1. Jeff Weaver is also the guy who convinced Bernie and Jane to start taking billionaire money at Our Revolution in August 2016. I was there. If I and the rest of the staff hadn’t walked out in protest they would have gone ahead with it. That’s why we resigned.
2. The worst part is that Weaver wanted to use the organization’s 501(c)(4) status to take billionaire money without telling grassroots donors about it. All while continuing to sign every email and piece merchandise with: “Paid for by Our Revolution. Not the billionaires.”
3. Asking millions of poor and working class people, who had just poured their heart and soul into the Bernie campaign, to give more, while not telling them that we were taking billionaire money on the side, is one of the worst things I’ve ever been asked to do.
4. I warned Bernie and the board that not only was this morally unconscionable, but it would destroy Bernie’s credibility and deal a crushing blow to the progressive movement when the story inevitably leaked to the press.
5. Billionaires like Steyer and Soros, who have organizations of their own, would have gladly cut Our Revolution a million-dollar check and then leaked it themselves, knowing that it would eliminate a new competitor group and return their organizations to dominance.
6. Once Our Revolution was caught taking big money, the grassroots fundraising would have plummeted, making the organization more dependent on big money in a vicious downward spiral. After decimating our grassroots base, the big donors would have been free to cut us off too.
7. On top of that, Bernie was already interested in running again in 2020. And our 2016 campaign had established independence from big money as the line between progressives and corporate Democrats. Our critique of Clinton and her Wall St. speeches exemplified it.
8. If Bernie’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton had been followed up just two months later with breaking his own cardinal rule and taking billionaire money, it would have devastated the progressive movement.
9. Millions who put their trust in Bernie, who answered his call to revolution, who skipped meals and haircuts to send us a few dollars — who let themselves hope again — would have been left utterly heartbroken and despondent. 2020 would have been over for Bernie before it began.
10. None of us had plans to go to the media after we resigned from Our Revolution, but amazingly Weaver publicized it and started attacking us in the press! I had a conversation with a colleague then that comes back to me now.
11. We spoke about Bernie taking big money at Our Revolution and endorsing establishment Democrats running for Senate in exchange for being named Chairman of the Budget Committee if Democrats won a majority. I argued that he shouldn’t make these deals: 
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15. Weaver sold Bernie and Jane on the notion that they would need to take money from billionaires because grassroots funding wouldn’t be enough to sustain Our Revolution and we couldn’t unilaterally disarm.
16. This is the same rationale that corporate Dems use to excuse corruption. And it’s the same logic that our campaign had just obliterated by raising $230 million from small donations — without a super PAC, bundlers, or a money-laundering scheme like the Hillary Victory Fund.
17. Our campaign was successful *because* we chose integrity over big money. We proved that a movement of working people can compete with Wall St. It was as if one of the most consequential revelations of the campaign had just been thrown out and we were supposed to forget it.
18. Weaver was so determined to take big money that he went as far as to sabotage Our Revolution’s grassroots fundraising in an effort to make his prediction that we needed billionaires a self-fulfilling prophecy.
19. Jeff leaked the announcement of Our Revolution in July, 2016, before it was legally incorporated and able to accept donations, costing us millions of dollars. When the organization still raised millions after incorporating and disproved him anyways, he disregarded it.
20. As horrible as this is, it’s just scratching the surface of Weaver’s repeated sabotaging of the 2016 campaign and profound disrespect for the progressive movement. I could write a book about it.
21. But the most disappointing part is that Bernie and Jane went along with it, and still listen to someone who is so clearly a corrupt establishment Democrat, at the expense of this movement and the millions who are counting on it.
22. Realizing that even someone as unique and principled as Bernie could be made to conform to the Democratic Party and take big money is a big reason that I left my career in the Party, and set aside my own financial stability, to help start the Movement for a People's Party.
23. No one goes into the Democratic Party and emerges further on the left. Every institutional pressure in the party moderates elected officials and reels them into the mainstream. The Democratic Party blocks most progressives from getting into office and...
24. The few that make it through are then dependent on the party for their power, privilege, and career. They have to befriend neoliberal committee chairs and party leaders for committee assignments, and to get their legislation heard. They have to horse trade with moderates.
25. They’re under huge pressure to support corporate Democrats in swing districts. They have to play nice with their colleagues and the DCCC so they don’t face well-funded primary challenges. They have to toe the party line and back corporate presidential nominees.
26. They have to spend personal time with and win votes from the establishment Democrats who were easy to criticize from the outside. These dynamics quickly take the edge off their critiques of the party and their colleagues, and it waters down their messages and platforms.
27. That’s why Bernie almost never supports primary challenges against incumbent Democrats in Congress. And why even AOC is backing away from creating a corporate free caucus in the House and supporting the primary challenges she said she would two years ago.
28. As progressives, we’re good at applying a systemic analysis to social conditions like poverty and public health. We don’t blame the poor for lacking work ethic, we understand that their poverty is a function of social forces, especially government policies.
29. When the banks crashed the economy and foreclosed on millions, we supported jailing their executives, but we didn’t pretend that swapping out their CEOs would change the banks’ behavior. Their behavior and those of their executives are a function of institutional incentives.
30. In this case, the banks' behavior results from government policies that make it profitable to defraud millions. They incentivize fraud.
31. We apply systemic analyses to the world. But when it comes to politics and the Democratic Party, we invert that analysis and insist on examining them through an individualistic lens, as if politicians are not subject to the social and institutional forces of their party.
32. That leads some to a flawed theory of change: the idea that if we can just find honest enough politicians and get them elected, we can reform the Democratic Party. It ignores the corporate institutional pressures that are acting on each newly elected class of politicians.
33. The people we’ve elected are perpetually regressing from their campaign stances. So rather than advancing by electing a few people each election cycle, you’re on a treadmill. The people you elected the last cycle have integrated into the party.
34. Reforming the Democratic Party is like adding drops of clear water to a bucket of sludge and expecting the sludge to turn clear. In other words: You don’t take the Democratic Party over. It takes you over.
35. We need to think on a systemic level when it comes to politics too. That means creating a major new party free of corporate money and influence. A party driven by and accountable to the people.
36. A party where the criteria for achieving and retaining power is how well you serve the people. A party with an incentive structure that aligns the personal interests of its elected officials with the public’s interests.
37. As long as we’re in the Democratic Party, the incentive structure will reward and elevate the most corruptible people: the Jeff Weavers and Pelosi's of the party. And it will moderate and neutralize even the most well-intentioned people like Bernie and AOC.
38. The majority of Americans are progressive on the issues. And for nearly a decade now they have been saying that they don’t want another flavor of Democrat or Republican. They want a major new party.
39. At a time when Americans are leaving the establishment parties in historic numbers, progressives shouldn’t be swimming against the populist current in a fruitless attempt to save a corporate party.
40. The people are leading the way to an independent alternative. It’s time we swim with them, build a major new party, and complete the political revolution.
#PeoplesParty
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#PeoplesParty
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