Yes, The Democratic Party Can And Will Survive The Scourge Of Corrupted Centrism

It was impossible to log on to DWT yesterday without knowing that woke iron worker and union activist Randy Bryce had announced his candidacy to bring new representation to southeast Wisconsin and oust the radical Republican Speaker of the House from Congress. The Democrats now have the ideal candidate to run against Paul Ryan. If you know anything of the history of the DCCC and this district, you’ll know they will not just do nothing to help, they are likely to work behind the curtains at their regular sabotage. Picture Pelosi and Hoyer, Crowley, Lujan and Wassermann Schultz, Bustos, Denny Heck and Rahm Emanuel calling their contacts and hissing into the phone that they will consider contributions to Randy’s campaign an unfriendly act. Do you want to be considered unfriend by these assholes? Here! Randy isn part of a long, proud tradition of Wisconsin progressivism. It’s tragic that powers within the Democratic Party fear that instead of embracing it.

Over the weekend, Conor Lynch, writing for Salon blasted the “third way” centrists for standing in the way of progressive policies both in the U.S. and in the U.K. Is was talking about Tony Blair’s Conservative wing of the Labour Party (New Labour) and the Clintonian Republican wing of the Democratic Party (the New Dems and the Blue Dogs). This month Corbyn, an “old-school socialist, triumphed because he ran an effective grassroots campaign with a compelling message that offered principled leadership and a progressive platform to galvanize the working-class and young people of Britain. Though Labour clearly benefited from May’s poorly run campaign, there is little doubt that Labour’s progressive manifesto was essential to its parliamentary gains.”

The snap election that was supposed to have crushed Corbyn-- and the Labour Party-- once and for all has instead re-energized the British left, while throwing serious doubt on the Conservative Party’s future. When Theresa May arrogantly called the election in April, polls indicated that her Conservative Party would win by a historic landslide, and the British press-- which has been fiercely against Corbyn since he was elected as leader of the Labour Party two years ago-- ran giddy headlines predicting the death of his party. There was no doubt whether May and the Tories would win a majority; it was only a matter of how massive that majority would be.

But if we have learned anything over the past year, with the election of U.S. President Donald Trump and the “Brexit” referendum result last summer, it is that absolutely nothing is certain in this populist age. May was expected to “Crush the Saboteurs,” as the Daily Mail’s front page read after her announcement in April, but instead she ended up crushing her own party, which lost its majority in the House of Commons after leading by more than 20 points just a month earlier.

Meanwhile, the unconventional and “unelectable” Corbyn, who has been smeared and misrepresented by the British media for the past two years-- and who has faced repeated mutinies within his own party-- generated the highest turnout for a U.K. election since 1997 and won a larger share of the popular vote than Tony Blair did in 2005. It was an even bigger upset than last year’s Brexit shocker.

Even Labour Party members and Corbynites had been resigned to the Tories winning back their majority; their goal had been simply to keep that majority as slim as possible and to not be completely humiliated. But Theresa May was the only one humiliated on election day, while the leftist Labour leader was clearly vindicated after years of abuse.

…Like Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders was seen by the commentariat as a fringe socialist kook who was completely unelectable-- and like Corbyn, he created a mass movement that appealed to working people and young voters in particular. Sanders was by far the most popular candidate among millennials in the 2016 election, while Corbyn’s Labour Party won 63 percent of aged 18 to 34 and increased voter turnout for 18- to 25-year-olds from 45 percent in 2015 to about 72 percent last week, according to exit polls from Sky data. Similar to the scenario in the U.K., the majority of Americans tend to support Sanders’ social democratic policies, including his support for Medicare for all and raising taxes on the rich.

Of course, there’s at least one obvious difference between the two progressive politicians: While Corbyn has been personally unpopular in his country, Sanders continues to rank as the most popular politician in the United States. Moreover, Sanders consistently outperformed Hillary Clinton in the polls against Donald Trump last year and would have likely defeated the Republican billionaire handily-- barring a major spoiler candidate like Michael Bloomberg.

