Tomorrow: A Battle Between The Two Wings Of The Democratic Party-- the Republican Wing And The Democratic Wing

Millions of Democrats are eligible to go to the polls tomorrow and put their collective foot down and stop the rise of the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. There are primaries in New Jersey, Iowa, Montana, and California where the two wings are in deadly conflict. In most cases, most Democrats aren't even bothering to learn the issues or understand that the primary tomorrow is as important-- or in many cases-- more important than the November election. Far more Democrats will not vote tomorrow than will vote. Even though the most basic, core issues of values are at stake.

Yesterday Dave Cole released a last minute TV ad (above) attacking corporate shill Bill Hughes, a machine candidate backed by Steve Israel. Like most of the questionable Democrats from the Republican wing of the party, Hughes favors cutting Social Security. Among the most important races tomorrow, so do Pete Aguilar (CA-31), Ro Khanna (CA-17) and Matt Miller (CA-33) in California. Each has spoken publicly about either raising the retirement age for Social Security or using Chained CPI as a means to cut back on earned benefits for retirees. Each represents the interests of the wealthy donor class against ordinary working families. Most Democratic donors in the districts are just yawning complacently.

Dave Cole's ad comes just days after the Philadelphia Inquirer made public Hughes’s plan for Social Security. Cole points out that the plan "aligns with the interests of billionaire big business CEOs and the failed economic policies of conservatives like Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and George W. Bush, instead of middle class families in South Jersey." The Inquirer: "Hughes would seek a study to consider the impact of raising the retirement age by six months."

Responding to the Inquirer’s report, Cole said, "It’s astonishing to me that someone could call himself a Democrat while being open to cutting Social Security. For me, benefit cuts and raising the retirement age are completely off the table. Hughes is out of touch with the realities and needs of working families and retirees who depend on the benefits they’ve earned. Our seniors deserve better than Bill."

From the beginning of his campaign, Cole has made protecting and expanding Social Security benefits for seniors a cornerstone of his campaign. Cole opposes any efforts to cut or privatize Social Security benefits, including raising the retirement age or cutting cost of living adjustments. Recently, in a TV interview with NBC40, Cole again advocated for protecting and expanding social security benefits:

We talk a lot about protecting social security. It's very important that we stand up against attempts to privatize and sell off benefits that seniors have worked for and have earned, but we also need to be proactive and expand Social Security. One of the problems is that Social Security does not meet the needs of seniors today. It hasn't kept up with the cost of living. So I'm also taking the stance that we can expand it. And there's a fiscally responsible way to do that: it's called scrapping the [income] cap… If we get rid of that cap, which is a very popular idea, it makes the system fair for everybody, and we can support social security and expanding benefits into the future indefinitely.

Leading economists like Paul Krugman and Dean Baker also advocate for the kind of Social Security benefits expansion Cole supports, and they have debunked arguments for raising the retirement age, as Hughes would be open to doing.

“[Raising the retirement age] sounds plausible until you look at exactly who is living longer,” explains Krugman. “The rise in life expectancy, it turns out, is overwhelmingly a story about affluent, well-educated Americans. Those with lower incomes and less education have, at best, seen hardly any rise in life expectancy at age 65; in fact, those with less education have seen their life expectancy decline. So this common argument amounts, in effect, to the notion that we can’t let janitors retire because lawyers are living longer.”

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) have also called for expanding social security benefits, shifting the formula that measures senior citizens’ cost of living so that would increase benefits for retirees, not cut them.

