Sunday, November 19, 2017

The Struggle in the Democratic Party

Welcome to The Real News Network, live on Facebook and YouTube and, I think, Periscope and therealnews.com. We’re going to continue our conversation we’ve been having on The Real News about the fight within the Democratic Party, Donna Brazile’s revelations, and as we go, a bit of a series that’s going to unfold here with our guest, who I’ll introduce in a moment, about just what is the prescription, one could say, for reform of the Democratic Party, if that’s possible, and we’re going to discuss whether or not it’s worth the effort, and if so, what that might look like.
But we’re going to start with Donna Brazile. In Donna Brazile’s book, which I’m sure just about everybody who’s watching this has heard about if not already read, one of the more explosive things she exposed was a sort of financial shenanigan that the Clinton campaign had used to up the amount of money any individual could donate by giving a certain amount of money, a few thousand dollars, to every state party, which in theory is supposed to be used for state funding of local elections. But instead, 99%, apparently, according to Donna Brazile, of that money actually went back to the coffers of the Hillary campaign, back to the DNC, and then the Hillary campaign controlled that money.
To quote Donna Brazile, she says, “The states kept less than half of 1% of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fundraisers that Hillary’s campaign was holding.” It’s interesting that if you actually do the math — because they accused Bernie Sanders of not raising hardly any money for the state campaigns — if you do the math, something like $850,000 or so actually stayed in the state campaigns once all this money gets transferred back to the control of the Hillary campaign. Sanders raised $5 million for down-ticket Democrats, so he actually wound up raising more for down-ticket ballots than the Hillary campaign.

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