Bernie-Elizabeth Tacit Alliance Frays

The SEIU, one of the biggest and, usually, one of the more progressive unions, is staying neutral in the presidential race, at least nationally. But not in New Hampshire. The crucially important State Employees’ Association/SEIU Local 1984 voted to endorse Bernie late last week. Richard Gulla, President of the union: "Bernie Sanders has a long history of fighting for working people. He shares many of our members’ goals and values. He is not afraid to take on Wall Street and will fight against corporate greed and corruption. Bernie supports every worker earning a livable wage allowing them to care for and support their families. He is also respectful and supportive of the collective bargaining process. He understands that many of our young people cannot afford to attend college so they can prepare for the jobs of this century; and that our senior citizens are not being afforded a dignified retirement... We look forward to supporting Senator Sanders throughout the primary race and will be prepared to support the most labor-friendly candidate post primary."

The media hasn't reported this and isn't interested in it. I guarantee you, neither Rachel Maddow nor Anderson Cooper will be interviewing Richard Gulla.

The media has a very different story it wants to stoke: a war between Bernie and Elizabeth. The worst of all the anti-Bernie reporters, vile Wall Street lackey Sydney Ember, who was assigned by the New York Times to lead their character assassination efforts against Bernie, helped manufacture a war between him and Elizabeth on Sunday. And a desperate Warren, watching her support collapse as Iowa and New Hampshire approach, took the bait.

Ember, gleefully: "A nearly yearlong run of good will between two of the leading progressives in the 2020 presidential race, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders, appears to be evaporating in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. Ms. Warren said on Sunday she was 'disappointed' that Mr. Sanders’s campaign had been using a script for volunteers that suggested she was appealing mainly to highly educated voters and would not be able to expand the Democratic Party coalition. 'I was disappointed to hear that Bernie is sending his volunteers out to trash me,' Ms. Warren, of Massachusetts, said. 'I hope Bernie reconsiders and turns his campaign in a different direction.' After months of studiously avoiding any negative words about Mr. Sanders, Ms. Warren went on to cite the divisiveness of the 2016 primary race between Mr. Sanders and Hillary Clinton, implying it had helped President Trump. 'We all saw the impact of the factionalism in 2016, and we can’t have a repeat of that,' she warned. 'Democrats need to unite our party and that means pulling in all parts of the Democratic coalition.'"

Because Shane Goldmacher, a professional journalist, shared the byline with Ember, the Times included:

In a rare question-and-answer session with reporters after his final event of a weekend Iowa swing, Mr. Sanders — in response to a question on whether he approved of his campaign’s criticism of Ms. Warren-- denied responsibility for the script, saying he himself had never attacked Ms. Warren. And he blamed the news media for overstating the tension between the two campaigns. “I got to tell you, I think this is a little bit of a media blowup, that kind of wants conflict,” he said.

“Elizabeth Warren is a very good friend of mine,” Mr. Sanders, of Vermont, said. “We have worked together in the Senate for years. Elizabeth Warren and I will continue to work together, we will debate the issues.”

“No one is going to trash Elizabeth Warren,” he added.

The Sanders campaign did not provide any further information on the script. Pressed again on the topic, Mr. Sanders said: “We have hundreds of employees. Elizabeth Warren has hundreds of employees. And people sometimes say things that they shouldn’t. You have heard me give many speeches. Have I ever said one negative word about Elizabeth Warren?”

Just as the media had hoped, Warren then sent out an attack e-mail aimed at Bernie:

Last night, we got some disappointing news.

Bernie Sanders’ campaign is instructing volunteers to dismiss our broad-based, inclusive campaign by saying the “people who support [Elizabeth] are highly-educated, more affluent people.”

When I heard that description, I didn’t recognize it, Jacqueline. That doesn’t describe me or many of the passionate volunteers and organizers I know. This type of attack isn’t about disagreeing on issues-- it’s about dismissing the potency of our grassroots movement.

Let’s be clear: As a party, and as a country, we can’t afford to repeat the factionalism of the 2016 primary. To win in November, we need a nominee who can unite a broad coalition of Democrats-- who will excite every part of the Democratic party and inspires more people to join the fight.

The Jacqueline mentioned above is Jacqueline Propps, an East Bay super-volunteer-- as well as a Blue America activist. "What a load of crap," she raged in a note today. "SHAME on her campaign and HER for letting them do this. As explained, it was a non-staffer volunteer and the comment was taken down off slack immediately. I have un-subbed from every Warren list and told them why she is no longer my #2. So disappointed."

Dorothy Reik, a member of the Executive Board of the California Democratic Party and president of one of the most progressive and most activist Democratic clubs in Southern California-- Progressive Democrats of the Santa Monica Mountains-- also seemed mortified by Warren's attack. "As the primaries approach it is finally time for Bernie to point out that he and Warren are very different people even if many of their positions seem to be the same," she told us early this morning. "If Warren's supporters see the pointing out of these differences as criticism they should act to correct those differences where they can. A life history, however, cannot be changed. Bernie has always supported working people. He has never been a registerd Republican. Warren is a capitalist.  Bernie is not. If she feels pointing that out in terms people can understand is wrong then maybe she should stop calling herself 'capitalist to the bone' and perhaps rethink her commitment to a system that has caused so much suffering to so many while enriching so few."

Politico's Holly Otterbein's dawn post this morning helps put Warren's desperation into context: Sanders surges as progressives flock to him over Warren--The consolidation of left-wing support is a remarkable turnaround for Sanders..

Something’s happening with Bernie Sanders that looked unlikely to many a few months ago: Progressive leaders and organizations are lining up behind him, not Elizabeth Warren, in the lead-up to voting.

