Ash writes: "Joe Biden's candidacy had the same purpose as Michael Bloomberg's: they were designed, planned, and promoted to derail the most popular and most trusted candidate in America, Bernie Sanders. No, it was not a fair fight, not even close."



Bernie Sanders campaigning in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 2019. (photo: Mark Makela/Getty Images)

The Political Assassination of Bernie Sanders

By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News

oe Biden’s candidacy had the same purpose as Michael Bloomberg’s: they were designed, planned, and promoted to derail the most popular and most trusted candidate in America, Bernie Sanders. No, it was not a fair fight, not even close.

Why would the Democrats, Bloomberg, and the cable news oracles go so far out of their way to bring down the Bernie Sanders campaign at any cost? Easy — when Sanders says he wants to “take on the special interests,” what the Democrats and their allies hear him saying is that he wants to get between them and the flow of money from those special interests. Yes, they were willing, as The New York Times put it, to “Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders.” Party damage and a whole lot more. More on that later.

Michael Bloomberg was up front when he entered the race that he was entering the race to stop Bernie Sanders. Specifically because Joe Biden wasn’t running a good enough campaign against Sanders. No, Bloomberg’s campaign was not a flop or a waste of his five-hundred-million-dollar investment, it was money strategically spent to achieve an objective. At this point, it’s on track to be a successful investment.

Joe Biden’s reason for entering the campaign late was virtually the same. Biden was not necessarily considered a strong candidate to defeat Donald Trump. He was encouraged to run because he would have the full backing of the Democratic Party machine for the purpose of preventing Bernie Sanders from getting the Democratic nomination. That machine includes two powerful cable networks, who could be counted on to put their full weight behind Biden and against Sanders.

Cable giants MSNBC and CNN, owned by NBCUniversal Media and WarnerMedia respectively, are ostensibly broadcast arms of Comcast in the case of MSNBC, and AT&T in the case of CNN, but when it comes to political policy they also function as Democratic Party oracles. At a price.

MSNBC, CNN, Comcast and AT&T are all subject to various forms of government regulation. If the government is friendly to their needs, legislation is produced that allows them to boost profits, often at the cost of consumers.

In the days leading up to the Super Tuesday primary contests, MSNBC and CNN generated a non-stop media blitz of coverage favorable to Biden and unfavorable to Sanders. It was a massive unreported campaign contribution to the Biden campaign.

This has been a five-year coordinated effort to derail and delegitimize the most popular and trusted political candidate in America because he has the audacity to try to separate public policy from private money.

What the Democratic Party and its cable news oracles are doing by engaging in this scorched-earth campaign against Sanders’s reforms risks far more than “Democratic Party damage.” At stake are four more years of Donald Trump’s lawlessness, the effective termination of the American Republic and the rule of law, the destruction of the NATO Alliance, and the rise of the Russian Federation in the power vacuum and a whole lot more.

The argument that Biden is better suited to defeat Trump than is Sanders is a scarlet red herring. If true, Biden would not have needed such extraordinary assistance, which he absolutely did.

The Democratic Party must not be the Anti-Democratic party. What the Democratic Party is proving is that its nominating process is a show and a sham and doesn’t actually have anything to do with how the nomination is won or who wins it. This is the same old top-down Democratic Party. The voters aren’t there to make decisions, they are there to do what the party instructs them to do.

So much for free and fair elections.

Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.