Will The Republican Wing Of The Democratic Party Continue To Dominate?

Late last night, we looked at the uncomfortable fact that progressives are not in control of the Democratic Party and that their values and ideals more often than not take a backseat to the career-driven needs of centrists and corrupted corporate shills. The Democratic Establishment, the Philly Machine, the cash-laden Republican wing of the Democratic Party and even the Clintons are backing a candidate in the hot PA-13 primary, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who advocates cutting Social Security over the most progressive political leader in the state of Pennsylvania, state Senatior Daylin Leach. Similarly, across the country in an even bluer district, CA-17, the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- along with Big Money Republicans-- are in a feeding frenzy to replace liberal icon Mike Honda with corporate whore Ro Khanna, who, like Margolies-Mezvinsky, has promised his predatory financial backers that he will vote to cut Social Security. And in CA-33, the most progressive candidate, Project Angel Food founder Marianne Williamson, who speaks the most clearly and passionately about actually doing something about the endemic corruption of the two Beltway party establishments, has eschewed the Democratic Party and is running as an independent!

Today, I was a little taken aback to read Michael Mishak's story for the Associated Press that Charlie Crist-- a former conservative Republican-turned-centrist-Democrat-- is being viewed in some deluded circles as a test case for progressive values. Third Way-- essentially the uber-corrupt spokesmen for the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- is whining that Crist isn't running as the corporate whore they expected him to be.

Crist isn't my kind of "Democrat" but he's a savvy enough politician to know he has to run as a progressive and a populist if he's going to get elected as a Democrat in Florida. Sleazy Democratic Party boss Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a corrupt centrist who has built her power in an unsavory alliance with the anti-Cuba sugar cartel, must have had an aneurism when her candidate, Crist, announced Friday that he favors ending the Cuban embargo-- a popular move, but one that would destroy the sugar cartel that inflates the price of sugar and pays for Wasserman Schultz's political career.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist said he supports ending the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, a complete reversal from his position as the state’s former Republican governor and as an independent Senate candidate in 2010.

“The embargo has done nothing in more than fifty years to change the regime in Cuba,’’ Crist said Friday night in a statement after announcing his support for lifting the decades long policy on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. Crist was on the left-leaning show as part of a series of appearances last week to promote his new book, The Party’s Over: How The Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became A Democrat.

As the Republican governor from 2007-2011, Crist backed U.S. sanctions against Cuba and signed a state law hiking costs on agencies that book trips to the repressive regime.

“I think the current policy in place is responsible,'” said Crist on June 14, 2010, on a visit to Miami Beach. “I do support the embargo.”

Third Way is less concerned with Cuba than with the continued dominance of the Democratic Party by the corporate entities that finance their slimy, degenerate operation. And Crist is starting to make them nevous.

When former GOP Gov. Charlie Crist announced he'd run for his old job as a Democrat in 2014, party leaders rejoiced at the prospect of a pragmatic candidate able to win back centrist Republicans and independent voters who had soured on incumbent Rick Scott.

But Crist is taking a hard turn left as his campaign begins to take shape.

He has embraced President Barack Obama's health care law even as many Democrats distance themselves from it. He supports efforts to legalize medical marijuana and to overturn the gay marriage ban he initially backed. He has called for an increase in the minimum wage, something he once voted against.

"Tallahassee is out of control," he told hundreds of supporters in declaring his candidacy. "The voice of the people has been silenced by the financial bullies and the special interests."

In seizing on the issues and rhetoric animating activists, Crist has made his populist campaign in the nation's largest swing state a critical test case of whether his new party's ascendant liberal wing is gaining momentum or overreaching. His appeals to economic populism could be particularly potent, with Florida voters identifying the economy as their chief concern this year.

Still, Crist's approach concerns some Democrats.

Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, warned that "us-versus-them, people-versus-powerful rhetoric" could hurt Democrats in the most contested states.

"That will work with a slice of the base, but that will not resonate with the kind of swing voters you need to prevail in places like Florida," he said. Democrats "need to talk about a much broader set of ideas to create opportunity."

Nationally, Democrats are fighting to reshape the party after a devastating recession and amid a growing income gap.

Liberals such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren favor an aggressive populist approach over the centrist economic strategy that President Bill Clinton used to revive a moribund party two decades ago. Democratic gubernatorial candidates in at least six states, including Florida, are making a minimum-wage increase a centerpiece of their campaigns.

Republicans say such moves jeopardize economic gains in a fragile recovery. They would streamline regulations and provide training and education initiatives benefiting the private sector.

"When I hear a politician say that we have to raise the minimum wage so working families can make ends meet, I cringe, because I know that statement is a lie," Scott told the Tampa Bay Times last month. "Even if we did raise the minimum wage, working families will still not be able to make ends meet on those jobs. We need good jobs that lead to good careers for our families and that's what I am focused on."

Today's full-blown editorial about the minimum wage in the New York Times belies the Republican view-- shared by some corporate whores inside the Democratic Party-- that raising he minimum wage is bad policy. (Conservatives, of course, would prefer abolishing the minimum wage altogether, but many are afraid to come out and admit that these days.)

The political posturing over raising the minimum wage sometimes obscures the huge and growing number of low-wage workers it would affect. An estimated 27.8 million people would earn more money under the Democratic proposal to lift the hourly minimum from $7.25 today to $10.10 by 2016. And most of them do not fit the low-wage stereotype of a teenager with a summer job. Their average age is 35; most work full time; more than one-fourth are parents; and, on average, they earn half of their families’ total income.

None of that, however, has softened the hearts of opponents, including congressional Republicans and low-wage employers, notably restaurant owners and executives.

