Dick Gephardt And Status Quo Joe Are A Certain Kind Of Democrat-- One Where A "P" Works Better Than A "T" As A final Letter

These people all belong in prison-- but only because no one would ever agree their crimes are capital offenses

Dick Gephardt’s dream was to be President or Speaker of the House or very wealthy; he never made it beyond majority leader, but he sure did become very wealthy, selling access to his friends in office to the highest bidders. Now he’s one of the nation's most contemptible Goldman Sachs and PhRMA lobbyist scumbags. Believe it or not, he was once an actual contender for president (of the United States). First elected to Congress by the St. Louis Democratic Machine, he never experienced one moment of politics that wasn’t drenched in corruption, criminality and convenient flip-flopping on any issue he needed to switch positions on. People outside DC sensed he was a piece of shit and-- like Biden-- all his attempts to run for president, starting in 1987 were smartly rebuffed.

After he helped Bush and Cheney trick Congress into declaring war on Iraq (2002), his political career as a Democrat was pretty much done. He didn’t run for a 15th term in Congress but he switched from anti-Choice to “pro”-Choice and tried to run for president again. That’s how I allowed myself to interact with him, against my own better judgment. I’ll make the story of how, as short as I can. The RIAA had paid a huge bribe to the Democratic Party in order to get Congress and President Clinton to go along with some internet publishing deal. But they wanted a president of one of the labels to go thank Clinton personally and there was no one else among the label presidents who had ever experienced the internet, so I was chosen. Therefore they put the bribe in my name, without even asking me-- of even telling me. I’ll skip over the Clinton part and how he and Charlie Rangel tried shaking me down for more cash and go right to the Gephardt story.

By the 2004 campaign my name was on all the political fundraising call lists as a mega-donor because of that RIAA bribe I had nothing to do with. The good news was that I got calls from some cool people, like Howard Dean, but the bad news is that I got attention from the shady characters like Al Gore-- I’ll never forget his wife, who I loathed for her censorship attempts, asking me while I was dancing with my boyfriend at the White House if I would become a Gore bundler-- and Dick Gephardt. Gephardt insisted on meeting me in person even after I told him bluntly that I was firmly and irrevocably backing Howard Dean because he was opposed to the war Gephardt helped Bush start. So I met him. Terry McAuliffe was there too. I felt like I was drowning in a cesspool of the kind of criminality that was destroying politics. Once I made it clear to Gephardt that I wouldn’t give him 5 cents if his life depended on it, he dismissed me and I knew without a doubt I would never hear from him again. (His last campaign puttered out after one of his staffers called a Dean aide a “faggot” and punched him.) Among Gephardt’s endorsers were Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Sherrod Brown, and lots of Blue Dogs who were soon defeated in their own reelection attempts. Gephardt, who had once won the Iowa caucuses, came in 4th in 2004 and that was that. He has devoted the rest of his life to crime, handing out bribes on behalf of corporations instead of taking them for himself from corporations the way he used to.

He immediately went to work for them after losing his presidential bid

So why bring this turd up? He led the battle against the public option in 2009 and has worked diligently to keep drug prices high by pushing to extend patents and block generic drugs from coming to market. It’s largely due to the efforts of Dick Gephardt that drug prices are often TEN TIMES higher in the U.S. than in other countries. And, as Lee Fang, just reported for The Intercept Gephardt is still helping PhRMA rip off the American public as he nears his 80th birthday. Ironically, for me at least, the lead picture in Fang’s article is Gephardt and McAuliffe. Today-- no surprise-- Gephardt is paid to act as a general in the war against Medicare-for-All.

Fang noted that the mere prospect of single payer has elicited swift derision from some corners of the Democratic Party, with Dick Gephardt “laughing off the idea at a health insurance conference earlier this month. ‘Not in my lifetime,’ scoffed Gephardt, when asked if the United States will ever adopt such a system. Gephardt, who serves as a Democratic ‘superdelegate’ responsible for choosing the party’s presidential nominee, was asked about the possibility of single payer at the Centene Corporation annual investor day conference at The Pierre, a ritzy five-star hotel in New York City. ‘There is no way you could pass single payer in any intermediate future,’ Gephardt declared. America, he added, has the ‘greatest health care system in the world, bar none.’ And while single payer would provide universal coverage, there would be less quality and innovation without the ‘involvement of the private sector.’ Haley Barbour, the former Republican National Committee chair, another speaker at the event, chimed in to agree. ‘Hear, hear. Put me down as agreeing with Leader Gephardt as usual,’ Barbour chuckled.”

