Yesterday, Joe Biden bested the previous record first day fundraising total held by Bernie Sanders with $6.3 million, which the campaign said included a “high dollar fundraiser”. That fundraiser was hosted by Comcast’s senior executive vice president David Cohen, who leads the company’s lobbying efforts in Washington D.C.
Comcast is the largest cable company in the world. They spent nearly $200 million in lobbying to achieve the recent killing of the 2015 net neutrality rules President Obama put in place.
But wait, you say, Uncle Joe was VP in 2015, so doesn’t that mean he supports Net Neutrality? Turns out, not so much, according to Sludge:
In 2006, when he was a senator from Delaware serving on the Judiciary Committee, Biden said that he did not think net neutrality rules were needed. “[Biden] indicated that no preemptive laws were necessary because if violations do happen, such a public outcry will develop that ‘the chairman will be required to hold this meeting in this largest room in the Capitol, and there will be lines wandering all the way down to the White House,’” CNET reported.
In 2007, Biden declined to co-sponsor the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, a bipartisan bill that would have amended the Communication Act of 1934 to include net neutrality protections.
Comcast was a top contributor to Biden’s Senate campaigns, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Individuals affiliated with the company gave Biden $84,500 from 1989-2010.
A lot of people have been using the hilariously ironic-sounding term “donor bias” to refer to me and a lot of other Bernie Sanders supporters’ claims that where you get your money from matters. But this just reiterates that it DOES matter. Without a bipartisan bill in 2006/7, the Obama administration was required to work through the FCC, which is an agency easily captured by industry, as it was when Trump appointed Ajit Pai, who reversed the 2015 rules. Those rules mattered. Here’s what NYU Law Professor Christopher Jon Sprigman says it means that they were repealed:
The effect of a repeal will be felt immediately by companies that are trying to launch business models that depend on access to consumers through broadband networks. I think those companies will feel the increased reluctance of venture capitalists to fund them because they are going to be at mercy of the ISPs. Consumers, I expect, will feel a softening of competition over time. The variety of new services that they may be able to access will be reduced.
Bernie Sanders is unlike any other US politician where, in a country where politics is all about the $$$, he is managing to fundraise exclusively from the grassroots. Here is Noam Chomsky’s favorite political scientist on the question of how corporate money drives the US political system, Thomas Ferguson, on the historical significance of Sanders’ 2016 campaign:
With respect to the Sanders campaign, these tables show something we are confident is without precedent in American politics not just since the New Deal, but across virtually the whole of American history, waiving the dubious case of the legendary 1896 election: a major presidential candidate waging a strong, highly competitive campaign whose support from big business is essentially zero. We are hardly the first to notice this fact, but like many other others, we had trouble believing our eyes. Thus we checked carefully. Sanders stands out not only for the high percentage of small contributions, but the minuscule totals of large contributions in the aggregate. Later in this essay, when we consider the sectoral breakdown of contributions, we will see that the handful of small donations scattered among our counts of big business contributions to Sanders clearly derive from many lower level employees, not top management. The few large contributions arise from aggregated contributions from a handful of unions (the official union leadership of most unions supported Hillary Clinton, see below). In 2016, Bernie Sanders was sui generis – not at all comparable to Ron Paul, whose 2012 campaign was hoisted aloft in part by a Super PAC funded by Peter Thiel and other mega-donors (Ferguson et al., 2013). He was exactly what he appeared to be, something truly new under the American sun.
That same impossible achievement is continuing to unfold in real time, Bernie virtually tying Joe Biden, the Health Insurance industry’s great white hope to prevent Medicare for All, the architect of the Bankruptcy bill, the darling of Comcast, in first day funds raised despite the complete lack of big business support... we have only our numbers, and we’re still capable of winning. Please, consider making a small contribution to this political revolution.