Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Jeffrey Bezos, Billionaire Buyer of the Washington Post in 2013
An article in the Washington Post yesterday continued the paper’s unrelenting efforts to marginalize Senator Bernie Sanders and his effort to press forward on his call for a political revolution in America. The Post article brandished its most preposterous cudgel yet: the cost of Senator Sanders’ continuing protection by the Secret Service, which it suggested was a drain on taxpayers. Calling Sanders the “now-vanquished Democratic presidential candidate,” the Post’s John Wagoner laments that even though “Hillary Clinton has clinched the party’s nomination,” Sanders is still receiving Secret Service protection which could be costing taxpayers more than $38,000 a day.
In fact, Clinton hasn’t clinched anything until there is an official vote taken at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 25-28, no matter how much corporate media might wish otherwise. And since there has never been a Presidential candidate like Clinton, who is under an active criminal FBI investigation for violating State Department policy and transmitting classified material over a private server in her home, anything is possible before the July convention — or thereafter.
To put that $38,000 a day Secret Service cost into perspective, in a report released this past February by the non-partisan investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. government flunked its audit for 2015 because “34 percent of the federal government’s reported total assets as of September 30, 2015” could not be reconciled. That 34 percent represents $1.08 trillion – perhaps a larger worry than spending $38,000 a day to safeguard a man now regarded as a national treasure and the only Presidential contender with any hope of restoring the confidence of young people in their government and the political process.
What was particularly outrageous about the Post writer raising the cost issue of a security detail is that it came at the end of a week when an elected member of the British Parliament, Jo Cox, was brutally murdered over her political beliefs and at a time in the U.S. when attacks by assault-weapon toting mass murderers are becoming a regular occurrence.
If this was an isolated smack down of Sanders at the Washington Post, it wouldn’t trigger speculation about an underlying agenda. But it comes on the heels of an endless series of efforts to marginalize Bernie Sanders at the newspaper.
…
