The powerful message of “we’re all in this together” is being thrown away for black victimization narrative votes that may or may not turn out on Election Day.

Dems also insist on lumping blacks, Hispanics (30 percent of whom support Trump), Chinese, and everyone non-lily into “People of Color,” a classic case of one size fits none. It would be an award-winning SNL skit to watch Larry David’s Bernie try to convince a Chinese friend, a medical doctor with kids in the Ivies, that as a “POC,” his personal concerns have significant crossover with what’s happening to a guy uptown as played by guest host Samuel L. Jackson. It’s about money, stupid, not color.

Dems seem to be working this narrative into the ground in an effort to alienate as many voters as possible. Poor whites, too meth-addled to see Trump making false promises, deserve to be replaced by driverless delivery trucks. Poor blacks, it’s not your fault, because racism. Everyone else not white, whatever, go with the black folk on this one, ‘kay? An issue that could unite 90 percent of Americans gets lost. And if you don’t agree racism is the root cause of everything, from “top to bottom,” as Bernie says, well, you’re a racist! James Carville says for the Democratic Party to win it has to drive a narrative that “doesn’t give off vapors that we’re smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant.” Instead the strategy seems to be Dems turning from criticizing ideas to criticizing voters.

Much of the rest is a mighty credibility issue for the Dems. They have stuck with so many proven false narratives so long, no one believes them anymore. Trump did not work with Putin to get elected, yet Maddow on MSDNC is still pushing something similar even today. Do we really need to talk about how few Americans cared so little about impeachment? Trump did not start World War III. Roe v. Wade is still firmly the law.

But the transpeople! Dems have clung to the narrative that trans rights are somehow a major issue among voters. Biden tweeted, “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.” While most voters want to see transpeople treated decently, there is no national election issue here. Same for all the other virtuous baggage Dems drag around the social media. For example, rights and benefits for illegal immigrants. It makes them seem out of touch with mainstream America, a particular liability in an election likely to hinge on purple voters in swing states.

Dems also cling too hard to the narrative of Barack Obama. Maybe he deserves accolades for this or that, maybe not, but that the guy who seems to be the talk of the Democratic Party isn’t one of the people on the ballot does not indicate strength. Barack’s and Michelle’s formal portraits are touring the nation, apparently so Democrats can worship them like artifacts from some lost cargo cult, a “communal experience of a particular moment in time,” according to the National Portrait Gallery. Five equally desperate candidates, with Biden in the lead Art Garfunkel role, are airing ads featuring St. Barack.

Health care is a kitchen-table economic issue. A majority of Americans, regardless of party affiliation, rank cutting health care and drug costs as their top priority. That polls as far more important than passing a major health system overhaul like Medicare for All. Americans are not interested in converting the entire economy over to some flavor of socialism just so they can see a doctor. The bigger the change the Dems sell, the more it frightens people away.

Same for all the other free stuff Dems are using to troll for votes (college, loans, reparations). Each good idea is wrapped in a grad school seminar paper requiring America to convert its economy from something people have grown to live with into something they aren’t sure they understand. It is a hell of a narrative: Democrats turning an election against Trump into a sub-referendum on socialism lite at a time when Americans’ personal economic satisfaction is at a record high.

James Carville summed it up, saying, “We have candidates talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments—talking about that is not how you win a national election…. By framing, repeating, and delivering a coherent, meaningful message that is relevant to people’s lives and having the political skill not to be sucked into every rabbit hole that somebody puts in front of you.”

Where once you had hope and change, now there’s the always exasperated Warren, the out-of-breath grumpy Bernie, that frozen Pete grin, Steyer giving his TED talks, Biden looking like the last surviving member of a rock band playing a Holiday Inn gig remembering when he and Barack once filled arenas, man. And now, Mike Bloomberg, cosplaying a Democrat. Oh well. The Beto revival of 2024 isn’t that far away.

If I were writing ad copy for the Republicans, I might try this: “Voters, do me a favor. Look out the window. Do you see a republic on the edge of collapse, Rome, the U.S. in 1860? Is your life controlled by an authoritarian? That’s what Democrats say is out there. But you don’t see that, do you? You see more people with jobs. You have a little more. And more kids down the block are home from war than are gearing up to fight in places like Libya and Syria that none of us really care about. Your choice is pretty straightforward at this point. Have a good night, and a good day at work tomorrow.”

theamericanconservative.com

Nevada Caucus-Goers Crown Bernie Sanders, Bury Bloomberg and Warren

A A — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 15:01:59 +0000

The ninth Democratic nationally televised debate between presidential candidates on Wednesday, February 19 proved to be a crucial one; Dramatic confrontations and melt-downs during it could be clearly seen to impact on the outcome of the Nevada state caucuses, which took place only three days later.

Nevada confirmed the main trends that had emerged in New Hampshire and Iowa, Senator Bernie Sanders, championing ideas so radical that President Franklin Roosevelt supported them 80 years ago, came first with an impressive 40.5 percent.

Second came former Vice President Joe Biden, with 18.9 percent, still the best bet for a “stop Sanders” coalition and third, losing ground where he had hoped to gain it but still in the race South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg with 17.3 percent .

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the other candidate along with Buttigieg most beloved by the Deep State and the Mainstream Media (MSM), was down at a miserable 11.5 percent, a crushing 29 points behind Sanders, whose Progressive voters she had tried so hard to woo away from him.

