Are There Democrats Who Want To Help Trump And Ryan Rob From The Needy And Give To The Greedy? You Bet There Are!

Yesterday, after reading the Trump Regime's blueprint for for what they're calling "tax reform," Caifornia Congressman Ro Khanna issued a statement to his constituents explaining that "Trump’s plan takes money out of the pockets of working families to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest individuals and corporations. Any tax reform plan must focus on closing loopholes that allow companies to avoid paying taxes. This one does the opposite. The United States could collect billions of dollars in new revenue and discourage companies from going offshore. Tax reform proposals must also recognize how to keep companies and jobs in the U.S. I encourage my congressional colleagues to engage in a thoughtful debate on how to change tax laws to incentivize corporations to create jobs here at home.” This morning's NY Times was even more direct: "a laughable stunt by a gang of plutocrats looking to enrich themselves at the expense of the country's future."

Neil Irwin, writing in last night's NY Times, took a look at who the losers and who the winners are in the Trump Regime's tax plan. The winners:

• Businesses with high tax rates. The plan would cut the 35 percent corporate income tax to 15 percent. While few businesses pay the full 35 percent rate, those that pay something close to it are in line for a huge tax cut.

• High-income earners. The plan would reduce the top rate on individual income tax-- now 39.6 percent for income over around $470,000 for a married couple-- to 35 percent. But that’s only part of the gain for high-income earners. It also would eliminate a 3.8 percent tax, used to help fund Obamacare, that applies to investment income over $250,000 for a couple.

• People with creative accountants. The 15 percent business tax rate could open a huge loophole for people to receive business income through a limited liability company or other pass-through entity instead of as wages. Depending on how the law is drafted, that could enable some people to pay that low 15 percent rate on their earnings instead of an individual income rate up to 35 percent. People who already receive their income through investment vehicles wouldn’t have to change anything for a windfall.

• Multimillionaires who want to pass money to their heirs tax-free. The plan would eliminate the estate tax, which currently applies to individuals with estates of $5.5 million or couples with estates worth $11 million.

• People who still fill out their tax returns by hand. Administration officials said the plan would simplify paying taxes, particularly emphasizing plans to eliminate the alternative minimum tax. The A.M.T. can definitely be annoying, and costly, but if you use an online tax preparation service, the software does most of the work.

• Retailers and other companies that feared a “border adjustment tax.” The Trump administration did not embrace House Republicans’ big strategy to pay for the tax cut, which was strongly opposed by the retail industry and others that thought they would be losers.

• Donald J. Trump. It is striking how many of the categories listed above affect the president and his family. He is a high-income earner. He receives income from 564 business entities, according to his financial disclosure form, and could take advantage of the low rate on “pass-through” companies. According to his leaked 2005 tax return, he paid an extra $31 million because of the alternative minimum tax that he seeks to eliminate. And his heirs could eventually enjoy his enormous assets tax-free.

And the losers... most everyone else, especially upper-middle-income people in blue states like California and New York since the plan would eliminate the federal tax deduction for state and local income tax.

Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) had a similar message for her constituents after she read the blueprint yesterday. "While our broken tax code badly needs reform, today’s White House proposal misses the mark by slashing rates for the biggest corporations and creating even more ways for the wealthiest Americans to avoid paying their fair share. This proposal would be a corporate giveaway, plain and simple, slashing rates for the wealthiest while preserving unfair loopholes and lucrative deductions written by lobbyists that allow huge corporations like Exxon Mobil to pay zero in federal taxes and instead claim millions in rebates. I continue to advocate for an honest, bipartisan discussion on tax reform that prioritizes tax relief for working families and small businesses in order to address our nation’s income inequality crisis. But I will not support any plan that exacerbates income inequality by giving away even more to the wealthiest 1% and the biggest corporations already favored by our tax code, while asking working Americans to bear the brunt of draconian budget cuts in the name of deficit reduction. I am deeply concerned by reports these corporate giveaways may not even be paid for, and I will insist that Congressional Republicans walk the walk on responsible deficit reduction in any tax plan."