This reality continues to infuriate many establishment Democrats, who have inevitably tried to dismiss and downplay Corbyn’s success in Britain, noting that Labour still didn’t win a majority of its own. If a centrist Blairite were leading the party, they insist (with no empirical basis whatsoever), then he or she would have been elected prime minister, say centrist Democrats. The same people who were gloating about Labour’s anticipated ruin just a month ago-- and using it as evidence that a populist shift to the left would be disastrous for the Democratic Party-- are now spinning Labour’s historic accomplishment to fit their narrative. Clearly there is a lot of denial going on here. The Blairites and Clintonites cannot bring themselves to admit that “third way” centrism is a relic of the neoliberal 1990s. They refuse to see the writing on the wall, even as it stares at them directly.

In a column for the New York Times on Tuesday, Sen. Sanders wrote that the British election “should be a lesson for the Democratic Party” to stop clinging to an “overly cautious, centrist ideology.”

He wrote, “There is never one reason elections are won or lost,” adding, “but there is widespread agreement that momentum shifted to Labour after it released a very progressive manifesto that generated much enthusiasm among young people and workers… The  [Democratic] party’s main thrust must be to make politics relevant to those who have given up on democracy and bring millions of new voters into the political process.”

A few days earlier at the People’s Summit in Chicago, Sanders discussed the U.K. election during aspeech, noting that Labour “won those seats not by moving to the right” but by “standing up to the ruling class of the U.K.” He also reiterated that “Trump didn’t win the election, the Democratic Party lost the election.” It seems clear that if the Democratic Party wants to start winning elections again, it should pay careful attention to what is currently happening in Britain.

It isn’t a lesson a brittle Pelosi DCCC, in which perennial failure has been baked into the cake for over a decade, is capable of ever learning. Progressives who still believe in using the Democratic Party as a vehicle for the legitimate aspirations of working families have to work around an always hostile and corrupt DCCC. If you haven’t contributed to genuine progressive candidates like Randy Bryce (WI), Matt Coffay (NC), Jenny Marshall (NC), Tom Guild (OK), Katie Hill (CA), Doug Applegate (CA) and the other Blue America candidates, please consider doing so by tapping on the ActBlue thermometer on the right. The Democratic Party Establishment is no more likely to bring any tip-of-the-spear progressive policies to the fore than Paul Ryan or Donald Trump are. Values-free careerism has taken root at the top of the Democratic Party. Only by electing independent-minded progressives will we manage to save the party from its own worst instincts. 

Could Jeremy Corbyn's Massive Victory Today Presage A Similar Result For Bernie Sanders?

The long, long campaign for leader of the U.K.'s Labour Party is over, and the results weren't even close. England's Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, won a landslide victory today, much to the chagrin of the discredited and failed Blairites and their allies in the media. 

The New York Times, a home of American neoliberal thought, fretted about a hard turn left. Imagine the Labour Party electing a socialist! Isn't that what it's always been intended to do-- or at least was until Tony Blair and New Labour came along from the Conservative wing of the Labour Party? "Corbyn’s success," they wrote, "reflects Labour’s internal failure to confront the toxic legacy of the war in Iraq, which Mr. Blair joined President George W. Bush in starting, and of the economic policies that many link to the financial crash." Corbin's three centrist opponents all shared the Tony Blair vision for a more conservative Labour Party that represents the special interests far more than working families. They are the UK's Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. 

Ed Miliband, the last Labour leader, acknowledged that Corbyn's victory was overwhelming and incontestable and called it "a massive opportunity for our party." Corby started the campaign as a 100-1 underdog against the party establishment. Of the Labour deputies in Parliament, only 20 backed Corbyn. 210 endorsed one or the other of the three losing centrist candidates.

The result of the contest, announced on Saturday morning in London, gave stewardship of the Labour party to the hard left for the first time in more than three decades, a development seen here as one of the most surprising upsets in modern British politics.

As Europe continues to feel the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008, voters have been increasingly attracted to the political extremes, with support growing both for socialist parties on the left and nationalist ones on the right. The Labour leadership result could now shift the main opposition party in Britain closer to the types of positions taken by other leftist parties that have become prominent across Europe, including Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain.

Mr. Corbyn, 66, has been a lawmaker for more than three decades but never served in government, preferring to campaign, often for unfashionable causes, and frequently rebelling against the party line.

...Much like Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who has ignited liberal passions in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in the United States, Mr. Corbyn is promising radical approaches to longstanding problems.

