Can A Paltry Minimum Wage Increase Save The Senate For The Democrats?

It's no coincidence that Florida Democrats put a referendum on the November ballot legalizing medical marijuana. Aside from passing a really good proposal, the referendum should draw lots of pro-marijuana voters to the polls where, it is hoped, most will vote for Democrats. Unfortunately, no one took Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her financiers at the private prison industry into account, The people who are helping-- along with Big Sugar-- her run for the top Democratic House leadership post need those arrested pot smokers to keep their prison cells full-- so that they can make big profits and donate a cut to Wasserman Schultz's slimy political career. So… once again, the avaricious mess who allowed the GOP to gerrymander the state up in their favor in return for her getting an unassailable district filled with elderly Jews, has betrayed Florida Democrats for her own selfishness. She's campaigning against the marijuana initiative, prompting Florida's most important Democratic donor-- and head of United for Care-- John Morgan, to say that he knows the "most-powerful players in Washington, D.C.… [and that] Debbie Wasserman Schultz isn’t just disliked, she’s despised. She’s an irritant." Fortunately there's no Debbie Wasserman Schultz standing in the way of Democratic strategy in Arkansas.

In that state, where Mark Pryor, a very conservative Democrat, is facing off a far worse Republican, Tom Cotton, they've managed to put a very popular minimum wage hike on the ballot for November. Republicans tried to keep it off the ballot but supporters turned in more than double the number of signatures needed. The Republican Secretary of State, Mark Martin, has already validated over the 62,000 valid signatures that were needed. It's a paltry raise-- up to $7.50 by January 1, 2016 and then a buck more a year later. Pryor has endorsed the measure (Issue 5) and Cotton has been talking out of both sides of his mouth, as usual-- not wanting to piss off the Koch brothers and their billionaire friends who have financed his political career but frightened that Arkansas voters will figure out who he works for if he doesn't back the measure.

So how unpopular is increasing the minimum wage-- or even having a minimum wage at all-- with Cotton's paymasters? Everyone knows ending the minimum wage is a top Koch agenda item, but this week news broke that one of their top strategists told a roomful of right-winger that the minimum wage leads directly to fascism. No, really; he said that.

At a political strategy summit hosted on June 16 by the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch, Richard Fink, their top political strategist, told the private audience that when he sees someone “on the street” he says, “Get off your ass, and work hard like we did.” Fink's anecdote came during his presentation titled “The Long-Term Strategy: Engaging the Middle Third,” which capped off a session of four speeches detailing the intellectual foundation of Charles Koch’s political ideology.

…In his speech titled “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society,” Charles Koch echoed an op-ed he wrote earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal in both his paranoia and self-pity. The billionaire oil industrialist, hosting some of the most powerful men in Washington, without irony claimed in his speech that he and his brother were “put squarely in front of the firing squad.” He later framed the path ahead for America as a binary choice between freedom and collectivism, a catchall term he used to describe liberalism, socialism, and fascism. Koch refrained from drawing explicit parallels to fascists, but his lieutenants did not… This conflation was a running theme throughout the session, articulated in large part by grand strategist Fink. An economist by training, he pointed to psychology to explain the dangers of raising the minimum wage vis á vis totalitarianism.

“Psychology shows that is the main recruiting ground for totalitarianism, for fascism, for conformism, when people feel like they’re victims,” said Fink. “So the big danger of minimum wage isn’t the fact that some people are being paid more than their value-added-- that’s not great. It’s not that it’s hard to stay in business-- that’s not great, either. But it’s the 500,000 people that will not have a job because of minimum wage.”

He continued, “We’re taking these 500,000 people that would’ve had a job, and putting them unemployed, making dependence part of government programs, and destroying their opportunity for earned success. And so we see this is a very big part of recruitment in Germany in the '20s.”

“If you look at the Third -- the rise and fall of the Third Reich, you can see that,” Fink said. “And what happens is a fascist comes in and offers them an opportunity, finds the victim-- Jews or the West-- and offers them meaning for their life, OK?”

Fink cited the historical examples of Nazi Germany and communist Russia and China to segue to terrorism. “This is not just in Germany. It's in Russia, in Lenin, and Stalin Russia, and then Mao,” said Fink. “This is the recruitment ground for fascism, and it's not just historical. It's what goes on today in the-- in the suicide bomber recruitment.”

Fink’s commentary on collectivism led to observations on the psychological underpinnings of the environmental movement. According to Fink, in the same way that lack of meaning in life leads to terrorism, it leads to environmentalism.

“The environmental movement. Occupy Wall Street. These kids are searching for meaning. They're protesting the 1 percent. They are the 1 percent, but they're protesting the 1 percent. The environmental movement and climate change. It's not about climate change.

I studied climate change for six years. I can't figure it out, quite frankly. Charles is ahead of me on this. I'm not a climatologist, but I'm not completely stupid. I can tell you I meet with people, particularly in California, that are convinced the world is going to burn up in you know, a year or two. They don't know the answer-- they don't even know the question, because it's not about climate change. It's about a cause. It gives their life meaning.”

Fink's statement that he's not a climatologist is notable considering both his education and employment. Koch Industries is a leading proponent of climate change skepticism. David Koch has posited that climate change may turn out to be good for humankind in that longer growing seasons would support greater food production. And Charles Koch personally helped found the Institute for Energy Research, a group that defends oil industry tax subsidies. Despite his actions, Charles Koch railed against this type of behavior during the seminar. “So to truly help the poor and the economy, we have to eliminate cronyism,” he said. “We have to eliminate welfare for the rich.”

Fink also pointed to blocking cap and trade as a success of the Koch network, appearing to give it equal weight to their success in flipping the House of Representatives. Cap and trade, a market-based approach to curbing carbon emissions, was first implemented on a large scale during George H.W. Bush’s administration to combat acid rain. The measure, derided by the tea party as “cap and tax,” died in Congress in 2010, chiefly as a result of staunch oil industry opposition. Later that year, the movement would claim victory in the historic landslide election that turned the House of Representatives over to Republican control. Both Koch Industries and David Koch have previously been reluctant to acknowledge any involvement in the early days of the tea party movement, though Americans for Prosperity has fueled much of its rise. AFP was founded by David Koch and is the primary vehicle of the brothers’ political activity.

Fink described the differences between the three thirds of the electorate-- the "freedom" third, the "collectivist" third, and the non-ideological middle third of voters, whose recruitment he said is crucial for the Koch network’s success. “Mitt Romney won on leadership. He won on the economy. He won on experience,” Fink said. “What did he lose on? He lost on care and intent. Intent is extremely important.”

Fink spoke at length about the appearance of the Koch network’s motives to the middle third, and the business-oriented solutions for improving its political brand.

“Yeah, we want to decrease regulations. Why? It’s because we can make more profit, OK? Yeah, cut government spending so we don’t have to pay so much taxes,” said Fink. “There’s truth in that, you all know, because we’re in the 30 percent of the freedom fighters. But the middle part of the country doesn’t see it that way.”

“When we focus on decreasing government spending, over-criminalization, decreasing taxes, it doesn’t do it, OK? We’ve been reaching the third by telling them what’s important-- what we think is important should be important to them. And they’re not responding and don’t like it, OK? Well, we get business-- what do we do? We want to find out what the customer wants, right, not what we want them to buy,” he said.