This statement was previously published on the Gloria La Riva for President website.
Amid a new scandal, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was left no alternative but to step down from her role as the chairwoman of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, in seeking to sabotage Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democrat’s presidential nomination.
Just days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released some 20,000 emails between top DNC officials. These emails show clearly that functionaries of the DNC were actively supporting the candidacy of Hillary Clinton while trying to destroy that of Bernie Sanders, despite publicly claiming to be neutral in the primaries. Supporters of Sanders were justifiably outraged at the revelations, which confirmed what Sanders himself had been saying for months.
Even more telling, the leaked emails illuminate in great detail how political favors are bought and sold, not as an exception but on a routine basis, and how major donors are rewarded with access to powerful government officials. This is equally if not even more true for the Republican Party.
In reporting on the rewarding of big donors, a New York Times article reported: “The emails capture a world where seating charts are arranged with dollar totals in mind, where a White House celebration of gay pride is a thinly disguised occasion for rewarding wealthy donors and where physical proximity to the president is the most precious of currencies.”
As has long been the case, paid “proximity” to the president and other influential politicians regularly translates into economic advantage for the big donors. And campaign contributions are critical to election and re-election campaigns from city councils to legislatures to the White House.
Party for Socialism and Liberation presidential candidate Gloria La Riva, commented: “These latest revelations show once again that our so-called ‘democratic’ political system is irredeemably corrupt, that big money—not the votes nor the interests of the people—is the decisive factor. It’s a system that cannot be reformed, but must be replaced with a new system, a socialist system where the great wealth created by working people is taken out of the hands of the banks, corporations and the super-rich. That is the way, the only way, that the popular demand ‘get money out of politics’ can actually be met.”
