With Sen. Bernie Sanders surging in the polls, DNC chair Tom Perez has put forward a cartoonishly neoliberal cast of foreign policy hacks and corporate lobbyists to sabotage his nomination.
Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez has nominated dozens of lobbyists, corporate consultants, think tank board members, and former officials linked to Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns to serve on the Democratic National Convention (DNC) nominating committee this July.
Many of Perez’s nominees are vocal opponents of Senator Bernie Sanders and spoke out against his campaign when he challenged Hillary Clinton for the nomination in 2016.
Just as it did in 2016, the DNC appears determined to sabotage a Sanders nomination, foisting a collection of neoliberal and imperialist hacks onto the convention committee to hold back a popular rebellion against the policies of endless war and corporate free trade they have personally presided over.
Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez issued a list of individuals he nominated for the 2020 Democratic National Convention committees.
Let’s examine some of the individuals. I’ll initially focus on the nominees for the DNC Platform Committee.
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— Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) January 25, 2020
Only a small percentage of those on the roster, such as Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen, are even remotely aligned or sympathetic to Sanders’ progressive agenda, and many of them are 2020 superdelegates.
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Though the Democratic Party reduced the influence of superdelegates after a backlash from Sanders supporters, over 700 superdelegates will be able to vote as part of a brokered convention if Sanders is not the nominee after the first ballot. They would not have to vote for Sanders, even if he won a majority of pledged delegates in their state’s caucus or primary.
Sanders could secure enough pledged delegates to win on the first ballot and still find his agenda thwarted by the standing committees. For example, members of the DNC’s Platform Committee beholden to corporate interests could vote against including “Medicare For All” or a ban on natural fracking in the agenda of policies they plan to fight for in 2020.
A close look at the list Perez offers a gruesome vision of morally repugnant operatives rigging the game on behalf of a desperate and increasingly discredited party elite.
Torture cover-ups, Russia fear-mongering, and lobbyist glad-handling
Denis McDonough was nominated to chair the Platform Committee. He was Obama’s chief of staff during his second term. McDonough is senior principal for the Markle Foundation and a chair of the Rework America Task Force.
In 2018, McDonough partnered with Heidi Capozzi, senior vice president of human resources at Boeing, to form the Rework America Business Network. It included eleven founding members: Aon, Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM), Boeing, Duke Energy, Kaiser Permanente, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, Stanley Black & Decker, Walmart, Zurich Insurance, and 21st Century Fox.” The network received support from Google.
Acting on behalf of the CIA, McDonough pushed for more redactions in the torture report summary that was ultimately released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He was a close ally of CIA Director John Brennan and fought for Brennan when the Senate delayed his nomination over his past support for torture. He also advised Obama on how to develop the drone program, which involved a kill list of alleged terrorism suspects to be assassinated extrajudicially.
Perez nominated Jake Sullivan to be a vice-chair of the Platform Committee. Sullivan was a national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. He also worked as a deputy chief of staff for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and was a senior policy adviser for Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
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Sullivan is a member of the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Advisory Council, which also includes Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security secretary, Bill Kristol, a neoconservative who pushed for the Iraq War, Michael McFaul, the former United States ambassador to Russia, Mike Morell, the former CIA director, John Podesta, former Clinton campaign chairman, and Mike Rogers, the former Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal has documented, the Alliance For Securing Democracy is a factory of modern-day McCarthyism, where it brands alternative media outlets as “vehicles for Kremlin propaganda” and paints actual people as Russian bots to discredit dissent against U.S. foreign policy.
An email chain in the “Podesta Emails” that WikiLeaks published in 2016 showed Clinton offering support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement if she was elected. It would have to pass some tests, but as Sullivan indicated environmental protections were not required. “Enviro was not a test.”
Sullivan did not believe the Clinton campaign could limit contributions from lobbyists or their clients because “clients” might be difficult to define. They could advocate for stronger bribery laws to limit the political influence of donations on legislation, but that would be “really dicey territory” for Clinton, he added.