All of the Democrats I've been hearing from since yesterday have been on the same page as Khanna and Shea-Porter. But there was a lot of anger from people watching MSNBC yesterday who kept seeing a collection of clueless stooges-- their daytime anchors-- referring to the Estate Tax in Republican-talk as a "death tax," exactly what you would expect from Fox News. But why MSNBC?

Gene Sperling, who was was Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy under both Obama and Clinton, penned a piece for The Atlantic this week that should be mandatory reading for all MSNBC anchors, Don't Cut the Estate Tax-- Raise It.

Repealing the estate tax—a tax on assets transferred from a deceased individual to their heirs—has become a staple cause among conservative Republicans. Eleven Republican candidates explicitly called for its elimination during the 2016 election. By calling it a “death tax,” and implying that it would hurt tens of millions of ordinary families, and force the sale of long-held family farms and family businesses, Republicans have successfully cast the estate tax as a ubiquitous and pernicious burden. That’s helped them win the public-relations battle over it so far.

The problem is that the main talking points that conservatives rely on when making this case are untrue. After years of looking, estate-tax repealers have not been able to come forward with even a handful of farms that, due to the estate tax, were forcibly sold off. And the notion that the estate tax somehow inhibits middle-class Americans from passing down savings to their heirs now, more than ever, falls somewhere between a hoax and a joke: The estate tax today kicks in at about $5.5 million for an individual, or $11 million for a couple. That means that there is a zero percent estate tax for every family estate under $11 million. A married couple that managed to save and leave $10.9 million to their children would not pay a single penny.

Even putting aside the claims used to galvanize support for cutting the estate tax, the Trump administration would be wise to consider that this might not be the time to go through with an expensive tax cut that only benefits a handful of America’s wealthiest families. This tax cut would coincide with the growing awareness of wealth inequality in the United States, where the top one-tenth of 1 percent have as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. This inequality has only become more skewed in recent years. After substantial declines in wealth inequality from 1937 to 1977, the share of wealth going to the richest 0.1 percent has nearly tripled, from 8 percent in 1980 to 22 percent in 2012—the highest it’s been since 1917. This may not be the best political or economic environment to propose a tax cut that over 10 years gives $269 billion to only 5,000 of the wealthiest inheritors each year.

The facts do not even indicate that the 5,000 estates that pay some estate tax (out of 2.7 million deaths each year) are significantly burdened by it. While this mysteriously remains a top priority from some leading farm and small-business lobbies, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that only 50 farms or closely-held family businesses in the U.S. will pay any estate taxes in 2017-- working out to an effective tax rate of less than 6 percent on each of those estates. And while the 40 percent estate-tax rate might seem high to some, it’s only applied to the amount passed down beyond the $11 million per couple, leaving the effective rate much lower. Consider that the Tax Policy Center estimates that the average effective tax rate for estates meeting the tax threshold is 17 percent, and that even the rare $20 million estate that took advantage of no deductions, exemptions, or loopholes would not pay more than an effective rate of 18 percent. If the estate tax is repealed, large amounts of accumulated wealth would go untaxed forever. As Chye-Ching Huang and Chloe Cho of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities have written, when it comes to the very wealthiest families in the United States, “unrealized capital gains account for a significant proportion of the assets held by estates.” Studies have shown that 55 percent of the value of estates worth over $100 million are never-taxed gains.

There is also is evidence that repealing the estate tax will be a tougher sell as more Americans come to understand how the estate tax really works. A prominent study published in the American Economic Review found that providing Americans with the facts about who actually pays such taxes raises support for increasing it. When the study’s authors told participants the threshold for the tax’s application, the number of Americans currently wealthy enough to have to pay it, and how unlikely they were to ever have to worry about it, support for a higher estate tax more than doubled. This is noteworthy since economists, including University of Michigan’s Joel Slemrod, have found that public opposition to the estate tax can be partially explained by misconceptions about who is subject to it.

The current case for repeal will be weaker if progressives come out in support of an estate tax that leaves the wealth of over 99 percent of Americans untouched and affects only the handful who want to leave eight-figure estates to their heirs. In 2008, as I finished a taping for a cable-TV show, a cameraman told me he agreed with everything I had said, except for my position on the estate tax. He dreamed of leaving his money to his children and didn’t want it to be taxed. I asked whether he would support a proposal that would allow him and his wife to leave up to $7 million to their children without paying any tax, and only tax people on the amount they left that was more than that. He didn’t hesitate to say he would.