The claim that single payer suppresses innovation is an old argument that does not stand up to scrutiny. Most medical innovation in the U.S. are already government funded, through universities receiving federal subsidies and grants, as well as through the National Institutes of Health. A single-payer insurance system, like Medicare, would simply negotiate for lower prices from providers, and would likely steer savings towards greater investments in research and development. Claims about lower quality care are also highly disputed, given that countries with single payer and tightly regulated universal health systems perform much higher than the U.S. in a range of health outcomes.

Despite well-entrenched opposition from much of the private health care industry, political momentum for single payer has enjoyed a rapid boom of late.

Does it make your blood boil? It does mine. It makes me want to commit myself to electing Bernie to the presidency and progressives to Congress even more. I spoke with some of the congressional candidates who are running on Medicare-for-All platforms and asked them how they deal with political opponents who use these same manufactured lies about Medicare in their campaigns. Eva Putzova isn’t from the Dick Gephardt wing of the party. She served as a Bernie delegate from Arizona to the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and she’s been fighting for working families every since. The revolving door between politics and corporate lobbyists is not something she looks at kindly, primarily because the results are horrifically damaging to the people she is running to represent in Congress. “We need to implement a single payer, Medicare for All system that will remove the profit-making insurance and pharmaceutical industries from the influence and control they presently exert on health care policy, and policy-makers,” she told me earlier today. “In no other industrialized nation do these profit-making interests have such influence as in the U.S. We need to chase these ‘money lenders from the temple’ as rapidly as possible in order to provide good, quality, universal healthcare to all Americans.”

Massachusetts progressive Brianna Wu addressed her comment directly-- “Here’s what I have to say to those elected officials and candidates who don’t support Medicare For All-- you’re simply not spending enough time listening to your constituents. I can’t count how many people in my district have told me they have no healthcare or inadequate health care. They don’t go to a doctor when they get sick because they just can’t afford it. Some have gone bankrupt because of obscenely high medical bills. These are real people who work hard for themselves and their families. In one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, it isn’t just unfair, it should be criminal. My opponent, Rep. Stephen Lynch, has said that he isn’t yet convinced that Medicare For All would be a good idea. I’m sure that’s true. He enjoys his cadillac insurance plan as a congressman. So do his campaign donors who work for the insurance industry. It’s clear that Rep. Lynch isn’t spending enough time listening to his constituents. If he and other establishment-backed elected officials did listen, they would learn that their days in office are numbered, and that we need Medicare For All. Now.”

Heidi Sloan has a keen understanding of how congressional agendas need to be analyzed. A TX-25 progressive, she is campaigning heavily on Medicare-for-All and for cleaning up campaign finance corruption and the revolving door between congressional offices and lobbying firms. "The most effective piece of the Affordable Care Act was the Medicare expansion, and now we have a movement of people demanding the expansion of Medicare to every person in this country. We have real enemies in this fight, people like Roger Williams who oppose us because his class interests conflict with the goal of single-payer universal healthcare. The ruling class is smart enough to realize that workers who don't depend on employers for healthcare are a lot more likely to go on strike or walk away from a lousy job. Besides, even one of the richest members of Congress doesn't want to lose contributions after the for-profit industry funding his campaign is abolished. He'd rather corporations profit off of the denial of healthcare than to have less industry money to run on. Roger Williams has got to go, and all of the crooked politicians who take corporate money have to go with him."

