Ties to major lobbyists compromise first wave of national “Berniecrats”

3/23 Update: FEC filings disclosed since the publication of this piece show that Angulo has contributed another $1,000 to Carmona. Furthermore, S. Donald Sussman has contributed $2,700 to Carrillo. No lobbyists or big money donors have yet been identified in Mejia’s filing.

Like millions of Americans, I donated my small dollars to Bernie Sanders. I believed in his promise to get money out of politics. Many are still pushing for upholding that ideal, but the cracks are starting to show: Publicly available information suggests that the first wave of “Berniecrat” candidates isn’t walking the walk on Bernie’s push to move away from corporate lobbyists and big donors.

Let’s examine the first Congressional election of the Trump era: A special election in the only Los Angeles County District that voted for Sanders over Clinton. The April 4th contest pits California Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, who donated $1,700 to Clinton prior to the start of the primaries, against three younger candidates who were each recently recognized by the LA Times as representing the “Sanders-style.” Publicly available information suggests that two of these candidates are being funded by the prominent lobbyists who bankrolled Clinton’s race against the socialist Senator (no FEC campaign finance report is available for the third, discussed below).

Arturo Carmona worked as Sanders’ Deputy Political Director. His campaign advertising makes heavy use of a picture with the Senator. While no endorsement has been offered, Carmona calls himself a “Bernie Sanders Democrat.” Yet, given the Senator’s strong stances against multinational corporations, it is notable to find a $250 and a $1,000 donation from a registered lobbyist for Wal-Mart, Javier Angulo, among the earliest donations to Carmona in December 2016.

A little background: Angulo is on the Steering Committee of the Mayors Business Council of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. He has worked on “building support for local and statewide candidates and ballot initiatives, including Senator Barbara Boxer’s successful 2010 reelection campaign.” He works closely with the Central City Association of Los Angeles, which describes itself as “L.A.’s Voice for Business.” He has thanked the Association for its “support of Walmart and the greater business community.”

Records from a Historic Cultural Neighborhood Council meeting show that following his hiring by Walmart in 2011, “one of the first things Walmart asked [Angulo] to do is to identify an opportunity for Walmart to introduce a new concept which is the Walmart Neighborhood Market.” Amid protests, the Market opened in Chinatown. At the time, controversy swirled around City Council member and now mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti for a $100 donation from Mr. Angulo. Following public outcry, Garcetti returned the money. The top executive of the Federation of Labor, Maria Elena Durazo, stated “Wal-Mart money is Wal-Mart money.”

While it was the donation to Garcetti that drew controversy, the former mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had already kept $250 from Angulo. Upon being questioned on any plans to oppose the Market, Villaraigosa said “I am not going to use the city’s powers to deny something that they [Walmart] have a right to do with or without us.”

Notably, the company has built multiple stores in Southern California in recent years. Peter Dreier, Distinguished Professor of Politics at the local Occidental College explains “To gain the support (or silence) of community groups, Wal-Mart dramatically increased its charitable philanthropy.” From the NAACP and Goodwill to Catholic Charities and Meals on Wheels, “Angulo makes sure that whenever Wal-Mart hands over a check to one of these groups, elected officials are there for the photo-op.” The relationship is reciprocal: Angulo received an award from the NAACP.

The money is not simply originating from Angulo. He is bundling it on a public ActBlue page for Carmona. The call for funds is directed to members of Hermanos Unidos, a campus organization for Latino men. Yet, records from the Federal Election Commission suggest that women have contributed to this fund, and Anibal Acevedo, the former Governor of Puerto Rico indicted on charges of campaign finance violations contributed $250. While the origins of the connection between Angulo and Acevedo are unclear, Acevedo served as National Finance Council Co-Chair and Angulo is listed as a member of Ready for Hillary 2016. Notably, Acevedo, who attended the University of Puerto Rico, could not have been a formal member of Hermanos Unidos, as the organization only exists in California.

Beyond Carmona, while the LA Times brands Wendy Carrillo as a Sanders progressive, her public record suggests an affinity to the establishment represented by Clinton. Observing Obama’s rising tide during the 2008 primary, Carrillo enthusiastically proclaimed on her personal blog, “Hillary Clinton . . . still in the game!” Other clues as to her support of Clinton are found elsewhere on the internet, but are not linked to here to help protect private citizens’ privacy. Nonetheless, it appears that only by the time of the California primary that Carrillo attended a Sanders rally and could answer the question to herself of “Who IS this guy from Vermont?” Having observed the rally, Carrillo finally understood “why many #FeelTheBern.” It’s unclear if she felt it herself, but she noted that she did “#FeelTheSunburn.”

