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One observer called Sara Eisen's Iran War remarks a "glorious time capsule of this broken moment we are in."
CNBC anchor Sara Eisen was dragged on social media this week for on-air comments asking whether US President Donald Trump's threat to destroy Iran's civilization is good for investors.
As the US-Israeli war of choice on Iran and the Iranian military's closure of the Strait of Hormuz—through which around 20% of the world's oil is shipped—fueled volatility in global markets, Trump issued an ultimatum to Tehran: reach an agreement to reopen the vital waterway by Tuesday night, or “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."
While much of the world recoiled in horror at Trump's explicitly genocidal threat, Eisen, who co-hosts the cable business news network's "Squawk on the Street" program, opted for a different angle.
“This deadline that President Trump has set, 8:00 pm, has threatened to destroy a civilization. How does an investor process that?" she asked Tuesday. "Is it a bigger upside risk or downside risk?”
Reactions ranged from incredulity to outrage.
Journalist and writer Charlie Warzel called Eisen's remarks a "glorious time capsule of this broken moment we are in."
David Sirota—whose Oscar-nominated 2021 satirical comedy Don't Look Up skewers vapid TV hosts who filter the existential threat of an imminent comet impacting Earth through a profit-driven lens—asked, "What stage of corporate media is this?"
(Video by YouTube)
Eisen's comments are part of a societal landscape in which the price of a gallon of gasoline is a bigger concern for Americans than the US-Israeli slaughter of hundreds of Iranian children.
Numerous news and analysis articles lauded the profit potential of the Iran war. So have some Republican politicians.
“When this regime goes down, we’re gonna have a new Mideast,” US Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News last month. “We’re gonna make a ton of money."
Big Oil—which invested $445 million in electing Trump and other Republicans in 2024—and fossil fuel executives are doing just that, cashing in on the war with record-setting stock sales.
Journalist David Sirota writes that the cases, each firmly backed by the Trump administration, are aimed at "incinerating any remaining deterrents to pay-to-play corruption."
Fifteen years after the Citizens United ruling opened the gates for corporate money to flow into US elections, the Supreme Court will soon hear another pair of cases that journalist David Sirota says are aimed at "eliminating the last restrictions on campaign donations and obstructing law enforcement’s efforts to halt bribery."
One of the cases, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Elections Commission (FEC), was launched in 2022 by then-Ohio Senate candidateJD Vance (R-Ohio), now the vice president of the United States, and several other Republicans, who argued that limits on coordinated spending violated the First Amendment.
The limits in question, which were imposed after the Watergate scandal, put a cap on the amount of money that outside donors can spend in direct coordination with their favored candidates.
"Though Citizens United unleashed a 28-fold increase in election spending, the ruling preserved the legality of campaign contribution limits," wrote David Sirota in Rolling Stone on Tuesday. "If those rules are killed off, party committees could become pass-through conduits for big donors to circumvent donation limits and deliver much larger payments in support of lawmakers who can reward them with government favors."
In 2001, the court, then presided over by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, upheld the limits by a margin of 5-4, with Justice David Souter writing in the majority opinion, "there is little evidence" that they "have frustrated the ability of political parties to exercise their First Amendment rights to support their candidates."
This time, Republicans in all three branches of government have seemed to work in tandem to get the law overturned.
In a highly unusual move, the Trump administration's Department of Justice has refused to defend the FEC. And contrary to his job as the federal government's lawyer, Solicitor General John Sauer—who also served as President Donald Trump's lawyer in the case that granted him "presidential immunity" from prosecution last year—has joined the Republican plaintiffs in calling for the Supreme Court to strike down the law.
Without the government to defend the law, the Supreme Court was put in charge of appointing an amicus curiae—"friend of the court"—lawyer to take up the FEC's defense.
The justices chose Roman Martinez, a member of a group run by the right-wing Federalist Society who has spent most of his career working for Republican presidential campaigns and has clerked for conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and later Chief Justice John Roberts during the time he was deliberating Citizens United. Since 2016, when Martinez went into private practice, he "has led high-profile cases for corporate clients and political lobbying interests," according to The Lever.
