Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Senator Bernie Sanders Speaking at George Washington University, November 16, 2016
After a humiliating election loss just eight days earlier, the Wall Street Democrats in the U.S. Senate laid the groundwork for another humiliating defeat in the midterms in 2018 by electing Senator Chuck Schumer to be the Senate Minority Leader.
Schumer is considered the poster boy for Wall Street — as their mouthpiece for lax regulation and a reliable Senate confirmation vote for Wall Street cronies to lead regulatory agencies. Over the past five years, Schumer has raised over $25.8 million for his campaign committee and Leadership PAC with the leading donors being security and investments firms and their outside law firms, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Schumer’s top ten largest donors over his entire political career include seven major Wall Street banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, UBS and the now defunct Bear Stearns. Also in the top ten are two law firms that regularly represent Wall Street firms when they are charged with fraud: Paul Weiss and Sullivan and Cromwell.
The Democrats’ head-in-the-sand vote yesterday came despite progressive activists staging a sit-in in Schumer’s office on Monday to demand that he step aside and allow the Senate Minority Leader post to go to Senator Bernie Sanders – now widely seen across America as the true leader of the Democratic Party.
On the same day that Schumer’s office called the Capitol Police and had 17 of the sit-in activists arrested, Senator Sanders appeared on the Late Show and told Stephen Colbert that “something is fundamentally wrong” with the Democratic Party. Sanders’ appearance was part of a promotional tour for his new book Our Revolution which seeks to sustain the political momentum he built during the primaries for serious change from the Washington status quo.
Yesterday, Sanders drew a cheering crowd for a speech at George Washington University (GWU) and likely millions more viewers to a live stream of the event that was emailed out to his supporters across the country.
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