Two groups run by young people-- the Sunrise Movement, which seeks to combat climate change, and Dream Defenders, which advocates for people of color-- endorsed him last week. He’s also won the backing of People’s Action and the Center for Popular Democracy, which together claim more than 1.5 million members, as well as three lawmakers in the so-called “Squad” and liberal-minded labor unions.

The consolidation of left-wing support is a remarkable turnaround for Sanders. In September, the Working Families Party became the first major national progressive group to endorse a candidate when it picked Warren-- despite siding with Sanders in 2016. Warren was surging at the time, and looked poised to overtake Sanders as the leader of the progressive movement and a frontrunner for the nomination.

But now it’s Sanders with the wind at his back. The endorsements, on display here Sunday when Rep. Rashida Tlaib and the Sunrise Movement joined him for a rally attended by more than 900 people, are giving him a jolt of momentum weeks ahead of the Iowa caucuses and supplying him with fresh volunteers in key areas.

“I’m not surprised that Bernie is increasingly consolidating support,” said Waleed Shahid, an aide for the left-wing group Justice Democrats, which has not yet endorsed a candidate. “Many of his staff have backgrounds in community organizing, his 2016 campaign helped grow the progressive movement, and he received [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's] endorsement, who is shaping the future of the progressive left in significant ways.”

Many Bernie supporters-- though not Bernie staffers-- have long advocated a unity ticket between Bernie and Elizabeth. Unless the two candidates are working behind the scenes to mend this rift now, the chances for that have probably ended, something that will only go to help the status quo establishment-- Biden among Democrats and, worse, Trump. The media is rubbing its collective hands together in anticipation of tomorrow's debate at Drake University in Des Moines, a debate with a far less crowded stage. (The only candidates who have qualified at Bernie, Biden, Elizabeth, Mayo Pete, Klobuchar and, somehow, Steyer.) The RealClearPolitics polling average in Iowa stands like this:

• Bernie- 21.3%
• Mayo- 21.0%
• Status Quo Joe- 17.7%
• Elizabeth- 17.0%
• Klobuchar- 5.7%
• Yang- 3.3%
• Booker- 2.7%
• Steyer- 2.0%

Pig man will do anything he can to make sure Democrats nominate Biden, the easiest candidate for him to beat

Is There A Worse Political Reporter Than Sydney Ember Anywhere? Spoiler: No

Actual enemy of the people

Every now and then, I mention that this Belway reporter or that Beltway reporter is really nothing but a piece of runny dog shit. Sydney Ember is one of those and when I started writing about what a worthless scumbag she was I thought she was a he. It's hard to get away with calling a woman a worthless scumbag-- even if she obviously is one-- but no one objects much when it's a male. Now that I know Sydney is a woman, I have to think of new ways to describe her worthlessness. Katie Halper did a good job of describing one of the NY Times most anti-progressive fake reporters in a new piece for FAIR, Sydney Ember’s Secret Sources. Halper's piece is basically about a prejudiced journalist passing off her opinions as news. "NYT reporter hides corporate ties of Sanders critics she highlights," wrote Halper. "Ember has a problem with Bernie Sanders-- which may be why the paper has her cover him."

Journalist Skip Kaltenheuser wondered how, "with such a stacked deck against him, Bernie has the ability to keep punching. What has happened to The Times' editors that they accept this sort of propaganda rot off the editorial pages? I can’t imagine it doesn’t infuriate those Times reporters who still care about their integrity. Katie Halper’s article on Ember ought to be on the shelf next to Thomas Frank’s Swat Team."

"Ember," wrote Halper, "is supposed to write reported articles, not op-eds, but she consistently paints a negative picture of Sanders’ temperament, history, policies and/or political prospects in the over two dozen pieces she’s done on him. This makes sense, given the New York Times’ documented anti-Sanders bias, which can be found among both editors and reporters alike."

The paper was caught making significant changes, without acknowledging them, to a 2016 article on Sanders hours after it went up:  It changed the headline (from “Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years via Legislative Side Doors,” to “Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories”); deleted a positive quote from a campaign advisor; and added two negative paragraphs. Even after the paper’s public editor chastised the Times for the practice known as stealth editing, the editors defended the changes because they “thought [the article]  should say more about his realistic chances.” In its original form, the article didn’t cast enough doubt on Sanders’ viability and ability to govern, in other words.

Ember came to the New York Times with a resumé limited to the finance industry: She was an analyst for BlackRock, the biggest global investment management corporation, and the largest investor in coal plant developers in the world. (Her husband, Mike Bechek, is also in the investment business; he was a senior associate consultant at Bain Capital, where his father was CEO.)

Bechek and Ember

Ember was hired by the Times in 2014 to cover advertising and marketing for the paper’s business vertical Dealbook. She started covering politics in May 2018, and immediately got the enviable assignment of covering one of the leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

Ember has a multi-prong approach to undermining Sanders: She went to great lengths to avoid calling him the frontrunner until he was “no longer” one;  she attributes his political positions to attention-getting, self-serving ulterior motives; frames even his victories and the popularity of his ideas as weaknesses; cherry-picks polls; presents opinions as facts (claiming he’s “outflanked on the left by rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Beto O’Rourke”); and creates false equivalency between Sanders and Donald Trump.

But for the sake of time and length, this piece focuses on her selection and misrepresentation of sources, which have already drawn scrutiny. Brad Johnson, a political analyst with a background in climate science pointed out that Ember quoted a source without mentioning that she’s a corporate lobbyist; journalist Zaid Jilani noted that Ember failed to disclose that another source was a senior advisor for a Hillary Clinton Super PAC. Education scholar Diane Ravitch devoted a blog post to the reporter’s “shameful” reporting on Sanders’ education policy, questioning the authority of her sources.