The debate was a triumph for Sanders. Neither his advanced age of 78, his supposedly outrageous left wing radical views and policies nor even a significant heart attack a few weeks ago have dented his momentum and popularity.

As analyst Jeremy Stahl wrote in Vox on February 24, “the reality is that Bernie Sanders is opening up a sizable polling lead nationally and in many key states, and is building a steady delegate lead, which could soon become insurmountable.”

The Nevada results also confirmed that Wednesday’s debate was a death knell for the hopes of former New York Mayor and multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

If he can’t fight and claw back even against Elizabeth Warren, what chance will he have in a debate with Donald Trump? This elementary calculation is now indelibly burned into the minds of 15 million potential Democratic voters who watched the Las Vegas debate.

The Nevada caucuses also confirmed no last minute miracle breakthrough for hapless Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. She remains the Darling of the East Coast ancient, men-hating Femi-Nazis, who were predictably reduced to childish and hilarious claims that American voters were afraid of “a strong woman.” Warren’s problem, however, is that voters – men and women alike – aren’t afraid of her at all. They just don’t like her.

At 11 percent in Nevada, Warren is clearly on the way down. Now she faces the Southern states on Super Tuesday where even Democrats historically don’t like Massachusetts liberals. And she is only four points ahead of Senator Amy Klobuchar, still in single digits at seven percent in Nevada, but the longer she lasts, the more attractive she looks as a veteran and moderate lady senator from the Midwest to balance Sanders on the presidential ticket.

Most of all, the Nevada results cruelly confirmed that Michael Bloomberg has no momentum at all: Nevada caucus goers were completely unimpressed by his endless soulless, passionless television advertisements falling faster than snow in a blizzard. He made zero impact on them in his first and most important nationally televised debate

As I have already elsewhere noted, Bloomberg reigned as a philosopher-king through his 12 years as Mayor of New York City. But the down and dirty, red in tooth and claw, scratch and draw blood, debates of presidential candidates are another game entirely. And at age 78, Bloomberg is just too old to learn it.

Bloomberg has also learned – far too late – that the truly impressive skills needed to make a personal fortune of $65 billion are entirely different from the skills needed to win a major presidential nomination, especially when the rank and file of that party hates billionaires.

Caveats have obviously to be added: Sanders tsunami-wave sweep to the Democratic presidential nomination will not be confirmed until he wins equally big across the 15 states going to the polls on Super-Tuesday, March 3.

However, already, Sanders’ dominance in the race has been confirmed in the vastly different worlds of the prosperous agricultural Midwest (Iowa caucuses), the post-industrial, depressed Northeast (New Hampshire primary) and the high tech economy of the Desert West (Nevada caucuses).

In fact, Bloomberg would never have had a chance against Trump. The master of wit and invective in the White House would have chewed him up and spat him out, day after day in the fall campaign.

Instead, it is Sanders who is now the unstoppable figure. All those mythical moderates and independents supposedly out to stop him at all costs will either stay at home or actually vote for the Vermont radical as still intellectually and socially more respectable than Trump. Sanders, indeed, appears fated to be Trump’s true nemesis: The first political champion in five years who can slay the dragon of Anti-Good Taste in the White House.

If you think US domestic politics have been a wild ride over the past five years, then, in the words of Al Jolson, the most popular (and most tasteless) American entertainer of the first half of the 20^th century, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

New Hampshire Buries Biden and Warren, Prepare for the Rise of Little Pete

A A — Sun, 16 Feb 2020 12:37:44 +0000

Not all the highly suspicious and flagrant bungling and/or manipulation of the Iowa caucuses – which should be the simplest and smallest of all democratic election procedures to count honestly and efficiently in real time – could save Senator Elizabeth Warren and her dreams of power.

A quarter of a million voters in the little Granite State of New Hampshire put the last nails in her political coffin.

After a year of empty speculation in the U.S. Mainstream Media (MSM) fawningly built up the hollow and fraudulent Warren – she fulfilled her political fate as a badly built giant airship, full of nothing but gas that crashed and burned on her first real test flight, just like her socialist predecessor, Britain’s bizarre R101 more than 90 years ago.

After her rejection by the caucuses of Iowa- who similarly threw out Hillary Clinton in both 2008 and 2016, performing signal services for world peace and survival – Warren knew she had to do better in New Hampshire. But she could not even make the top three candidates among Democratic voters alone and she also failed to break the 15 percent barrier.

Democrats in New Hampshire were even more stunning in their humiliation of veteran national candidate Vice President Joe Biden who led the preferences of national Democratic voters for so long.

Biden’s campaign is plummeting out of control. His vaunted loyal support, among older, white working class and rural Democrats and among Hispanic and African American voters must now kick in across the U.S. South on March 3 – Super Tuesday – or he’s toast.

Biden could yet prove a “Comeback Kid”. Registered Democrats across Heartland America and the great Hispanic and African American communities have so far have shown no enthusiasm at all even for Senator Bernie Sanders – who has won the hearts and minds of students and potential young voters, or of the other two now clear frontrunners, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

The heiresses of Hillary Clinton and other feminist extremists across the United States – the same people who actually believe Russia stole the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump – are truly grieving for Elizabeth Warren.

The Washington Post on the very day of the New Hampshire primary ran a long piece in its Style section lamenting that voters’ rejection of Warren was a judgment on the bigotry of gender-bigoted Americans who were not a ready for a Strong Woman at their head.

As is now usual for the Post, its lies are not only absurd but also incompetent: It was not mainstream American voters who rejected Warren: It was her own liberal Democrats in New Hampshire.

