Want To Know What Sets Bernie Sanders Apart From Hillary Clinton? Look At Their Donors. (Demo)

Win McNamee/Getty Images; Kevin Hagen/Getty Images

On April 30, 2015, Dylan Matthews writes on VOX:

You can expect Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who announced his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination today, to argue forcefully that frontrunner Hillary Clinton is beholden to corporate interests, particularly the finance sector. And when he does so, you could imagine him citing these numbers:

OpenSecrets.org, screenshot from Bombed

This screenshot from Reddit user Bombed shows the OpenSecrets.org “career profiles” ofClinton and Sanders, summarizing their top contributors from 1989 to the present. That leaves out Sanders’s time as mayor of Burlington, but includes both politicians’ entire careers in federal politics. “The organizations themselves did not donate,” OpenSecrets explains. “Rather the money came from the organizations’ PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families.”

The differences could hardly be more striking. Out of Clinton’s top 20 organizational donors, only two (EMILY’s List and the University of California) aren’t corporate. There are seven mega-banks, five corporate law/lobbying firms, and three big entertainment companies. Now, to be fair to Clinton, the vast majority of these donations came from individuals rather than corporate PACs, and as a senator from New York it’s understandable that finance and media interests (not to mention New York ceramics giant Corning) would give to her heavily. But it’s still a very corporate-heavy list.

By contrast, 19 of Sanders’s top 20 donors are unions. The one non-labor group on the list is the American Association for Justice, an interest group for plaintiff’s attorneys, perhaps the most reliable non-union Democratic constituency. This isn’t too surprising. Sanders is, along with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), just about the most pro-labor member of the Senate. He has fought free trade agreements for decades and is a major opponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he’s critical of guest worker programs that he believes undercut Americans’ wages, and he’s pushed back on the Obama administration’s education reform agenda. (Vermont, it should be said, is the only state in the union without charter schools.)

This is precisely the contrast Sanders wants to set up: Clinton’s donor list reads bank, bank, bank, and his reads union, union, union. That won’t be enough to win, not least because Democratic primary voters aren’t actually more liberal than Clinton. But the threat of being tarred as a tool of finance could be enough to push Clinton in a more populist direction, which is what victory for Sanders would really look like.

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/30/8522019/bernie-sanders-hillary-donors

By this account, Hillary Clinton represents the big money interests while Bernie Sanders represents the workers in the middle class and the poor––basically ALL those (the vast majority) who are without productive capital ownership stakes in the economy and limited to earning an income ONLY through a job. The money interest, on the other hand represent the top 10 percent of the nation who are the OWNERS of wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets and who have rigged the system to ensure that they will OWN the FUTURE.

Sanders needs our support to reform the system to empower EVERY child, woman, and man to acquire OWNERSHIP shares in the building of a FUTURE economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen. Sanders needs to be directed to embrace advocating financial mechanisms based on insured, interest-free capital credit extended specifically to grow the economy, credit that is repaid with the earnings produced by the investments. In other words, Sanders needs to advocate for using the logic of corporate finance (which represents about 98 percent of all new capital asset formation) that financial sound investments will pay for themselves, and empower EVERY citizen to participate through their personal OWNERSHIP stakes in the FUTURE growth of the economy.