In tomorrow's primaries, the Democrats in House races most committed and best equipped to never surrender to the corporatists on Social Security are:

• IA-01- Pat Murphy
• NJ-12- Bonnie Watson Coleman
• NJ-02- Dave Cole
• CA-17- Mike Honda
• CA-25- Lee Rogers
• CA-31- Eloise Reyes
• CA-33- Ted Lieu and Marianne Williamson

Pat Murphy was the Speaker of the Iowa House and today he's running for the open Iowa House seat Bruce Braley. He has a phenomenal record backing up his claims that he's the bets and most effective progressive running. When it comes to protecting Social Security, I can't think of better hands to put it in. “My parents," he told us, "raised me to keep my word and stand up for what’s right. We’ve made a promise to seniors who have worked hard and paid into Social Security for decades that their benefits will be there when they need them, and I intend to keep that promise. It’s the right thing to do. We need to find long-term solutions to the solvency issues that are facing Social Security, but these can't be unfair measures, like chained CPI, that cut benefits and threaten the quality of the program. By raising the cap on the Social Security tax we can extend solvency and create a tax system that fairly taxes income, whether you make $50,000 or $500,000 a year.”



Pete Aguilar has been endorsed by the Wall Street owned New Dems and his campaign is being financed by the Credit Union PAC which seeks to destroy Social Security. Before Steve Israel shut him up he brayed in the press about cutting back on benefits for seniors. Eloise Reyes is the polar opposite. She's been endorsed by the Congressioanl Progressive Caucus and this is what she told us about protecting Social Security against predators and their handmaidens like Pete Aguilar:

The need to protect-- and, in fact, expand--Social Security could not be clearer, especially with fewer and fewer companies offering pensions or other retirement plans to their employees. Our seniors and veterans depend on these benefits to get by and, in many cases, Social Security is their only source of income. What we saw during the economic downturn in recent years was that while many people watched the value of their homes, savings and 401k plans take a sharp downturn, they were still able to count on their Social Security benefits.

Social Security is an effective, essential and popular program that is far too important to treat as a legislative bargaining chip. What we should be talking about is how to strengthen and expand our Social Security program by eliminating taxable wage caps, strengthening the formula used to calculate benefits and fighting back against the Chained CPI. Social Security benefits form a critical safety net for all Americans and, at a time when working families need them more than ever, we must take proactive steps to bolster this critical lifeline.

If you want to end Social Secuity and Medicare, there's already a Republican Party for that. That's not what the Democratic Party is all about-- at least it isn't what it should be about. Corporate shills like Aguilar, Hughes, Miller, Khanna and the rest should be defeated tomorrow.

FCC Forces Blue America To Endorse New Jersey Progressive Dave Cole-- Here's Why

Hopefully you've been following Dave's inspiring campaign for the south Jersey seat currently occupied by conservative Congressman Frank LoBiondo. We were going to endorse him anyway but the move the FCC made against net neutrality, one of Dave's signature issues, pushed out schedule up to… immediately. If you believe in net neutrality, as so few Republicans and corporate Dems do, please help Dave win this seat by contributing what you can on the Blue America ActBlue page. And let's let Dave explain why the FCC is totally off-base… and why their decision is much more of a danger than most people understand.


We need to protect the open Internet
Tell FCC: Don’t let “pay to play” break the Internet
by Dave Cole

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is about to create an Internet “pay to play” scheme to give major corporations and big business unprecedented control of the Internet.

That means that giants like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon and others--  the same corporations who have a near monopoly over our digital lives and businesses--  will be able to buy their way to an even larger share of market control, snuffing out competition and holding back innovative new business models and creative content producers.

Chairman Wheeler wants to allow big Internet providers to charge websites for faster content delivery, setting up a pay-to-play fast lane. We don’t allow pay to play anywhere else in society--  the Internet, the backbone of our current and future economy is no place to start.

This undermines a key tenet of net neutrality, the principle that “Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication.”

Net neutrality is the reason you can watch a citizen journalist reporting on a small blog with the same quality and accessibility as mainstream reporting on a popular news website--  or stream an Independent film as easily as a Hollywood blockbuster. Think of this in contrast to premium cable services, which are completely rigid and all content channels are determined by the cable companies, based on what content producers are able to pay.

The FCC’s pay-to-play fast lane threatens to make the Internet a lot more like what you get from an old cable box.