...Hardly anyone contemplated such an outcome after the party’s previous leader, Ed Miliband, led Labour to defeat in May’s general election, on a platform already seen as being to the left of Mr. Blair. After that electoral rebuff, most expected the right of the party to reclaim the leadership. Instead the Blairites tried frantically to derail Mr. Corbyn, a vegetarian teetotaler based in North London who made a career of rebelling against the party line and until now had little public profile outside of party activists.

Steven Fielding, professor of political history at Nottingham University, said Mr. Corbyn’s rise had “taken everyone by surprise,” yet even opponents concede that his campaign has energized a cohort of enthusiastic, and often young, supporters.

Such people, Mr. Corbyn said at a rally in London this week, had been “written off as being a nonpolitical generation, when in reality they were a political generation that politics had written off.”

Although Britain’s economy is growing fast, Mr. Corbyn’s message has struck a chord with workers and families still feeling the aftershocks of Europe’s financial crisis of 2008.

For many, prospects remain poor, wages low and employment insecure. Soaring housing prices in the south have left many locked out of the real estate market. Bankers remain the target of simmering resentment.

The Guardian was more celebratory in its coverage this morning, noting that Labour "now has one of the most leftwing, anti-establishment leaders in its history." The results:

• Jeremy Corbyn- 59.5%
• Andy Burnham- 19%
• Yvette Cooper- 17%
• Liz Kendall- 4.5%

Kendall was the most overtly Blairite of the three centrists, a self-admitted New Labour enthusiast, utterly and cluelessly out of touch with what her party's members wanted. Within minutes of the totals being announced, Corbyn was asked if there was a message in the results. He pointed to the obvious, that people are "fed up with the injustice and the inequality" in Britain, not unlike what Bernie is talking about today with voters across South Carolina. 

Both Corbyn and Sanders emphasize the way establishment politics have alienated young voters, and both of them are winning huge support from young voters, who would otherwise not even participate.

The new leader concluded by saying the poorest were suffering a terrible burden of austerity and have seen their wages cut or are forced to rely on food banks under the Conservatives.

“It’s not right, it’s not necessary and it’s got to change,” he said. “We go forward as a movement and a party, stronger, bigger and more determined than we have been for a very long time ... We are going to reach out to everyone in this country, so no one is left on the side, so everyone has a decent place in society.”

Throughout his speech, Corbyn stressed that he would be inclusive, in comments designed to allay the fear of centrist MPs that they may no longer have much of a place in his party.

Attention will now turn to who serves in Corbyn’s top team, with MPs such as John McDonnell, Angela Eagle, Sadiq Khan, and possibly leadership rival Burnham tipped for key roles.

The difficulty of this task was underlined as Cooper, the shadow home secretary, and Rachel Reeves, the shadow work and pensions secretary, became the first to say they would not serve. Jamie Reed, a shadow health minister, published his resignation letter on Twitter while Corbyn was still speaking.

Corbyn, like Bernie, spoke before unprecedented rallies, much bigger than anything his rivals could imagine. And like Bernie, his support came from actual voters, not insiders. Keep in mind, as polls are showing Bernie winning in New Hampshire and gaining on Clinton in Iowa, and nationally, that not one single Democratic House member or senator has endorsed him. Progressives like Keith Ellison and Alan Grayson have come closest, by praising him and his vision for the country, but they praise Clinton and Biden as well. Even among progressive challengers in the 2016 congressional races, only one, as far as I know, has come out swinging 100% for Bernie: Alex Law, the young challenger to corrupt conservative Democrat Donald Norcross in south New Jersey.

So, England's Labour Party has picked someone from the Labour wing of the party-- and in a landslide. Today might be a good day to consider helping out Bernie Sanders do the same thing in America. Please contribute what you can to Bernie's campaign here.

And if you want to thank Alex Law for having the smarts and the guts to endorse Bernie... there's a page for that too.

Is Jeremy Corbyn The UK's Bernie Sanders?

As we mentioned yesterday, the right-of-center, Wall Street-owned New Dems are making a play to assert themselves within the Democratic congressional caucus. They are following in the footsteps of the Tony Blair New Labour wing of the UK's Labour Party, which took over the party but has more recently lost support by inching further and further right. The New Labour dominance may be ending, though. Labour Party leadership elections-- in the wake of the 2015 general election defeat and the subsequent resignation of Ed Miliband-- begin Friday (August 14) and close September 10. And the front runner is much-admired leftist icon and establishment outsider Jeremy Corbyn of Islington.

