{"id":259238,"date":"2016-07-31T17:48:32","date_gmt":"2016-07-31T17:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=259238"},"modified":"2016-08-01T13:23:45","modified_gmt":"2016-08-01T13:23:45","slug":"hillary-clinton-squashed-sanders-supporter-nina-turner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/hillary-clinton-squashed-sanders-supporter-nina-turner\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Hillary Clinton Squashed Sanders-Supporter Nina Turner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

On Tuesday night July 26th, when Nina Turner was supposed to be onstage delivering the nominating speech for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton\u2019s people \u2014 at the last moment \u2014 barred her from going onstage, and offered no explanation.\u00a0Hillary, not Bernie, would determine who would go up onstage to deliver the nominating-speech for him. The candidate, Bernie, couldn\u2019t make that choice \u2014 not even prior<\/i> to Hillary\u2019s winning the Party\u2019s nomination after the delegate-votes were counted. The DNC, the Democratic National Committee \u2014 under first the Hillary friend Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and then the Hillary friend Donna Brazile \u2014 controlled things, and they were taking their instructions ultimately from Hillary Clinton. (But, actually, Wasserman Schultz had been made the leader of the DNC by Obama, and was now at least as much a friend of his, as of Hillary\u2019s, because Wasserman Schultz had delivered<\/span><\/a> one of the three seconding-speeches for his<\/i> 2008 nomination, not<\/i> one of the three speeches \u2014 one nominating speech, plus two seconding \u2014 for Hillary<\/i>. Originally, Wasserman Schultz had backed Hillary in 2007, and had even been co-chair of Hillary\u2019s campaign against Obama. In other words: Wasserman Schultz represented both Hillary and Obama, and Obama chose her to rig the primaries<\/span><\/a> for Hillary \u2014 and there were even news reports about some details of that rigging<\/span><\/a>. Obama wanted Hillary to be his successor. But after Wasserman Schultz got fired for being exposed to have been rigging it, Obama placed long-time Hillary friend Donna Brazile in charge of the DNC. And, so, it was Brazile who actually made this decision against Turner, on behalf of Brazile\u2019s longtime friends, the Clintons.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Turner had arrived in Philadelphia on Tuesday afternoon, after great anticipation that she would make what she had been hoping would be the speech of her life, the speech that could quite possibly (and Bernie ardently wished would) catapult her into top-level Democratic politics in the way that Barack Obama\u2019s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention<\/span><\/a> did. Bernie wanted Turner to take his movement forward, to ultimate victory after 2016. Turner \u2014 as Bernie knew well, from his own experience seeing her address crowds<\/span><\/a> \u2014 can get an audience out of their seats and onto their feet applauding, as Obama had done at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, though in her own distinctive crossover Black-and-White way, not Obama-cool, but instead soul-hot. Her style fuses references to Euro cultural heroes such as Dante, with references to Afro cultural heroes such as Martin Luther King, all joined together in advocacy of the peoples\u2019 progress toward equality, both of justice and of economic opportunity. But her hope was not to be, by Clinton and Obama, allowed to fruition.<\/span><\/p>\n

A friend of Turner said<\/a><\/span> that both Turner and\u00a0Rosario Dawson \u2014 who is another extremely effective public speaker and advocate of Bernie \u2014 were edited by the Hillary people, out of the promotional video that had been prepared by Bernie\u2019s people, for presentation leading up to the nominating speech for him. The DNC\u2019s objective was to do everything they can to crush that movement, so as to enable Clinton to avoid any effective organized Democratic opposition to her re-election run in 2020, like Obama had been unopposed to become the Party\u2019s nominee in 2012.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hillary doesn\u2019t want anyone to represent the Bernie movement who is as effective a proponent of that movement as Turner is \u2014 who had even whipped the famously articulate debater Barney Frank, proponent of Hillary, when Turner argued against him for Bernie on MSNBC<\/span><\/a> \u2014 Hillary doesn\u2019t want someone like that<\/i>, to be a competitor against her<\/i> in 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

The way this zapping of Turner was done is that Hillary\u2019s people told Sanders to tell Turner not to deliver his nominating-speech<\/span><\/a>. They would allow only Tulsi Gabbard (whom Bernie had chosen to deliver the seconding speech) to do that. Gabbard is a flat, Hillary-like, public speaker \u2014 and Sanders would now need to choose someone other than Turner to second the nomination by Gabbard. Turner couldn\u2019t be any part of it, at all. They wouldn\u2019t let her onto the stage, at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

