My political enemies are conservatives and reactionaries, and in Trump's case, mentally deranged fascists. The Democratic establishment will never hesitate for a moment to say "All you Bernie (and, to whatever small extent is needed) Elizabeth Warren supporters get on board the Biden for President train now." I'm not going to try to dissuade anyone from doing so-- and I wish people who discovered electoral politics 2 weeks ago would stop frothing at the mouth about me refusing to personally vote for Biden-- but Biden has a long and repulsive record going back 5 decades that has helped me form a hatred for him that's not going away. I know Trump is worse. I don't like racists and Biden only ran on one issue in his first election: racism. I don't like corporatists and he has always tried-- even harder than some Republicans-- to fellate Wall Street and the banksters and to wreck Social Security and Medicare in the name of Austerity... Yeah, yeah, you're heard it all before. But locking arms with a bunch of corrupt status quo Democrats to help elect Status Quo Joe Biden and other establishment candidates is not something I have any intention of doing. As you already know, the lesser of two evils is still evil.Who's better? Who's worse?My grandfather, a socialist and a devoted FDR fan, once told me, when I was very young, that there's only one thing in American politics worse than the Democratic Party-- the Republican Party. As I've written many time, Chuck Schumer went to James Madison High School in Brooklyn at the same time I did (a few years after Bernie graduated). He was as much "Little Schucky Schmucky" back then as he is now.Writing for Too Much Information yesterday, Andrew Perez revealed that Schumer spent $15 million destroying progressive primary candidates. And now they expect us to vote for putrid conservatives like Frackenlooper (Colorado) or somewhat less putrid nothing candidates like Sara Gideon (Maine), Amy McGrath (Kentucky), Jon Ossoff (Georgia), Theresa Greenfield (Iowa), Ben Ray Luján (New Mexico), Barbara Bollier (a Kanas Republican pretending to be a Democrat), Jaime Harrison (South Carolina), and Cal Cunningham (North Carolina). I wouldn't vote for any of them. I vote for someone, not against someone who is worse. "With the help of the party, its major donors, and the Senate Majority PAC (SMP)-- a super PAC funded by labor unions, corporate interests and Wall Street billionaires-- candidates endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have won contested primaries in four battleground states," wrote Perez.
Colorado was the most emblematic example of the party putting its thumb on the scale against progressives: There, former Gov. John Hickenlooper cruised to a primary victory over former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. In the final weeks of the race, SMP spent $1 million to boost Hickenlooper, after he spent his failed presidential campaign attacking key tenets of progressives’ legislative agenda, including Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.At the time of the cash infusion, Hickenlooper was losing ground in the polls and engulfed in scandals: He had just been fined by Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission for violating state ethics law as governor, the local CBS station uncovered evidence of his gubernatorial office raking in cash from oil companies, and a video circulated showed Hickenlooper comparing his job as a politician to a slave on a slave ship, being whipped by a scheduler.With the help of SMP and the endorsement of the DSCC, Hickenlooper held off the more progressive Romanoff to win a 17 point primary victory.SMP is led byformer top staffers at the DSCC. The super PAC has raised a staggering $118 million this cycle, pooling cash from both organized labor and business titans to promote corporate-aligned candidates over more progressive primary challengers.Working for Working Americans, a super PAC funded by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, has donated $5 million. The Laborers' International Union of North America’s super PAC has given $1.5 million. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’s political action committee has chipped in $1.3 million. SMP has received also big donations from groups affiliated with labor unions like the Service Employees International Union ($1 million), the National Association of Letter Carriers ($750,000), and Communications Workers of America ($500,000).Overall, the top donor to SMP so far this cycle has been Democracy PAC-- a super PAC that’s bankrolled by billionaire George Soros and the Fund for Policy Reform, a nonprofit funded by Soros. Democracy PAC has contributed $8.5 million to SMP.Other donors from the financial industry include: Renaissance Technologies founder and billionaire Jim Simons and his wife Deborah ($5.5 million) and billionaire D. E. Shaw & Co. founder David Shaw ($1 million).Some major donors have financial stakes in current and future legislation.For instance: SMP received a $1 million donation from billionaire Jonathan Gray, an executive at Blackstone, which owns the hospital staffing chain, TeamHealth. SMP also received $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association.In late 2019, Schumer helped stall Senate legislation that would have kept patients from receiving “surprise medical bills,” the hefty charges that occur when they visit hospitals that are in their insurance network but are unknowingly treated by providers who are considered out-of-network.SMP is affiliated with Majority Forward, a dark money group focused on attacking Republican Senate candidates. Majority Forward received $450,000 in 2018 from pharmacy giant CVS Health-- which also owns health insurer Aetna. The group also received $300,000 from the American Health Care Association (AHCA), a trade association that represents the nursing home industry.The Democratic primary candidates backed by the DSCC have expressed reservations about Medicare for All, arguing they believe people should be allowed to keep their private health insurance if they want it. Many of the DSCC’s favored candidates do support creating a public health insurance option.Meanwhile, the Real Estate Roundtable, a trade group for real estate investors, donated $50,000 to Majority Forward. Schumer and Senate Democrats recently helped Republicans unanimously pass pandemic relief legislation that included a special, little-noticed provision that amounted to $170 billion worth of new tax breaks for wealthy real estate investors.
Schumer has also derailed progressives in Maine, North Carolina, New Mexico, Kentucky, Texas, Georgia and Iowa. He and his cronies basically ignored West Virginia-- allowing Paula Jean Swearengin to win the primary and find herself as the only progressive challenging a Trumpist incumbent in the Senate this cycle. The 2020 Blue America Senate thermometer on the right makes it easy to contribute to her campaign. It's either that or an all-Schumer status quo Democratic caucus in the Senate next year-- doing nothing but disappointing people so badly that 2022 will see a replay of 2010, when progressives didn't even bother to vote, giving the Republicans massive wins in both houses of Congress and bringing on a decade of right-wing control.And one more thing-- a question. Do the Democratic committees, like the DCCC and DSCC get behind progressives in the general election when they manage to win primaries? Sometimes, but rarely. They want progressives to help them after primaries... but they usually refuse to help progressives.