This means content providers like Netflix have to pay ransom to Internet providers to make their videos available at the fastest speeds. Meanwhile, content from other innovative websites and small businesses who can’t afford to pay will be drowned out. Once websites begin paying fast lane fees to the Internet providers, the extra cost will likely get passed on to consumers as higher subscription fees.

By making money off of access as well as premiums on content, the big Internet providers will make the Internet feel a lot more like a fancy cable subscription, and a lot less like an equal playing field where everyone has a voice.

We’re number… 30ish

Americans already pay way too much for way too slow Internet service. In many rural and suburban areas, Internet access looks the same as it did in the ‘90s, while profits for these giant companies have never been higher.

We are leaving the crucial investments we need in infrastructure to deliver the fastest Internet connections in the hands of profit-maximizing corporations. Consequently, these companies have an economic interest in building out fiber networks where it’s most profitable --  affluent, dense urban areas, leaving out poor and rural areas where the opportunities of a robust digital connection could have an even greater social benefit. Think about it --  where do you live and how many affordable high speed Internet options do you really have?

Across the world, other countries are investing in true high speed Internet by building fiber optic networks. Faster than copper cable or phone lines, fiber provides a true broadband connection. In the United States, fiber networks are a virtual monopoly owned by Verizon through its FIOS service, with some experimental services like Google Fiber in the mix. US cities rank somewhere around number 30 in value for broadband Internet, and a true high speed fiber connection in New York City will cost you nearly 10 times what it costs in Seoul, South Korea, for half the speed ($299.99 vs $31.47)! Of course, this kind of connection is not even available in most of our country.

Bad for Business

In addition to squeezing more money out of consumers for less speed and unequal delivery of content, abandoning net neutrality is just plain bad for business. All those smaller websites are going to have to compete against Netflix, Youtube, Amazon, and the other well-funded giants of Internet media. Even those giants are going to need to pay more to distribute their content. Everyone except the Internet service providers are losing out in this deal.

It doesn’t stop at video. Once net neutrality is out the window, we could see the auctioning off of all types of content. Like Google search over Bing? Well (hypothetically) Microsoft paid more to Comcast, so Bing’s going to load a lot faster. Prefer the fast and beautiful, ad-free Mapbox maps to Google’s? Better hope Verizon doesn’t start bidding for a preferred mapping platform.

Buying the Internet

The Internet is under attack, because the government, specifically, the FCC commissioners and Congress, are allowing the big Internet service providers to buy it from the people.

As the Center for Public Integrity reports, “Three Internet service providers were among the top 20 lobbying spenders in the first nine months of 2013. Combined they hired more than 350 lobbyists, 14 of whom were former members of Congress.” Moreover, “the total from these broadband providers and their association surpassed $55 million in the first nine months of 2013.” Here are those who are buying our free and open Internet:

• Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable operator, spent almost $14 million during the period, the fifth-largest amount of all corporate lobbying spending, and hired 98 lobbyists, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
• AT&T Inc. hired 89 lobbyists and spent $12.3 million, ranking it 11th among the top spenders.
• Verizon Communications Inc., the plaintiff in the suit against the FCC, came in at No. 17 with $10.1 million in spending, hiring 96 lobbyists.
• Also among the top lobbying spenders is the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, which includes Comcast and Time Warner Cable Inc. as members. NCTA spent $13.3 million in the first nine months of 2013, ranking it ninth among the top spending lobbyists, according to CRP

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is a former President and CEO of the National Cable Telecommunications Association.

Fighting for an open Internet

I’ve spent my career in technology, working at the White House as a senior advisor for technology and joining early on at a new tech start up company. Now I’m running for Congress. We need to elect people who understand how technology works and what’s at stake for our personal lives and economy, and who will fight to protect an open Internet.

Districts like mine in South Jersey, with large suburban and rural populations stand to lose the most in these deals. Internet access is often controlled by a single provider. Lack of competition leaves families, schools, and small businesses lagging behind without the tools to compete.

