Eric Zuesse
Bernie Sanders — the only Democratic Presidential candidate who is supported by no billionaire — is now clearly in a position where he has the support of more Democratic Party voters nationwide than does any other candidate. Therefore, the Democratic National Committee will likely hand its nomination to Elizabeth Warren, who is the only other contender in the contest who even possibly might be sufficiently preferred by Democratic Party voters for those voters to accept their Party’s Presidential nomination being handed by its billionaires to someone else. No other nominee than she would be even possibly acceptable to both the billionaires and the voters. She would be the only compromise candidate (compromise between the Party’s billionaires and its voters). She — and she alone — has been competing against Sanders as being an opponent of control over the Government by America’s billionaires, and her statements in that regard have convinced a sufficient number of Democratic Party voters so that they will possibly be enough to defeat Donald Trump in the final election on November 3rd. Trump, of course, is funded by Republican Party billionaires. Therefore, as in 2016, it would be a contest between Democratic billionaires versus Republican billionaires. Here is how it would be done this time:
Approximately 15 % of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention are Superdelegates who were not elected in primaries or caucuses but who instead are basically chosen by the billionaires and centi-millionaires who fund the Democratic National Committee and financed those peoples’ careers.
On 5 May 2016, Pew Research headlined “Who are the Democratic superdelegates?” and inquired into “Just who are these 700-plus party officeholders and insiders who automatically get delegate spots at July’s convention and can vote for whomever they want?” 432 of them were simply “DNC members.” 193 were “U.S. Representatives” (in the U.S. House). 47 were “U.S. Senators.” 21 were “Governors.” And 20 were “Distinguished party leaders.” All of them were largely, or entirely, dependent upon billionaire and centi-millionaire donors. These 700+ individuals — all of them dependent upon the Party’s billionaires — will determine whom the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee will be if Sanders does not control over half of all delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Of course, Sanders will not control over half of the delegates in a convention in which there will be a considerable majority of delegates who come to that Convention committed to other candidates. Therefore, this 15%+ of the delegates (superdelegates), whose sole loyalty will be to the Party’s billionaires, will come together to an agreement to back only one of the non-Sanders candidates, so that the ‘Democratic’ Party might then have a chance to beat Donald Trump with a Democratic Party billionaires-backed nominee, and thereby defeat the choice of the Republican Party’s billionaires (except for, perhaps, Michael Bloomberg).
On February 20th, one of the Democratic Party’s two leading newspapers, the Washington Post, headlined “The Democratic race is now Sanders against the field, and a contested convention possibly awaits the party”, and reported
But if there is agreement that Sanders will lead the delegate race, there is similar agreement that he is not likely to be able to win a majority. If that turns out to be the case, Democrats could he headed for a chaotic national convention, one that could split the party and weaken Democrats in the general election, regardless of who ends up as the nominee.
The objective, in such a case, would be to appoint a nominee who would be acceptable to the Party’s billionaires while at the same time not disappoint so many of the Democratic Party’s voters so that what had happened the last time with Hillary Clinton would not happen again — Clinton turned off so many of the Sanders voters so that lots of people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 did not vote for Clinton in 2016 — some voted for no one, while others voted instead for Trump. (Though Hillary Clinton refuses to accept this fact, and blames Russia and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, it is a fact. Whereas Republican voters were highly motivated to vote for Trump, Democratic voters were far less motivated to vote for Clinton, and this made all the difference.)
Normally, the DNC tries its best to appoint a nominee who not only is acceptable to its billionaires but is sufficiently acceptable to its voters so as to win against the Republican billionaires’ choice. That, then, makes the contest one which is between Democratic billionaires versus Republican billionaires, and yet which also satisfies enough of the Democratic Party’s voters in order for them to remain Democratic Party voters. This was the problem in 2016. It seems likely to occur again, but this time with Elizabeth Warren, instead of with Hillary Clinton.
On the Republican Party side, that problem does not exist, because for over a hundred years the Republican Party has represented the billionaires not only covertly but also overtly — its ideology is that richer people are superior to everybody else: that a person’s net worth is also a reflection of his moral worth, and that it may even be a reflection of God’s having blessed that individual — and thus a sign of moral superiority: blessing by ‘The Almighty’. Consequently, Republicans have no problem with being ruled by an aristocracy. For Republicans, aristocrats are superior people. But the Democratic Party ideology has always been ambivalent about that belief, and, if anything, has opposed that view. For the Democratic Party, in the present era, to embrace that pro-aristocracy view — even though only covertly, not overtly — would be for it to raise the question as to whether America, which has been a two-party dictatorship, is now actually a one-party dictatorship. If that is the case, then the adjective “democratic” won’t apply at all, even though the adjective “republican” still will continue to apply; and so a replacement of the Democratic Party would now be in order. At this stage, the hypocrisy of that name, for one of the nation’s major political parties, would be not only obvious, but offensive to many even of its own voters, and so the clock would then be ticking till that Party’s ultimate demise and replacement by a new ‘alternative’ against the Republican option.