Ember’s articles on Sanders (sometimes co-written with other Times reporters) often quote as neutral authorities individuals who are on the other side of a wide ideological divide, with longstanding antipathies to Sanders’ left socioeconomic perspective. Moreover, many of these “experts” are corporate lobbyists, whose work in a particular area is not guided by academic, journalistic or other professional standards, but by the economic and political interests of their clients. Ember spins the identity of her authorities, who are themselves professional spinners.

Consider Ember’s March 1 article, which opened with the kind of unflattering headline her stories often bear: “Bernie Sanders Is Making Changes for 2020, but His Desire for Control Remains.” (Headlines, of course, are chosen by editors, not reporters, but in these stories they reflect the slant of the text.) The piece ended on a typically ominous note: “Even if Mr. Sanders does talk more about himself, his competition presents a new set of challenges that his own biography may only compound,” Ember wrote. She brings in an expert to prove her point: “‘At the end of the day, he is still an old white man,’ said Tracy Sefl, a veteran Democratic strategist.”

Sefl is hardly a disinterested authority; she’s a paid political consultant and media specialist who worked as a surrogate and senior advisor for Hillary Clinton. Other outlets mention Sefl’s experience working for Clinton when they cite her, including the New York Times, which has identified her as someone “supporting Mrs. Clinton,” someone who “worked for Mrs. Clinton,” and a “Democratic consultant and Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter.”

A New York Times story (10/22/07) on the 2008 Clinton campaign’s relationship with the right-wing Drudge Report identified Sefl as someone “who has established a friendly working relationship with Mr. Drudge-- and through whom Mrs. Clinton’s campaign often worked quietly to open a line of communication.” The paper also noted that her “fingerprints are usually impossible to spot.” Sefl admitted in an interview (Chicago, 7/13/15):

My solo consultancy doesn’t have a name, quite purposely so. I do often collaborate with other consultants, including Republicans—within reason—when the work warrants it.

Reporter Zaid Jilani caught Ember’s omission, tweeting that she didn’t “note [Sefl] was senior adviser to Ready for Hillary Super PAC or that she was a hired gun at a Republican-led firm Navigators Global.” The piece has since been updated-- without notice-- to describe Sefl as “a veteran Democratic strategist and formerly a senior adviser to the Super PAC Ready for Hillary.”

Sefl’s choice of phrase, “an old white man,” is surely a crude description for someone who, as he has explained, has a strong Jewish identity, shaped in part by his father’s side of the family having been “wiped out” in the Holocaust, and growing up a working-class Jew in Brooklyn. If successful, Sanders would be the first Jewish president of the United States. But Sefl’s dismissive description is consistent with the way Clinton campaign loyalists and much of corporate media continue to weaponize identity politics against Sanders, erasing not only his Jewish identifty, but also his anti-racist record and his supporters of color.

Ember’s February 17 article, “Bernie Sanders Stumbled With Black Voters in 2016. Can He Do Better in 2020?,” published two days before Sanders announced his candidacy, predicted that “his weak track record with black voters-- a vital base in the Democratic Party-- could be a potential threat to his candidacy.” Echoing the conventional wisdom of the 2016 campaign, the piece made no mention of the CNN poll issued two months earlier that found Sanders had a higher approval rating with nonwhite voters than any other major candidate.

Ember’s March 29 article, “Bernie Sanders Says ‘No’ to Incrementalism, Highlighting Divide Among Democrats,” started with a neutral enough headline, but ended with a harsh critique by a fierce Sanders opponent, whose politics the reporter misrepresents:

“The path to the White House and to majorities has to be in a pragmatic, progressive area,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for Policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “If you go too far left, Donald Trump gets re-elected and Republicans control both houses of Congress.”

“Our heads are in the clouds, but our feet are also on the ground at the same time,” he added. He cited his group’s universal healthcare plan, which he said was “just as ambitious” as Mr. Sanders’ proposed “Medicare for all.” There was, however, a key difference.

“It just doesn’t blow up the system,” Mr. Kessler said. “It builds on the existing system.”

But Third Way is a fiscally conservative, not a “center left,” think tank. Given the state of public opinion, a group that pushes to cut Social Security and Medicare, and calls raising taxes on billionaires “soaking the rich,” is to the right of centrist. In 2013, of 29 trustees on Third Way’s board, 20 were investment bankers, three were CEOs and two were corporate lawyers.

Third Way’s “about” section reads, “Our work is grounded in the mainstream American values of opportunity, freedom and security.” They continue, “But we identify as center-left, because we see that space in US politics as offering the only real path for advancing those ideals in the century ahead.” For Third Way, identifying as “center-left” is lip service, a strategic necessity in a nation that has moved to the left and whose demographics promise a more diverse and left electorate to come.

Ember chooses the label that Third Way uses for itself, because if she accurately identified its corporatist mission and positions, she could not use one of its leaders as an objective authority on the efficacy of Bernie Sanders’ proposal of free healthcare for all. It would be obvious that Third Way’s healthcare plan was in no way as ambitious as Sanders’, and that it was using the term “universal” to undermine single payer.

Reflecting its function as a corporate advocate for moving the Democratic Party to the right, Third Way has consistently disparaged Sanders and progressive politics in general. In a 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed (12/2/13), Kessler (and Third Way co-founder and president Jon Cowan) declared that “economic populism is dead,” urging Democrats not to follow Elizabeth Warren and Bill deBlasio “over the populist cliff.” Kessler singled out Sanders in a USA Today op-ed (12/15/17), declaring, “Take It From Voters, Democrats Don’t Want a Bernie Sanders.”