I will be the leading voice in Congress for Internet users, content providers small and large, the makers and creators--  all of us--  against an urgent and growing threat from big Internet providers who seek to consolidate power and lobby us out of one of the most democratic innovations of all time.

Please fight with me, and sign on to my petition:

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, stand up for consumers against big corporations like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, by rejecting a pay to play “fast lane.” The FCC should take immediate action to classify broadband Internet as a public utility, not a luxury, preserving a free and open Internet for everyone.


Watch Susan Crawford explain net neutrality and the solutions for protecting the open Internet, via Vox.com.

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And please contribute to Dave's campaign here.

Meet Dave Cole-- Progressive Congressional Candidate In South Jersey

This week, several of the Blue America candidates were at the PCCC training in Washington. Some of them called me and e-mailed me and told me they were really impressed with a smart young guy we hadn't been writing about, Dave Cole, the progressive who wants to take on Frank LoBiondo. So I called Dave and started the conservation. I can see why everyone is so impressed. He's a software engineer and former technology advisor at the Obama White House. Within a minute of beginning a conversation you can see he's a knowledgeable and committed progressive, motivated by, as he puts it, "a desire to fix our broken economic system, make investments in education and infrastructure, and ensure the middle class dream for working families in South Jersey."

He struck me as a different kind of "tech guy," not a Ro Khanna corporate shill trying to represent the big, gigantically wealthy tech corporations, but a "people's tech guy." Wired, in covering his campaign, mentioned that he had downplayed his experience in the coding world but that his "experience came shining through when Cole released his political platform on the popular software development site GitHub."

GitHub is a place where coders can easily collaborate on a piece of software, and Cole hopes that his constituents will collaborate on his political policies in similar ways. On GitHub, they can readily comment on and even edit his policies. But that’s only a start. Cole’s bigger vision is that all sorts of political work-- from campaigns to the bills proposed by elected officials-- will be handled in a similar fashion.

…Of course, citizens have long had ways of communicating with candidates and politicians. They could write or call or send emails. But the technology that underpins sites like GitHub provides a new way to actually evaluate, track, and integrate public suggestions into policy documents. It’s not just that anyone can instantly suggest changes to Cole’s platform. Each suggestion can also be discussed, in much the same way you can discuss a Facebook status update. Cole can then sift through the suggestions and discussions, automatically incorporating any change he and his staff think is beneficial. GitHub also makes it easy to navigate old versions of documents, making all changes transparent and making it easy to revert to old versions if necessary.

I asked him to write a guest post introducing himself to DWT readers.

A Fresh Start for South Jersey
by Dave Cole

I come from an incredibly beautiful and unique part of New Jersey-- the garden of the garden state. I grew up amidst family farms and endless peach orchards, and we spent our summer weekends down the shore, at family-friendly beaches along the Atlantic.

  South Jersey is where my parents settled down to raise our family. My dad was a union factory worker from Northeast Philadelphia and my mom, a real estate agent-turned-entrepreneur, from the South Jersey suburbs.

From first grade through college, I attended New Jersey's public schools. At an early age, I developed an interest in computers and technology. I have a distinct memory of going to a computer fair at the old race track and picking out an anonymous beige box we affectionately called an IBM Clone. It didn't have internet access or much memory, but it opened me to an entirely new world. I learned science and engineering from educational video games, wrote stories and made posters, and eventually got brave enough to start pulling out the pieces, reassembling them, and writing code. I was having fun, but what I didn't realize at the time was that this experience would open up so many opportunities.

Slightly before this time, when I was just five, my father was laid off from his job. A take over company had come in to trim what it saw as fat at the independent baking factory. My father was singled out most likely because he had the good sense to start up his own non-competing side business making blended flavors as well as the unfortunate courtesy to tell his bosses about it and secure their blessings.

My mother wasn't working at the time, following the birth of my sister, who was still less than a year old. My father doubled down on setting up his new business, and to cut costs, they considered dropping their life insurance policy which would pay off the mortgage in the event of the unthinkable.