The most notable of these was a case last year before the Supreme Court that overturned the Chevron doctrine, which had given government agencies leeway to interpret ambiguous statutes as they saw fit. Martinez, who has described himself as an opponent of "government overreach," called Chevron “a doctrine that puts the thumb on the scale in favor of the government.”
While experts have said they still believe Martinez will take his job seriously, having an outsider defend the coordinated spending limits puts the defense at a structural disadvantage: "It’s very different than when an agency with decades of expertise is defending their own law,” said Tara Malloy of the Campaign Legal Center.
Lever reporters Jared Jacang Maher and Katya Schwenk described the case as a "Citizens United 2.0" that, if successful, would further obliterate limits on campaign spending:
Since 2022, party committees reported $241 million in coordinated spending, compared to over $858 million in "independent" expenditures on individual campaigns. Striking the coordinated-expenditure cap could shift vast sums into direct, mega donor-driven collaborations between parties and candidates.
At the same time, the court is also hearing a case, Sittenfeld v. United States, with wide-ranging implications for the government's ability to prosecute politicians who accept bribes. The case was brought by former Cincinnati City Councilman PG Sittenfeld, who was caught accepting a $20,000 campaign contribution in exchange for supporting a local development project.
Though Sittenfeld is a Democrat, he has already been pardoned by Trump and is challenging his conviction with pro bono representation from the DC law firm Jones Day, which has served as counsel for Trump's campaigns as well as the Republican National Committee and helped defend Trump's cases to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
"Those circumstances and all that legal firepower make clear that this is less about one shady municipal deal and more about broadening a string of rulings making it increasingly impossible to prosecute public corruption cases," Sirota argued.
The court already narrowed the definition of bribery substantially last year when it ruled that statutes criminalizing overt "quid pro quo" deals between politicians and donors did not ban "gratuities"—gifts of value given to politicians after an act has already been performed. This was notably the exact form of corruption that conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas participated in when they received substantial gifts from billionaire right-wing donors.
"Sittenfeld’s appeal aims to take the Supreme Court’s legal assault on anti-bribery laws even farther," Sirota said. "In legal briefs, his lawyers are offering a novel theory: They insinuate that pay-to-play culture is now so pervasive that it should no longer be considered prosecutable."
One brief even cites Trump himself as a primary example of this endemic corruption: On the campaign trail in 2024, he directly asked oil executives for $1 billion in campaign cash, pledging to do favors for the industry in return. Sittenfeld's lawyers argue that a "prosecutor could doubtless present this meeting alone as at least ambiguous evidence of a quid pro quo" and lament that “politicians are open to prosecution if they say anything during these often informal, unscripted conversations that can be read to even hint at a possible quid pro quo.”
Sirota said these two cases follow the same tactics used during Citizens United, using a small dispute over a technicality to legislate major changes to campaign finance law that could never get through Congress.
"It’s the same dynamic today," he says. "Conservative groups behind today's two new cases undoubtedly hope that their spats over the esoterica of campaign finance and bribery law prompt the even-more-conservative court to not merely mediate these specific conflicts, but to issue broad rulings instead incinerating any remaining deterrents to pay-to-play corruption."
"The Delaware lawmakers that enacted S.B. 21 are lapdogs for corporations and Musk," said one expert at the Open Markets Institute.
While Democratic Gov. Matt Meyer declared that "Delaware is the best place in the world to incorporate your business, and Senate Bill 21 will help keep it that way," critics reiterated concerns about the corporate-friendly state legislation he signed this week.
The Delaware House of Representatives sent the Senate-approved S.B. 21 to Meyer's desk on Tuesday in a 32-7 vote, with two members absent. The Delaware Business Times reported that the governor "arrived in Dover to sign the measure into law less than two hours after it passed," and "the bill signing was closed to the press."
The bill sailed through the Delaware General Assembly despite anti-monopoly, economic, and legal experts blasting it as a "corporate insider power grab" and accusing state legislators of choosing "billionaire insiders—like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg—over pension funds, retirement savers, and other investors."
Delaware Working Families Party (WFP) political director Karl Stomberg said in a Wednesday statement that "at a time when rank-and-file Democrats across the country are begging their leaders to stand up to" President Donald Trump and Musk, his billionaire adviser, Democratic lawmakers in the state "just gave Musk a $56 billion handout."
