Most of us were pleased with the news that the Republicans had lost control
of the House of Representatives last November and the resulting discomfiture of
Donald Trump. We were even more pleased that for the first time, open
supporters of the Palestinians were elected.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dislodged a 10 term Democrat in New York. Both Ilhan
Omar and Rashida Tlaib, elected for constituencies in Minnesota and Michigan,
have come out in support of BDS. Opinion in the Democratic Party is slowly shifting in support
of the Palestinians.
However it
would be a great mistake to assume that this change at the rank and file level
is having any great impact nationally.
As the following article from The
Intercept shows, the major winners in the November elections were the
Corporate Democrats. It would be great mistake to assume that the election of
Ocasio-Cortez and her sisters reflected the Democrats in the House as a whole.
What we saw
was billionaire Republican donors financing ‘centrist’, i.e. right-wing
Democrats. The ‘blue dog Democrats’
increased their numbers to 24 and it is estimated that the right-wing caucuses
have 90 members between them.
Another
right-wing caucus, the Problem Solvers Caucus (it seems that the only problems
they solve are how the rich can get richer) consists of 24 Democrats and 24
Republicans. Bipartisanship is the way that the capitalist system ensures that
there is never a political challenge to corporate corruption. They have imposed
a procedural demand on the Speaker-elect of the House, Nancy Pelosi that she
give greater privileges to Republican members from now on.
The same
caucus members were responsible for ensuring that Obama’s Affordable Care Act
did not attempt to cut the price of drugs thus providing a windfall for the
drug companies.
There is a
saying (though I can’t find where it originated!) that the Democrats are the
graveyard of all social protest. Historically they were the party of
segregation and slavery. The Southern Dixiecrats were epitomised by George
Wallace, four times Governor of Alabama and a three-time Presidential candidate.
At a time
when the American electorate are moving to the left, a shift symbolised by
Bernie Sanders near-win in the Democratic primaries against Hilary Clinton
(which he might have won but for fraudulent conduct of those primaries by the
Democratic National Committee) the Democrats pose a danger to progressive and
socialist movements.
Both the
Republican and Democratic represent different wings of the capitalist political
establishment. Although the Democrats
have a radical and even socialist fringe, their whole make up and organisation
is based on support for the existing capitalist system. It is riddled with corporate influence and
finance. It is the task of socialists and radicals to build a third party based
on the American labour movement.
Tony
Greenstein
The three centrist Democratic caucus groups could
boast as many as 90 members or more in January when new lawmakers
elected this month are sworn in.
From left, James Murdoch in N.Y., on Sept. 20, 2018, Howard Marks in N.Y., on Aug. 1, 2017, Louis Bacon in N.Y., on Jan. 17, 2013, Nelson Peltz in N.Y., on July 16, 2014., Bryan Bedder/Getty Images; Christopher Goodney/Getty Images; Diane Bondareff/AP; Heidi Gutman/Getty Images
JUST THREE
YEARS ago, hedge fund manager Louis Bacon was writing a $19,600 check
to a committee called “Boehner for Speaker.”
Now, the
billionaire GOP donor has pivoted to influence the future of the Democratic
Party. Records show Bacon is one of several deep-pocketed donors that have
shifted to financing recent Democratic campaigns. Though national media
attention has focused largely on newly elected democratic socialists and
progressive members, the House Democratic caucus has also swelled with
pro-business moderates, such as the Blue Dogs, the Problem Solvers Caucus, and
the New Democrats.
The newly
ascendent centrists flexed their muscle this week when a bloc of
moderate lawmakers imposed a set
of rules on Rep. Nancy Pelosi in her bid for speaker of the House, forcing the
California Democrat to accept parliamentary changes that are designed to give
the GOP greater access to floor votes and amending legislation.
The rule
changes were proposed by the Problem Solvers Caucus — a nearly 2-year-old
group affiliated with the organization No Labels that consists of 24 House
Democrats and 24 House Republicans. Many of the members of the caucus were
elected with financial support from Bacon, the billionaire hedge fund manager,
along other wealthy donors with a long history of giving to Republicans.
