Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a powerful, corrupt Democratic Party official, the chair of the DNC who has tilted the rules to give the advantage to Hillary Clinton (Wasserman Schultz co-chaired the Clinton 2008 campaign), publicly threatened staffers who questioned her Clinton partisanship, voted against medical marijuana, co-sponsored SOPA, demanded the extradition and prosecution of Edward Snowden, takes massive corporate donations, and stands unopposed for the Democratic Party nomination in South Florida in every election — except this one.
After six terms in office, Wasserman Schultz has her first primary challenger, activist lawyer Tim Canova — who worked with Occupy, fought the Drug War and private prisons, hates the TPP, and refuses to take big corporate donations for his campaign, financing solely on small-money donations.
Wasserman Schultz has burned a lot of bridges in the Democratic Party and is ripe for toppling, and Canova sounds like just the fellow to do it — someone with real credentials and real principles who stands for genuine reform.
Glenn Greenwald conducted an interview with Canova, which goes into more detail about his campaign — and his corrupt, long-serving crony-capitalist opponent:
Across the board, whether it’s the TPP or the drug war, she’s taking a lot of corporate money, and she’s been taking it for years. She talks the talk about campaign finance reform – she will say she’s for campaign finance reform – but she’s not walking the walk.
She voted recently the way most of Congress did on this latest omnibus spending bill. There were a couple of terrible provisions that allowed dark money to remain in our politics. One provision that she voted for in this omnibus package was to prevent the Securities and Exchange Commission from writing rules for transparency – to require corporations to disclose to their shareholders the extent of their campaign contributions; their political spending. Another ties the hands of the Internal Revenue Service from creating rules to curb special interest donors from forming these sham social welfare organizations that hide political spending.
She’s been raising corporate money for herself; she’s been giving it away to other candidates. She is the quintessential corporate machine politician. She really is, across the board. And then it influences her votes. And it’s not just TPP and the drug war, it’s Wall Street issues, and this is really what I’ve been teaching and writing about for many years. Just in the past few months – the past year or two – she has voted to prevent the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to write rules to regulate payday lending, to prevent racial discrimination in car loans.
In December 2014, she voted to eliminate the part of Dodd-Frank that had prevented big banks from using deposits to speculate in financial derivatives. So she doesn’t have any real vision for public finance other than lining the pockets of her donors.
Meet Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s First-Ever Primary Challenger: Tim Canova [Glenn Greenwald/The Intercept]
