Deconstructing Democracy or: The Attempted Murder of an American Political Revolution
By Phil Creek
Chapter One
It was a joke….. At least that was how it was perceived and portrayed by establishment party leaders and the main stream media. When Bernie Sanders declared his candidacy for the democratic nomination for President of the United States, many viewed the scruffy out-spoken senator from Vermont as a humorous far-left fringe attempt to budge Hillary Clinton to the left. A feeble gesture of the progressive base designed to promote some hair-brained lefty socialist ideas in the spot-light of a national primary. Good for 15 seconds of commentary, a condescending smile, and an eye-rolling facial expression from the Talking Heads on CNN and MSNBC. Maybe a nice article or three on a couple of the progressive blogs… But nothing more. Certainly the Sanders campaign would be nothing that would threaten the carefully orchestrated, coordinated, and corporately approved candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
As the 2016 democratic primary season progressed something… odd…. Was starting to happen. Odd, at least, from the perspective of the DNC party machine. The scruffy senator from Vermont was actually attracting support! And not from Wall Street or multi-national banks or large insurance corporations or even some massive Super-PAC funded by Dark Money. That Bernie guy, the Democratic SOCIALIST was getting the support of… well… people? Average American People? Why would they support this guy who can’t even seem to keep his hair combed? It didn’t matter… The Powers That Be had spoken, the Candidate had been chosen, the message vetted, polished, gone over by the best political strategists the corporatist establishment could muster and packaged for the mere formality of a primary season. It was the traditional message of ambiguity. A platform designed to pay lip-service to the progressive base while the banks and political power-brokers were assured (behind closed doors) that there was no need for concern, the fix was in, their profit margins were safe and the status quo would continue…. This was the perception of the establishment.
But still…..memories of the 2008 embarrassment began to surface in the minds of the political machinery… Better start sending the message out to down-play the joke-candidacy supported by those silly know-nothings in the progressive base…
And so the Bernie-Black-Out fell across Main Stream Media. It wasn’t really that difficult a goal to achieve. After all, CNN was owned by Time-Warner, which was one of the top ten corporate donors to the Clinton campaign. On MSNBC, Chris Mathews had a wife running for office, and her largest campaign contributors were Big-Money backers and friends of the Clintons. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post all were safely in the pocket of the DNC and the corporate establishment. Even with On-Line media, entities like Blue Nation Revue had been purchased by Clinton allies and operatives. All in all it was easy enough to get the message across…. Don’t mention Bernie. Don’t talk him up. If Bernie Sanders DOES come up, dismiss him with a left-handed compliment (Bernie is doing well considering how OLD he is….) and follow up with 10 minutes of pro-Hillary commentary…
In the late summer of 2015 all was well in Establishment land. Hillary was polling around 60% nationally (Sure, she had been at 80% but it was just a hick-up, nothing serious. Besides, it gives the illusion of choice for the masses.). That Sanders guy was getting a few crowds, but those crowds were dutifully dismissed by the pundits. Coverage was kept to a minimum. Out of sight out of mind after all….
But then, in late August, something weird happened. One of the candidates, and it turned out NOT to be Bernie Sanders, took to a podium and blasted the Democratic National Committee on the subject of there only being 8 debates scheduled. And that the debates were scheduled in a way to guarantee the minimal amount of viewing possible in order to prevent any support growing for a candidate other that Hillary Clinton. “This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before," Candidate Martin O'Malley expounded. O’Malley added, "We are the Democratic Party, not the UN-democratic party." Not only had O’Malley DARED to say this, but had said it with Debbie Wasserman Shultz sitting not 10 feet away…. The look she gave him would have cut through solid steel… No one was supposed to notice. No one was supposed to SAY anything about how the DNC had set up the process to nominate Hillary Clinton and ONLY Hillary Clinton for the top of the democratic ticket… Heads would roll, retribution would be swift, and Martin O’Malley was affectively black-listed by the Party, rarely to be heard from, if at all, from then on.
But the cat, as they say, was out of the bag. The voters had been given a glimpse of the machinations which happen behind the closed doors of board rooms between political operatives and corporate handlers and a tiny peek at how the “democratic process” is manipulated…. It still didn’t worry the Powers that Be at the time. After all, they had tied up nearly all the endorsements from the democratic members of the U.S. Senate. Elizabeth Warren hadn’t come around, but most of the others had fallen in line. The Super-Delegates had been bought off via a partnership of the DNC and the Hillary Victory Fund, with state party affiliates acting as the bag-men for the bribes. The Bernie-Black-Out was still in full swing and an army of “online political strategists” (internet trolls) was on hand to weaken or attack any support for any candidate whose initials were not HRC.
Things were still well in hand….
( More to Come in Chapter 2! )