DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE
The Democratic National Committee led by Clinton's 2008 campaign co-chair and DNC chair, the strongly condemned Debbie Wasserman Schultz, biased the primary against Sanders as shown by the Guccifer memos and subsequent events.
It started with the skimpy and inconveniently-timed six debates, one quarter of what Clinton participated in during her 2008 primary. Clinton refused to debate Sanders before California, despite her 2008 statement, "You should be willing to debate anytime, anywhere."Democratic insiders called a potential Sanders-Trump debate before California,"bullshit," "peculiar" and "time to start winding down the primary," in an attempt to silence Sanders.
Also early on, the DNC delayed Sanders' access to the voter database at a crucial time, despite both campaigns receiving access to the other's information. The DNC established Hillary's PAC far earlier than usual, accepting checks of up to $353,400 and lobbying money. They was effectively laundered with 99 percent of state party donations sent back to the DNC. Wasserman Schultz' interfered in Nevada also. The DNC then stacked convention leadership in favor of Clinton and rejected powerful labor and health care advocate National Nurses United Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro, as the DNC sought to limit labor's influence on the platform drafting committee. The statement of key Democratic values now excludes important Sanders' priorities like a carbon tax, a national moratorium on fracking, rejection of the TPP, and single payor health care.
There have been widespread calls and petitions for Wasserman Schultz to step down and hopes she will lose her primary. Yet it's clear neither would compensate for past acts, nor fix the party and the system going forward.
COLLUDING WITH THE MEDIA
The media has been the largest contributor to destroying democratic debate unfriendly to Clinton, which culminated in their refusal to discuss who is the better general election candidate before the superdelegates vote in Philadelphia.
Let's start at the beginning. "[T]he greatest story [a journalist] could ever possibly ever cover" was Sanders' rise according to media guru Robert McChesney. Yet it was reported by the corporate media "through the eyes of the Clinton campaign." The extraordinarily well-known Democratic candidate -- the former first lady, presidential candidate, and Secretary of State -- saw her lead evaporate last year. People responded to Sanders' visionary public ambition which addressed our daunting challenges, and was in line with courageous stances on housing integration, the Panama "Free Trade" agreement, the 1994 Crime Bill, the Iraq invasion, and the filibuster of Bush tax cut extension. Sanders rose in the polls like Donald Trump, but the media blacked out his packed stadiums and victory speeches. Clinton responded by moving her rhetoric and policies leftward to reflect Sanders' progressive policies. Yet mainstream media networks generally ignored and occasionally belittled him, giving Clinton and Trump 23 times more coverage in 2015.
As early as October, the media reported superdelegates' overwhelming support of Clinton. The unsubstantiated, premature and misleading attribution of 350-500 superdelegates likely influenced voters through either "the bandwagon effect" that leads people to support the expected winner, or led many not to vote out of a sense of futility. This despite DNC Spokesman Luis Miranda calling for--and doubling down--on the media not reporting superdelegate counts before the convention and the AP story which implied all previous tallies were illegitimate. Yet this reporting was the norm across the mainstream media all primary season.
Eventually, Secretary Clinton and her surrogates realized they could no longer ignore Sanders and many, with undisclosed ties, actively sought to manipulate the media. They relied on the media to promote her misleading statements, change the subject at her whim and highlight her successes. Her first debate used at least four carefully crafted deceptive answers. The compliant media, rather than fact-checking her or relying on focus groups and polling, declared her the "winner" which gave her crucial early momentum. Over time, Clinton and her supporters deceptively mischaracterized Bernie's broad movement-based campaign as only being about the banks and his health care plan as causing millions to lose insurance. The list of manipulations would be too long to count. But consistently when the issue at hand didn't favor her (regularly) or she or Bill Clinton were stumbling after being confronted with real people or their own records (frequently), they introduced a new talking point or a shallow policy. The corrupt media immediately changed their focus in full complicity with her anti-democratic strategy. The indication the election is over now is just an extreme version of her many attempts to silence discussion of Sanders' sterling record, his progressive vision, or his better general election viability.
This media manipulation mattered even more because our public's limited exposure to the societal realities and solutions implemented globally that are promoted by Bernie. Establishment institutions like colleges, left-leaning think tanks, large nonprofits, the DNC, much of the Democratic party, and arts institutions have failed to illuminate or advocate in a substantive way for progressive priorities, even as their funding from foreign governments, multinational corporations, and hedge fund and private equity managers have skyrocketed. Many of these institutions have strong connections with Clinton as a former colleague, speaker or campaign chair. By effectively declaring a process that should be decided at the Convention over, she aims to silence, largely successfully, this critical policy debate as well.
Additionally, Google and other search engines appeared to have manipulated their results to favor Clinton as this report shows(Google says it avoids offensive or disparaging phrase completions, which certainly works well for her.) Bing's political index showed up as a top result when searching on candidates for many months, misleadingly avoiding critical issues like Wall Street reform, trade or war to make Sanders appear more out of touch with the American public.
She and/or her supporters even attacked the social media that sprung to life to promote Sanders' campaign. Earlier Secretary Clinton championed internet freedom as the "cornerstone of the 21stcentury statecraft policy agenda." Yet Hillary trolls took down most of Sanders' Facebook pages. A pro-Clinton SuperPAC is spending $1 million to attack Sanders on social media. Popular news articles that seem like they should accept comments have done so sporadically or stopped them after a short time, even as they promote a highly flawed narrative from her campaign. Information from searches on important topics that did not favor her -- like millennial or independent voting -- have also been difficult to find.
The effort to silence, misreport or laugh off Sanders' candidacy culminated in the unbelievable suppression of democracy. His incredibly--and probably unhelpfully--clean campaign needed to stop, according to establishment forces. Thus the most competitive, viable and important candidacy for our highest office in decades was left off the air. Clinton's Bataan Death March to the nomination-- now more than ever -- employs the full power of the media and establishment to try to end Bernie's campaign and the discussion of issues that could prevent Brexit-like results and the rise of the right wing.
SUPERDELEGATES
Superdelegates are an institution that was created for a particular purpose. Love them or hate them, eliminate them now or never. But for now, it is their job to choose the more electable candidate. Or so we were told.
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