Even if Trump and his team do not share my feelings about the unfairness of cutting the estate tax, pushing for this change could lose the support of voters who recognize that it is being prioritized over health-care protections or other types of tax cuts. For the $269 billion that it would cost the U.S. Treasury to give multimillion-dollar tax breaks to the 5,000 wealthiest estates each year, the administration could give nearly 27 million hardworking families a tax cut of $10,000 over the next decade. How could any member of Congress possibly argue that there was no choice but to cut Medicaid for millions of families, or say that it was impossible to afford the protections for pre-existing conditions or benefits like maternity care available under the Affordable Health Care Act, when they could afford nearly a quarter-of-a-trillion dollars to enhance the wealth of the already wealthiest Americans? On the other hand, if, as Hillary Clinton proposed, the president returned the estate tax back to the 2009 threshold of $7 million a couple-- with a 45 percent rate on anything over that threshold-- he would have an additional $160 billion in revenue to fund his other priorities without intruding on the aspirations of 99.5 percent of Americans to leave a nest egg to their children. Indeed, a September 2016 Bloomberg poll of high-income voters even found that 53 percent supported Clinton’s plan to broaden the estate tax to apply to individual estates worth more than $3.5 million.

Cutting the estate tax would do little to dampen accusations that Trump and his immensely wealthy cabinet are looking out more for the economic interests of their families and their financial peers than for typical working families. The likes of Senators Ted Kennedy and Jay Rockefeller showed that coming from a wealthy family doesn’t mean someone can’t be a champion for working America. But they proved that by fighting for a more progressive tax system that helped fund investments in workers, health care, and poor children. In Trump’s case, Americans would see him cutting investments for urban and rural America and threatening Medicaid, while (if he is as wealthy as he says he is) changing the tax code to save his family $4 billion, not to mention the savings for the rest of his cabinet.

Finally, there is the question of whether passing on huge amounts of untaxed wealth from generation to generation is consistent with long-held American values. President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1906, proposed a progressive tax on “all lifetime gifts and death-time bequests” for the direct purpose of limiting the amount of wealth that one person could transfer to another, thereby breaking up large concentrations of wealth. Three decades later, FDR echoed, “inherited economic power is as inconsistent with the ideals of this generation as inherited political power was inconsistent with the ideals of the generation which established our government.” In 2001, Warren Buffett compared repealing the estate tax to picking the 2020 Olympic team from the first-born children of the 2000 team. Bill Gates Sr. has been one of the most eloquent advocates for the estate tax, recognizing that even those like his son, who’s often the richest person in the world, owe their success in some part to the investment and hard work of generations of Americans before them and thus have a moral obligation to pay forward a return to invest in the success of current and future generations.

In past years, the worst of the corrupt conservative Democrats have voted with the Republicans to repeal the estate tax. Example, on April 16, 2015, Kevin Brady brought up a typical reactionary bill, H.R.1105-- the Death Tax Repeal Act of 2015. It passed the House 240-179. 3 Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with the Democrats against it-- Walter Jones (R-NC), Scott Rigell (R-VA) and David Jolly (R-FL)-- but they passed 7 really slimy right-wing Democrats going in the other direction. Happily one, Brad Ashford, an "ex"-Republican from Omaha was quickly defeated after one ugly term. But the other six are still in Congress, still pretending to be Democrats inside the Big Tent while sneaking out the back door and voting with the GOP virtually all the time. This is congressional slime:

• Brad Ashford (Blue Dog-NE)

• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Dutch Ruppersberger (MD)
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)

How can we expect congressional Republicans to watch out for the interests of ordinary American working families if we can't even guarantee that so-called Democrats will endeavor to do so?

Republican Party Class War Is Relentless But It's Turning Especially Ugly Right Now

A friend, who apparently doesn't read this blog, just called me astounded that this week 1.3 million Americans would be losing their unemployment benefis. He had just found out. "What are they going to do," he asked. I mentioned something about turning their anger, in a decidedly non-electoral way towards the individual conservatives in Congress, who have authored their impending misery. He pointed out that if anyone gets shot it'll probably be someone at a WalMart or post office, rather than a Paul Ryan, John Boehner or Ted Cruz, all merciless persecutors of the working poor.

