Only weeks away from the 2016 Presidential election, the pressure on progressives is mounting to vote for Hillary Clinton to stop the racist, misogynist Donald Trump.
The recent revelation of Trump’s extreme misogyny and admission of sexual assault is being used to detract attention from the recent WikiLeaks release of emails from the account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman.
One of the emails in Podesta’s inbox was from former Democratic Party official Alan Siegel, detailing his plan for deceiving Sanders’ delegates. In the email, Siegel writes of the desire to give these delegates a false sense of victory so they would return home after the convention and “work their asses off for Hillary Clinton.”
Toward these ends Siegel wrote: “Bernie and his people have been bitching about super delegates and the huge percentage that have come out for Hillary…Why not throw Bernie a bone and reduce the super delegates in the future…So if we ‘give’ Bernie this in the Convention’s rules committee, his people will think they’ve ‘won’ something from the Party Establishment. And it functionally doesn’t make any difference anyway. They win. We don’t lose. Everyone is happy.”
We can see how this plan to trick Sanders’ delegates played out in Philadelphia. During the Democratic National Convention, Liberation News spoke with Brian Ertz, a Sanders’ delegate and attorney from Idaho. Having been elected to the DNC’s Rules Committee Ertz told us at length of his experience. In short, the Rules Committee was not any kind of deliberative body. The many proposed changes brought to the committee by the Sanders delegates, including those about superdelegates, were summarily ruled out of order and people were “shamed” off the microphone by committee chair Barney Frank, who Ertz described as a “tyrant.” The Clinton delegates on the committee voted in lockstep at the thumbs up or down of the “whip.”
Here is where Ertz’s story and the revelations of the Siegal-Podesta email dovetail:
Ertz: “After about the fifth amendment got shut down, we all got pulled into a back room where Jeff Weaver [Sanders’ campaign manager], Ben Jealous [former national head of NAACP and prominent Sanders endorser who is now supporting Hillary Clinton-ed] and others pitched this Unity Commission, which is an advisory commission that deals with a lot of the issues. It is basically an advisory commission to the DNC. The Commission is charged with recommending that superdelegates relinquish their own power. That, to me, was unacceptable. I would say that the insiders, for whatever reason, had hashed this out and prepared it at least a week prior. They placed it on the agenda and basically said this is what we want you to vote for.”
So, the idea floated in Siegel’s email, to “throw… a bone” to the Bernie people with some sort of future limitation on superdelegates, came to pass in the rules committee, in the form of a pre-scripted Unity Commission proposal that political insiders tried to push down the delegates’ throats in a backroom discussion.
However, since only a small percent of delegates participated in the Rules Committee, not all delegates may have shared Ertz’s level of insight.
It was the WikiLeaks release of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s e-mails that confirmed the suspicions that the DNC was actively conspiring against Sanders for Clinton–and propelled so many delegates into the streets. Once the Wasserman Schultz e-mail leaks emerged, the thousands of Sanders supporters who had come to Philadelphia from across the U.S. transformed into angry protesters chanting “DemExit Now.”
Siegel’s emails should be a reminder of the Democratic Party’s attempt to crush and subvert the Sanders movement. However, let us not forget that this attempt at extinguishing the movement actually served as a turning point for young Sanders supporters as well as for life-long members of the Democratic Party. For many it was a moment of political awakening leading to the quest for a genuine alternative.
Most people know that Clinton is no more likely to end poverty and suffering than Trump is. Neither candidate is going to give us the change that the people need. As socialists, we understand that capitalism is the root cause of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the triple evils of poverty, racism and war. Regardless of who ends up in the White House, we need to be in the streets from the very first day of the next administration, fighting for the change we need.