At some time on Monday night, July 25th, Paul Feeney<\/a><\/span>, the legislative director of the Dorchester Massachusetts-based International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 2222, received a phone call from his longtime friend Bernie Sanders, asking him to deliver the seconding speech for Sanders. (You can see Fenney\u2019s address at 57:00 here<\/span><\/a>.) Gabbard now was to become the person delivering the nominating speech (it\u2019s at 51:30 there), and so Sanders needed quickly to find someone who would do this seconding.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whereas Obama in 2008 allowed Hillary one nomination speech and two seconding speeches \u2014 all by speakers of her choosing \u2014 Hillary in 2016 would allow Bernie only one nominating speech and one seconding speech, and blocked him from having Turner deliver either of those speeches.<\/span><\/p>\n

Turner, evidently, didn\u2019t find out until sometime early Tuesday morning, that she wouldn\u2019t be allowed on the stage at all \u2014 not even to deliver the seconding speech. At 4:12 AM on the 26th, Turner tweeted<\/span><\/a>, \u201cDNC betrayed Bernie Sanders and the rest of America.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Though Gabbard\u2019s speech was flat, her beauty-queen-like looks, and terrific progressive record in Congress<\/span><\/a>, caused Bernie supporters to comment at the youtube of her nominating-speech for Sanders<\/span><\/a>, extremely favorable things, like \u201cMan, she is beautiful,\u201d and, \u201cTulsi Gabbard deserves to be first female president.\u201d However, Hillary evidently still prefers to be running against her, instead of to be running against Turner. <\/span><\/p>\n

The reasons for that are sound. Either way, it would be a woman-against-woman race. But, if Turner were to become the opponent, then how would Hillary be able to retain the support of her 76% share of the Black vote<\/span><\/a>, when running against a Black \u2014 and not only a Black but one who has \u201csoul\u201d (which neither Hillary nor Gabbard does)? Gabbard isn\u2019t the type of person to lead a movement; she (like Turner \u2014 but certainly not like Hillary) would be a progressive President, but (unlike Sanders and Turner) Gabbard cannot inspire the type of \u201cpolitical revolution\u201d that Sanders wants. She wouldn\u2019t make it to the Presidency. Hillary, running as the incumbent against Gabbard in 2020, would easily win, no matter how bad Hillary\u2019s term in office might turn out to be. By contrast, Turner would win the support not only of progressives but of Blacks \u2014 which even Sanders didn\u2019t manage to pull off against Hillary. Hillary would thus lose a very large percentage of what has been (for no sound reason, but just because of the Clintons\u2019 superficial rhetoric against racism \u2014 and despite Hillary\u2019s actual policies favoring Wall Street against Main Street and thus hurt Blacks especially) a huge chunk of the Clintons\u2019 support-base: black voters. Without Blacks, Hillary doesn\u2019t stand a chance. So, Hillary has always \u201ctalked the talk\u201d but never walked the walk.<\/span><\/p>\n

Clinton did what was best for herself. She made a well-advised political decison for her personal benefit, and for the benefit of her Wall Street and her other donors.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Mother Jones<\/i> asked Turner whether Sanders stood up against Clinton, and had insisted that Turner must be allowed to go onstage, Turner responded<\/span><\/a> (tactfully ignoring that MJ<\/i> was asking a leading question in order to extract from her any ill-will she might be feeling against Sanders for having given her the bad news), \u201cSen. Sanders is in a difficult\u00a0position. I don’t know. I don’t\u00a0want to say.\u201d That\u2019s code for: So that Sanders not be absolutely iced out of the Democratic Party, he had needed to do whatever he was being instructed to do; Turner bore no resentment against him for what had happened to her. Her \u201cI don\u2019t want to say\u201d meant: I don\u2019t want to make things even worse, either for Sanders, or for myself, than they already are, and I won\u2019t bite your bait. You\u2019re hoping to destroy this movement; I am not.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mother Jones<\/i> is funded by Democratic-Party billionaires<\/span><\/a>, who donate heavily to Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign<\/span><\/a>. The Democratic Party\u2019s newsmedia are run like that. This is the sort of thing that Sanders has been running against.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Sanders was being instructed to do \u2014 to boot his own nominating speaker, and to get some last-minute person to deliver his seconding speech; and not even to be allowed more than a single seconding speaker \u2014 was not what\u2019s normal in such a situation. Normally, each candidate gets one nominating speech, and at least one seconding speech. When Obama was running the Democratic National Convention in 2008, he allowed<\/span><\/a> his former opponent, Hillary Clinton, to select one person to make her nominating speech, and two people to deliver seconding speeches for her; Obama then selected one person to deliver his nominating speech, and three people (one of them being Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as was noted) to second it. Whereas Obama treated his fellow-Wall-Street stooge Clinton with decency and respect, neither Obama nor Clinton treated Wall Street\u2019s opponent, Sanders, that way. They despise him; they just can\u2019t afford to state it publicly. (One might say instead that they do what their funders want them to do to him, but this way of phrasing the matter amounts really to saying practically the same thing, and semantics is not at all important here \u2014 it\u2019s diversionary from the reality, which is the reason so many people prefer to get into it.)<\/span><\/p>\n