Far from being gender bigoted, those same voters preferred in their top three, an openly gay young mayor (Pete Buttigieg) and another woman (Amy Klobuchar) as well as an elderly Jewish Socialist originally from the borough of Brooklyn in New York City (Bernie Sanders). Not much if any racism or gender hatred there.

However no tears will be shed yet in Langley. Wall Street and the U.S. Deep State would clearly prefer not to have Bernie Sanders as the next president of the United States. But so far their efforts to demonize him have failed entirely.

On the other hand, Buttigieg, suddenly the hot commodity to “stop Sanders” has been packaged as the new “moderate” and “bright fresh face.” He came out strong from both Iowa and New Hampshire. And the dynamics of primary politics and favor him.

Taken separately, Iowa and New Hampshire are both extremely low population states and the Iowa caucuses are a bizarre though sweet ceremonial procedure that began before even railroads or electric wire telegraphs had fully come to the Midwest back in the 1840s. The Iowa caucuses are democratic politics as they were conceived in the era of horses and buggies, slaves and serfdom.

However, Iowa and New Hampshire are so different from each other and so far apart that to do strongly in both of them, as Sanders did in 2016 and this year, as Barack Obama did in 2008 and as Donald Trump did in 2016 shows a candidate has the broad appeal to give him or her national credibility.

This year, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Sanders all passed that test in both contests with flying colors. But Warren and Biden both dismally failed to do so.

I regard Buttigieg as an entirely empty figure, another of T S Eliot’s Hollow Men – a Straw Dog. The most chilling thing about him is that despite his utter lack of experience, achievement and substance on every issue, literally scores of senior CIA, NSA and other Deep State officials have enthusiastically endorsed him, as the Grayzone has documented.

The question is Why?

The answer is obvious:

Lovable little Pete Buttigieg is not only a Manchurian Candidate: He is Langley’s Manchurian Candidate.

Buttigieg is far from being an unprecedented phenomenon: Repeatedly, the U.S. establishment tolerates or actively advances a young, inexperienced, supposedly squeaky clean candidate to launch a new era of Instant Happiness and Virtue.

The disgusting little hypocrite Jimmy Carter – who unleashed both the Iraqi attack on Iran and supported the Mujahedeen to start more than 40 years of war in Afghanistan – won the presidency that way in 1976.

Barack Obama rode the popular wave of a similar appeal in 2016.

Having a first woman president is now passé. In fact Klobuchar could certainly do the job credibly, but the ludicrous fiascoes of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren have tarnished her.

Buttigieg offers yet another childish, meaningless “glass ceiling” to be broken in the way so beloved of infantile romantic-liberal Americans. He would be the first gay president! A new Rainbow Coalition! A new way to display imagined U.S. moral superiority over the rest of the world!

Watch for the rise of the pampered little Buttigieg as the brave boy knight in shining armor ventures forth to slay the foolish old raving socialist dragon Bernie Sanders.

It is a ludicrous narrative. It is packed with lies. But it is going to be stuffed down our throats in the months ahead.

Media Skewers ‘Sexist’ Sanders for Refusing to Bend the Knee

A A — Sun, 19 Jan 2020 15:30:00 +0000

By desperately wielding the sword of victimhood, Elizabeth Warren insults, not empowers her sex.

Barbara BOLAND

The media cannot forgive Bernie Sanders for refusing to “bend the knee” to Elizabeth Warren regarding her recounting of a now infamous December 2018 meeting between the two, in which the Vermont senator allegedly said a woman could not be elected president.

Furthermore, if you don’t agree with Sen. Warren’s version of events, or if you mention her history of “embellishing,” you are a sexist and a misogynist just like Sanders. So fall in line with the establishment narrative, quick.

That is the clear takeaway after the media took off its fig leaf of journalistic impartiality at the seventh Democrat presidential debate in Iowa Tuesday.

Never mind that women make up about 70 percent of Sanders’ campaign leadership team, or that young women actually make up a bigger share of Sanders’s base than young men do.

During the debate, CNN moderator Abby Phillips had this exchange:

Phillips: You’re saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman couldn’t win the election?

Bernie: Correct.

Phillips: Senator Warren, what did you think when Sanders said a woman couldn’t win the election?

Warren: I disagreed. Bernie is my friend, and I am not here to try to fight with Bernie.

This is “when did you stop beating your wife” level debate questioning from CNN. The question is premised around an anonymously-sourced story CNN reported Monday describing a meeting between Sanders and Warren in December 2018, where the two agreed to a non-aggression pact of sorts. For the sake of the progressive movement, they reportedly agreed they would not attack each other during the campaign:

They also discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters. Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.

In a statement to CNN, Sanders said before the debate that’s not what happened at all.

“It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn’t win,” said Sanders, chalking up the story to “staff who weren’t in the room … lying about what happened.”

“I thought a woman could win; he disagreed,” said Warren in a statement.

Cue CNN’s gladiatorial presidential debates.

Eager to strike all the right girl-power notes for the night, Phillips followed up by asking Sen. Amy Klobuchar the substantive policy question, “what do you say to people who say that a woman can’t win this election?” and Warren earned cheers for a line about women successfully winning elections.

“Look at the men on this stage,” Warren said. “Collectively, they have lost 10 elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women: Amy (Klobuchar) and me.”

After the debate, media commentators roundly declared Warren the winner, and pundits attacked the very idea of questioning the veracity of Warren’s account.

