Progressives For Sale: Are Former Bernie Alumni Choosing a Payday Over Policy? HootHootBerns Follow Dec 30, 2018 · Unlisted

You may have read recent headlines making quite a stir about how some Bernie Sanders “alumni” are looking to work for Beto O’Rourke’s potential 2020 bid over Bernie’s.

What these reports likely have not told you about is how money — as it too often does — is potentially influencing at least some of these peculiar decisions.

Take, for instance, Kenneth Pennington, Hector Sigala and Elizabeth Bennett — co-founders of Middle Seat Consulting. One look at FEC records, and you quickly begin to realize why these “Bernie alumni” might be so keen to work for a member of the centrist New Democrat Coalition who even the Third Way saw fit to praise (“We are big Beto fans”).

This OpenSecrets list says it more plainly: in exchange for work in support of Beto’s 2018 Senate campaign, Middle Seat was paid a handsome sum of $18,133,750. The runner-up in money spent for Middle Seat’s services downright pales in comparison by at least a couple of orders of magnitude.

It doesn’t take a campaign finance expert to see Beto is good for Middle Seat’s business. $18 out of $20 million ain’t bad.

This is not to say just anyone who has purchased services from Middle Seat must, therefore, be questionable. After all, they do openly advertise themselves as former Bernie staffers committed to progressive causes. What honest progressive in need of such services wouldn’t get the warm-and-fuzzies about that?

However, one should ask why two open “partners” of Hillary Clinton’s latest organization, Onward Together — ColorOfChange and Indivisible — would see fit to purchase services from former Bernie staffers. Perhaps this is down to happenstance or coincidence, or these were transactions conducted in some spirit of “unity.”

Perhaps it is down to more simple coincidence that Kenneth Pennington also had a habit of butting heads with Jeff Weaver, ultimately walking out of the then barely-forming Our Revolution with others, to the cheers of oh-so-trusty reporters like Edward Isaac-Dovere and Alex Seitz-Wald.

Another coincidence? Pennington’s colleague from the Bernie days, who also happens to have followed him to work at Middle Seat —Aidan King.

Or, as Reddit once knew him by, vermonty_python.

You see, in addition to working for the Bernie campaign at the time, he was also a moderator of the SandersForPresident subreddit. And one day, in the middle of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, he happened to “panic” at a deluge of terrible comments entering a public online forum and closed the sub.

Evidently, Aidan was in such a panic over the flood of horrific comments that he responded to notorious, anti-Bernie subreddit “Enough_Sanders_Spam” tagging him with a plea to close SandersForPresident by asking them to “Stay Tuned,” closing the sub, then initially noting he included a “Cherney reference just for [them]” in the S4P closure post, but had “edited it out. Opted for professionalism instead.” He would later edit this post again — more than once — before all was over.

Needless to say, Aidan King is no longer a moderator of SandersForPresident.

In another interesting coincidence, Real Justice PAC has not only also purchased services from Middle Seat, but openly touts a partnership with the firm in outreach.

It just so happens that Real Justice PAC’s leadership includes Becky Bond and Zack Malitz — two more former “Bernie alumni” who have gone so far as to “pledge” to support Beto O’Rourke’s campaign, should he run.

In fact, Bond co-founded and runs Real Justice PAC with Shaun King, who also, quite coincidentally, has been throwing recent notes of “concern” towards a potential Bernie 2020 bid — even as he, currently, is a “fellow” at the Sanders Institute.

Note here that he specifically targets “senior staff” — which, I might add, could potentially include Jeff Weaver — the same Jeff Weaver that Middle Seat’s Pennington once left Our Revolution over.

The next day, Shaun also happened to speak more favorably towards Beto O’Rourke, and has since gone on to defend him from supposedly excessive “attacks.”

But this set of coincidences seems innocent enough — after all, honest enough reasons and conditions could lead a group of people to choose Beto over Bernie. We don’t know how close that business “partnership” is with Middle Seat, after all — they, too, could have simply chosen the group on their “former Bernie staffer credentials,” and also just so happen to be eyeing Beto over Bernie.

Innocent enough, that is, until you make the mistake of following the money.

Once again, the top donor has funded Real Justice PAC by large sums more than the next largest in the list.

Who is Cari Tuna? Turns out, she’s the wife of Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz. She was also quite the donor to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and has also more recently donated to earlier-mentioned Onward Together partner ColorOfChange.

Meanwhile, her husband has been busy donating to Moveon.org (whose recent 2020 poll also declared Beto the winner after “other” — polling which, Twitter rumor has it, may not have been working correctly). More interestingly, he’s also donated to Senate Majority PAC.

Why is Senate Majority PAC relevant? Well, they also happen to have been the primary source of funding for anti-Cruz super PAC Texas Forever — a matter even the mainstream media called out.

That $2 million from Dustin was about enough to cover Texas Forever’s affairs, funny enough. But I’m sure there’s nothing to see here, either.

By the way…did I mention our friend Becky Bond is also listed as the treasurer of Real Justice PAC?

Meaning, of course, she would better recognize than anyone else at the org who pays their bills.

This is why I hate money in politics. It, and the pursuit of it, is why we literally can’t have nice things.

I hope that I am somehow mistaken in my read of all of this— that these connections are an illusion, that all of these facets are down to myriad human errors and nothing untoward or hinting towards further “defection” the mainstream press will merrily parade to, for the 975th time, prove once and for all “the Bernie movement is dead.”

It is entirely plausible — in fact, it is all but certain — that at least some good people, whom harbor no ill will for the movement, nor malicious intent to undermine it, nor to exploit it simply to make a profit for oneself or one’s organization, have nonetheless been entangled in this web.

However, the connections laid here — in money, and those who no doubt stand to profit from such money — at the very least, appear incredibly suspect. They need to be confronted and addressed, and addressed soon by all parties involved. And I can only imagine what more an actual journalist or reporter— as opposed to a regular nobody on the internet who happened to do some FEC searches on a whim — could find, and what they could do with such information.

I have no taste for encouraging internal sowings of strife. I cannot stand COINTELPRO games. But I felt I no longer had a choice but to speak out on this information. I had come to fear choosing to ignore it — wishfully presuming I must be wrong, have no idea what I’m talking about, have my tinfoil hat on too tight, should keep my mouth shut, my head down, and not to risk hurting other allies —could and would do far more damage to us in the long run. This could have taken the form of betrayals we had not otherwise foreseen, exploitation by those who seek to co-opt and steer the movement back to the quieter, corporate-friendly fringes, and even poisonings of the well by those who would seek to use such information to sow senseless division rather than ask honest questions.

I hope our allies will understand this, address and course-correct the situation now playing out in cash before our eyes.

But if not, then I can only hope it’s because there’s little to nothing to see here, and that I’m full of shit.

And frankly, I’d rather be full of shit.