This is not a new debate. The minimum wage is a battlefield in a larger political fight between Democrats and Republicans-- dating back to the New Deal legislation that instituted the first minimum wage in 1938-- over government’s role in the economy, over raw versus regulated capitalism, over corporate power versus public needs.

But the results of the wage debate are clear. Decades of research, facts and evidence show that increasing the minimum wage is vital to the economic security of tens of millions of Americans, and would be good for the weak economy. As Congress begins its own debate, here are answers to some basic questions about the need for an increase.

WHAT’S THE POINT OF THE MINIMUM WAGE? Most people think of the minimum wage as the lowest legal hourly pay. That’s true, but it is really much more than that. As defined in the name of the law that established it-- the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938-- the minimum wage is a fundamental labor standard designed to protect workers, just as child labor laws and overtime pay rules do. Labor standards, like environmental standards and investor protections, are essential to a functional economy. Properly set and enforced, these standards check exploitation, pollution and speculation. In the process, they promote broad and rising prosperity, as well as public confidence.

The minimum wage is specifically intended to take aim at the inherent imbalance in power between employers and low-wage workers that can push wages down to poverty levels. An appropriate wage floor set by Congress effectively substitutes for the bargaining power that low-wage workers lack. When low-end wages rise, poverty and inequality are reduced. But that doesn’t mean the minimum wage is a government program to provide welfare, as critics sometimes imply in an attempt to link it to unpopular policies. An hourly minimum of $10.10, for example, as Democrats have proposed, would reduce the number of people living in poverty by 4.6 million, according to widely accepted research, without requiring the government to tax, borrow or spend.

…DOES IT KILL JOBS? The minimum wage is one of the most thoroughly researched issues in economics. Studies in the last 20 years have been especially informative, as economists have been able to compare states that raised the wage above the federal level with those that did not.

The weight of the evidence shows that increases in the minimum wage have lifted pay without hurting employment, a point that was driven home in a recent letter to Mr. Obama and congressional leaders, signed by more than 600 economists, among them Nobel laureates and past presidents of the American Economic Association.

That economic conclusion dovetails with a recent comprehensive study, which found that minimum wage increases resulted in “strong earnings effects”-- that is, higher pay-- “and no employment effects”-- that is, zero job loss.

Evidence, however, does not stop conservatives from making the argument that by raising the cost of labor, a higher minimum wage will hurt businesses, leading them to cut jobs and harming the low-wage workers it is intended to help. Alternatively, they argue it will hurt consumers by pushing up prices precipitously. Those arguments are simplistic. Research and experience show that employers do not automatically cope with a higher minimum wage by laying off workers or not hiring new ones. Instead, they pay up out of savings from reduced labor turnover, by slower wage increases higher up the scale, modest price increases or other adjustments.

Which brings the debate over raising the minimum wage full circle. The real argument against it is political, not economic. Republican opposition will likely keep any future increase in the minimum wage below a level that would constitute a firm wage floor, though an increase to $10.10 an hour would help tens of millions of workers. It also would help the economy by supporting consumer spending that in turn supports job growth. It is not a cure-all; it is not bold or innovative. But it is on the legislative agenda, and it deserves to pass.

If progressives are going to fight this battle and win, the last thing they need is a further takeover by fake Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- whether that be Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky in Pennsylvania, Ro Khanna in northern California, Wendy Greuel in southern California, Jennifer Garrison in Ohio, Ann Callis in central Illinois or any of Steve Israel's shady "mystery meat" Jump Start candidates who refuse to take public policy positions. Let's be strong... and elect real progressives.

Let me recommend that you make the time to read James Kunstler's essay on the failure of our political elites to lead. "The failures of the Left these days," he posits, "are pretty obvious and awful. They got their storybook change-agent elected president and he hasn’t done a darn thing in five years to halt the wholesale racketeering that pervades our national life. Obama’s Department of Justice is home to more zombies than the Grand Cemetery of Port-Au-Prince. The Attorney General’s office essentially signed off on prosecuting bank fraud when Lanny Breuer, chief of the Criminal Division, declared some banks too big to jail. End of story, as Tony Soprano used to say."

Obama promised to brick up the revolving door between Wall Street and the federal agencies and he only added more turnstiles to the gate. Most of the government officials involved in the 2009 TARP program and related crisis management operations are now pulling in six figure salaries at the banks and hedge funds they formerly regulated, while a veteran fixer (Mary Jo White) from the whitest white shoe fixit law shop in the land (Debevoise & Plimpton) was appointed to head the SEC a year ago.

The Left, as represented by President Obama and a majority in the US Senate, did nothing to arrest the ongoing corporate hijacking of the USA. When the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case (2010) that corporations could buy elections via unlimited campaign contributions under the free speech clause of the constitution, Obama had the chance to propose new legislation or a constitutional amendment to redefine the distinction between human persons and corporate “persons.” You’d think that as a constitutional lawyer, he would have been eager to lead on this. But he just ignored the historic opportunity and, anyway, he was on the receiving end of gobs of corporate “free speech” money to run his reelection campaign.

Apart from its pitiful roll-out bugs, the Affordable Care Act has the odor of the biggest insurance scam in history. People joke these days about Obama serving George W. Bush’s fourth term. The internal contradictions of Democratic Party behavior under Obama have only driven political cynicism to new heights. The millennial generation must feel horribly swindled by it.

The last time the USA faced a comparable political convulsion was the decade leading into the Civil War, but this time it will be more complex and confusing and it will have a different ending. A dominant theme will be a continued loss of faith in the Federal government to solve our ills, and a re-emergence of reliance on local support networks at the state, municipal, community and family levels.

This devolution will likely play out very differently across the major regions of the US. And most will follow this course unwillingly.

Strange days are coming.