Here’s CNN, just after the debate:

Chris Cillizza, CNN politics reporter: Sanders, look, a lot of it is personal preference. I didn’t think his answer vis-a-vis Elizabeth Warren and what was said in that conversation was particularly good. He was largely dismissive. “Well, I didn’t say it. Everyone knows I didn’t say it, we don’t need to talk about it.”

Jess McIntosh, CNN political commentator: And I think what Bernie forgot was that this isn’t a he-said-she-said story. This is a reported-out story that CNN was part of breaking. So to have him just flat out say “no,” I think, wasn’t nearly enough to address that for the women watching.

Joe Lockhart, CNN political commentator: And I can’t imagine any woman watching last night and saying, I believe Bernie. I think people believe Elizabeth.

Van Jones, CNN political commentator: This was Elizabeth Warren’s night. She needed to do something and there was a banana peel sitting out there for Bernie to step on when it came to his comments about women. I think Bernie stepped on it and slid around. She knocked that moment out of the park.

But isn’t this story the literal definition of a he-said, she-said story?

The accusation may have appeared in a “reported-out story,” but these are its sources:

“The description of that meeting [between Sanders and Warren in December 2018] is based on the accounts of four people: two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two people familiar with the meeting.”

Is it sexist to question why this story would come out on the eve of the debate—after months of the two candidates getting along as they had promised to do, when Sanders pulls ahead of Warren in polling?

If CNN were impartial, they would have mentioned the sourcing and timing of the story, and Warren’s fraught history with the truth. Warren has shown she is willing to tell lies in order to get a job she wants, like when she claimed to have Native American blood. She has also claimed she go fired from her teaching job for being pregnant, even when records contradict that. She’s said her children went to public schools, not private ones, even though that’s not true either.

In addition to Warren’s tenuous relationship with the truth, there also happens to be video from the 1980s where Sanders says a woman could be president:

1988,@BernieSanders, backing Jackson:”The real issue is not whether you’re black or white, whether you’re a woman or a man *in my view, a woman could be elected POTUS* The real issue is are you on the side of workers & poor ppl, or are you on the side of big money &corporations?”

1988,@BernieSanders, backing Jackson:”The real issue is not whether you’re black or white, whether you’re a woman or a man *in my view, a woman could be elected POTUS* The real issue is are you on the side of workers & poor ppl, or are you on the side of big money &corporations?” pic.twitter.com/VHmfzvyJdy

— Every nimble plane is a policy failure. (@KindAndUnblind) 13 января 2020 г.

Yet, you wouldn’t know any of that, listening to the coverage of the debate, where commentators waxed poetic about Warren’s “win” and how any attacks on her predilection for lying were misogyny itself.

Over on Sirius XM POTUS channel Tuesday, an executive producer on Chris Cuomo’s show (Chris Cillizza filling in) said that the suggestion from Sanders surrogates that Warren’s staff knows she is prone to “embellish” things is “a misogynistic thing to put out there … like, ‘oh well, look at the quaint housewife, she is prone to embellishment.’”

The New York Times also embraced the questionable sexism premise, writing that in“a conflict heavily focused on which candidate is telling the truth, Ms. Warren faces a real risk: Several studies have shown that voters punish women more harshly than men for real or perceived dishonesty… If voters conclude that Ms. Warren is lying, it is most likely to hurt her more than it will hurt Mr. Sanders if voters conclude that he is lying.”

Over at Vox:

The over-the-top language — likening criticism of an opponent to a knife in the back— was familiar. When powerful men have been accused of sexual misconduct in recent years, they and others have often complained that they’ve been “killed” or that their “lives are over” … The situation between Warren and Sanders is very different from those that have arisen as part of the Me Too movement. But the exaggerated language around a woman’s decision to speak out is strikingly similar.

This sort of language is an insult to all women who have had to deal with sexism and misogyny, both in the workplace and in society, and this need to glom on to any aggrieved group, no matter how ill-fitting, is getting really stale.

Meanwhile, former Hillary Clinton and Obama Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri tweeted, “I just rewatched the footage from last night and found it odd that Sanders never says ‘a woman could beat Trump.’ His formulation is he believes a ‘woman could be president.’ It’s only when he speaks about his own abilities that he talks about what it takes to ‘beat Trump.’”

This is the old sexist standby: “I’d vote for a woman, just not that woman.”

What is it that these people want, for Sanders to endorse his opponent, simply because she is female? Isn’t that the very definition of sexism? By virtue of the fact that Sanders is still in this race, he obviously thinks he can do a better job as president than Warren. There isn’t going to be another presidential race against Trump, but Palmieri still essentially wants Sanders to say, in a five-way race three weeks before the Iowa caucus, “Warren can beat Trump in November.”

The question here should be whether this is a person that we can trust, not whether the candidate is male or female. Does this person have a history of being honest, or do they have a history of lying?

No wonder Sanders was complaining about liberals’ obsession with identity politics. As an elderly, Jewish socialist, he might be an endangered species, but he’s one minority group that intersectional politics has no use for.

theamericanconservative.com

U.S. Deep State Loves Elizabeth Warren: U.S. Voters – Don’t!

A A — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 12:00:50 +0000

The U.S. Deep State loves Senator Elizabeth Warren: It’s a pity the American public, even the Democratic base doesn’t agree with them:

Warren has been implausibly sold by the U.S. Mainstream Media, more out of touch with their own public than the Bourbons were before the French Revolution, as the next “principled” leader of the Social Democratic Soft Left and the figure to unite her party and sweep President Donald Trump from power.

