The election of Tom Perez by the discredited Democratic National Committee, which did everything it could to sabotage the presidential candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders, was a step in the wrong direction.
The DNC’s arrogant message to progressives is that despite their efforts to bring about reform, the party apparatus will remain under the control of the wealthy corporate donors who Perez represents.
As Matt Stoller wrote on the Intercept, besides not having anywhere near the grassroots organizing experience of Congressman Keith Ellison, his main competitor for the position of party chair, Perez was much too cozy with the big banks.
In the Justice Department, Perez refused to prosecute bankers who illegally foreclosed the mortgages on over a thousand American soldiers, some of whom committed suicide when faced with losing their homes while fighting for our country overseas.
Labor Secretary Perez issued highly questionable waivers to UBS, Barclays, JPMorgan, the Royal Bank of Scotland Group and to Citigroup, allowing them permission to manage pension money despite having just pleaded guilty to conspiring to rig the foreign exchange markets.
Paul Hodes calls Tom Perez a “good guy” (Monitor Forum, March 12), but Perez advised the Clinton campaign to smear Sanders as the candidate of angry white liberals, which devolved into the nefarious strategy of attacking fictional “Bernie Bros” to intentionally damage Sanders.
Another contemptible campaign of personal destruction was orchestrated by Hillary Clinton’s favorite Islamophobic billionaire contributor Haim Saban and others, who successfully derailed Ellison’s candidacy by falsely and maliciously accusing him of anti-Semitism. Following this travesty, the DNC decided that it would emulate the Republicans by taking bundles of corporate cash and empowering Perez to appoint registered federal corporate lobbyists to serve as at-large members of the DNC.
What’s next, a DNC beholden to Wall Street permitting hundreds of superdelegates to again have an undemocratic and decisive role in selecting another establishment politician as the 2020 nominee for POTUS?
The problem with the Democratic Party is that it has become just like the Republican Party, a tool of the economic elite and the military-industrial complex surveillance state actively destroying our civil liberties while supporting foreign interventions, dictatorships and oppression throughout the world.
On YouTube, Tom Perez can be seen literally running away from journalist Zaid Jilani in the middle of their interview after being asked a question about Israel’s demolition of hundreds of Palestinian homes.
If you think he represents change and has the courage to challenge the status quo and the direction of the Democratic Party, you’re sadly mistaken.
(John S. Hancock lives in Concord.)