In October 2018, Third Way’s executive vice president Matt Bennet (who can be seen in this video (below) refusing to disclose how much money his think tank gets from Wall Street) disqualified Sanders as a presidential candidate: “The exception is Sen. Sanders. We’re open to everybody except for him.” That would seem to make the organization an odd source to go to to evaluate Sanders’ policy proposals.



But Ember turned to Kessler again in her April 27 article, “Bernie Sanders Opens Space for Debate on Voting Rights for Incarcerated People,” to comment on Sanders’ call to enfranchise the incarcerated:

“There’s a difference between felons who are in prison for nonviolent offenses and those who are in for capital offenses,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. Mr. Sanders’ remarks, he added, “seemed like a bit of a stumble.”

The comment seemed like a bit of a stumble for Kessler, into an area where he has no evident expertise, and, interestingly, where Third Way hardly wades.

Ember’s May 17 article, “Mayor and ‘Foreign Minister’: How Bernie Sanders Brought the Cold War to Burlington,” presented as problematic and incriminating the senator’s support of Nicaraguan Sandinistas and his opposition to the CIA-backed Contra rebels trying to overthrow them-- whose systematic pattern of gross human rights violations in the 1980s included death squad assassination, kidnapping, rape, mutilation and torture. In a subsequent interview, Ember’s first and apparently most pressing question to Sanders was whether he had heard an anti-American chant at a rally he and approximately 499,999 other people attended. Her second question was whether he would have stayed at the event if he had heard it.

While NBC’s Meet the Press (5/19/19) and New York’s Jonathan Chait (5/27/19) accepted and amplified Ember’s framing, other journalists and historians familiar with Latin American history condemned the piece as context-lacking  “neo-McCarthyite,” “‘anti-American’ baiting,” “only slightly more subtle than Fox News.” Calling the piece “fundamentally ahistorical” “bothsidesism,” the Long Version’s Jonathan Katz (5/20/19) wrote that Ember doesn’t “have much experience covering foreign affairs in general or Latin America in particular. It shows.” Journalist Ryan Cooper (The Week, 5/29/19) quipped, “Americans should be very concerned about Bernie Sanders’ record of opposing mass murder.”

For this article on Sanders’ foreign policy past, Ember thought it would be appropriate to get a quote from a significant player in the Iran/Contra scandal:

Otto J. Reich, a former special envoy for Latin America who helped oversee Nicaragua policy for the Reagan administration, said that by the middle of the 1980s a politician like Mr. Sanders “should have known better” than to fawn over Mr. Ortega.

Reagan’s “Nicaragua policy” involved illegally funding the terrorist Contras in an effort to overthrow the elected Sandinista government. And he oversaw it as director of the now defunct State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, working with CIA propaganda experts and Army psy-ops specialists, leaking hoaxes, spreading rumors, smearing, and pressuring and threatening reporters,  in order to whitewash the Contras and demonize the Sandinistas.

Reich’s office was condemned by the U.S. Comptroller General, the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Iran/Contra Committee and a House Foreign Affairs committee for conducting “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” including psychological operations (psy-ops) “beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.”



Ember, though, offers Reich as an expert witness on Sanders’ Cold War activities:

“He has, by virtue of these travels and associations, joined up with some of the most repressive regimes in the world,” Mr. Reich said of Mr. Sanders, alluding to his visit to Nicaragua and subsequent trips to the Soviet Union and Cuba.

Speaking of travels and associations, as well as Cuba, Ember fails to mention that Reich has worked as a lobbyist for Bacardi-Martini and Lockheed Martin, and tried to get an anti-Castro terrorist a US visa. As historian Greg Grandin told me in an interview (Katie Halper Show, 6/4/19):

The Office of Public Diplomacy was one of the most corrupting and degrading instruments of democracy you can imagine…. It was a destabilization  and disinformation campaign.

“People like Sydney Ember,” he noted, are “the product of that reeducation.”

Back to domestic issues, Ember ended her May 23 article, “Sanders’ Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation,” on a predictably down note:

But while the charter-school issue might be relevant in cities, Mr. Loadholt said, it was hardly top-of-mind for voters in the state’s expansive rural areas, where charter schools are rare. “To a hammer, everything is a nail,” he said. “And to Sanders, everything is an issue created by millionaires and billionaires.”

Ember describes Jarrod Loadholt as “a Democratic strategist who has worked on education policy in South Carolina.” This obfuscating description was one of the many things that led Diane Ravitch to write her blog post, “The New York Times vs. Senator Bernie Sanders. ” I’ll let Ravitch explain:

The real stinker in the Times’ article comes at the end, where the writers quote someone unfamiliar to me. I know many education activists in South Carolina, but I have never run across Jarrod Loadholt…. I googled. He is a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, DC, who was born in South Carolina. I can find no evidence of any involvement by him in any education issues. His specialty seems to be consumer finance. Why was he called upon to put down Senator Sanders’ factual statement that the Waltons, the DeVos family and hedge fund managers are behind the push for charter schools? Senator Sanders made his statement in South Carolina, and Loadholt was born there. South Carolina has dreadful education policy. When did Loadholt work on it and with what results? To the naked eye, he was called upon as a Beltway insider to cut Bernie Sanders down with a false statement. Shameful.

In fact, there are no traces of Loadholt having worked on any education policy. When I tweeted out Ravitch’s piece, he responded, “Lol. I guess if you’re a lawyer or a lobbyist, you could at no point in your life worked on ed policy in SC.” When I asked him if he had worked on education policy, he replied, “My quote speaks for itself. And it’s like a month old.” Loadholt has also tweeted that Sanders is “like a rash.”