Warren was formally crowned as the President Apparent as the subject of an adoring and uncritical cover story in Time magazine on May 20, 2019.

Time’s editors, however, remained blissfully unaware that they now enjoy far less political clout than Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment which played a major role in propelling Trump into the White House.

All the senile, eighty-something Feminists who gushed – weak at the knees – for the ludicrous, incompetent and foul-tempered Hillary Clinton in 2016 of course stampeded after Warren as eagerly as the Gadarene Swine.

However, Warren – to put it mildly – is not a likeable candidate. She has shown zero appeal to America’s massive African-American and Hispanic American communities – together a combined 80 million people, or around 25 percent of the total national population.

Hillary Clinton learned the hard way that without an overwhelming turnout in those two communities, no Democratic candidate, especially not a white woman from the East Coast claiming (though falsely) to be a radical leftist has the slightest hope of winning a U.S. national election.

Now, after six nationally televised presidential debates through 2019 that were supposed to be Warren’s greatest strength, she has even failed where she was supposed to be strong. She no longer polls among the top three Democratic candidates nationally and her crucial fund-raising is collapsing less than two months before the first two bell-weather contests in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in February.

The importance of this development cannot be overstated: Hillary Clinton displayed extraordinarily genius at losing national campaigns she entered with record funding and enormous poll leads in 2008 and 2016. These negative “achievements” carved her named in eternal tungsten as the most incompetent major national candidate in 230 years of U.S. political history.

Today, the cold numbers are already lining up to sink Warren’s dreams of plodding to glory with her usual ice cold ambition and overall mediocrity.

In the last three month quarter of 2019 (October through December), Warren acknowledged in an ill-judged admission to her supporters that her fundraising had dropped to $17 million, a fall of more than 30 percent from the $24 million she had managed in the third quarter of the year (months July through September).

By contract, in the fourth quarter of the year, unsinkable old Senator Bernie Sanders his appeal dinted not at all by his age (78) and recent heart trouble raised a whopping $34.7 million.

Pete Buttigieg, young mayor of the town of South Bend, Indiana (population only 102,000) raised $24.7 million. Former Vice President Joe Biden still raised $22.7 million and would certainly be the second choice for most of Buttigieg’s Heartland moderate Democrats.

Warren could not even hold a secure fourth place position with her shaky $17 million unofficial figure for the fourth quarter. Businessman Andrew Yang has waged a far more robust and credible campaign than anyone predicted, raised $16.5 million.

These figures spell impending political doom for Warren. Current polls show Buttigieg in particular surging in Iowa and Sanders looking to flatten her as an alternate left-progressive challenger in New Hampshire.

Warren simply lacks the personality and the experience, let alone the credibility to be a come-from-behind Comeback Kid candidate. She rose professionally first by falsely claiming significant Native American ancestry – a lie since devastatingly exposed and repeatedly condemned by Native American leaders, especially of the Cherokee Nation whose laws of citizenship she could not understand even this year.

Warren has been a Harvard professor – a clear mark these days of intellectual mediocrity as much as class arrogance. And she is from the state of Massachusetts – the graveyard of presidential hopefuls.

The only two U.S. presidents to win election from Massachusetts in the past 190 years were John F. Kennedy in 1960 and George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988.

But Kennedy was one of the most attractive and charismatic candidates of all time and even he only managed to win by one of the narrowest margins in history and because voting figures were palpably faked in the city of Chicago (Cook County, Illinois) and the state of Texas, stronghold of his vice president, Lyndon Johnson.

Also, Warren has all the warmth and compassion of the frightful Nurse Ratched character in the 1975 movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to who she looks eerily similar.

In 1988, Bush won with a devastating landslide over Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, but Bush won on a once-again booming economy, on the coat-tails of his adored predecessor Ronald Reagan and because in every way that mattered, he was really a son of giant Heartland Texas rather than of marginal Massachusetts.

In 2012, Mitt Romney showed that Republicans from Massachusetts made as useless national candidates as Democrats did – a lesson the Democrats had further rubbed home to them in John Kerry’s fiasco of a campaign in 2004.

Two people are likely to be most disappointed by Warren’s remarkable fold and collapse before the first votes are even counted.

The first obviously is Elizabeth Warren: Like all incompetent and unlikeable mediocre people she is sublimely oblivious to how untalented and unlikeable she truly is.

And the second of course is President Trump: Where-else can he find a Democratic candidate almost as clueless as Hillary Herself?

Is Mayor Pete the billionaires’ choice for Democratic nominee?

A A — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 11:52:32 +0000

Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Pete Buttigieg brought a heated exchange to the debate stage Thursday night on the topic of campaign financing. Warren brought up Buttigieg’s recent close-door fundraiser, which she described as “a wine cave full of crystals” that served $900 bottles of wine. In response, Buttigieg said he was the only one of the seven candidates on the stage who was not a millionaire or billionaire. Heather McGhee, distinguished fellow and former president of Demos, says the key difference between the two candidates’ approaches is that Warren’s commitment to fighting inequality has always been clear, while Buttigieg “is more of a cipher” and a moderate candidate billionaires think “maybe we can influence.” Warren continues to advocate for changing campaign rules and breaking up big corporations, whereas Buttigieg is still having “closed-door fundraisers, still raising from billionaires” and “being softer on economic inequality,” McGhee notes.

