Hillary Clinton Is Exposing the Dark Underbelly of the Democrats’ Money Machine

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Hillary Clinton Is Exposing the Dark Underbelly of the Democrats’ Money Machine

Her campaign has put a spotlight on the cozy relationships between Democratic operatives and corporate America.

By Joshua Holland
March 9, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is staffed with veteran Democratic advisers, fundraisers, pollsters, and consultants. Some of them worked on Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns. Others cut their teeth working for John Kerry in 2004, or on Bill Clinton’s campaigns in the 1990s. They’re career Democrats.

A handful of Clinton’s key personnel also work for Washington firms that have lobbied or consulted for various corporate interests. Some are principals in those firms. And in some cases, those companies worked on behalf of their corporate clients to defeat or water down progressive legislation that Clinton touts as major Democratic accomplishments.

These kinds of ties between high-level Democratic operatives and multinational corporations and trade groups that seek to influence legislation are nothing new, but until recently they didn’t receive the level of scrutiny that they’re getting today. That’s partly because the 2016 campaign is being fought at a time when Thomas Piketty’s wonky tome on inequality hit the best-seller lists, the pope is condemning unbridled capitalism as “the dung of the devil,” and an unabashed democratic socialist is giving the presumptive nominee a serious run in the Democratic primaries. With the “Warren wing” of the Democratic Party on the rise, the party’s business as usual is no longer being taken for granted as it once was.

In February, the Democratic National Committee rolled back an internal policy, pushed by Barack Obama in 2008, that barred it from taking contributions from federal lobbyists. Campaign finance reformers were rightly outraged. In addition to the questionable “optics,” it gave big corporations yet more ability to influence the party. At the same time, this was exactly the kind of inside-baseball, process-based story that tends to fall on deaf ears.

....... http://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-is-exposing-the-dark-underbelly-of-the-democrats-money-machine/