Furthering the pro-Clinton narrative, Carrillo’s donation records show she accepted a $2,700 donation from Emily Sussman, the Campaign Director for the pro-Clinton Center for American Progress. Sussman has donated tens of thousands of dollars to a slew of Democratic establishment politicians. She was no fan of Sanders or his primary supporters, dismissing them as mostly White and male. She also dismissed questions of Clinton’s trustworthiness from Bernie Sanders supporters, and defended the superdelegate system as “the will of the Democratic people in the voting process.”

E. Sussman’s father, S. Donald Sussman, is invested in Phillips 66, a major company working on the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). This is notable in light of the fact that Carrillo is known in the progressive activist community for spending several weeks at DAPL. Yet, she not only accepted Sussman-family money, she accepted $2,700 from Alida Garcia, a lobbyist for Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.US, which ran controversial ads that seemed to encourage support for the Keystone XL Pipeline.

S. Donald Sussman provided major additional funding to Clinton during the Democratic primary: Over 300,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund, and over 21 million to pro-Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA. Half a million went to Correct the Record, a Super PAC that paid an online army to combat criticism of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. The Clinton Foundation donor database released by Guccifer 2.0 shows a $50,000-$100,000 contribution to a Sussman Family Foundation, and an email in the Wikileaks archive shows Sussman as the first to have been scheduled to receive a Thank You Call from John Podesta.

DAPL protesters received no such treatment, as Clinton’s campaign did not issue a statement on the controversy until quite late in the controversy, imploring “all the parties involved” to “find a path forward that serves the broadest public interest.” Clinton ignored young Native Americans who traveled to her New York office asking for her help at DAPL. Following Trump’s executive action on the pipelines, Sussman-backed Carrillo stated “I am the only candidate in the race for California’s 34th Congressional district that has the background and proven track record of standing up for human rights whether they be for peaceful protestors or undocumented immigrants.”

The only other “Sander-style” candidate identified by the LA Times is Kenneth Mejia, a 26-year-old, first-generation Filipino-American Certified Public Accountant who volunteered for Sanders, left the Democratic Party during the Convention, and become a Green Party activist focused around eliminating homelessness and promoting universal health care. As Mejia only had pledged donations in his CrowdPac rather than actual donations as of the latest FEC deadline, his donations cannot be verified using public information yet. The only publicly available fact that could hint at any questionable activity sought on Mejia is that he worked at a hedge fund, which he quit to focus on his campaign. His role as an accountant is unlikely to have included any decision making capacity, as accountants generally book entries in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. He is listed on the ballot as a Certified Public Accountant and says on social media that he works an 8–5 job.

As a young candidate and an outsider to the political establishment, Mejia faces considerable challenges. Yet, his experience includes running as a write-in candidate for the same seat during the 2016 primary and receiving over a thousand votes. He has amassed a nationwide following on Facebook of over 20,000 people, and he has raised just over $40,000 from over a thousand people, claiming that his average donor donor amount is $33. Notably, upon hearing Mejia’s campaign story, Sanders responded “I think you’re running for the right reason.”

While donations for Carmona and Carrillo include numerous friends and supportive family members, the large contributions from such notable lobbyists contradicts their marketing of themselves as following Sanders’s legacy. The Senator demanded that the Walton family “get off of welfare” by increasing wages so that their workers may require less government support. Indeed, Sanders railed against the Sussman-backed Hillary Victory Fund and claimed it “skirts legal limits on federal campaign donations.”

All candidates can reject donations — why haven’t these donations been rejected by these two “Berniecrats”? The Waltons and the Sussmans are some of the wealthiest people in the world. They backed Clinton against Sanders, meaning that they supported the flawed Clinton over the more likable candidate. As such, their unwavering support for Clinton played a substantial role in the DNC-backed “elevation” of the “Pied-Piper” candidate Trump, and thus to his election as the President of the United States.

Bernie is the most popular political figure in the country now — and all kinds of candidates will ride that wave by talking the talk — but few will actually walk the walk. We who want to carry forward the political revolution should set some minimum standards to protect our movement against establishment opportunists who are already trying to hitch themselves to the Bernie bandwagon and draw our candidates into the same compromised relationships we are fighting against.

These two cases in California suggest that the Democratic Party’s donor class is already hard at work co-opting (some) of the young, non-White faces associated with Bernie Sanders’ small donor revolution. As such, these donations suggest a limited effectiveness to Sanders’ hopes of reforming entrenched practices within Democratic primaries. Progressive voters nationwide ought to be very skeptical of anyone branding themselves or being touted as a “Berniecrat.” Stick to the oldest adage in American politics: Follow the money.