When the
House was previously under Democratic control, the Blue Dogs and New
Democrats helped industry lobbyists kill health care reforms designed to lower
costs and expand public insurance options. Earlier this year, the same
bloc sided with
House Republicans to repeal financial reforms on medium and large-sized banks.
On Monday,
the Blue Dog Coalition also formally announced the addition of eight new
members, bringing the total group to 24 members. The new members represent
a rebound for the caucus, which has lost a lot of its members since the 2010
tea party wave. The recent electoral success is at least partially thanks to
close ties to Democratic leadership — the Blue Dog caucus, notably, helped the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee identify pro-business candidates for swing
districts ahead of the midterm elections.
The Blue Dog
caucus is known for embracing a corporate-friendly agenda draped in rhetoric
about finding common ground with conservatives. The caucus has a long history
of supporting defense spending, fiscal austerity, and corporate-friendly
free trade deals and regulations, while opposing civil rights legislation and
expanded social services.
The three
newly elected Blue Dog co-chairs, Reps. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla.; Tom
O’Halleran, D-Ariz.; and Lou Correa, D-Calif., are simultaneously members
of the New Democrats. Murphy and O’Halleran are also members of the Problem
Solvers Caucus and were two of the members who signed a letter demanding
rule changes in exchange for their support of Pelosi. The three centrist caucus
groups could boast as many as 90 members or
more in January when new lawmakers elected this month are sworn in.
No Labels, Lots of Cash
The newly
empowered centrist Democrats rode a wave of big money into office.
Federal
Election Commission records show that much of the centrist bloc has
been financed by eight Super PACs associated with group No Labels, a centrist
group that created the Problem Solvers Caucus.
Despite the
litany of PACs, the donors remain largely the same group of about 13
wealthy businessmen, most of whom have a history of financing Republican
campaigns.
Bacon, the
founder of the Moore Capital Management hedge fund, gave $1.1 million in
campaign contributions exclusively to GOP committees for federal office during
the 2016 cycle. This cycle, Bacon gave $1 million to three No Labels-affiliated
Super PACs, with much of that money flowing to races that elected centrist
Democrats. One of the groups, United for
Progress, played a decisive role in helping Rep. Dan Lipinski, a centrist
Illinois Democrat who is anti-abortion, beat back a progressive primary
challenger.
James
Murdoch, chief executive of 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News,
gave $500,000 to United for Progress, a No Labels Super PAC. The group
transferred $730,000 to another No Labels Super PAC, Progress Tomorrow, which
helped Rep. Darren Soto, D-Fla., fend off a primary challenge this year from
former Rep. Alan Grayson, who has been highly critical of Fox News.
Lipinski and
Soto, who are members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, both signed the letter to
Pelosi. They are also members of the New Democrats, and Lipinski is the former
policy co-chair of the Blue Dogs.
Investor
Nelson Peltz, an adviser to No Labels, has donated $900,000 to No Labels Super
PACs and directly to several centrist Democrats that pressed to impose new
rules on Pelosi, including Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Tom
Suozzi of New York, and Murphy, the representative from Florida. Peltz is also
a major donor to Donald Trump, having given to the president’s campaign and
joint fundraising committee over the last two cycles.
Peltz, who
made much of his fortune using junk bonds, has awarded himself very large pay packages. At one of
his former companies, known as Triac, he paid himself $29 million for a company
with only $1.2 billion in sales. After the election in 2016, he urged support
for Trump and called for policies that give investors a special tax holiday on
repatriated oversees profits.
Last year,
the Washington Post revealed that
the top aide to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin traveled on Peltz’s private
plane, a trip that raised ethics concerns. Peltz notably has pushed for lower
tax rates for corporations.
Dan Webb,
co-executive chair of the law firm Winston & Strawn, gave $100,000 to
Citizens for a Strong America, one of the No Labels Super PACs. Webb’s other
direct federal donations this cycle only went to two incumbent House
Republicans.