The unthinkable happened two months later. My father passed away suddenly due to liver failure. It's at this darkest point in my family's story that I began to see a bright light that would become my guide.

In addition to returning to work, my mother, Patti, went back to school, and took business courses at the local community college. She used the experience to build her own company selling medical equipment. This gave her the resources and flexibility she needed to be there for my sister and me. It would be years before I could fully realize the strength this took, to rise up from losing a partner at such a young age, and with two young children to support. Her strength drives me and shapes my world view.

In college I studied computer engineering, but eventually moved to political science and history, and I looked for ways to use my technical background to help the larger cause of social progress.

I was an early volunteer on President Obama's first campaign, and was honored to join his White House as a founding member of the New Media team and a senior advisor for technology. I served at the White House for half of the first term, building projects like WhiteHouse.gov, including the first-ever online disclosure of White House staff and visitor logs, and the "We the People" petitioning platform. I also worked with other agencies and departments to help them modernize their websites and engagement tools.

After serving in government, I joined a new company called Mapbox, which my team and I grew into a successful small business hiring dozens of new employees and growing even during a difficult economy.

Growing up in South Jersey gave me the education and opportunity I needed to succeed. When I was a kid, a middle class life meant you could get by even when the worst happened. Public schools and higher education were affordable ways to build a better life. But that middle class dream is slipping away for far too many people.

Across New Jersey's 2nd district, 12.8% of our people are unemployed. Many more are adjusting to stagnant or shrinking wages, and less hours on the job. Without any meaningful action on climate change, we remain vulnerable to more powerful super storms like Sandy, and rising sea levels that could swallow the beaches of our childhood memories. People of all ages from our seniors to students are facing mounting costs and little assistance. We're at risk of losing entire generations as that once prosperous middle class lifestyle is slipping away and our youth leave for opportunities elsewhere.

After 20 years of the same excuses and inaction from our Congressman, Frank LoBiondo, we need new ideas and new leadership for South Jersey. At best, Congressman LoBiondo is a fair-weather friend to working families. He plays a moderate on safe issues, but when we really need him, he's nowhere to be found. He's not interested in creating jobs through new investments in infrastructure and education, but instead prefers to support the misplaced priorities of Paul Ryan's austerity budget. He's relentless in opposing common-sense reforms to our healthcare system, to the point of shutting down the entire federal government, only to sheepishly seek to re-open it days after the damage has been done. Our economic system is broken, and to fix it, we need to be bold, not benign.

I'm an engineer with experience growing business in the private sector and modernizing government as a public servant, and I'm running to bring a fresh start to South Jersey. It's time for new ideas to jumpstart our economy, like establishing a National Infrastructure Bank to ensure reliable funding is ready to expand and repair our roads, bridges, railways, schools, and high-speed internet (fiber optic) networks. And it's long past time to take care of our people first by raising the minimum wage out of poverty, renewing unemployment benefits, protecting and expanding social security benefits, and strengthening medicare by giving it the power to negotiate for the best prices on prescription drugs.

We need progress. We can win back our seat in Congress with a bold vision for the future that once again makes South Jersey the perfect place to raise a family. We won't get there with feigned moderation on the Republican or Democratic side. In this election, I face a primary challenger-- a son of a former Congressman-- who has considerable resources and connections, but lacks conviction. While I've had my policy platform publicly available on my website, my primary opponent, a self-described "moderate with conservative leanings," has yet to publish a word about for what or whom he stands. We won't move forward by leaning toward the past.

This is why I'm running for Congress. We're running this campaign on a platform of ideas, not a rolodex of connections. We're even running this campaign in new ways, like inviting public discussion about our ideas, which Wired.com described as, "a glimpse into the future of politics." I'm doing this because I recognize that the best ideas come from collaboration. That's how we build movements. Will you join me in this movement to bring a fresh start for South Jersey? Please sign on at http://ColeForCongress.com.