Elite donors push Democrats left on climate and immigration, but right on taxes

[think]

Elite donors push Democrats left on climate and immigration, but right on taxes

Updated by Jeff Stein Dec 26, 2016, 8:30am EST

Bernie Sanders has identified the cancer he thinks is coursing through the Democratic Party’s bloodstream. In speech after speech, the Vermont senator has gone after the party’s donor class — and its hold on politicians — as the central impediment to both a more populist Democratic Party and its electoral success.

“I believe strongly that the party must break loose from its corporate establishment ties,” Sanders said in a New York Times op-ed shortly after the election. “We must have the courage to take on the greed and power of Wall Street, the drug companies, the insurance companies and the fossil fuel industry.”

Sanders’s argument has a lot going for it. Hillary Clinton campaign’s spent much of the summer fundraising with super-elite donors, and ignored the union organizers in the Rust Belt in a way that backfired spectacularly. The WikiLeaks emails revealed that conservative donors like Israeli hawk Haim Saban were closely involved with the Clinton team’s policy shop. Her campaign was certainly to the right of Sanders’s, which relied on an unprecedented grassroots fundraising effort.

But a report published last week by the think tank Demos appears to complicate this story. The research suggests that one of Sanders’s goals — to free the party of its elite campaign contributors — may actually be at odds with his other plans to move the party to the left.

~Snip~

Vox’s David Roberts wrote up this part of the study. As he writes:

Donors are, on average, wealthier, older, whiter, more conservative, and more likely to be male than the general voting population; the larger the donations, the more wealthy/old/white/male donors get. Donors are also more supportive of fiscal austerity and more opposed to President Barack Obama’s agenda than the voting public.

In short, the donor class drags US politics to the right of median public opinion...

Read more:
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/26/14042118/donors-democrats-bernie-sanders

[gulliver]

1. Dr. Sanders is channeling Theodoric of York

If one bloodletting doesn't cure the patient, repeat the treatment until it works.

[think]

2. Bernie ran a clean campaign without the influence of corporations who spend billions lobbying

our government.

That's being beholden to the people not special interests...

[whathehell]

3. +1000

[gulliver]

4. How is that a clean campaign?

Why is taking money from individuals automatically clean? People who can afford to give money to campaigns get a voice. People who can't don't.

Is where you get your campaign money from the only thing that determines "cleanliness?" Nope. There's no "clean" to begin with. We're all sinners, Mr. Sanders fully included.

[think]

5. I'd rather have my leaders funded by small donations from individuals rather than corporate lobbyist

Call all donations unclean if you like but small donors represent me more than corporations who have a long history of screwing the American people.

Corporations expect their profits to take precedence over the needs of the general public when making donations.

Small donors have the interests of the general public at heart rather than corporate profits for the few....

[madinmaryland]

6. I would love to see publicly funded elections and get the money entirely out

of the campaign system.