Elizabeth Warren Endorses Trump’s Economic War on Venezuela, Soft-Pedals Far-Right Bolivia Coup

A A — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 15:19:59 +0000

Ben NORTON

For the millions of Venezuelans suffering under a suffocating U.S. blockade, there is no functional difference between Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren. In fact, the liberal Democratic presidential candidate has enthusiastically endorsed the far-right president’s strategy of relentless warfare against Venezuela and its nearly 30 million inhabitants.

After praising the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, which violate international law and have led to the preventable deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, Warren went on to whitewash the far-right military coup in Bolivia, where the Trump administration has helped put racist Christian extremists and actual fascists in power.

Warren’s eagerness for economic war on Caracas earned her the recognition of right-wing news websites like The Federalist, which gleefully emphasized that “Elizabeth Warren Agrees With Trump’s Strategy In Venezuela.”

The Massachusetts senator wanted to show off her foreign policy bona fides in a softball interview with a former Barack Obama administration apparatchik on the podcast “Pod Save America,” which is known for its centrist politics and close links to Hillary Clinton.

Warren praised Trump’s strategy of appointing the deflated Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó as president and declared, “I support economic sanctions.” She also described the country’s democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro as a “dictator.”

In the interview, the Democratic presidential candidate agreed wholeheartedly with her host Tommy Vietor, who previously served as a spokesperson for President Barack Obama and the U.S. National Security Council.

Both spread lie after lie about Venezuela, based on hyperbolic corporate media myths.

Although the interview was conducted back in February, video clips have recently resurfaced and gone viral on social media.

Elizabeth Warren supports Juan Guaido. Supports sanctions of Venezuela. Says Maduro is starving his people even though she acknowledges that the US has economic sanctions and that she supports those sanctions.

She’s horrible and a threat to Latin America. pic.twitter.com/2FTH2yufXV

— (@AlytaDeLeon) 18 ноября 2019 г.

Supports Economic Sanctions

Tommy Vietor, an implacable critic of Trump and a prominent symbol of the liberal self-declared “Resistance,” kicked off the interview segment singing the praises of the far-right president’s strategy of economically and diplomatically strangling Venezuela.

“The Trump administration has recognized the National Assembly president Juan Guaidó as the president, and encouraged a bunch of other countries to follow suit, in frankly what was a pretty impressive diplomatic play by them,” Vietor applauded — failing to mention that more than 80 percent of Venezuelans had never heard of Guaidó at the time Washington anointed him as the unelected head of state.

“Mm hmm,” Warren uttered in agreement, echoing Vietor’s endorsement of the Trump administration for attempting to install Guaidó through a coup.

Trump “also sanctioned Venezuela’s oil industry, which is a major step to cut off all their supply of dollars and their ability to have an economy,” Vietor continued.

Warren chimed in: “Start with the fact that Maduro is obviously a dictator; he’s terrible; he’s stolen this election; it’s a nightmare for the people of Venezuela.”

The Democratic presidential candidate, who portrays herself as a progressive, proceeded to endorse all of the major planks of the Trump administration’s hybrid war against Venezuela.

“This notion of using our diplomatic tools, I’m all for it,” she continued. “I think recognition [of Guaidó], I think getting our allies to do it; it’s a way to bring diplomatic pressure.”

“Economic sanctions? Yeah, I support economic sanctions,” Warren added. “But we have to offer humanitarian help at the same time.”

“We should be leading the international community to get help to those people,” she said of Venezuelan migrants. “That puts more pressure on Maduro,” Warren boasted.

The Democratic presidential candidate made it clear that she would continue the hybrid war on Venezuela, which has caused large numbers of Venezuelans to leave the country, while also incentivizing Venezuelans to leave the country with promises of aid on the other side of the border. In other words, Warren pledged to exacerbate Venezuela’s migration crisis, which is already at epidemic levels thanks to crushing U.S. sanctions.

A study published in April by economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot at the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, which are illegal under international law, caused at least 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018.

“The sanctions are depriving Venezuelans of lifesaving medicines, medical equipment, food, and other essential imports,” said Weisbrot.

Warren has promised to continue lethal sanctions, fueling more migration from Venezuela, but simultaneously boosting aid — just like liberal war hawks who supported the international proxy war on Syria, which created millions of refugees, while pledging to help those displaced people.

The only Trump tactic Warren disapproved of was his “saber-rattling,” referencing his belligerent tone. Instead of threatening direct military intervention, Warren argued, the United States should continue polices of hybrid and economic warfare to destabilize Venezuela’s leftist government.

And Washington should continue this hybrid warfare while “working with our allies,” she stressed, in a way “that increases the pressure on Maduro.”

While demonizing Venezuelan President Maduro, who was first elected in 2013 and then re-elected in 2018, host Tommy Vietor and Elizabeth Warren went on to praise German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is from a center-right religious party.

Reiterates Her Neoconservative Policies Against Venezuela

Elizabeth Warren repeated her support for regime change in Venezuela in an interview in September with the Council on Foreign Relations, a central gear in the machinery of the military-industrial complex.

“Maduro is a dictator and a crook who has wrecked his country’s economy, dismantled its democratic institutions, and profited while his people suffer,” Warren declared.

She referred to Maduro’s elected government as a “regime” and called for “supporting regional efforts to negotiate a political transition.”

Echoing the rhetoric of neoconservatives in Washington, Warren called for “contain[ing]” the supposedly “damaging and destabilizing actions” of China, Russia, and Cuba.

The only point where Warren diverged with Trump was on her insistence that “there is no U.S. military option in Venezuela.”