From the first day he announced he would run, he said he would campaign on a "clear anti-austerity platform." Obviously, this alarmed the New Labour faction.

The poll suggests that Mr Corbyn has built up at 32 percent lead over Mr Burnham, up from 17 percent in the most recent YouGov poll one month ago.

Mr Corbyn is now on 53 percent, while Mr Burnham has slipped to 21. The survey also shows that Yvette Cooper has also slipped by two points to 18 percent. Liz Kendall [a New Labour/Blair loyalist], seen as the most right-wing candidate on the ballot, is on just 8 percent.

Six out of ten of Mr Corbyn's supporters were newly registered voters-- people who have signed up for a basic £3 Labour membership which allows them to take part in the leadership bid.

This will raise concerns among party members and supporters of other candidates over the election process. It has been suggested that members of far-left parties, the Green party and even the Conservative party have paid the £3 fee to ensure that Mr Corbyn wins the leadership.

Mr Corbyn is most popular among Trade Unions sign ups, with 67 percent of them supporting his bid. 55 percent of all new sign ups also back him, while 49 percent of Labour members do.

Mr Corbyn has also proved extremely popular with women. YouGov not that women who are eligible to vote are "dramatically" more likely to back the 66-year-old. Although Mr Corbyn is still the most popular among both sexes, Andy Burnham polls better with men with 24 per cent backing him, compared to 17 per cent of women.

His success comes despite a series of Labour figures lining up to attack his bid. This week Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell is the latest to say that a Corbyn leadership will damage the Labour party.

Like Bernie, Corbyn is packing every venue he campaigns in-- and none of his right-leaning rivals are coming anywhere close. Of course, politicians (and media) who are in the pocket of the finance sector have been on a vicious tirade against Corbyn. And predictably, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has joined the anti-Corbyn jihad. Comparing him to Hugo Chávez and using discredited Beltway framing, the Journal insists: "His rise has exposed deep rifts within Labour over whether it should vie with the center-right Conservatives for the voter-rich middle ground or take a more traditional tack to the left. The discord has spurred talk about the possibility of a party split as happened in the early 1980s-- after which Labour spent nearly two decades in opposition."

Alan Johnson, a former Labour home secretary, last week called on Mr. Corbyn’s supporters to “end the madness,” while a former Blair adviser dubbed politicians who supported his nomination “morons.”

Mr. Blair-- who led the party to three national election victories-- has also weighed in. Those who say their hearts tell them to vote for Mr. Corbyn should “get a transplant,” said Mr. Blair during a speech last month. [Corbyn said that he'll wait for the release of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War before commenting on Blair's remarks.]

...Like Bernie Sanders, a socialist candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination next year in the U.S., Mr. Corbyn has drawn enthusiastic crowds of young and old to political rallies with passionate attacks on the wealthy and big business, and won support among major unions and local party branches. Composer and record producer Brian Eno has backed him as someone who could inspire the disenchanted.

Hundreds of people at the Corbyn rally in North London cheered when he said the British people have had enough of being told that cutting spending on social services ultimately helps the economy.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has endorsed Corbyn, pointing out that "The promises of New Labour in the UK and of the Clintonites in the US have been a disappointment." Musicians Billy Bragg and Brian Eno have also been outspoken in their backing for Corbyn, who has always described himself as "an anti-poverty campaigner" and supports a living wage, higher taxes on the richest Britons, free higher education, racial equality and renationalization of the railroads and utilities. He's admired as the Member of Parliament who has claimed the smallest amount of reimburseable expenses. He told The Guardian this summer that he doesn't spend a lot of money. "I lead a very normal life, I ride a bicycle and I don’t have a car."

More important, he "doesn’t buy into the idea that Ed Miliband’s Labour had moved too far to the left," which is being promoted as conventional wisdom by New Labour and Conservatives and their media allies.

“It certainly wasn’t an ultra-left manifesto,” he says. “What was it proposing? A limited amount of public ownership of the national railways, which is actually very popular, quite good stuff on the minimum wage and so on, but on the economy, it wasn’t fundamentally redistributive, which is what we need to be putting forward. We live in a very unequal society.”