At 7:44 PM on July 26th, the leader of the largest labor union for nurses, National Nurses United,\u00a0RoseAnn DeMoro tweeted<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNina Turner was treated horribly by the Clinton Campaign today. The story is out there. They also took Bernie\u2019s staff\u2019s credentials. Evil.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

At 1:17 AM on July 27th.\u00a0Chris Kott Toepfer posted a comment at facebook<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

“Are any of you still thinking that the Dem’s have your back or best interest at heart?\u00a0That the Dem’s are the party of life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness? Dem’s are\u00a0the party of dependence, not independence. The Dem’s are the party of\u00a0depression,\u00a0oppression & recession. Dem’s are not the party of lifting you up, there\u00a0[they\u2019re] about holding you down.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Many other comments at that facebook page were asking questions such as this: “Skinner Vance\u00a0There is nothing online about this. What happened???\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s most important in history happens usually behind closed doors and in private, and the public usually get wind of it too late, or else never.<\/span><\/p>\n

THE MEANING OF THIS FOR THE FUTURE<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

There were no further public statements from either Sanders or Turner about the matter. Sanders\u2019s hardworking devoted followers were simply left to wonder. But this silence from them is the reason why, for example, another comment there (at that facebook page), at 12:27 AM on July 27th, posted:<\/span><\/p>\n

“Roland Vincent\u00a0There is no question but that Bernie is playing the long game. …Were he to do a Ted Cruz and decline to endorse Hillary, the repercussions that\u00a0would blow back on him if she were to lose would be a real problem for him in\u00a0consolidating power within the Democratic party. The best case scenario, of course, would be for Bernie to be seen as Hillary\u2019s loyal,\u00a0enthusiastic supporter, and then having her lose. Bernie can never state that publicly. He can never admit that would be the best way\u00a0to ensure the future of the revolution. He must go through the motions of\u00a0embracing all he loathes, of supporting all he knows to be evil, of paying lip service\u00a0to the oligarchy and its whore. And praying each night that Trump cleans her clock.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Others were joining the Green Party, which stands no chance of winning the election unless it\u2019s on the ballot in all states (which it\u2019s nowhere near) and has an already-established star U.S. Senator or else state governor, such as Sanders was, heading its ticket (which it never did); so, that\u2019s purely a throw-away vote, a mere\u00a0\u2018protest vote\u2019, protesting to the wind. Stupidity, really. None of the\u00a0\u2018third parties\u2019 is even on the ballot in a majority of states; each of these\u00a0\u2018parties\u2019 is a play for suckers\u2019 votes and nothing more than the candidate\u2019s hope, like Ralph Nader\u2019s one successful shot at doing this in 2000 turned out to be, of throwing the election to whichever major-party nominee is the farther of the two from the mouthed positions that the given \u2018third party\u2019 nominee espouses. (Nader was actually campaigning for Bush<\/span><\/a>.) In the present instance, Clinton is probably actually farther from Sanders than is Trump, especially because her record in public office exists and is catastrophic, whereas Trump has none at all and self-contradicts as much as Hillary\u2019s record contradicts her statements. But most of all: Trump\u2019s victory would present at least a high likelihood of the Sanders movement taking over the Democratic Party, taking it away from the billionaires \u2014 and so forcing the billionaires to choose between the Sanders movement and the Trump Presidency. If Clinton goes up against Trump in 2020, the billionaires won\u2019t be nearly as disturbed as would be the case Sanders-Trump, or even the case Sanders-Anyone. The billionaires fear Sanders above all else.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, Toepfer had it correct: All intelligent Bernie supporters will be voting for Trump. If Hillary wins, the turnout on November 8th will still be so lackluster that Republicans will almost certainly hold Congress, and President Hillary Clinton will fail to muster even as much from that resistant Congress as Obama did, since Obama is a vastly more effective deceiver than she is. At the end of her Presidential term, she\u2019d be hated overwhelmingly: recognized as a Wall Street stooge even by the people who had voted for her \u2014 and despised as an incompetent one, by those who did not.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse On Tuesday night July 26th, when Nina Turner was supposed to be onstage delivering the nominating speech for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton\u2019s people \u2014 at the last moment \u2014 barred her from going onstage, and offered no explanation.\u00a0Hillary, not Bernie, would determine who would go up onstage to deliver the nominating-speech for him. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":259239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,461,18],"tags":[115,968,30,1036,951,96,954,698,949,49,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-259238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-editorials","9":"category-latest-news","10":"tag-barack-obama","11":"tag-bernie","12":"tag-big-brother","13":"tag-breaking-news","14":"tag-clinton","15":"tag-cover-up","16":"tag-hillary","17":"tag-hillary-clinton","18":"tag-sanders","19":"tag-usa-news","20":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}