The
individual donors named in this article did not respond to requests for
comment. Melanie Sloan, a spokesperson for No Labels, noted that she’d seen our
request to at least one of the donors. In a statement, she said, “No one in the Problem Solvers Caucus takes
their marching orders from a donor.”
The Problem
Solvers Caucus, Sloan added, “didn’t
demand plum committee assignments, goodies for their districts, a special
interest provision or any of the other horse trading usually required to move a
congressional vote from no to yes. They asked for reforms that are good for the
whole Congress, and they started pushing for them over the summer, when they
didn’t even know which party would control Congress or who would be Speaker.”
Most of the
No Labels backers have not been strictly partisan in campaign giving. Howard
Marks, co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, has been a major player in
Democratic fundraising circles and was a heavyweight donor to Hillary Clinton,
though he also donated briefly to former Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va. Another donor
to the No Labels Super PACs, John Arnold, the former Enron energy trader, has
given largely to Democrats but also to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Earlier this
week, The Intercept reported that former Clinton adviser Mark Penn, who owns an
investment company that owns a stake in a number of political consulting firms,
has quietly shaped the
anti-Pelosi strategy. Penn’s spouse Nancy Jacobson is the founder of No Labels.
The No
Labels project touts itself as an effort to build commonsense solutions to
vexing political issues. Yet the group did not demand that Republicans
John Boehner or Paul Ryan seek Democratic votes or open legislation to
Democratic amendments in order to serve as House speaker, a new bipartisan
criteria the group succeeded in imposing in
part on Pelosi.
Instead, in
the era of unlimited campaign giving, the organization has provided a backdoor
way for Republican donors to shape control of the Democrats, even when the GOP
is defeated at the ballot box.
Blue Dogs Fetch Dark Money
One of the
other Super PACs that worked to elect centrist members is known as the Center
Forward Committee, an outgrowth of the Blue Dog Research Forum, a now-shuttered
think tank affiliated with the House Democratic caucus.
The group
was formed by former Rep. John Tanner, D-Tenn., and other retired centrist
Democrats. Tanner now serves at the lobbying firm Prime Policy Group, which
represents many corporate clients, including FedEx, Bayer, the American
Hospital Association, Google, and the National Restaurant Association.
The Super
PAC spent big on electing moderate, pro-business Democrats, including Florida’s
Murphy, Arizona’s O’Halleran, and Rep.-elect Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J. But
unlike the New Labels PACs, the Center Forward Committee has virtually no
identifiable individual or corporate donors. Out of
$1.2 million the Super PAC raised, $980,000 came from Center Forward, an
affiliated 501(c)(4) nonprofit that is not required to disclose its donors.
Another $200,000 came from the New Democrats PAC and the Blue Dog PAC, two
groups nearly fully funded by a range of corporate PAC money. Center Forward
did not return a request for comment.
Despite the
opaque nature of the big-money group, there are some hints.
The National
Restaurant Association, an avowed opponent of expanding union rights and
raising the minimum wage, is funded through company donations from the likes of
McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Jack in the Box franchise owners, though the group
does not provide a public breakdown of exactly how it is funded. The National
Rifle Association, notably, directly contributed $40,000 to the Blue
Dog-affiliated Super PAC, according to FEC disclosures.
Other
corporate donors have given through a daisy chain of semi-disclosed entities.
The Center Forward 501(c)(4), for instance, received $77,000 from NCTA, a trade
group that represents Comcast, Cox Communications, and other cable giants,
according to the 2017 tax filing made available to The Intercept last
week.
The Blue
Dogs’s name comes from paintings of dogs that once adornedthe
walls of former Louisiana Rep. Billy Tauzin’s congressional office,
who once hosted an informal gathering of fellow conservative southern
Democrats. Tauzin, notably, switched to the Republican Party in 1995. He later
oversaw the creation of Medicare Part D through 2003 legislation that
expanded drug benefits to seniors. Tauzin passed the bill with a special
provision preventing the government from negotiating with pharmaceutical
companies for better prices.
