Hi there. I know I have been posting a fair amount about certain paid staffers for Bernie and the allegations they may be plants working on behalf of the DNC or Hillary Clinton. I am still pursuing that story.

Today, however, I'd like to address the larger issue of how paid campaign staff who come in to run Bernie's state campaigns have abused, ignored and misused volunteers and the independent organizations they organized to support Bernie's candidacy. I've heard from many of these folks. They created their own grass roots organizations for Bernie months in advance of any direct contact with paid staff, acquiring valuable knowledge about l conditions in their localities that, sadly, was all too often dismissed out of hand by the paid staff hired to run Bernie's official state campaigns in the run-up to the elctions.

These volunteers did tremendous work creating networks of Sanders supporters throughout each state and even across state lines. They canvassed, used social media and generally spread the word about Bernie, his values and positions when the traditional media essentially refused to even acknowledge Bernie's candidacy. Many volunteers sacrificed both time and money on his behalf.

Yet, when Sander's paid staffers 'parachuted' into these states mere weeks before their state's primary or caucus, these volunteers, who were already organized and working for Bernie's victory, found their voices ignored and dismissed and their talents wasted. The paid staff, many of whom had limited experience themselves, and then only in working in traditional campaigns, essentially told the volunteers, who had acquired all this local knowledge and hard won experience, that their advice was not only not welcomed, but that they should just shut up and follow the plan laid out for them by the "professionals" who knew better, even when that plan was flawed and duplicated work by volunteers that had been already accomplished months earlier.

I discussed some of these issues in my story about Mark Craig and his interactions with Ryan Hughes, the official campaign's state director in Michigan, and since then I've heard from a number of volunteers in other states who have experienced similar issues. Rather than summarize them for you, I will let them tell their stories in their own words.

Let me begin with this comment I found on Facebook from a Michigan volunteer, Yolanda, responding top a post by Billy Taylor, where Hughes was assigned by the national campaign as the state director for the Pennsylvania. Here is what Yolanda had to say:

We were sent into neighborhoods with 8 out of 10 houses abandoned or condemned..Yeah great walking in 12" of snow where even the streets are not plowed much less the sidewalks cleared. And when they found out that WE were going to keep the office opened after the primary THEY decided to stay. Mark Craig secured the lease and paid for the internet to be put in. Now we are left with meeting back in each others houses like we began last summer. Yeah, that is really helping Bernie.

These issues, however, are not confined to Michigan. Here is a message sent to me by a volunteer in one of the western states about her problems working with the paid staff the national campaign in her state:

I have been reading your post about Hillary "moles" working in Bernie's campaign. What you are describing in your post about the relationships between grassroots organizers and the campaign staff fits my experience ... None the less, as the leader of a grassroots organization for Bernie , I found it frustrating that [the state director] and his staff did not want to work with us, rather ignored our work and started where we had been months before when the clock was ticking. Early voting just around the corner and Independents needed to be registered Dem. It would have been productive if he took the time to find out what we had done and what gaps needed to be filled in. No one from staff visits until after early voting is under way. First field organizer creates an event at a cafe at a time when the cafe is closed. I asked for canvassing materials and info and he gives us an area that we have worked in for months. I asked for areas that we haven't targeted yet and get nothing. Anyway, lots of other details I will not bore you with. I spoke to Dave Doering with Bernie's campaign, in San Francisco, told him that we could use help from the campaign and gave him some suggestions. He asked how working with [the state director] was going. He said I was not the first person he asked who was frustrated ... If [ the person who was the state director for this western state] was sent to another state, I would be very concerned. If Bernie wants to build a mass movement, his staff needs to work with the local people trailblazing the path to victory. My group was thinking WTF is the campaign staff doing?

WTF, indeed.

And here are some comments in email I received for a person working in Alaska for Bernie to whom I sent information regarding the irregularities and problems volunteers faced in North Carolina and Michigan:

Steven, thank you. I will try to get this passed up to someone with influence on the national campaign. Wish I had gotten it 14 hours earlier to be able to get it to Jane Sanders directly. The Michigan experience and how grassroots and local people were treated there was very similar to what happened here in Alaska, including volunteers negotiating for the lease of and paying for official campaign office space and not getting reimbursed.