The biggest problem, he says, was that Labour allowed the Tories to set the agenda on the economy and never offered an alternative narrative. “We’re very bad at asserting certain things. After the 2010 election and Liam Byrne’s note in the Treasury, it became in the public mind a fact that Labour spent too much and this became repeated all the time, unchallenged. And by the time we actually got round to an election five years later, there was an assumption that we admitted we’d spent too much. Actually, what did we spend too much on? The banking system collapsed because of a combination of a sub-prime mortgage crisis and deregulation. There was a lot of money spent buying out bank shares and buying out banks, a lot of money spent on quantitative easing to keep the money supply going, and now Osborne is selling off RBS shares at a loss and calling it a triumph for him and his government. So I think we have to be much more assertive as to what actually happened.”

But he is unimpressed with the attacks on Miliband by New Labour’s old guard. “I obviously didn’t agree with everything he did or said in the campaign, but he stood up well and worked very hard and should be thanked for that. I’m not joining in personal attacks … I don’t do personal attacks.” It’s true, he doesn’t. Try as you might to get him to badmouth an individual politician, he won’t. Everything is about the policy.

New Labour/New Dems... Old Crap

I suspect there aren't many DWT readers who know who George Mudie is. I'd never heard of him until a few days ago when I read in the Guardian that Mudie, a Labour Member of Parliament from Leeds, was about to unload on Labour leader Ed Miliband-- which he has now done. So, you ask-- why should anyone care?

Between Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron's Conservative governments-- with the briefest of technical intervals for John Major and Gordon Brown--Tony Blair moved the Labour Party considerably right with a political concoction called New Labour, basically an anti-union move. New Labour, at least domestically, was never as bad-- in terms of heartless pandering to Big Business and in terms of corruption-- as our own New Dems (let alone America's Blue Dogs). But it still helped muddle the differences between Labour and the Conservatives and it did push the Conservatives further right on a number of issues. Today, according to the long-serving Mudie, voters no longer even know what Labour stands for. But he blames the hapless Miliband.

Labour backbench anxiety about Ed Miliband's leadership spilled into the open on Thursday when George Mudie, a veteran backbencher and former whip, issued a withering assessment, accusing him of being hesitant, cocooned in a bunker and failing to make the political weather.

Mudie, one of the leading figures in the move to oust Tony Blair from the Labour leadership in 2006 and a supporter of Ed Balls in the 2010 leadership election, said that even as a Labour MP he could not describe the party's current policies on education and welfare.

He also said there was a general fear among Labour MPs that the the party's poll lead was weak and unlikely to withstand the heat of an election campaign.

A palpable anxiety has spread in some Labour circles ever since its poll lead started to shrink and it became clear that growth is likely to be higher than forecast this year. There are also political rumbles over the decisions to confront the unions about their role in the party and to accept the coalition spending totals for 2015-16.

... The significance of Mudie's intervention, a self-confessed "cynical old and bad tempered" figure, will depend on whether other MPs voice similar doubts, or he remains an isolated voice. Mudie claimed there was a general concern among Labour MPs that the party's lead in the polls was "not firm enough, big enough and will it withstand a general election discussion?"

He told the BBC's World At One: "I think one of the difficulties a Labour party member would say to you, and I would say to you, I have difficulty knowing what we stand for now. We are 18 months away from an election, thinking that we will put out a document on all these major items and the public will say, 'Oh great'... At the moment the government are setting the agenda, making the weather, and we're responding to it. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown never did that."

He asked: "Do you know, because I don't, our position on welfare, do you know our position on education, do you know our genuine position on how we'd run the health service?

"I remember before we won, the five years to 97, this place was bubbling, we were energetic, we were at them, we thought we had all the answers. We're not at them and we're slightly hesitant and we're slightly confused and I deeply worry about that." Asked whether Miliband was in touch with the concerns of backbenchers like him, Mudie said the leader was "always cocooned by people round him and the basis they are around him is he trusts them".

He said one of Miliband's problems was that "he is young, the way he came to power, the problem with his brother, the fact that the trade unions had a major say. I think he is still trying to find himself and I think the problem with that is that sometimes he is doing things that he thinks a Labour leader should do that he should not do."