Tauzin later
retired from Congress and took the job as the chief lobbyist for the
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, known as PhRMA, the very
drug industry group whose corporate members he had showered with an
unprecedented financial windfall reaped by the Medicare expansion he
passed. In 2010, Tauzin helped convince Democrats to leave aggressive cost-cutting
measures out of the Affordable Care Act, another win for drugmakers. That year,
he was paid $11.6
million by the drug lobby for his services.
PhRMA, again
facing political headwinds as Democrats confront high drug prices, appears to
have been laying the groundwork for the challenge. The group’s most
recently filed tax
return shows that PhRMA provided massive donations to a range of
pro-Trump and Republican groups, along with conservative nonprofits fighting
against greater government oversight of the drug industry.
But the
filings also show one seven-figure donation to Democrats: PhRMA gave $1.19
million to Center Forward last year, the dark-money group that helped
elect several Blue Dogs to Congress in the Trump era.
Lee Fang is
a journalist with a long-standing interest in how public policy is influenced
by organized interest groups and money. He was the first to uncover and detail
the role of the billionaire Koch brothers in financing the Tea Party movement.
His interviews and research on the Koch brothers have been featured on HBO’s
“The Newsroom,” the documentaries “Merchants of Doubt” and “Citizen Koch,” as
well as in multiple media outlets. He was an investigative blogger for
ThinkProgress (2009-2011) and then a fellow at the Investigative Fund of the
Nation Institute and contributing writer for The Nation.
In 2012, he
co-founded RepublicReport.org, a blog to cover political corruption that
syndicates content with TheNation.com, Salon, National Memo, BillMoyers.com,
TruthOut, and other media outlets. His work has been published by VICE, The
Baffler, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Progressive, NPR,
In These Times, and the Huffington Post. His first book, “The Machine: A Field
Guide to the Resurgent Right,” published by the New Press, explores how the
conservative right rebuilt the Republican Party and its political clout in the
aftermath of President Obama’s 2008 election victory. He is based in San
Francisco.
Will those who focus on wealth’s concentration gain
the upper hand within the Democratic Party’s leadership?
December 12,
2018 Sam Pizzigati
 |
| Bernie Sanders, Joseph Biden: two different approaches to billionaires, Getty Images |
Back in the closing years of the 20th century, the British Labour Party
leader Tony Blair thoroughly redefined his party’s essence. Labour, Blair
believed, had to shake off the past and become a political
force “on the side” of the upwardly mobile, not just workers and their unions.
Blair’s chief strategist, Peter Mandelson, would capture the new
Blairite sensibility with a quip that would go viral in the UK, even before the
days of social media.
“We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich,” Mandelson
opined, “as long as they pay their taxes.”
And those taxes would stay modest in the years after Blair’s electoral
triumph in 1997. Prime minister Blair would pay precious little attention to
the increasing concentration of British income, wealth, and power in the hands
of a filthy rich few.
How did that benign neglect work out for average people in the UK? Not
so well. Families in Britain’s industrial belt, reeling ever since the 1980s
free-market fundamentalism of the Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher,
continued on a dispiriting economic slide.
Corporate and banking honchos, meanwhile, stuffed their pockets and
eventually crashed the British economy. For an encore, they helped shove Great
Recession Britain into years of austerity that placed the full burden of
economic recovery onto the backs of low- and middle-income households.
This toxic economic stew would bubble over into a widespread political
frustration that right-wing fringe elements would shamelessly exploit. The
resulting wave of racism and xenophobia and a “national mood sour
and cynical,” concludes one UK commentator, have
become Tony Blair’s “legacy.”
The good news? An intense relaxation about the filthy rich no longer
dominates the British Labour Party. In 2015, the backbench lawmaker Jeremy
Corbyn came from seemingly nowhere to win the party’s top leadership post.
Corbyn and his fellow progressives have since led Labour to new policy stances
that repudiate the Blairite indifference toward grand concentrations of private
wealth.