We asked @ewarren 12 questions about her foreign policy views. Read her answers on China’s treatment of the Uighurs, trade, Venezuela, and more https://t.co/zwqaKGGIXN

— Council on Foreign Relations (@CFR_org) 10 ноября 2019 г.

Soft-Pedals Far-Right Coup in Bolivia

While Warren endorsed Trump’s hybrid war on Venezuela, she more recently whitewashed the U.S.-backed coup in Bolivia.

On Nov. 10, the U.S. government backed a far-right military coup against Bolivia’s democratically elected President Evo Morales, a leftist from the popular Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party and the first Indigenous head of state in a country where nearly two-thirds of the population is Native.

Warren refused to comment on the putsch for more than a week, even as the far-right military junta massacred dozens of protesters and systematically purged and detained elected left-wing politicians from MAS.

Finally, eight days after the coup, Warren broke her silence. In a short tweet, the putative progressive presidential candidate tepidly requested “free and fair elections” and calling on the “interim leadership” to prepare an “early, legitimate election.”

The Bolivian people deserve free and fair elections, as soon as possible. Bolivia’s interim leadership must limit itself to preparing for an early, legitimate election. Bolivia’s security forces must protect demonstrators, not commit violence against them. https://t.co/oDiiGmzEzq

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) 18 ноября 2019 г.

What Warren did not mention is that this “interim leadership” she helped legitimize is headed by an extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalist, the unelected “interim president” Jeanine Añez.

Añez has referred to Bolivia’s majority-Indigenous population as “satanic” and immediately moved to try to overturn the country’s progressive constitution, which had established an inclusive, secular, plurinational state after receiving an overwhelming democratic mandate in a 2009 referendum.

Añez’s ally in this coup regime’s interim leadership is Luis Fernando Camacho, a multi-millionaire who emerged out of neo-fascist groups and courted support from the United States and the far-right governments of Brazil and Colombia.

By granting legitimacy to Bolilvia’s ultra-conservative, unelected leadership, Warren rubber-stamped the far-right coup and the military junta’s attempt to stamp out Bolivia’s progressive democracy.

In other words, as The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal put it, Liz’s Big Structural Bailey compliantly rolled over for Big IMF Structural Adjustment Program.

consortiumnews.com

Ugly Airship Doomed to Crash: The Presidential Campaign of Elizabeth Warren

A A — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 09:55:47 +0000

Strange Things are happening once again in the ruling circles of the Democratic Party of the United States: The party’s Wise Women (and a couple of Token Men) have decided that Senator Elizabeth Warren, a longtime Republican who supported Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders in 2016, will be the next president of the United States.

The US Deep State would be delighted to have Warren and she has already been Blessed and Sanctified by them through the Secular Confirmation of being featured with a fawning cover story profile in “Time” magazine.

However, Warren eerily resembles an ugly, obsolete state-built and miserably designed British airship from 90 years ago: The R101.

The R101 was built to demonstrate the superiority of State Socialism in Britain. It looked ugly. It had enormous gas bags. It flew like the deadweight white elephant it was and it had pathetically underpowered and badly designed engines. All the Progressive Good and Great of Britain’s Labour Party government of the day came on board to celebrate the maiden flight all the way to India.

But the R101 couldn’t even get from London to Paris: It crashed into a low hill in France killing 48 people on board.

Like the R101, Warren and her campaign are badly designed and expend enormous amounts of hot air. Warren presents an ugly personality (insofar as she has one at all) and is utterly inept.

By any normal standards, Warren’s chief rival, former Vice President Joe Biden should ruffle no feathers. His son made $600,000 a year sitting on a business board in Ukraine while Biden was vice president but of course there is not a hint of disapproval or suggestion of corruption, of scandal or fraud about this in America’s fatuous Mainstream Media.

Normally, such behavior would be seen as reassuring by the Deep State since it would suggest Biden was as corrupt and tractable as all their other puppets and equally prepared to Play the Game.

Nevertheless, Biden – to his great credit – is anathema to the Deep State. At the very beginning of the Obama administration, he was the only senior official who urged the neophyte young new president Barack Obama to pull all US forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Obama instead listened to his old rival and choice as Secretary of State – Hillary Clinton, of course – to take the cheap, popular and cowardly course of action. He stayed in Afghanistan and Iraq and the American people continue to pay the endless lives and enormous expenses that decision cost.

History showed Biden was right when it mattered. But only the Deep State remembers: And it has neither forgiven nor forgotten.

Yet a strange thing has been happening. The American media – with a lockstep unanimity that simply does not exist in Russia – relentless sneers at and belittles Biden, emphasizing his supposed exhaustion, stupidity, confusion and senility. (There is of course no truth to these claims: Only someone capable of believing the New York Times or The Washington Post could possibly swallow such nonsense)

At the same time, Warren has been treated with deference worthy of a successful incumbent two term president. Her ludicrously un-thought-through and financially ruinous social and economic policies receive no serious coverage.

Yet the grassroots voters of the Democratic Party still refuse to swallow Warren. And they still stubbornly refuse to abandon Biden despite all the hysteria manufactured against him.

The latest Real Clear Politics average of most recent opinion polls still puts Biden clearly ahead of Warren in his ability to defeat President Donald Trump – despite the gigabytes of data that have been expended to build her up and tear him down.