Without giving details, he said he knew Miliband had made mistakes. He said unless Labour offered something different and relevant, voters would decide to stick with what they have got.

Miliband has made the strategic decision to hold back on major policy announcements until closer to election, arguing that a five-year, fixed-term parliament requires a more disciplined approach.

I wonder if Miliband gets advice from Steve Israel, who encourages Democratic candidates to keep all but the most insipid, mom-and-apple-pie positions to themselves, and who urges freshmen incumbents to vote with the Republicans in the mostly pointless hope of wooing conservative voters. Two of Israel's worst freshmen, New Dems Sean Patrick Maloney (NY) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), have followed his advice and have amassed two of the worst voting records of any Democrats in the House. Both are considered very vulnerable to defeat in 2014. Neither has persuaded many conservative voters to abandon Republicans but both have alienated their Democratic bases who are unlikely to turn out for them at the polls.

MoveOn.org members have launched petitions against 14 Democrats-- including Arizona’s Congresswomen Kyrsten Sinema and Ann Kirkpatrick-- for siding with Republicans in their vote to delay implementation of the Affordable Care Act from 2014 to 2015.

According to The Hill, these members were targeted with MoveOn.org petitions: Reps. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) Scott Peters (D-Calif.), Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Julia Brownley (D-Calif.), Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.), Elizabeth Esty (D-Conn.), Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.), Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.), Bill Enyart (D-Ill.), Bill Owens (D-N.Y.), Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) and Collin Peterson (D-Minn.).

Is There Recourse When A Political Party Decides To Sabotage The Economy To Undermine The Country?

When I retired from my job at Warner Bros, one of the happiest thoughts I had is that I would never have to go to a Grammy Awards show again-- nor anything like it-- and never have to be a prop in the audience in someone's lame TV extravaganza. All those shows made me sick and I had to go to all of them. However... there was only one I actually did like and that was the U.K. version of the Grammies, the BRIT Awards. I was at the 1998 version, the night before my birthday at the London Arena, primarily to support Fleetwood Mac, who were performing and getting an Outstanding Contribution to Music Award, or something like that. I had a table right up front for the event, right next to Cherie Blair, Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife.

I recall a band with a catchy tune I had barely heard of getting up to play a song, the one Ezra referenced in the video about the American economy Friday night (in the video above), "Tubthumping (I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again)." Chumbawumba were an anarchist punk band and they were wearing t-shirts that said "Sold out" and "Labour whore" and changed the lyrics of their hit song to "New Labour sold out the dockers, just like they sold out the rest of us." Sitting right across from me at Cherie's table was Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, basking in the glory of how Labour wasn't Margaret Thatcher but was hip and cool enough to be hobnobbing with the pop stars. Unfortunately for Prescott, people were becoming aware that Labour-- or at least Blair's New Labour actually was Margaret Thatcher (just a slightly defanged, less bloodthirsty version). Labour had just decided to not support the striking Liverpool dockworkers, inspiring Chumba singer/guitarist Danbert Nobacon to jump up on the table and empty a bucket of ice water on his head. Nothing like that has ever happened-- nor could ever happen-- at the staid old boring, hideous Grammies, where "politics" is a no-no.

Now the point of Ezra's rant that brought up Chumbawumba (several times), the Scarborough/Krugman debate on the Charlie Rose Show and Venn diagrams, is that the Austerity-minded Republicans are sabotaging the American economy. And they are. There's no question about it. Perhaps it's unfair to assign motivation but you can't seriously dispute that John Boehner and Miss McConnell are undermining growth and literally doing everything they can to drive up unemployment numbers. That's what they do; that's what they are-- the sworn enemies of working families. And what about the Democrats? Glad you asked.

The progressives in Congress have some ideas for growing the economy and gradually decreasing the deficit at the same time. The Big Money behind the Democratic Party does not like what they've been hearing from these guys and gals. And they've made a massive push-- along with elements of the Beltway political Establishment-- to empower a more Big Business-oriented faction, the New Dems, very much like Blair's New Labour, or failed U.S. attempts to undermine progressive ideals within the Democratic Party in the past (DLC, Blue Dogs, Boll Weevils, Bourbon Democrats, Dixiecrats). So will Al Barr or Ken Casey jump up on a table and pour a bucket of water over hipster Joe Crowley, Allyson Schwartz, Jim Himes, Rick Larsen or Ron Kind, the corporate whores at the heart of the New Dem take-over of the House Democratic Caucus? [If you didn't click on that "hipster Joe Crowley" link, you missed something none of your friends know about.]