David Scott stays quiet in Congress-- a career-long backbencher and Blue Dog with a tendency to back Republicans back in Georgia. This year there’s a strong progressive contesting the right to represent the suburban district south and southwest of Atlanta-- Dr. Michael Owens. Yesterday he told us that his platform has "included Medicare for All since day one of my campaign-- which is in stark contrast to my opponent’s stance. This is very unfortunate especially when you consider that there are parts of my district that rank among the least insured in the whole state. This is typical of Scott. He has consistently not supported Medicare for All. In the 114th, 115th and now in the 116th Congress, Scott hasn’t backed Medicare-for-All legislation. I would have signed on as an original cosponsor of Pramila Jayapal’s H.R. 676.  Remember, Georgia currently has the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States-- 46.2 deaths per 100,000 live births. More than 60 of Georgia’s 159 counties do not have a pediatrician. My opponent’s solution is the same that it has been over the last 15 years-- to host a one-day ‘health fair.’ This is a far cry from the bold health care solutions we need. 'Affordable and accessible health care' is a term we should learn to not trust. We also shouldn't trust an elected official who has received over $400,000 from the insurance industry over the last 4 election cycles. The women, children and men of my district and of this country need a single payer system, specifically Medicare for All, to ensure that all Americans have healthcare. Not 'affordable and accessible' healthcare via insurance companies whose goal is to maximize profits and deny and delay coverage. Healthcare is an an American crisis and we must put the need of the people over the greed of the health insurance industry."

Rachel Ventura’s New Dem opponent, Bill Foster, is a total DC insider who plays all the lobbyist games that see congressmen betraying the interests of their constituents for the interests of their campaign donors and other insiders. It might not be as bad if he lived in the district and met some of the folks he’s supposed to be representing. Last night, Rachel told us that “In 2018, Americans spent an all-time high of $360 billion on prescription drugs! Bill Foster won’t support Medicare for all because he supports a tiered healthcare system for those who can afford better insurance. We all deserve to have quality healthcare! Dick Gephardt and my political opponent have one thing in common. They are both part of our political past. Gephardt’s candle is fading quickly and it won’t be long before we are passing single-payer healthcare. We will do things different when I am elected to represent the people of Illinois’ 11th congressional district. There is an intelligent group of young people running for office this cycle, and we are going to win. We will join those who are already reshaping the political landscape in Washington and fighting to represent people over corporations. Change starts in the political campaign. I won’t be taking a penny from big PhRMA or from the for-profit healthcare system. I will have no problem hanging a “not for sale” sign on my office door and refusing meetings with those who have corrupted our political system to a point where voters, in desperation, choose a chaotic outsider like Donald Trump. It’s time to put the past behind us. The old way of doing things and the old players who are still scrapping for relevancy in this changing system will one day be written about as the dark ages in American history.”

The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President: Terry McAuliffe, Part V

Reports have it that Trump wants Jim Webb as Defense Secretary. He might even make a good Defense Secretary (or a lousy one; I don't know) but I think the two prima donnas deserve each other. Webb was a dickwad senator and in 2014 he decided to run for president (as a Democrat for some reason I'll never figure out) only to withdraw from the race while whining that he was "unhappy" and "not comfortable" with the policies Democratic grassroots voters seemed to favor. He had garnered virtually no support except from the same kind of inside the Beltway assholes who always claimed Biden would be a shoo-in every time he ran one of his single-digit campaigns for president. Webb said he might run as an independent and then, thankfully, more or less disappeared from the national stage... til Trump found him this week. (Remember, in 2016, "Democrat" Webb had said he would never vote for Hillary and that he might vote for Trump.) Lesson: all kinds of shit floats briefly to the surface in the lead up to a presidential election-- and then, thankfully, disappears.

I didn't think Terry McAuliffe, another creepy Virginia right-of-center faux-Dem like Webb, was even worth a chapter of our series The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President... but while I was writing this post, I changed my mind. McAuliffe was a career bankster and he entire life has been built around one shady insider business deal after another. Those deals define who he is and who has always been and will always be-- someone who has been at war with ethics for a lifetime. Like Trump, he got rich by manipulating sleazy real estate opportunities. He was a master of raising immense amounts of money for the Clintons and making sure he would benefit from all sides of every transaction. In 1999 he admitted to the NY Times that the success of his grubby business dealings stemmed from his relationship with Bill Clinton, as well as other Democrats who played fast and loose with ethical considerations, particularly Rahm Emanuel role model Tony Coehlo and Missouri sleaze bag Dick Gephardt. "I've met all of my business contacts through politics. It's all interrelated."