There are many good reasons for this:

First, Warren, again in the face of all the castrated media fearful courtier coverage acclaiming her Warmth, Humanity, Compassion and Brilliance – has all the real warmth and humanity of Nurse Mildred Ratched in the classic 1975 movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Nurse Ratched perfectly portrayed by the great Louise Fletcher in the Oscar-winning movie lobotomized the lovable hero Randle Patrick McMurphy played by Jack Nicolson and tuned him into an appalling, suffering walking-dead zombie. One can easily see Warren doing that to Biden, President Trump and anyone else who crossed her.

Warren cannot attract African-American voters – the largest and most important safe voting block for the Democrats. They loved Barack Obama, rejected Hillary Clinton and have stayed loyal to Biden.

Warren is being marketed as a fake progressive but as long as Bernie Sanders stays in the field he will deny her that claim. And if he should have to step out, the outspoken, fearless and genuinely principled young Tulsi Gabbard would be ready to take over that role.

Warren is not young. She has no track record or credibility as a progressive. She won her position in Harvard by lying that she was of significant Native American origin. She is not. And none of the Native American nations will have her.

Warren is elitist. And even Nurse Ratched had more charisma. Like the ludicrous R101 airship, she spends public money like water and is grossly underpowered in support among Heartland older Democrats, young progressives and African-Americans alike. Also, she has never run anything significant in her life.

Mountains of worthless propaganda were expended in the British media in 1929 and 1930 boasting of the supposed world beating capabilities of the R101. It crashed into a low hill after only a few hours of flight. India was still 7,500 kilometers (4,600 miles) away. For Warren, winning the White House will be an equally remote prize.

Billionaires Have Declared All-Out War on Sanders and Warren

A A — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 10:25:32 +0000

Norman SOLOMON

For many decades, any politician daring to fight for economic justice was liable to be denounced for engaging in “class warfare.” It was always a grimly laughable accusation, coming from wealthy elites as well as their functionaries in corporate media and elective office. In the real world, class warfare — or whatever you want to call it — has always been an economic and political reality.

In recent decades, class war in the USA has become increasingly lopsided. The steady decline in union membership, the worsening of income inequality and the hollowing out of the public sector have been some results of ongoing assaults on social decency and countless human lives. Corporate power has run amuck.

Now, the billionaire class is worried. For the first time in memory, there’s a real chance that the next president could threaten the very existence of billionaires — or at least significantly reduce their unconscionable rate of wealth accumulation — in a country and on a planet with so much human misery due to extreme economic disparities.

When Elizabeth Warren stands on a debate stage and argues for a targeted marginal tax on the astronomically rich, such advocacy is anathema to those who believe that the only legitimate class war is the kind waged from the top down. In early autumn, CNBC reported that “Democratic donors on Wall Street and in big business are preparing to sit out the presidential campaign fundraising cycle — or even back President Donald Trump — if Sen. Elizabeth Warren wins the party’s nomination.”

As for Bernie Sanders — less than four years after he carried every county in West Virginia against Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary — the state’s Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin flatly declared last week that if Sanders wins the nomination, he would not vote for his party’s nominee against Trump in November 2020.

Some billionaires support Trump and some don’t. But few billionaires have a good word to say about Sanders or Warren. And the pattern of billionaires backing their Democratic rivals is illuminating.

“Dozens of American billionaires have pulled out their checkbooks to support candidates engaged in a wide-open battle for the Democratic presidential nomination,” Forbes reported this summer. The dollar total of those donations given directly to a campaign (which federal law limits to $2,800 each) is less significant than the sentiment they reflect. And people with huge wealth are able to dump hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars at once into a Super PAC, which grassroots-parched AstroTurf candidate Joe Biden greenlighted last month.

The donations from billionaires to the current Democratic candidates could be viewed as a kind of Oligarchy Confidence Index, based on data from the Federal Election Commission. As reported by Forbes, Pete Buttigieg leads all the candidates with 23 billionaire donors, followed by 18 for Cory Booker, and 17 for Kamala Harris. Among the other candidates who have qualified for the debate coming up later this month, Biden has 13 billionaire donors and Amy Klobuchar has 8, followed by 3 for Elizabeth Warren, 1 for Tulsi Gabbard, and 1 for Andrew Yang. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has zero billionaire donors.

(The tenth person who has qualified for the next debate, self-funding billionaire candidate Tom Steyer, is in a class by himself.)

Meanwhile, relying on contributions from small donors, Sanders and Warren “eagerly bait, troll and bash billionaires at every opportunity,” in the words of a recent Los Angeles Times news story. “They send out missives to donors boasting how much damage their plans would inflict on the wallets of specific wealthy families and corporations.”

The newspaper added: “Sanders boasts that his wealth tax would cost Amazon owner Jeff Bezos $8.9 billion per year. He even championed a bill with the acronym BEZOS: The Stop Bad Employers By Zeroing Out Subsidies Act would have forced Amazon and other large firms to pay the full cost of food stamps and other benefits received by their lowest-wage employees.”

For extremely rich people who confuse net worth with human worth, the prospect of losing out on billions is an outrageous possibility. And so, a few months ago, Facebook mega-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg expressed his antipathy toward Warren while meeting with employees. As a transcript of leaked audio makes clear, Warren’s vision of using anti-trust laws to break up Big Tech virtual monopolies was more than Facebook’s head could stand to contemplate.

“But look,” Zuckerberg said, “at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”

The fight happening now for the Democratic presidential nomination largely amounts to class warfare. And the forces that have triumphed in the past are outraged that they currently have to deal with so much progressive opposition. As Carl von Clausewitz observed, “A conqueror is always a lover of peace.”

truthdig.com