Loadholt does have experience as a lobbyist and currently works at Pine Street Strategies, a lobbying firm whose clients include Anheuser-Busch and the National Bankers Association (NBA). It was in his capacity as an NBA lobbyist that Loadholt defended a sweeping rollback of Dodd/Frank banking regulations.  Dubbed the Bank Lobbyist Act by critics, which included the NAACP, the bill made it easier for banks to discriminate against communities of color. Loadholt, however, dismissed the concerns: “[Black] banks don’t have the luxury of waiting on a perfect bill…. If we thought the [bill] did substantial damage to African-Americans, we would not support it.”

Then there’s the June 12 article, originally headlined “Sanders Delivers Defense of His Democratic Socialist Philosophy” and later renamed “Bernie Sanders Calls His Brand of Socialism a Pathway to Beating Trump,” where Ember quoted as an authority Mary Anne Marsh, whom she described as “a Democratic strategist in Boston who worked for Senators Senators John Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy.” Marsh did not mince words in her assessment of Sanders’ politics, policies and electability:

Most Democrats running don’t subscribe to Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism and his economic policies. Ultimately, Bernie Sanders giving this speech will appeal to his base and no one else, and it gives fodder to Trump and the Republicans.

But the woman linking Sanders’ socialist rhetoric to a Trump victory is not just a Democratic strategist. When reporters at places like the Financial Times, CNBC, NPR, Yahoo! Business and Jewish News Services quote her, they cite her as a principal at the Dewey Square Group, a lobbying and public relations firm. Dewey Square’s corporate clients have included Allegiance Healthcare Corporation, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Coca-Cola, Collegiate Funding Services, Countrywide Mortgage, DuPont, General Motors Corporation, Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA), Mortgage Insurance Companies of America, Purdue Pharma, Starbucks, United Health Group. The US Chamber of Commerce hired the firm to fight for caps on damages that can be paid in lawsuits; the National Restaurant Association paid them to fight against a law that made it easier for unions to organize workers; and Fix the Debt to push its austerity astroturf campaign to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

When Dewey Square was caught (CJR, 2/24/09) tricking senior citizens into signing letters to the editor on behalf of its client Medicare Advantage, Marsh tried to blame the hapless victims who had been lured to events with door prizes and free food and were unaware of what they were signing, positing, “The time that elapsed between the meetings when the seniors saw the letters and the letters’ arrival at the newspaper may have clouded some memories.”

Her career as a lobbyist for many of the industries that would be most impacted by Sanders’ proposals might explain Marsh’s obvious animus against the candidate, as displayed in the May 20 edition of her weekly Fox News column, “Bernie Sanders’ Incredible Shrinking Candidacy-- Why He Won’t Be Dem Nominee.” One of Sanders’ apparent insurmountable weaknesses, she wrote, is that people “remember Sanders didn’t support Clinton in the general election against Trump.” People with better memories recall that Sanders was one of the most energetic surrogates for Clinton on the campaign trail, campaigning constantly for her in battleground states (New Yorker, 11/4/16).

Marsh is right when she says that “most Democrats running don’t subscribe to Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism,” which is why he’s seen as a unique threat to those who promote rapacious profiteering in the areas of finance, health care, education and the military. Third Way made that clear, once again, at a conference they held last week, where its co-founder Matt Bennett singled out Sanders’ vision from his opponents’: “One is a Democratic capitalist narrative…. The other is a socialist narrative,” notably omitting the “Democratic” descriptor for the latter.

By presenting her sources as objective authorities, instead of paid lobbyists and austerity ideologues, Ember both conceals and advances their agenda, undermining the integrity of the Fourth Estate, our democracy, and one of the most popular politicians.

Regardless Of Partisan Affiliation, The Billionaire Class Has Always Been Afraid Bernie Would Take Away Their Toys-- And Now He May

Establishment Democrats have always hated Bernie. Most people are unaware that when Bernie first ran for Congress-- as an independent-- the Democratic Party ran establishment candidates against him. In his first congressional campaign (1988) the Democrats ran a conservative spoiler, Paul Poirier, state House majority leader, who allowed a Republican, Peter Smith win the seat:

• Peter Smith (R)- 98,937 (41.2%)
• Bernie (I)- 90,026 (37.5%)
• Paul Poirier (D)- 43,330 (18.9%)

Some in the Democratic Party didn't give a rat's ass; they opposed Bernie as vigorously as they opposed Smith, maybe more so. And in 1990, they ran an African-American woman, Dolores Sandoval, in the hope of pulling away votes from Bernie, whose popularity was surging. They knew she had no chance to win, but they preferred to see the Republican incumbent reelected than the independent SOCIALIST win. But the independent socialist did win... and by a lot:

• Bernie (I)- 117,522 (56.0%)
• Peter Smith (R)- 82,938 (39.5%)
• Dolores Sandoval (D)- 6,315 (3.0%)

Bernie entered Congress in January of 1991 and began caucusing with the Democrats. The Party didn't like his influence and the Democratic establishment wanted to get rid of him ASAP. He talked about how the Democrats and the Republicans represented the interests of wealthy donors, not the interests of working families. It hit a nerve with the Democrats because it was true and it was embarrassing for them. In 1991, he founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus which he hoped would offer progressives a way of distinguishing themselves from Democrats. (Brief tangent: The current co-chair, Mark Pocan, a more conventional liberal Democrat, must have lost sight of that when he started recruiting New Dems into the caucus, watering it down and wrecking its credibility.) In 1992, the Democrats ran Lewis Young in the hope of taking away enough votes from Bernie to allow the seat to flip back to the GOP. The disgusting strategy failed again-- and Bernie's popularity soared:

• Bernie (I)- 162,724 (57.78%)
• Tim Philbin (R)- 86,901 (30.86)
• Lewis Young (D)- 22,279 (7.91%)

Howard Dean, then Governor of Vermont, had had enough and persuaded the state Democratic Party to back Bernie. Nonetheless, four years later, the establishment Democrats were flipping out about "the Socialist" and tried the same tired trick, which once again, flopped:

• Bernie (I)- 140,678 (55.2%)
• Susan Sweetser (R)- 83,021 (32.5%)
• Jack Long (D)- 23,830 (9.3%)

That pretty much ended it-- although Democrat Larry Drown ran against Bernie in 2004, his last run for Congress-- and Bernie clobbered him and the Republican, taking 205,774 votes (67.5%). People in Vermont liked him, more than they liked either of the establishment political parties and their crappy candidates. Today, the wealthy donor class hates Bernie as much as they ever did-- whether the GOP wealthy donors or the Democratic Party wealthy donors. They know that when he says he's for change, it's real and profound change, not a few tweaks around the edges (Obama change). Last week, writing for the New Republic, Alex Shephard noted that Bernie's loudest opponents are party insiders who don't represent a political constituency of any significance-- and their strategy is self-defeating. Bernie is the frontrunner "and entering the White House in January of 2021 both seem increasingly possible, maybe even probable... [Bernie's] most vocal opponents in the party are an assemblage of establishmentarians and familiar Beltway hands, none of whom speak for a political constituency of any size or significance. Moreover, far from hurting Sanders, this impotent assault is self-defeating, fueling the narrative that party gatekeepers want, at all costs, to keep a political revolution from taking over the Democratic Party."

There is undoubtedly an ideological component of the anti-Sanders wing of the party that is often framed in practical terms. Attacks on Sanders (and other high-profile Democrats like Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez) often contend that left-wing goals like socialized medicine will be an electoral albatross, dooming the party to failure in battleground states. These arguments are rarely presented in policy terms, but it’s easy to draw a line between an opposition to Sanders rooted in the Democratic Party’s donor class and Sanders’s high-tax proposals and class-war rhetoric.

While there’s a growing backlist of articles detailing the resistance within Democratic fundraising circles, most of the criticisms of Sanders center around the question of “electability.” Media Matters founder David Brock told Politico last month that he believed that Sanders would struggle to unite the Democratic Party’s many unruly factions and that his sizable war chest would make it easy for him to stay in the race, even if there were little chance he could win. Former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill echoed this sentiment to the Times, saying, “One thing we have now that we didn’t in ’16 is the uniting force of Trump. There will be tremendous pressure on Bernie and his followers to fall in line because of what Trump represents.”

...There’s another possible, if unintended, effect of the growing challenges to Sanders from Democratic establishment circles, however. Trump’s best chance at victory doesn’t come from a democratic socialist claiming the nomination, but from a third-party candidate splitting the vote. Claims from Democratic stalwarts that Sanders can’t unseat the president are fool’s gold to self-funding candidates like Howard Schultz, who argues that a majority of voters are clamoring for a centrist, corporate candidate. If anyone is splitting the party and undercutting Democrats’ chances, if anyone is paving the way for a second Trump term, it isn’t Sanders—it’s his most obstinate and obstreperous opponents.

And that brings us right to Greg Jaffe's Washington Post piece from yesterday: Capitalism In Crisis: U.S. Billionaires Worry About The Survical Of The System That Made Them Rich. "For decades," he wrote, "Democrats and Republicans have hailed America's business elite, especially in Silicon Valley, as the country's salvation. The government might be gridlocked, the electorate angry and divided, but America's innovators seemed to promise a relatively pain-free way out of the mess. Their companies produced an endless series of products that kept the U.S. economy churning and its gross domestic product climbing. Their philanthropic efforts were aimed at fixing some of the country's most vexing problems. Government's role was to stay out of the way. Now that consensus is shattering. For the first time in decades, capitalism's future is a subject of debate among presidential hopefuls and a source of growing angst for America's business elite. In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart."

Americans still loved technology, Khanna said, but too many of them felt locked out of the country's economic future and were looking for someone to blame.

"What happened to us?" he imagined people in these left-behind places asking.

Part of Khanna's solution was to sign on as co-chairman of the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the democratic socialist who rose to the national stage by railing against "the handful of billionaires" who "control the economic and political life of this nation," and who disproportionately live in Khanna's district.

The other part of Khanna's solution was to do what he was doing now, talking to billionaire tech executives like Larsen who worried that the current path for both capitalism and Silicon Valley was unsustainable. Boosted by a cryptocurrency spike last year, Larsen's net worth had briefly hit $59 billion, making him the fifth-richest person in the world before the currency's value fell.

Without an intervention, he worried that wealth would continue to pile up in Silicon Valley and anger in the country would continue to grow.

"It seems like every company in the world has to be here," Larsen said. "It's just painfully obvious that the blob is getting bigger."

At some point, Larsen and Khanna worried, something was going to break.

The 2008 financial crisis may have revealed the weaknesses of American capitalism. But it was Donald Trump's election and the pent-up anger it exposed that left America's billionaire class fearful for capitalism's future.

Khanna was elected in 2016, just as the anxiety started to spread. In Europe, far-right nationalist parties were gaining ground. Closer to home, socialists and Trump-inspired nationalists were winning state and congressional elections.