That's a reference to Musk's 2018 compensation package for his electric vehicle maker, Tesla, which a Delaware judge ruled against, prompting the richest billionaire on Earth to ditch the state and encourage other business leaders to do the same. Fears of a potential "Dexit" led to lawmakers' frantic effort to pass S.B. 21.
"The Working Families Party has been standing up against this proposed bill for weeks now, and we recognize the need to fight back against corporate overreach in our government," said Stomberg. "WFP electeds proposed serious amendments to address our concerns with the bill that would protect the people of Delaware, but the Democrats chose to side with Musk and vote them down."
"This bill is an indictment of the failed Delaware Way, which continues to allow big corporations and the ultrawealthy like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to enrich themselves at the expense of working people," added Stomberg.
Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta, Facebook and Instagram's parent company. CNBC recently revealed that "a day after The Wall Street Journal published its story on Meta considering a Delaware departure, Meyer, who was brand new to the job, convened an online meeting with attorneys from law firms that have represented Meta, Musk, Tesla, and others in shareholder disputes in the state, according to public records obtained by CNBC. Other attendees included members of the Delaware Legislature."
"The following day, records show, Meyer invited a second group to meet with him and new Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. That invitation went to Kate Kelly, Meta's corporate secretary, and to Dan Sachs, the company's senior national director of state and local policy," according to CNBC. "The invite also went to James Honaker, an attorney with Morris Nichols, a firm that's represented Meta in federal court in Delaware, and to William Chandler, former chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, who is now part of Wilson Sonsini's Delaware litigation practice."
Just weeks after those meetings, the governor urged state lawmakers to swiftly pass S.B. 21. The Lever's Luke Goldstein wrote Wednesday that "the timing of the emails obtained by CNBC reveals clear motivations driving the current law which was rushed before the Legislature last month by the new governor: to let top executives off the hook for legal liabilities."
In earlier reporting, Goldstein highlighted that "Delaware, which has long been perceived as a billionaire playground and corporate tax haven, is the incorporation home to more than 60% of all Fortune 500 companies. That means, if enacted, the wide-ranging regulatory handouts in the bill will have sweeping consequences for corporate behavior across the country."
The Lever's founder, David Sirota, on Wednesday lamented the limited attention the Delaware law is receiving, compared with a major national security breach involving several top Trump officials' unsecure group chat about war plans. As he put it, "Cannot overstate how significant this is—while the national media is focused on the D.C. drama, a group of Democrats off the radar in a tiny state just radically shifted more power to the planet's largest corporations via world-changing legislation."
Daniel Hanley, senior legal analyst at the Open Markets Institute, said Wednesday that "the Delaware lawmakers that enacted S.B. 21 are lapdogs for corporations and Musk. How this one state came to control practically all of American corporate law is a long story, but regardless, Congress can and should take the power away."
"The most efficiently run healthcare systems in the world," said National Nurses United, "have been proven time and time again to be single-payer systems."
Two of the United States' most outspoken critics of the for-profit health system welcomed billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's criticism of the country's sky-high healthcare spending—and suggested that Musk, a potential Cabinet member in the incoming Trump administration, join the call for Medicare for All.
A social media post by Musk drew the attention of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who reintroduced legislation to expand Medicare coverage to every American last year and have long called for the for-profit healthcare system to be replaced by a government-run program, or single-payer system, like those in every other wealthy country in the world.
"Shouldn't the American people be getting getting their money's worth?" asked Musk, posting a graph from the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation that showed how per capita administrative healthcare costs in the U.S. reached $1,055 in 2020—hundreds of dollars more than countries including Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
"Yes," said Sanders, repeating statistics he has frequently shared while condemning the country's $4.5 trillion health system in which private, for-profit health insurance companies increasingly refuse to pay for healthcare services and Americans pay an average of $1,142 in out-of-pocket expenses each year.
"We waste hundreds of billions a year on healthcare administrative expenses that make insurance CEOs and wealthy stockholders incredibly rich while 85 million Americans go uninsured or underinsured," the senator added. "Healthcare is a human right. We need Medicare for All."