Friday, Obama's Director of the National Economic Council, Gene Sperling, told the press that "While we remain disappointed that Congress did not heed the President's call to extend emergency unemployment benefits for next year before the holidays, the President as well as the Democratic Congressional leadership have made clear the importance of extending the benefits immediately upon Congress's return. Senator Jack Reed and Senator Heller have put forward bipartisan legislation to extend emergency unemployment insurance for three months which would prevent these 1.3 million workers and their families from losing benefits while giving more time for consideration of further extension through 2014, and Leader Reid will bring it to a vote as soon as they return. The President strongly encourages both the Democratic and Republican Congressional leadership and their members to support this bipartisan solution and to pass the Reed-Heller bill."

There were some people who weren't fans of Elizabeth Warren's campaign speech (above) about all of us being in the same boat. Those are conservatives, usually conservative Republicans. Normal people found the speech uplifting and inspiring. A few days ago a Columbia University sociology professor, Shamus Khan, author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School,did an Op Ed for the NY Times, We Are Not All In This Together, as part of their "great Divide" series on inequality.

Rising income inequality troubles Americans. Some of us worry that the fate of the many has become divorced from the fortunes of the few. Others are concerned that the government will attack inequality by taking their hard-earned money and giving it to the less virtuous.

What both sides seem to agree on is that from the late 1940s until the early 1970s things were different. Those coming home from the war entered college in record numbers, which fueled a generation of economic growth. As each year passed, a majority of Americans were economically better off. Incipient political movements that confronted racial oppression and gender discrimination flourished.

Today, when we try to imagine our ideal future, we often turn to this unique moment of our past in which the expansion of rights, the advancement of the economy, and the march toward equality appeared to constitute the defining trinity of American life.

The Obama administration has done little to push back directly against the rise of inequality. But earlier this month, in a speech announcing his plans to dedicate the rest of his term to the problem, Mr. Obama joined the chorus in suggesting that we turn to postwar America for answers. Yet perhaps we are yearning for a past that, in terms of its dynamics, is not terribly different from the present.

During our golden age not all Americans experienced the same kind of growth and mobility. The richest among us saw their share of the national income decline. They were also stagnant: in comparison to their counterparts in other periods in the 20th century, a higher proportion of the wealthiest Americans had inherited their money rather than earned it.

Doesn’t the fact that millions of Americans were better off more than counterbalance the fact that a few rich people weren’t rising so quickly? I certainly think so. But America’s golden age of parity and today’s winner-take-all society have something in common. The economic experiences of the many and of the few are the opposite of each other.

We understand this basic insight: In a world of finite resources, if you have more, I have less. But we also believe that the magical quality of markets can counteract these dynamics. The imagery we deploy is revealing. Markets behave like water. Resources can and should flow freely and if they do, we’ll all be better off. President John F. Kennedy famously used an analogy to imprint this elegant view of economic relations upon the American psyche, “A rising tide lifts all the boats.” Yet the evidence of the past 70 years shows that this is a myth.

In the postwar period the rich found themselves in a quandary. Their wages and their membership were static. They needed to resuscitate themselves. This required allies who shared a basic concern. The rich thought, not incorrectly, that high tax rates were handicapping their capacity to advance. And they found common ground with suburbanites who didn’t see social spending as something that enhanced their lives and neighborhoods, but as something that transferred their tax dollars to a different kind of American-- urban, of a notably darker hue-- who had only recently gained political legitimacy. Through a tax revolt these groups went to work dismantling social programs.

They were terribly successful and they helped turn America on its head. Since the late 1970s, it has been average Americans who have experienced comparative wage stagnation and who are more likely than their parents to stay in the same economic position. For the rich, the story is the exact opposite.

