Billionaire Donor Threatens to Cut Democrat Funding
In an MSNBC segment, Diamond Resorts International Chairman and CEO Stephen Cloobeck said that he had spoken to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and had threatened to cut off their funding if they dare utter the term “billionaire” ever again. He lamented a supposed leftward lurch of the Democrat Party toward Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren which he views as “so effin’ wrong” and which – if it continued – would cause him to be “done” with the party altogether.
Cloobeck isn’t savvy enough to keep the backroom chiding of his employees on the hush. His ego compelled him to go on national television, brag that he and his billionaire buddies are the rightful & true Democrat Party marionettes, and threaten to cast them aside should they fail to do his bidding.
He actually said out loud, publicly, on purpose, that because he finances their campaigns, in return Chuck & Nancy and the whole of the Democrat Party owe him. They owe him whatever he demands because he pays them.
This is an incredibly revelatory statement. It exposes the truth of the matter that wealthy elites use the private financing of elections to purchase politicians who use the power of government to rig the system for their own further enrichment.
According to Cloobeck, billionaire plutocrat sponsor: Democratic Party leadership does the bidding of wealthy elites as a matter of course, but Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren threaten to upset that dynamic, which has fractured the party and lead to his threatening to divest and exit.
One can only hope. A party of the people is one in which billionaire plutocrats find no sanctuary.
But he does find quite a comfortable home in the Democrat Party.
Cloobeck, billionaire plutocrat, standing alongside corporate Democrats like Chuck & Nancy - whose compliance he braggadociosly lauded - draws a line in the sand; and on the other side are rascally Bernie & Elizabeth leftists who so upset his billionaire sensibilities by daring to suggest that healthcare is a right and education should be free.
He wants Democrat leadership to choose between billionaires and the base. He wants voters to choose between plutocrats and populism. He wants the Democrat Party to be that of wealthy elites; the party of socially liberal, fiscal conservatives who will let you get gay married so long as they get their tax cuts.
They are the protectors of the status quo who are the reason we have Reagan’s tax code, Nixon’s war on drugs, Dubya’s war on terror, and the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare plan.
They are the reason there is no anti-war party, no anti-Wall Street Party, no anti-mass incarceration party, no anti-mass surveillance party.
The reason that despite the American public wanting gun safety measures, single-payer healthcare, free college, marriage equality, abortion access, marijuana legalization, immigration reform with a path to citizenship, the wealthy to pay more in taxes, and to remove the corrupting influence of money in politics – Democrats consistently fail to try and win on and with those issues and refuse to represent the will of the people.
And the reason Republicans control two-thirds of state legislatures and gubernatorial seats, the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, and the White House.