Jayapal added that she has "a solution" to exorbitant healthcare costs in the U.S.: "It's called Medicare for All."
Musk has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to lead a new federal agency that he wants to create called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Sanders has expressed support for some of the agency's mission, saying its plan to "cut wasteful expenditures" could be put to use at the Department of Defense, which has repeatedly failed audits of its annual spending.
But Sanders has sharply criticized the economic system and business practices that have helped make Musk the richest person in the world, with a net worth of $343.8 billion.
Another progressive, David Sirota of The Lever, suggested last month that DOGE could be used to eliminate the nation's vast health insurance bureaucracy and replace it with Medicare for All, pointing to a 2020 report from the Republican-controlled Congressional Budget Office that showed that a government-run healthcare program would save the country an estimated $650 billion each year.
"Such a system could achieve this in part because Medicare's 2% administrative costs are so much lower than the 17% administrative costs of the bureaucratic, profit-extracting private health insurance industry," wrote Sirota.
Musk drew the attention of Medicare for All advocates amid online discussion about the greed of for-profit insurance giants.
The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday prompted discussion about widespread anger over the U.S. healthcare system, and following public outcry, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield on Thursday backtracked on a decision to stop paying for surgical anesthesia if a procedure goes beyond a certain time limit. The American Society of Anesthesiologists said that if Anthem stopped fully paying doctors who provide pain management for complicated surgeries, patients would be left paying hundreds or thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs.
National Nurses United, which advocates for a government-run healthcare system, urged Musk and others who support the broadly popular proposal to "join the movement to win Medicare for All."
"The most efficiently run healthcare systems in the world," said the group, "have been proven time and time again to be single-payer systems."
"If existing restrictions were enforced, the U.S. would have firmly halted all offensive military support for Israel rather than continuing to fuel its devastating war," said one group.
As U.S. arms continue to fuel Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, critics responded skeptically on Friday to a memo from President Joe Biden requiring human rights assurances from governments receiving American weapons, noting that the White House issued—and ignored—a similar directive last year.
Biden's memo—which is modeled on an amendment proposed by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)—"requires the secretary of state to obtain certain credible and reliable written assurances from foreign governments receiving defense articles... and requires the secretaries of state and defense to provide periodic congressional reports to enable meaningful oversight."
"The question has always been what the administration is willing to do in practice, not in theory."
The White House said the policy is meant to "prevent arms transfers that risk facilitating or otherwise contributing to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law" and "strengthen ally and partner capacity to respect their obligations under international law and reduce the risk of civilian harm."
Referring to the far-right administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Van Hollen said that "this new policy will help hold all recipients of U.S. weapons—including the Netanyahu government—more accountable. It's a huge step forward in shining a light on the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars, and will have a lasting impact for years to come."
Skeptics, however, noted the yawning chasm between U.S. policy and practice. David Sirota, founder of the investigative news site The Lever, said on social media that "this isn't new. This is a press release designed to distract from basically the same directive [Biden] issued less than a year ago, which he just totally ignored."
Biden's February 2023
memo states that "no arms transfer will be authorized where the United States assesses that it is more likely than not that the arms to be transferred will be used by the recipient to commit... genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949... or other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law, including serious acts of gender‑based violence or serious acts of violence against children."
The
International Court of Justice and a federal judge in California have found that Israel is "plausibly" committing genocide in Gaza. At least hundreds of international legal and genocide scholars, including numerous Israelis, have said Israel's onslaught—which has caused more than 100,000 casualties and has displaced around 90% of Gaza's 2.3 million people—is genocidal.
Gazans and human rights observers have documented a wide range of potential Israeli war crimes, including the deliberate withholding of lifesaving humanitarian aid; indiscriminate killing; bombing of vital civilian infrastructure including shelters, hospitals, and schools; deliberate targeting of media, medical, and humanitarian workers; and the execution of civilians including elders, men, women, and children.
At least 12,150 children have been killed by Israeli bombs and bullets, according to Palestinian officials.
"For civilians in Gaza, where U.S. arms continue to cause catastrophic harm, this memo is too little too late," Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, said of Biden's new directive. "The Biden administration needs to do what it should have months ago: End U.S. complicity in devastating harm and leverage assistance to deescalate and protect civilians."
Biden has acknowledged and implored Israel to stop its "indiscriminate bombing" of Gaza, which on Thursday he called "over the top."
However, the Biden administration has requested $14.3 billion in additional U.S. military aid for Israel atop the nearly $4 billion the apartheid state already receives from Washintgon each year. Biden has also twice bypassed Congress in order to expedite "emergency" armed aid to Israel.
Since the passage of the Foreign Assitance Act of 1961, and later the Leahy Laws, the U.S. government has been statutorily prohibited from providing assistance to foreign security forces that commit gross human rights violations. However, this has not stopped Washington from supporting some of the world's worst human rights violators—including the perpetrators of genocides in Paraguay, Guatemala, Bangladesh, East Timor, Kurdistan, and Gaza—since these laws were enacted.
Responding to Biden's new memo and its requirement of written human rights pledges, Shiel contended that "assurances like this would not be necessary if the U.S. was already following its own laws and policies."
"Where it's clear U.S. weapons are contributing to violations or blocking humanitarian aid, U.S. law and policy says arms transfers can't continue—full stop," she said.
Despite massive U.S. military aid—which has totaled more than $150 billion since Israel was established in 1948 amid the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's Arabs—Biden administration officials have claimed that they have little leverage over the Israeli government.
"Assurances like this would not be necessary if the U.S. was already following its own laws and policies."
While U.S. officials including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argue that conditions on arms transfers should not apply to Israel, human rights defenders assert that the Biden administration must go beyond mere words to stop the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
"The United States must press Israel for a cease-fire," Center for International Policy senior fellow Melvin A. Goodman wrote for CounterPunch Friday.
"The only way to pressure Israel would be to place genuine conditions on U.S. arms transfers or to withhold the lethal systems that only Washington provides," he added.
In recent weeks, investigative journalist David Sirota made the repeated fatal error of doing his job. He reported facts, as his wont, and the corporate media and political elites flipped out, as is their wont.
Earlier this week, he linked to another investigative journalist's tweet which accurately described what Biden said in a 2018 video--that he would support a means test for Social Security. In response, The Daily Banter--a website which smears anyone to the Left of the DNC, portrays harassers as victims and has a white male staff writer who lectures Nina Turner about her "ancestors" and African American history because he went to a civil rights museum once--posted a story with the expected regurgitation of a talking point used by conservatives or centrists pretending to have progressive politics: 'Universal programs, you see, are bad, you see, because they benefit the super wealthy, you see, who don't deserve the help.' This hot take ignores history and common sense. Universal programs are less stigmatized and less likely to be cut when they apply to everyone. There's a reason why the politically savvy Bill Clinton went after Welfare and not Social Security.
The attack on Sirota over Biden is just beginning but it's the latest iteration of smearing investigative journalists for reporting inconvenient truths. Last month, when David Sirota tweeted out a simple fact about a segment of Beto O'Rourke's donors, he was accused of launching a "seriously" dangerous war on behalf of Trump. "Oh look," tweeted Neera Tanden, the president and CEO of the liberal(ish) think tank Center for American Progress and a close ally of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. "A supporter of Bernie Sanders attacking a Democrat. This is seriously dangerous. We know Trump is in the White House and attacking Dems is doing Trump's bidding. I hope Senator Sanders repudiates these attacks in 2019."
As is often the case, the smear began with a blatant distortion covered in a mantle of self-righteous moralism. Why is it risky for a journalist--who writes regularly about campaign finance and the interactions between corporations and politics--to point out that the former Democratic Congressman was "the #2 recipient of oil/gas industry campaign cash in the entire Congress." How is stating a fact "doing Trump' s bidding"? Why would Sanders need to condemn a journalist for reporting the truth?
Tanden is known for her compulsive tweeting. The frequency, veracity, and nocturnal nature of her tweets resemble those of another CEO and president, but she was nothing if not on-brand in her response to Sirota. A few days later, when journalist and Texas native Elizabeth Bruenig wrote an op-ed titled, "Why this progressive Texan can't get excited about Beto O'Rourke," Tanden put together three critical yet fair columns--plus one factual tweet--and got: conspiracy!
She took to Twitter, as is her wont, and alleged, "Bruenig's piece in the Post on Beto is just the latest attack by a supporter of Senator Sanders on Beto: joining Jilani, Jacobin and Sirota. Feels a bit orchestrated and clearly they are worried." As a point of comparison, during the 2016 primary The Washington Post famously ran 16 negative pieces on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours. That feels slightly more orchestrated than a few negative articles and tweets about a congressman who has been in the headlines as a potential presidential candidate.
Several other pundits and journalists--even television writer David Simon, creator of The Wire--echoed Tanden's bizarre framing, describing Sirota's tweet as the start of a war on Beto and proof of an alleged coordinated smear campaign that could be traced back to Bernie Sanders. "Inside Bernie-world's war on Beto O'Rourke," reported NBC. "Democrats trying to annihilate an O'Rourke Campaign," Vanity Fair cried. Channeling his inner Borat, columnist Jonathan Chait wrote, ""Why the Bernie Movement Must Crush Beto O'Rourke," at New York Magazine. Meanwhile, Charles Pierce at Esquire fretted over "a concerted effort from the Bernie Sanders camp to paint O'Rourke as a tool of the oil and gas industry." The Hill, no stranger to smear campaigns they usually aim at Sanders, reported that "Sanders supporters deny coordinated attacks on O'Rourke's progressive credentials."
The attacks on Sirota and his alleged co-conspirators sparked the curiosity of another investigative reporter, Alex Kotch of Sludge. Kotch looked into the story and discovered that Beto had signed a "no fossil fuel money pledge," which states "a politician and their campaign will adopt a policy to not knowingly accept any contributions over $200" from not only PACs, but also from "executives, or front groups of fossil fuel companies--companies whose primary business is the extraction, processing, distribution, or sale of oil, gas, or coal." O'Rourke had violated the pledge he signed. As a result of the discovery, his name was removed from the pledge website.
Meanwhile, Sirota continued with his own work as an investigative reporter, and looked into Beto's voting record. And what he discovered was even worse: on 167 votes, O'Rourke had broken with the majority of his fellow Democrats and supported the Republican agenda not just with regard to fossil fuel (he voted against limiting offshore drilling), but with regard to healthcare (which he voted to chip away at); bank regulation (which he voted to weaken); Trump's tax scams (one of which he voted for); the death penalty (which he voted to apply to attempts to murder a law enforcement officer); and even immigration (when he voted to decrease screening and background checks of Customs and Border Protection agents and applicants).
In order to get to the bottom of this intrigue for my podcast, The Katie Halper Show, I spoke to David Sirota, the man who wrote the little tweet that started this great war.
You can read a partial transcript, edited for concision and clarity, that follows.
Katie Halper Show (KH): You're being presented as attacking the Democrats, and Beto O'Rourke in particular. But you won an award for your reporting on the Republican tax bill, known as "The Corker Kickback."
David Sirota (DS): It's so strange to me. I do reporting on politicians' voting records and where they get their money from, particularly Republicans. And sometimes I look at Democrats. This all started with a tweet. So, it's a Sunday and I'm working on a completely separate story about the fossil fuel industry and how it throws money to all different kinds of candidates and I came up on the Center for Responsive Politics' website. Now, anybody who's a reporter in Washington or who follows the money knows that the Center for Responsive Politics is literally the gold standard of campaign finance data because they do a good job of aggregating the data by industry. And I noticed that Beto O'Rourke was the number two recipient of money from donors in the oil and gas industry, donors above $200. And I tweeted out a very innocuous tweet that said, "Something I didn't know: Beto O'Rourke is the #2 recipient of oil/gas industry campaign cash in the entire Congress." That's it. I didn't make a follow up comment. I didn't say, "He's an oil shill!" I just thought it was notable in the era of climate change when there are people pushing politicians to take absolutely no money from the fossil fuel industry. That tweet sits out there for two days. Nobody cared about it. It wasn't that interesting.
Then suddenly Neera Tanden tweets it out saying, Oh look. Here's a Democrat attacking another Democrat. Essentially saying this is bad and this is dishonest because the money came from individuals and it didn't come from PACs because Beto has sworn off PAC money. It's definitely true that that money is not PAC money. I didn't say it was PAC money. There is, though, a push by various environmental groups to ask politicians not to take any money from not only PACs in the oil and gas industry, but also executives in the oil and gas industry.
I was portrayed as some sort of horrible villain dividing the Democratic party for tweeting one tweet that said, "I didn't know this..." And it became this huge controversy and people are freaking out and David Simon, the creator of The Wire, was tweeting literally non-stop for days about this tweet. I don't really understand that but the point is there was an epic freak out.
Full disclosure because people have made an issue of this. Even though it's right on my biography on my website. I worked for Bernie Sanders 19 years ago as a twenty three year old right out of college. I worked for him for I think it was two years, it might have been a little less than two years and then I worked for house Democrats and then I was the third employee at the Center for American Progress. And I want everybody to keep this in their mind: Yes, I work for Bernie Sanders 19 years ago for roughly two years and I worked after that and for a longer period of time for the Center for American Progress and for house Democrats.
And then Alex Kotch at Sludge, the investigative reporting outlet, got interested in it so he did a story about it. And actually a not insubstantial amount of this money came in the form of max donations: $2,700 a piece or above $1,000 from top-level people in the oil and gas industry. And what do you know? Beto O'Rourke signed the no fossil fuel money pledge. And the no fossil fuel money pledge says, "I will not take money from oil and fossil fuel related PACs or Executives in the fossil fuel industry." So Beto O'Rourke broke his no fossil fuel money pledge and was taken off the website of the Pledge.
Now, is that the biggest story in the world? No, it's not the biggest story in the world. Does that mean Beto O'Rourke is automatically a shill for the oil and gas industry? No. That doesn't mean that. Does it mean that it's an important story that a campaign finance reporter should report on? Yes it does.
So, in the middle of this I started taking a look at O'Rourke's voting record and there was a not insubstantial amount of times that he has cast votes against the majority of his party in the House.
There's been some reporting about Beto voting this percentage of the time with his party or that percentage of the time liberal or conservative. And I think those kinds of metrics, frankly, just on their face are kind of bullshit because it doesn't tell you what the actual votes are. If you're only evaluating somebody [by looking at], where is he on the liberal and conservative scale of his votes, well liberal and conservative are subjective. Or, if you look at how frequently he breaks with his party, that stat unto itself doesn't tell you all that much.
So I looked specifically at the economic policy votes that O'Rourke cast that broke with the majority of house Democrats and what we found was that he frequently voted with Republicans against the majority of his party for bills to deregulate Wall Street. He voted for some bills to chip away at the Affordable Care Act. He voted at one point for a key portion of Donald Trump's deportation force. He co-sponsored a bill to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's rules of fighting racial discrimination in lending. He supported two Republican bills that President Obama's White House slammed and threatened to veto. A lot of these votes were not progressive dissents breaking with the party. These votes were not the equivalent of Barbara Lee voting against the Afghanistan war in the minority of her party.
Then we did the granular details of these votes and we included quotes from House Democrats on the floor of the house arguing why these Republican bills should be voted down, begging lawmakers like Beto O'Rourke to not vote for these Republican bills. On economic issues many of the votes from Beto O'Rourke were Beto O'Rourke voting to help the Republicans pass the Republican economic agenda, and we reported that out.
And it was like I had declared [a war on Beto.] I mean literally NBC News reported it as "this is a quote war on Beto O'Rourke" for a journalist to publish this.
When we presented this report, people said: "This is an attack on Beto, you're attacking him." "This is unfair, you're unfairly maligning him." And I said look, "You could easily look at this record and make the argument that this is a pro-business, pro-corporate moderate Democrat who will appeal to business leaders and affluent voters."
KH: And say that he'll be effective in running against Trump.
DS: Exactly. I don't think that's a particularly good argument but you could make that argument. The point is that if you inherently see somebody's votes and and quotes from the Congressional Record as negative, as an attack, what you are saying is that you think these votes inherently are bad. And if you are saying you think these votes are inherently bad then you are saying that they are inherently newsworthy and you are essentially saying that they are inherently something that voters in a democracy where voters should be informed, voters should know about this.
KH: It's a bit of a "self-own," or self-incriminating when you're very upset that someone you're defending has his or her record discussed. You shouldn't be openly upset about that. This is not a smear. This is a relevant fact. If you're upset at someone for reporting on the facts, you're the one who's actually indicting the person who's being reported on. It's not like they can say you're picking on him because you're interviewing someone who hates him or you're showing that he sent his kids to private school or some personal things that you could politicize. These are just things that everyone is supposed to look at and know about.
DS: I think that's a really excellent point. I hadn't thought of it that way, which is had I gone to El Paso and interviewed everybody who hates Beto O'Rourke and written a story just airing out that kind of, effectively, dirty laundry. I'm not saying people shouldn't do that, but--
KH: But that's a different category.
DS: Right. And I think it really speaks to is something very sad about our politics, which is that there's an authoritarian tendency to our politics. I do think that there are a lot of people out there on both the right and in the Democratic party who just want a coronation. They don't necessarily believe in the basic fundamentals of democracy. One of the basic fundamentals of democracy is that there are contested primaries. Candidates go back and forth and they debate their policies and they debate their records and this is healthy. This is a healthy discourse and I think there are a lot of people who buy into the argument that it would be better if we just appointed two nominees, had the two nominees run against each other, and that would be it. If I have an ideology, I'm ideologically opposed to the idea that we must coronate candidates and just have uncontested elections where we don't debate the issues. I think that they're terrified off scrutiny. They're terrified of what's going to be revealed.
KH: So why are they terrified?
DS: The establishment media and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party is fundamentally threatened by Bernie Sanders' agenda. And I'm being objective. This isn't a value judgment. They don't like his agenda for a couple of reasons. One: his agenda is built on challenging corporate power and wealth, that is corporate power and wealth the establishment media and the establishment wing of the democratic party is built upon. It is their foundation. And there's a second tier of this which is that Bernie Sanders-- beyond his ideology--also poses a fundamental threat to the career networks and relationships of people in The Establishment themselves especially within the Democratic Party circles. In other words, if you are at a think tank, let's use Neera Tanden because everybody knows her. I'm not saying this to pick on her, but if your entire career has been built on the Clinton Network--you were Hillary Clinton's top aide, you are at a think tank that is basically funded in part by Clinton-supporting donors--a Bernie Sanders presidency or, by the way, a presidency from somebody similarly outside of that system--doesn't matter that it's Bernie--a presidency like that would basically destroy your relevance and your career because your career is based on leveraging your relationships in the current system as it is now. So Sanders, his ideology threatens them, but also where he exists in politics is a threat to the literal careers and livelihood of people who make their careers and livelihood on the relationships tied to the current establishment of the Democratic Party.
After publishing the straight reported story on the votes, I later did an opinion column, where I said I believe that the Democrats have a very good chance to win in 2020 because Donald Trump is so unpopular and because I think people are genuinely pretty sick of Republican politics, and rightly so.
We've got to use this historic opportunity in 2020 to elect somebody who is willing to challenge corporate power, who is willing to say that we cannot have a multi-billion-dollar ExxonMobil continuing to produce what it produces and also have a livable planet; that we cannot have a humane Health Care policy and private health insurance companies making hundreds of millions of dollars in profit; that we cannot have a Wall Street that eviscerates industries; and also have sustainable wages and a sustainable economy for most workers; that all of these things are in conflict; and that we actually need a president and a political leadership that is willing to take sides and say that there is no Third Way. Climate science is telling us that. What's the right metaphor for climate change? If climate change is a meteor headed towards earth, then we have an obligation right now to look at which presidential candidates have voted to accelerate the meteor and which ones have voted to stop it.
We have an obligation now to to do what we can to elect a president who is serious about stopping the meteor and I don't care which particular candidate wins for president: Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown or any of these other people. My goal as a journalist and as a person who has children and who lives on planet Earth is that we elect somebody who is serious about dealing with these crises and is not afraid to stand against corporate forces.
KH: So, you have a pro-planet, pro-human survival bias.
DR: I will admit that I am anti- mass extinction and I am pro-ecosystem that supports human life. I'm so biased.