Let’s say you’re fortunate enough to be in the top 1 percent of American families; at a minimum you make almost $400,000 a year. Things aren’t just good; they seem to keep getting better. While the median American worker received about a 5 percent wage increase since 1979, your raise was above 150 percent. From your perch, even when you look at people right below you in the top 5 percent, you find that the rate of your wage growth is much greater than theirs

The satisfaction of looking down is met with the anxiety of looking up. That’s because even within the 1 percent, those who make more money than you do are outpacing your wage gains at an even greater rate than you are outpacing those below you. But it’s hard to be jealous. When you look at some of the richest people around you, you notice that they aren’t just the children of other very rich people. Warren E. Buffett, Bill Gates and Michael R. Bloomberg may have had well-off parents, but they weren’t born billionaires.

If you’re an average American, you don’t see this at all. It’s been more than 30 years, and you’ve barely seen a drop trickle down.

This helps us better understand why it is that the rich and the rest see the world differently, and why it’s difficult to develop political movements based on economic solidarity. We can think of elites as selfish, power-hungry monsters, or we can think of them as being like others: products of their particular experience and likely to overgeneralize from it. Elites understand their own world well enough. Yes, they underestimate the advantages that helped them along the way and overestimate their own contributions to their status. But they are not wrong to think that for them there is more mobility and growth today than there was a generation ago. What they do not see (or care to see) is that for others, stagnation is the new normal.

As a worldview, there’s something seductive in imagining that what’s good for me is good for everyone. Realizing my own advantage, then, doesn’t only feel good; it’s the moral thing to do. But sadly there isn’t much evidence that greed is good.

This leaves us with two lessons. The first is that just as political alliances brought us out of our golden age, they can also return us to it. This will not be easy. The nation has often come together in response to shared threats, but a political project like this is tougher. Those who want the lion’s share of the national wealth will threaten to leave our shores. Let them. There are plenty of civic-minded members of the elite who recognize that absent major changes, our future is clear: more and more for the richest and a society where the mass of the citizenry idles. This is democracy in decline.

The second lesson is harder. We are not in this together. We need to get back to what made America great, when the many and not the few were winning. To do so we must stop conflating moral arguments with economic ones. Instead of operating under the fiction that we will all benefit from a proposed change in economic direction, let’s be honest. If a few of us are better off, then many are not. If many are better off, then the few will be constrained. Which world would you rather live in? To me the answer is obvious.

The Battle For Social Security Begins Anew

I've been wondering if all the strum und drang over the typically glitchy launch of the Obamacare website isn't just a shiny object moment to distract attention from what the conservatives among our ruling elites have in mind for us. Friday, Gene Sperling, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, may have given away the game. Obama has Social Security firmly in his sites again. The Grand Bargain he and Boehner cooked up before has been on the back burner and the two of them are determined to roll it out again-- and that means Chained CPI and other benefits cuts for those who can least afford them. The Republicans could never do this themselves; they need someone like Obama to front the effort. And now Obama is even willing to give Republicans the benefit cuts they (and he) want so badly without raising taxes, since the GOP have signaled they can't pull that off without destroying their base. Obama, apparently, doesn't care about his own base. Let's hope enough Democrats in the House and Senate do. Let's start with a quote from Sperling to fellow Democrats:

Right now, I think there is among a lot of people a consensus as to what the ingredients of a pro-growth fiscal policy are. It would be a fiscal policy that-- yes-- did give more confidence in the long run that we have a path on entitlement spending and revenues that gives confidence in our long-term fiscal position and that we’re not pushing off unbearable burdens to the next generation. That is very important.”

“We could have an economic growth strategy where we had a more pro-jobs, pro-recover fiscal policy right now that included-- that did not have this harmful sequester. We could have more savings that were on both the revenue and entitlement side that were long-term and would help in the future. And we could make sure that we’re making room for the things that almost everybody thinks we need to do more of”-- that is, investments in infrastructure and research and development.

None of what Sperling said was entirely new. Rather, it was what he chose to emphasize (and not emphasize) that struck me. Afterward, Sperling took a grand total of one question from the audience. I hustled after him to ask if was really proposing an entitlement-cuts-for-stimulus budget deal. Sperling smiled a little awkwardly and said something about how he’d love to negotiate with me. (Not sure what that was about.) But he didn’t rule a deal that cut entitlements without additional tax revenue, even when I asked him a second time.