Conversations of the sort that Khanna was having with Larsen were now taking place in some of capitalism's most rarefied circles including Harvard Business School, where last fall Seth Klarman, a highly influential billionaire investor, delivered what he described as a "plaintive wail" to the business community to fix capitalism before it was too late.



The setting was the opening of Klarman Hall, a new $120 million conference center, built with his family's donation. "It's a choice to pay people as little as you can or work them as hard as you can," he told the audience gathered in the 1,000-seat auditorium. "It's a choice to maintain pleasant working conditions... or harsh ones; to offer good benefits or paltry ones." If business leaders didn't "ask hard questions about capitalism," he warned that they would be asked by "ideologues seeking to point fingers, assign blame and make reckless changes to the system."

Six months after that speech, Klarman was struck by how quickly his dire prediction was coming to pass. Leading politicians, such as Trump, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) were advocating positions on tariffs, wealth taxes and changes in corporate governance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Klarman wasn't opposed to more progressive taxation or regulation. But he worried that these new proposals went much too far. "I think we're in the middle of a revolution-- not a guns revolution-- but a revolution where people on both extremes want to blow it up, and good things don't happen to the vast majority of the population in a revolution," he said.

He wasn't the only one who felt a sense of alarm. One of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, home to the next generation of Fortune 500 executives, was a class on "reimagining capitalism." Seven years ago, the elective started with 28 students. Now there were nearly 300 taking it. During that period the students had grown increasingly cynical about corporations and the government, said Rebecca Henderson, the Harvard economist who teaches the course.

"What the trust surveys say is what I see," she said. "They are really worried about the direction in which the U.S. and the world is heading."

A few dozen of those students spent their winter break reading Winners Take All, a book by Anand Giridharadas, a journalist and former McKinsey consultant, that had hit the bestseller list and was provoking heated arguments in places like Silicon Valley, Davos and Harvard Business School. Giridharadas' book was a withering attack on America's billionaire class and the notion that America's iconic capitalists could use their wealth and creativity to solve big social and economic problems that have eluded a plodding and divided government.

This spring, Giridharadas took his argument to Klarman Hall. He slammed Mark Zuckerberg, taking aim at the Facebook founder's $100 million effort to fix Newark's faltering schools and his $3 billion push to end disease in a generation. "I'm glad he's trying to get rid of all the diseases, [but] I wish Facebook wasn't a plague," Giridharadas said.

He trashed Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's independent presidential run as an effort to protect the interests of the uber-wealthy. And he lambasted the notion, frequently championed by the likes of Bill Gates and Barack Obama, that Silicon Valley's innovations would disrupt old hierarchies and spread capitalism's rewards. "Really?" Giridharadas asked. "Now five companies control America, instead of 100! And a lot of those companies are whiter and more male than the ones they disrupted."

For many of the students, schooled in the notion that business could make a profit while making the world a better place, Giridharadas' ideas were both energizing and disorienting. Erika Uyterhoeven, a second-year student, recalled one of her fellow classmates turning to her when Giridharadas was finished.

"So, what should we do?" her colleague asked. "Is he saying we shouldn't go into banking or consulting?"

Added another student: "There was a palpable sense of personal desperation."

Khanna experienced a version of this desperation almost every day in his district. He grew up in an overwhelmingly white, middle-class suburb of Philadelphia. After college and Yale Law School, he moved to Silicon Valley in 2003, hoping to use his training as a lawyer to help set the rules for a lawless online world.

In 2014, backed by the tech community and a long roster of billionaire donors, Khanna challenged an eight-term incumbent in a Democratic primary and lost. The defeat caused him to reflect on what he had missed-- in particular, the problems that runaway capitalism were causing in his district, where the median home value in formerly blue-collar cities surged past $2 million.

"The best thing that happened to me was that I lost my 2014 election," he said. "Had I won... maybe I would've been a traditional neoliberal. It really forced my self-reflection and it pointed out every weakness I ever had."

In California, Khanna's home is a small apartment around the corner from a Dollar Tree, one of only two in his district. His wife and two children live most of the year in Washington, where home values are cheaper.

His days are split between meetings with billionaires and his many constituents who are struggling to stay afloat amid Silicon Valley's success. "I am an 11-year renter with a master's degree," a teacher told him at a meeting with school employees. Her question wasn't about whether she would ever be able to afford a home, but about a fellow teacher who couldn't afford health insurance.

A few days earlier, he had met with two activists who wanted his help pressuring big tech companies to pay contract janitorial and cafeteria workers a living wage. Khanna agreed to host a press event on their behalf.

The billionaires in Khanna's district, meanwhile, were consumed by a different worry. Mixed in with the valley's usual frothy optimism about disruption and inventing the future was a growing sense that the tech economy had somehow broken capitalism. The digital revolution had allowed tech entrepreneurs to build massive global companies without the big job-producing factories or large workforces of the industrial era. The result was more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.

As technology advanced, some feared things were only going to get worse. Robots were eliminating much factory work; online commerce was decimating retail; and self-driving cars were on the verge of phasing out truck drivers. The next step was computers that could learn and think.

"What happens if you can actually automate all human intellectual labor?" said Greg Brockman, chairman of OpenAI, a company backed by several Silicon Valley billionaires. Such thinking computers might be able to diagnose diseases better than doctors by drawing on superhuman amounts of clinical research, said Brockman, 30. They could displace a large number of office jobs. Eventually, he said, the job shortages would force the government to pay people to pursue their passions or simply live. Only Andrew Yang, a long-shot presidential candidate and tech entrepreneur, supported the idea of government paying citizens a regular income. But the idea of a "universal basic income" was discussed regularly in the valley.