Voters need to start understanding that not all Democratic members of Congress are Democrats the way we think of Democrats. Blue Dogs and New Dems are, basically, your father's Republican Party. Backed by the Village, they have a mission-- a Grand Bargain with the Republicans that pushes the failed European Austerity agenda. Robert Reich discusses it with Ezra in the video above-- although they both just blame the Republicans. But lifelong Republican (opportunistically calling himself a "Democrat" now) Patrick Murphy rounded up a band of naive freshmen Democrats to start sacrificing working families on the alter of Republican Austerity. Last week Tom Edsall went a long way towards explaining why Obama shouldn't cut Social Security and Medicare in a smart NY Times column. There's no support in the country, among actual Americans outside the Beltway, for these cuts. Edsall even as a suggestion of what the Democrats ought to do instead:

So why don’t we talk about raising or eliminating the cap-- a measure that has strong popular, though not elite, support?

When asked by the National Academy of Social Insurance whether Social Security taxes for better-off Americans should be increased, 71 percent of Republicans and 97 percent of Democrats agreed. In a 2012 Gallup Poll, 62 percent of respondents thought upper-income Americans paid too little in taxes.

Medicare, in turn, is financed by a flat 1.45 percent tax on the first $200,000 of earnings for a single person and $250,000 for a married couple, matched by the employer, after which it rises by a modest 0.9 percent on all income above the $200,000 and $250,000 levels.

...As 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day, 72 percent of them are currently without the protection of a defined benefit pension plan, which leaves growing numbers dependent on inadequately funded 401(k) and other voluntary (defined contribution) plans to keep their heads above water.

Cutting benefits is frequently discussed in the halls of Congress, in research institutes and by analysts and columnists. The idea of subjecting earned income over $113,700 to the Social Security payroll tax and making the Medicare tax more progressive-- steps that would affect only the relatively affluent-- is largely missing from the policy conversation.

The Washington cognoscenti are more inclined to discuss two main approaches that are far less costly for the affluent: means-testing of benefits and raising the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare. (Sidenote: policy makers and national journalists who weigh in on this issue generally earn more than $113,700 a year.) Means-testing and raising the age of eligibility as methods of cutting spending appeal to ideological conservatives for a number of reasons.

First, insofar as benefits for the affluent are reduced or eliminated under means-testing, social insurance programs are no longer universal and are seen, instead, as a form of welfare. Public support would almost certainly decline, encouraging further cuts in the future.

Second, the focus on means-testing and raising the age of eligibility diverts attention from a much simpler and more equitable approach: raising the payroll tax to apply to the earnings of the well-to-do, a step strongly opposed by the ideological right.

Third, and most important in terms of the policy debate, while both means-testing and eliminating the $113,700 cap on earnings subject to the payroll tax hurt the affluent, the latter would inflict twice as much pain.

The C.B.O. estimates that elimination of the payroll earnings cap would cost the well-to-do the equivalent of 0.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product, while substantially reducing Social Security payments to the top third of the income distribution, through means testing, would only cost those better off recipients the equivalent of 0.1 percent of G.D.P.

...In the rarefied community that sets many of the terms of national policy making, a recurring theme is the notion that the federal government is subsidizing the “good life” of the nation’s elderly at the expense of needed investments in young people, in infrastructure and in innovation.

...In this kind of conflict over limited goods, one of the most valuable resources that can get lost in the fray is the wisdom of the electorate at large. In this case, the electorate is pointing toward progressive tax increases for those closer to the top far more readily than members of the political class, for whom high-earners are a crucial source of campaign contributions.

The very nature of the basic security Americans are entitled to is at stake.

It's a losing argument economically and politically. Democrats shouldn't be stampeding into making it in the false name of bipartisanship. New Labour was thumped and the New Dems, if they make the same mistake again, will be as well. By the way, and apropos of nothing at all, here's my favorite version of "Tubthumping," one that didn't get much play in America. I dedicate it to... Ezra: