by William Skink

Wow, Montana Democrats, just when I thought I couldn’t be more repulsed by your rank hypocrisy and corruption, actress and activist Margot Kidder lays out how you have whored yourselves to Hillary before a single primary vote has been cast in Montana.

The story of how Hillary Clinton bought the loyalty of 33 state Democratic parties isn’t surprising, but it is very demoralizing for anyone in Montana who supports Bernie Sanders, or democracy for that matter. What’s even more discouraging is how little it took for Montana Democrats to whore themselves out to Hillary. We’re not talking some classy, high-end escort whoring here, we are talking the meth head in the motel room giving out twenty dollar blowjobs. Think that sounds obscene? Well, read the damn article and then tell me the analogy doesn’t fit. Here’s the basics of the scheme:

In August 2015, at the Democratic Party convention in Minneapolis, 33 democratic state parties made deals with the Hillary Clinton campaign and a joint fundraising entity called The Hillary Victory Fund. The deal allowed many of her core billionaire and inner circle individual donors to run the maximum amounts of money allowed through those state parties to the Hillary Victory Fund in New York and the DNC in Washington.

The idea was to increase how much one could personally donate to Hillary by taking advantage of the Supreme Court ruling 2014, McCutcheon v FEC, that knocked down a cap on aggregate limits as to how much a donor could give to a federal campaign in a year. It thus eliminated the ceiling on amounts spent by a single donor to a presidential candidate.

In other words, a single donor, by giving 10,000 dollars a year to each signatory state could legally give an extra $330,000 a year for two years to the Hillary Victory Fund. For each donor, this raised their individual legal cap on the Presidential campaign to $660,000 if given in both 2015 and 2016. And to one million, three hundred and 20 thousand dollars if an equal amount were also donated in their spouse’s name.

From these large amounts of money being transferred from state coffers to the Hillary Victory Fund in Washington, the Clinton campaign got the first $2,700, the DNC was to get the next $33,400, and the remainder was to be split among the 33 signatory states. With this scheme, the Hillary Victory Fund raised over $26 million for the Clinton Campaign by the end of 2015.

It’s not enough apparently for our Democratic leadership to be leading fundraising efforts for out-of-state politicians–Bullock with the Democratic Governors Association and Tester with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Not satisfied with that degree of hypocrisy (when it comes to railing against dark money) Montana Democrats decided to upped the ante and sold us out. It’s disgusting. Here’s more from Kidder:

The leadership of a very broke Montana Democratic Party decided in August of 2015 that this was a seductive deal they were willing to make. And by the end of that year scores of 10,000 donations came in from out of state.

Montana’s list of out of state donors to the state campaign reads like a Who’s Who of the Democratic financial elites. The names vary little from the list of high donors to the other 32 states that signed on to the Hillary Victory Fund.

What do billionaires like Esprit Founder Susie Buell of California, and Sri Lankan lobbyist Imaad Zuberi of California, and media mogul Fred Eychaner of Chicago, and Donald Sussman hedgefund manager from New York and Chicago real estate mogul J.B Pritzker, and gay activist Jon Stryker of NY, and NRA and Viacom lobbyist Jeffrey Forbes and entertainment mogul Haim Saban all have in common?

They all appear to be brilliant business people who have all given millions to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and to her various PACS. And they all gave the Montana State Democratic Party $10,000 each in 2015. It is doubtful that many of them have any interest in Montana politics, or that they have even bothered to visit.

And, as Kidder points out, this money doesn’t even stay in the state but is instead funneled back to the DNC:

The Montana State Democratic party received $43,500 dollars from the Hillary Victory Fund on November 2, 2015. Yet on that same day it transferred $43,500 back to the Democratic National Committee in Washington. And on December 1, 2015 it received another $20,600 from the Hillary Victory fund. And on the same day the Montana State Democratic Party sent that exact same amount, $20,600, back to the DNC in Washington as well, an entity that has not bothered to disguise its preference for a Hillary Clinton candidacy over that of a Bernie Sanders one.

By November 2015, 22 of the state parties linked to the Hillary Victory Fund have received $938,500 from the fund and sent the same amount back to the DNC. There is no limit to amounts of money transferred between state and national parties and PACS or Funds.

(Obama had a similar fund in 2008, but not until he had already won enough delegates to be sure he would be the nominee.)

The Democratic spokespeople for the17 states that refused to go along with the Clinton campaign’s plan, even though many of them were as broke as the Montana State Democratic Party was (Nebraska springs to mind), were clear that it seemed less than democratic to be choosing sides in a primary that hadn’t happened yet. That the very purpose of a primary was to let the people choose which candidate they wanted to represent them and to not let the party establishment load the dice in their own favour. They made it obvious that they were choosing democracy over kick-backs.

Now it’s starting to make more sense why we don’t hear much Bernie support from the Democrat mouthpiece blogs in the state. The party apparatus in Montana has decided to give Democracy the middle finger and opted instead to become political whores for Hillary.

So, the next time you hear a Montana Democrat talking about dark money being bad and the need to overturn Citizens United, please realize they are either ignorant of their party’s corruption or deceitful, lying, anti-democratic shills for one of the more disgusting political creatures of our time, Hillary Clinton.

I’ll give Kidder the last word on what this means:

Our state party leadership signed a deal with a woman who out here, on our turf, possibly wouldn’t last a week. They signed away our unobstructed right to choose which Democratic candidate we supported for President. Given that we have 15 pledged delegates and seven superdelegates, we have lost our absolute right to have superdelegate endorsements proportional to the wishes of the primary voters

For what? Sixty four thousand and one hundred dollars? Which we had to give back? That’s a pretty poor excuse for selling out our right to our own choice.