Stimulus is short term and tax increases (revenue) can be changed a week after an election that goes badly for Democrats. Decoupling Social Security from the concept of a Third Rail is forever. When I woke up Saturday, I found 4 e-mails from Bernie Sanders, all about the potential for this betrayal of American working families. They were letters he wrote for Social Security Works, for the Campaign for America's Future and for the Progressives United PAC:

They’re at it again.



Billionaires like the Koch Brothers, Pete Peterson, Stanley Druckenmiller and others are leading the charge to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.



If they succeed, millions of senior citizens, working families, disabled veterans and children will suffer. We must not allow that to happen.



Today, the middle class is disappearing, real unemployment is extremely high, poverty is increasing and working families throughout the country are struggling to keep their heads above water economically. Meanwhile, the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider and the wealthiest people and the largest corporations are doing phenomenally well.



WE MUST NOT BALANCE THE BUDGET ON THE BACKS OF WORKING FAMILIES, THE ELDERLY, THE CHILDREN, THE SICK AND THE POOR.



As Vermont’s senator, I have the honor of serving on the Budget Conference Committee which will be negotiating a new federal budget over the next few months-- and where I am fearful that a deal could be struck to slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits.



As the founder of the Defending Social Security Caucus, please stand with me, our friends at Social Security Works and our coalition partners in demanding; “No grand bargain in exchange for cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits.”



Let’s be clear. Despite right-wing rhetoric:

• Social Security is not going broke. According to the Social Security Administration, Social Security has a surplus today of $2.8 trillion and can pay out every benefit owed to every eligible person for the next 20 years.
• Social Security has not contributed to the deficit. Social Security is funded independently by FICA taxes which are paid by workers and their employers.

The so-called chained-CPI, which recalculates how COLA’s are formulated, is not a “modest tweak.” If the chained CPI went into effect today, a senior aged 65 would receive $658 a year less in Social Security benefits when he/she is 75, and $1,100 a year less at age 85. Further, the average disabled veteran would lose tens of thousands of dollars in benefits over his/her lifetime.



Please stand with me today and demand that Congress and the President oppose any grand bargain which cuts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits.



When one out of four U.S. corporations pay nothing in federal income taxes; when Bush’s tax breaks for the rich remain in place for many wealthy Americans; when the U.S. spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined on defense, there are much fairer and economically sound ways to address the budget than cutting programs desperately needed by the most vulnerable people in our country.

The Members of Congress who have chosen to stand with ordinary working families rather than the Wall Street predators-- so Bernie, Jeff Merkley, Elizabeth Warren, Keith Ellison, Raul Grijalva and a handful of others-- have been warning about Chained CPI since Obama first signaled he was going there. Below is a chat Alan Grayson had about the subject with Thom Hartmann a few months ago:



When Blue America vets a candidate for endorsement, we ask them about where they stand on Chained CPI. Anyone indicating they plan to go along with Obama and Boehner on cutting benefits for Social Security can't be endorsed by our PAC. Our newest endorsement was this week-- Eloise Reyes, who is running against corporate shill Gary Miller in the San Bernardino area (CA-31). Miller doesn't want to just institute Chained CPI; he would like to privatize or abolish Social Security altogether. He doesn't believe in social insurance policies and never has. It is a dream for extremists like Miller to remove the Third Rail from Social Security. We endorsed Eloise because she assured us she will never go along with that. Yesterday she weighed in on this debate:

I grew up in a family where everyone did their part to make ends meet. My brothers, sisters and I all worked the onion fields alongside our parents to help pay for our school clothes. I understand what it means to work your whole life, pay into Social Security and expect to live out your final years without having to make critical choices between food or medicine or rent.

It’s simply wrong to try to balance the budget on the backs of our seniors, veterans and the disabled. I’m running for Congress to make sure that never happens to anyone in San Bernardino, Upland, Redlands or anywhere else in America. Whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat who proposes it, "chained CPI" is just another way of saying "benefits cuts"-- and I will always hold Congress accountable when it comes to keeping the promises we have made to our seniors.

The families here in the Inland Empire will always come first for me, before anyone in Washington or anyone on Wall Street.

That's the kind of candidates Blue AMerica endorses. If you'd like to help her win her primary battle against a DCCC empty suit with no strongly held beliefs about anything beyond advancing his own career, you can do so here.