Why should Americans care about this history from across the Atlantic?
One simple reason: Our past quarter-century of history eerily mirrors the
course of events in the UK.
In the 1990s, the British had a relaxed-about-the-rich Tony Blair. We
had a relaxed-about-the-rich Bill Clinton. No one in the Clinton administration
would ever capture their relaxation perspective as colorfully as Peter
Mandelson did in the UK. But some Clintonites came close.
Former Clinton Council of Economic Advisors chief Laura D’Andrea Tyson
may have come the closest. In remarks at a 1998 Federal Reserve conference,
Tyson asked us to imagine our income distribution as an apartment building with
a rat-infested basement and a penthouse ever more luxurious. What to do?
Pillage the penthouse? By all means no, contended Tyson. We need to focus instead on doing “something about
that rat-infested basement.”
Worrying about the wealth of the wealthy, in other words, simply
distracts us from more pressing matters.
This attitude has dominated the Democratic Party leadership mainstream
ever since President John F. Kennedy started pushing tax cuts on America’s
highest incomes as a secret sauce for economic progress. More dollars in rich
people’s pockets, the argument went, would enhance the nation’s economic
growth, in the process creating a “rising tide” that would “lift all boats.”
In more recent years, even Democrats who’ve challenged the Democratic
Party leadership mainstream have accepted the be-happy-don’t-worry framing on
grand fortune.
“The thing to do is concentrate on the 90 percent of people who don’t
have what they need and make sure they have it, and not worry about the people
who make $500,000 a year,” as former Vermont governor Howard Dean noted in his insurgent 2004 White
House bid. “Of course, it’s obscene, but so what?”
How has this relaxation about the filthy rich, a constant through both
the Clinton and the Obama years, worked out for average families in the United
States? We have essentially suffered the same fate as the British. Hard-hit
industrial centers have continued to rust. Real wages have stagnated, and
widespread economic insecurity has exploded into a frustration and cynicism
that purveyors of xenophobia and racism have shamelessly exploited.
The Brits ended up with Brexit. We ended up with Donald Trump.
But here in the United States, as in the UK, we’ve seen a political
pushback against relaxing while wealth continues to furiously concentrate. In
2016, a year after backbencher Jeremy Corbyn helped energize an end to that
relaxation within the Labour Party, backbencher Bernie Sanders came out
swinging against the “billionaire class” and performed far better in the
Democratic Party presidential primaries than any pundit ever thought possible.
Unlike Corbyn in 2015, Senator Sanders ultimately fell short in 2016.
What will now happen in 2020? Will Sanders or someone who shares his
perspective on grand fortune win the Democratic nomination? Will those who
worry — intensely — about wealth’s concentration gain the upper hand within the
Democratic Party’s leadership?
At the grassroots level, Gallup polling suggests, that shift has already
taken place. Late this past spring, Gallup researchers asked a cross-section of
Americans a simple question they had originally asked in 2012: “Do you think
the United States benefits from having a class of rich people, or not?
Six years ago, a slim majority of self-identified Democrats, 52 percent,
told Gallup they do believe that the United States benefits from having rich
people in our midst. That slim majority has now evaporated. In the 2018
surveying, only 43 percent of Democrats felt that the United States benefits
from having a class of rich people.
A clear majority of grassroots Democrats now believe,
in effect, that we don’t need the rich. We don’t have that clarity —at least
not yet — at the party leadership level. What we do have: a clear fault line
within the ranks of those who seek to shape the party’s future.
“We must develop an international movement that takes on the greed and
ideology of the billionaire class and leads us to a world of economic, social
and environmental justice,” Senator Sanders noted earlier this year. “Will
this be an easy struggle? Certainly not. But it is a fight that we cannot
avoid.”
“I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders,” former Vice President
Joseph Biden retorted to a Brookings Institution
audience this past May. “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in
trouble.”
Two different takes on grand fortune, one party. Which take will
prevail? We’ll see soon enough.
This is a very
long article but well worth reading for a background to radical working class
movements in the United States.