Do I think that all these paid staffers are Hillary plants? No, I do not. However, I believe that they are likely following the lead of certain paid national staff, such as Tad Devine, Bernie's , a man who is a well known political mercenary, who has been involved with many establishment figures in the Democratic party, and whose political work has not been confined to the United Sates. Read the following excerpts from this Salon article about him back in February:

For members of the Democratic professional political class, 2016 presented two options: either sign on with the Cruise Ship Clinton, hoping to land a berth somewhere in the engine room; or stay on the sidelines entirely, stewing in green rooms, saving bon mots for the cable shows.

Except for one guy — Tad Devine, the Karl Rove to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 populist uprising. [...]

Devine though is as cosseted in the Beltway power establishment as a consultant comes. Pre-Barack Obama, he worked on every contested Democratic presidential primary going back to Jimmy Carter in 1980. He was the top delegate-counter for Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. He has worked on campaigns in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, helping to elect 11 presidents or prime ministers and 17 U.S. Senators. He was a top adviser to both Al Gore’s doomed 2000 campaign and to John Kerry’s 2004 effort. [...]

In his previous presidential forays, Devine was signed with the guy who the rest of the party rallied around. The ships he helped steer in 2000 and 2004 were massive operations, backed by all sorts of party insiders, institutional players, and the best pollsters, political operatives and message mavens money could buy.

Tad Devine is a quintessential Democratic Party ultimate insider. He's President of Devine, Mulvey, Longabaugh, and his firm's list of clients include a who's who among the establishment wing of the Democratic party, including conservatives such as Ben Nelson and John Corzine, former New Jersey Senator and Governor with major ties to Wall Street. Oh, and Devine also worked as "[s]enior strategist on the Gore-Lieberman campaign" and was "[c]ampaign manager for Senator Bob Kerrey's 1992 presidential campaign." Yes, that "Bob Kerrey", a Republican for 14 years and a Hillary supporter in 2008 who attacked Obama for his "Muslim background." Tad Devine is not in this campaign because he's enamored for Bernie and his revolution. He needed a job. He's in it for the money that Bernie's is paying him.

My issue with Tad Devine is that he only knows one way to run a political campaign - the old fashioned way, the DNC way, the way that depends on using a fundraising model dependent upon 'bundlers' beholden to Big Money. He's never been involved in an insurgent, grass root movement like Bernie's candidacy, and based on the evidence so far, in my opinion he knows nothing about working with volunteer grass roots groups that have fueled Bernie's rise from fringe candidate to a legitimate contender for the nomination.

Tad Devine sticks out like a sore thumb among Bernie's senior advisers. I suspect he is behind most of the hires at the national level who have ties to the DNC, to traditional Democratic candidates and to establishment figures in the party. And that is how people like Aisha Dew and Ryan Hughes got appointed to run state campaigns in North Carolina and Michigan, respectively. It is how the Chief of Staff at Cook County ClerkClem Balanoff, , became Bernie's Illinois state director.

I'm not claiming anything sinister here. I'm not impugning the dedication or loyalty of these paid staffers. What I am saying is that the people who run Bernie's official state operations are deeply connected to the the Democratic establishment, whether at the state or national level. They don't have the experience of running a truly grass roots campaign, nor do many of them seem willing to meet the self-organized volunteer groups for Bernie halfway. They are used to a top-down model of campaigning, and to them volunteers are nothing more than low level subordinates who should do what they are told regardless of their experience and the vast store of knowledge they've amassed working for Bernie in their own states prior to the national campaign's field organizers showing up to take over.

The former Sanders campaign organizer I spoke to indicated that the disconnect between the paid operatives and volunteer groups was the primary reason he resigned from the campaign. He saw the problem as a clash of cultures between the "hired guns," as he called them, and the grassroots people. Early on as part of Bernie's national staff, he worked to create a model for true cooperation between the national campaign and the thousands of volunteer organizations that had sprouted up across the country to support Sanders. Over time, however, he saw the national staff move away from that cooperative, decentralized, horizontal model of working with volunteers on an basis of mutual respect to a more traditional vertical, hierarchical model, where volunteers' insights, knowledge and creativity were dismissed as not conducive to the top-down model preferred by people like Tad Devine. The same top down "do what your told and like it" model that has frustrated and demoralized so many volunteers for Bernie.

And that is far more of a problem for the Sanders' campaign as it now moves to the crucial big delegate states of Pennsylvania, New York and California, than any "moles" secretly working for the Clinton campaign. One of the volunteers I quoted above said it best:

If Bernie wants to build a mass movement, his staff needs to work with the local people trailblazing the path to victory.

Amen to that.