And speaking of the vile Gephardt, currently a lobbyist who might have been re-sworn in as Speaker Thursday instead of Pelosi had he not thrown his lot in with Bush when it came to the attack on Iraq-- which is how Pelosi pushed him out of Congress just before the Dems won it back and made her Speaker. Off the point, but the only time I ever met McAuliffe, a character I had always avoided, was through Gephardt, then a candidate for president. The back story is long and stupid but, at the time, I was listed-- mistakenly-- as a $50,000 donor to a Clinton-related Committee. So every Democratic presidential candidate would call me to schmooze me and try to get me to write them a big check too. I met some nice ones that way. But one day Gephardt called me and wouldn't take no for an answer. He whined so pathetically the I actually felt sorry for him and agreed to meet him. When I agreed to meet Howard Dean around that same time, I was happy to invite Deanover to my home. Gephardt... I agreed to meet him in a public hotel lobby. When I got there though, he insisted I come up to his suite. I knew I shouldn't, but I did-- and what was waiting for me at the door? "Howard Klein, allow me to introduce you to [and by this time we're shaking hands] "Terry McAuliffe." Instinctively, I reacted as though I was shaking a rattlesnake and grabbed my hand away. McAuliffe headed for the exit and... well the rest is a boring story about me telling Gephardt why I thought he would make a terrible president and why I was supporting Howard Dean.

Yesterday I got an e-mail-- spam-- from McAuliffe, trying to build up his mailing list for a presidential run. "Hi there," his fundraiser pretending to be him wrote, "I want to take a moment to share my latest op-ed with you, which was published this morning by the Washington Post. I hope you'll take a look! — Terry McAuliffe."

Dull crap about Trump being a bad, bad man. But then came the last paragraph (in the e-mail): "Voters are now looking for a more realistic alternative. Leading up to 2020, Democrats must maintain our credibility with a pledge of results that are honest and achievable. We can expand the Affordable Care Act and take on pharmaceutical companies' cartel pricing, pass comprehensive climate change legislation and substantially raise incomes through minimum-wage increases and tax fairness. And that's just the start." So that was it... except for a link to click on that brought the reader to the Washington Post article itself. Those who didn't click, probably more than half, likely more than 90%, didn't see what came next, a veiled attack on progressives (i.e., Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, the 3 top candidates with vision) from the transactional scumbag dying to follow Trump into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and steal whatever Trump left over. Here's what came next:

These changes would be revolutionary for average families. Americans are asking us to focus on improving their lives, not to make unrealistic ideological promises.

For example, some senators have started to discuss a “federal jobs guarantee”-- a promise that, in certain formulations, means that anyone who wants could have a government job paying $15 an hour with great benefits. Sound too good to be true? It is. Proponents of a jobs guarantee are smart people with good motives, but they surely recognize that it is not a realistic policy.

[Note: he didn't include this video:]

Similarly, a promise of universal free college has an appealing ring, but it’s not a progressive prioritization of the educational needs of struggling families. We need to provide access to higher education, job training and student debt relief to families who need it. Spending limited taxpayer money on a free college education for the children of rich parents badly misses the mark for most families.

[Note: he didn't include this video:]



He kept going: "When the stakes are another four years of Trump degrading our country, do we really want to use the 2020 campaign as a first-time experiment on idealistic but unrealistic policies?" Unrealistic? Ah... yes, the old conservative trope. If you read DWT with any regularity you know what else conservative have always claimed was "unrealistic" or "pie-in-the-sky."

• The American Revolution
• The Bill of Rights and the forging of a democracy
• Universal white male suffrage
• Public education
• The emancipation of the slaves
• The national park system
• Food safety
• The breakup of monopolies
• The Homestead Act
• Land grant universities
• Rural electrification
• The abolition of child labor
• The eight hour workday
• The minimum wage
• Social Security
• Civil rights for minorities and women
• Voting rights for minorities and the poor
• Cleaning up our air, our water, and toxic dump sites
• Consumer product safety
• Medicare and Medicaid

Yeah, like Bloomberg, McAuliffe is another crooked political hack who can't imagine anything great ever, since he himself could never be great and he realizes that to the core of his being. "As we approach 2020," the pompous jackass droned on, sounding more and more like Claire McCaskill, "we should look at the candidates who won in swing districts in 2018. They are an energetic, diverse group who ran on realistic goals of lowering the cost of health care, improving education and raising wages. These are credible promises that Democrats have a proven record of addressing. We are the party that created the Affordable Care Act, raised the minimum wage, invested in education and even balanced the budget... Resisting dishonest populism is not just a policy imperative for serious Democrats but also a political imperative for 2020. Across the country, voters just sent a powerful message that they are tired of the broken promises of this administration, especially on health care and taxes." As soon as you see this corporate marketing tool on an e-mail, delete at once:

Who Is The DCCC Selling Your Personal Information To?