The prospect was both energizing and terrifying. OpenAI had recently added an ethicist-- Brockman sometimes referred to her as a "philosopher"-- to its staff of about 100 employees to help sort through the implications of its innovations. To Brockman, a future without work seemed just as likely as one without meat, a possibility that many in the valley viewed as a near certainty. "Once we have meat substitutes as good as the real thing, my expectation is that we're going to look back at eating meat as this terrible, immoral thing," he said. The same could be true of work in a future in an era of advanced artificial intelligence. "We'll look back and say, 'Wow, that was so crazy and almost immoral that people were forced to go and labor in order to be able to survive,'" he said.

Khanna heard such prophecies all the time but mostly discounted them as sci-fi fantasy. His focus was on fixing the version of capitalism that existed today. He often pleaded with big tech executives to spend just 10 percent of their time thinking about what they could do for their country and 90 percent to their companies.

The tougher question was exactly what he wanted them to do with that 10 percent.

On a warm spring evening, Khanna was trying to answer that question for about two dozen Silicon Valley tech executives, software engineers and venture capitalists. The group gathered at a $5 million Mediterranean-style villa perched atop a hill overlooking Cupertino, which glittered in the valley below.

Khanna described a December trip he organized to tiny Jefferson, Iowa, for a group of tech executives that included Microsoft's chief technology officer and a LinkedIn co-founder. The executives donated to the community college's scholarship fund and paid to equip its computer lab with the goal of training 25 to 35 students for software developer jobs, starting at $65,000 a year.

Khanna had made similar trips to West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky. The total number of jobs these trips produced was small, and the pay wasn't great. Still, Khanna believed they served a larger purpose. They proved that people in Silicon Valley cared about places like Jefferson, a rural town of only 4,200. They gave people hope that even the remotest parts of America could take part in the country's tech revolution.

The next step, Khanna told the executives at the mansion in Cupertino, California, was a $100 million effort to build 50 technology institutes, similar to land-grant colleges, to train workers in left-behind parts of America. Khanna had already introduced a bill that he admitted was unlikely to pass. But that wasn't really the point. "It sets a blueprint," he said.

Khanna's blueprint reflected his broader view of how to unite an increasingly polarized country. Many Democrats blamed Trump's victory and the country's divisions on racial tensions as the nation grew more diverse and whites lost their favored positions.

Khanna had a different view. He saw the country's problems primarily as the product of growing income inequality and a lack of opportunity.

Sometimes Khanna imagined what people in these left-behind parts of the country were thinking: Their grandparents had fought in World War II and helped build the country's industrial age economy. Now they worried people like Khanna, whose parents emigrated from India, were surging past them.

"They just got here, and they are doing really, really well," Khanna imagined these people saying. "What happened to us?"

...A few days after the meeting at the Cupertino mansion, Khanna was standing in front of 16,000 amped-up Sanders supporters. The San Francisco skyline rose in front of him and the Golden Gate Bridge spanned the bay behind him.

In his gray suit and pressed white shirt, the two-term congressman looked a bit out of place-- an emissary from establishment Washington crashing someone else's revolution. Khanna gave a brief speech introducing Sanders, who a few minutes later rushed onto the stage and into the same campaign spiel he had been delivering since the 2016 Democratic primaries.

He bashed the billionaire class and its influence over American elections. "Democracy means one person one vote and not billionaires buying elections," Sanders yelled in his Brooklyn growl.

"We say no to oligarchy," he continued. "Yes to democracy."

Khanna's eyes fixed on Steve Spinner, a big tech investor in Silicon Valley and major fundraiser for Obama's 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Spinner, who chaired Khanna's congressional win, was listening with his arms folded across his fleece vest.

"We dragged him out here," Khanna said. "He's about as far from Bernie as you can get."

Many of Khanna's billionaire supporters-- even those who worried about capitalism and inequality-- seemed genuinely puzzled by Khanna's affection for Sanders.

For Khanna it was simple: In Sanders, Khanna found a candidate who shared his diagnosis of the country's most vexing problems: inequality and the failures of unrestrained capitalism.

Sanders wasn't a perfect match for Khanna. Sanders didn't really understand the tech industry-- though he wasn't calling for the breakup of big tech companies like Warren and some other candidates. Warren's proposal, if executed, would hurt companies in Khanna's district and alienate some of his wealthiest backers.

Khanna wished Sanders would talk more about the greatness of the American economy and the power of the tech industry, when properly taxed and regulated, to lift people out of poverty. But on that score Khanna believed he could help Sanders.

"We can quibble over his plans to solve this issue or that issue," Khanna said. "But I have no doubt that if Bernie Sanders was in the White House, he'd wake up every day thinking, 'How do I solve structural inequality in America?'"

The 77-year-old socialist's speech had passed the one-hour mark and the crowd was still laughing, cheering, hooting and shouting.

"We're probably not going to get a lot of support from the one percent and the large profitable corporations," Sanders said.

A voice in the crowd screamed an expletive.

"That's OK," Sanders continued, "I don't need, and we don't want, their support."

The congressman in the gray suit gazed out at the crowd, which stretched to the back of the park. Khanna saw Sanders' revolution as an imperfect solution to a near-impossible problem. For now, though, it was the best he could find.

In past discussions on the same topic, I always got the idea that Khanna felt that Bernie would bring a moral urgency-- and system-defying zeal-- to issues of income inequality and unrestrained capitalism, which motivate both of them politically. It looks to me that Khanna, as one of the most prominent of Bernie's surrogates, used his interview or interviews with Jaffe to frame Bernie's policies in terms of far brighter American future, not just for the true-believers but for people who haven't been persuaded yet. If anything, it's this kind of perceptive reporting by Jaffe that will help expand Bernie's base. Let's hope so!