A re-election of Trump, if Elizabeth Warren is to be the ‘compromise’ nominee to run against him, would be just a continuation of what happened in 2016; but a re-election of Trump, if Bernie Sanders is to be the Democratic Party’s nominee to run against him, would be a clear and unambiguous indication that not only America’s billionaires but the American people favor fascism — dictatorial capitalism — and in that case, there will be a new realism, on the part of America’s progressives, that they live under a dictatorship.
An election of Elizabeth Warren, if she is to be the ‘compromise’ nominee against Trump, would be a choice between two nominees both of whom are proven liars but both of whom are trusted by voters in their respective political Parties. The existing American political ambiguity would therefore continue to exist, and democracy — even in the highly compromised form in which it currently exists — would be precarious, at best. A ‘democracy’ in which the leaders on all sides are lying to the public is no democracy at all, because, if the public cannot reasonably trust any of the leaders, then there is no reasonable basis for electoral outcomes, and this means that only corruption — whomever spends the most money to fool the voters — will rule there. Corruption and resulting dictatorship is the default.
By contrast, if some miracle were to happen, and the candidate who has won the most votes in the Democratic Party were finally allowed to represent that Party as its Presidential nominee, then all the billionaires’ money in the world would likely be no more effective against him than Michael Bloomberg’s and Tom Steyers’s money now is, in the Democratic primaries; and the result, of that, would be a realistic chance that authentic democracy might, in our lifetimes, come to be restored to America, in at least the partial sense in which it existed before 1945. (Maybe even better than that, because of the reduced groupist bigotries against women and Blacks etc. after that time.) Obviously, what exists today in America is nothing even close to that: American democracy does not exist, at all. It doesn’t today, and it hasn’t for decades (at least). It is a myth that is propagated by America’s billionaires, via their ‘news’-media and their hired scholars and other ‘experts’, all of whom owe their careers to the decisions and dollars of billionaires, and are loyal to them.
Here is an example: Huffington Post. It’s owned by Verizon Communications, which is controlled by the anonymous few individuals who control some of America’s largest institutional investment funds, so its controllers constitute a virtually impenetrable black box. In any event, dollars are the ultimate controllers of it. That ‘news’ site is intensely a propaganda-site pumping Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, so as to split off enough progressives from Bernie Sanders so as to make seem okay a ‘brokered convention’ in which the Party’s billionaires (through their “superdelegates”) will anoint Warren as the ‘compromise candidate’ of the ‘Democratic’ Party to win their nomination to go up against the Republican billionaires’ choice, Trump. Also: Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post is (along with the New York Times) the billionaires’ main vehicle for transmitting from the billionaires-controlled agency the CIA (which does coups etc.) disinformation to the public (such as it did regarding “WMD in Iraq” before we invaded and destroyed that country); and, now, they have published on the day before Nevada’s caucuses the smear, “Bernie Sanders briefed by U.S. officials that Russia is trying to help his presidential campaign”, so as to get suckered Democratic Party voters to transfer to Sanders some of the hate they already feel for Trump (as if ‘They’re both traitors!’). Bezos’s rag also used an opinion column to pump Warren by deceiving Democratic Party voters to think that switching from Sanders to Warren won’t even hurt Sanders’s campaign: “On the other hand, as Dave Karpf points out, Warren doesn’t necessarily need to cut into Sanders’s base (which is unshakably loyal) to come back.” Of course, that’s a flat-out lie directed only at fools, because if she won’t defeat Sanders in the primaries, then she won’t even possibly win the Democratic Party nomination, and thus won’t have any chance to become the U.S. President in 2021. Perhaps it’s because such lying tactics usually work, that billionaires Bloomberg and Steyer are in this race themselves: billionaires typically get a big ego-boost from deceiving others into doing what they want them to do. It’s one of the ways they became as rich as they are.
All of the billionaires will lie, cheat, and/or steal, in order to prevent Sanders from winning — and, in order to block everything that he tries to do as the U.S. President. And such deceptions, and whatever other coercions might be needed, will be merely par for their course. However, absolutely essential for them is to rule by means of deception, no matter what happens. This is today’s American ‘democracy’.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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