You may not remember Dick Gephardt, once a powerful congressman from Missouri with ambitions to be Speaker and vice president and president. None of that worked out for him and he's just a sleazy K Street lobbyist now working for Goldman Sachs and other criminal enterprises… but he was the House Democratic leader from 1989 until 2003. A past chairman of the corrupt Wall Street-owned Democratic Leadership Council, the reason he sunk to that level is because he cosponsored, with Speaker Denny Hastert, the authorization for Bush to invade Iraq and persuaded 80 other House Dems (mostly Blue Dogs and Zionists-- Steve Israel included) to cross the aisle and vote with the Republicans. His deputy, Nancy Pelosi, led the normal Democrats against it. The next year Pelosi replaced him as Democratic leader. He decided to run for president, something that was never taken seriously outside the ridiculous and out-of-touch Beltway bubble.

Anyway, because of a mixup, every Democratic candidate looking at the list of top donors saw a contribution from me to the DNC for $50,000. (I never gave the DNC a dime.) So I started getting phone calls from every Democrat running for president. It's how I had the pleasure of making a raw vegan breakfast for Howard Dean at my house-- and learning about health care policy. But the bad Democrats called me too. One was Dick Gephardt. I was more polite and circumspect back then than I am now, so when he said he wanted to meet me, I didn't laugh in his face or hang up on him. (And, thanks, DNC for giving out my unlisted phone number.) Instead, I told him I was already backing Howard Dean. That didn't stop him and he insisted we get together in person. I told him I was aware of his voting record and that I follow that kind of thing the way normal people follow sports stats. And that he had way too many strike-outs for me. He still insisted. So, foolishly, I agreed to meet him. He brought sleazy Democratic Establishment operative (now Governor) Terry McAuliffe and I forgot about being polite. It didn't end well.

I challenge anyone to read just one week of DWT posts from the last 9 years and not walk away knowing what I think of conservatives, be they Republicans, teabaggers, fascists, Birchers, Blue Dogs, New Dems… whatever they want to call themselves. Who in their right mind would contact me if they're a conservative? And yet, almost every day, I get e-mails from DCCC-backed conservative Democrats asking for money. How strange is that? I even turn some of those e-mails into posts denouncing the corporate whores who sent them. But they keep coming-- even from DCCC candidates who I've written about over and over and urged people to vote against.

One particularly clueless DCCC candidate, empty-suit Pete Aguilar, who Blue America is working hard to defeat, sends me the most content-less and insipid e-mails of anyone. How did this idiot get my e-mail address? He's so stupid and incompetent that he actually managed to lose last year to two Republicans in a D+5 district, the only Democrat in America who managed to do anything like that. The only Republicans in blue districts are David Valadao (D+2), Frank LoBiondo (D+1), Chris Gibson (D+1) and Mike Coffman (D+1). And then there's the San Bernardino/Inland Empire D+5 seat Aguilar and Steve Israel lost in 2012. So, of course, Israel, responding to the clear message from voters that they can't relate to Aguilar in any way, recruited him to run again.

And as it turns out, when the DCCC, endorses a candidate, two of the first things it does is to make their candidate hire some overpriced, often clueless Beltway consultants and then buy the DCCC call list. You know all those petitions the DCCC is always asking everyone to sign? "Sign on so we can tell John Boehner… whatever." Obviously, Boehner has no interest in their bogus petitions and I would bet they never get delivered in any case. All those petition drives are just a fundraising tool to get your name and e-mail address, not only so they can ask you for contributions but also so they can sell your name and e-mail to whoever will pay-- klutzes like Aguilar, of course. But these DCCC lists get around quite a bit. I can't prove that the DCCC itself sells them to non-Jump start candidates, but some of their shady consultants sure do. This week, one of the 2012 candidates told me suddenly his relatives and personal friends, who were on his donor list, started getting e-mails from another candidate. It wasn't that hard to trace it right back to a sleazy DCCC operative-- even though the DCCC itself never even endorsed this candidate and, of course, refused to share any donor lists with him. Word to the wise: until the DCCC gets rid of Steve Israel, this isn't an operation you should even think of trusting with any personal information… ever. Don't say I didn't warn you.