Should The Country Be Soley Ruled By Multimillionaires And Billionaires?

Republicans Darrell Issa (CA), David Trott (MI), Diane Black (TN), Tom Rooney (FL), James Renacci (OH) and Rodney Frelinghuysen (NJ) will not be returning to Congress next year. The only one worth less than $30 million is Frelinghuysen but altogether this half dozen anti-healthcare fanatics are worth quite a bit over half a billion dollars. Among the Democrats not returning to the House next year are Jared Polis (New Dem-CO- $122.6 million) and John Delaney (New Dem-MD- $92.6 million).

Don't worry about millionaires and their interests not being represented in Congress next year. Although just 5% of Americans are millionaires, 51% of the members of Congress are. As iron-worker and Wisconsin congressional candidate Randy Bryce-- who the DCCC is trying to crush-- tweeted this week, "Just 2% of our members of Congress have come from the working class. A Congress made up of millionaires works for millionaires. We need a Congress made up of working people if we want our government to work for us." Good luck with that. Nancy Pelosi and her elite gang of multimillionaires have moved systematically to keep working class candidates from winning primaries and when they do win primaries-- as Bryce did-- Pelosi and her crooked gang of wealthy creeps make sure they are not supported by either the DCCC or Pelosi's own House Majority PAC.

Wednesday, Vox published an essay by Nicholas Carnes, a professor of public policy at Duke and author of The Cash Ceiling: Why Only The Rich Run For Office. That's him up top explaining the difference between the Millionaires Party and the Working Class Party. And the clip below is also Nick, this time being interviewed at Duke a few years ago after he released a previous-- and related-- book, White Collar Government. His main point in the two books is that "our government is run by rich people-- and it benefits them the most"-- and he asks, in a country where virtually any citizen is eligible to serve in public office, why are most of our elected representatives drawn from the millionaire class rather than the working class, which makes up way over half the population.



"This year," he wrote, "it might be tempting to think that working-class Americans don’t have it so bad in politics, especially in light of recent candidates like Randy Bryce, the Wisconsin ironworker running for the US House seat Paul Ryan is vacating, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former restaurant server whose primary election win over Democratic heavyweight Joe Crowley may go down as the single biggest election upset in 2018. In reality, however, they are stark exceptions to a longstanding rule in American politics: Working-class people almost never become politicians. Ocasio-Cortez and Bryce make headlines in part because their economic backgrounds are so unusual (for politicians, that is). Their wins are stunning in part because their campaigns upset a sort of natural order in American politics."

The figure above plots recent data on the share of working-class people in the US labor force (the black bar) and in state and national politics. Even in the information age, working-class jobs-- defined as manual labor, service industry, and clerical jobs-- still make up a little more than half of our economy. But workers make up less than 3 percent of the average state legislature.

The average member of Congress spent less than 2 percent of his or her entire pre-congressional career doing the kinds of jobs most Americans go to every day. No one from the working class has gotten into politics and gone on to become a governor, or a Supreme Court justice, or the president. And that probably won’t change anytime soon.

...The exclusion of working-class people from American political institutions isn’t a recent phenomenon. It isn’t a post-decline-of-labor-unions phenomenon, or a post-Citizens United phenomenon. It’s actually a rare historical constant in American politics-- even during the past few decades, when social groups that overlap substantially with the working class, like women, are starting to make strides toward equal representation. Thankfully, the share of women in office has been rising-- but it’s only been a certain type of woman, and she wears a white collar.

This ongoing exclusion of working-class Americans from our political institutions has enormous consequences for public policy. Just as ordinary citizens from different classes tend to have different views about the major economic issues of the day (with workers understandably being more pro-worker and professionals being less so), politicians from different social classes tend to have different views too.

These differences between politicians from different social classes have shown up in every major study of the economic backgrounds of politicians. In the first major survey of US House members in 1958, members from the working class were more likely to report holding progressive views on the economic issues of the day and more likely to vote that way on actual bills. The same kinds of social class gaps appear in data on how members of Congress voted from the 1950s to the present. And in data on the kinds of bills they introduced from the 1970s to the present. And in public surveys of the views and opinions of candidates in recent elections.

The gaps between politicians from working-class and professional backgrounds are often enormous. According to how the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce rank the voting records of members of Congress, for instance, members from the working class differ by 20 to 40 points (out of 100) from members who were business owners, even in statistical models with controls for partisanship, district characteristics, and other factors. Social class divisions even span the two parties. Among Democratic and Republican members of Congress alike, those from working-class jobs are more likely than their fellow partisans to take progressive or pro-worker positions on major economic issues.

These differences between politicians from different economic backgrounds-- coupled with the virtual absence of politicians from the working class-- ultimately skew the policymaking process toward outcomes that are more in line with the upper class’s economic interests. States with fewer legislators from the working class spend billions less on social welfare each year, offer less generous unemployment benefits, and tax corporations at lower rates. Towns with fewer working-class people on their city councils devote smaller shares of their budgets to social safety net programs; an analysis I conducted in 2013 suggested that cities nationwide would spend approximately $22.5 billion more on social assistance programs each year if their councils were made up of the same mix of classes as the people they represent.

Congress has never been run by large numbers of working-class people, but if we extrapolate from the behavior of the few workers who manage to get in, it’s probably safe to say that the federal government would enact far fewer pro-business policies and far more pro-worker policies if its members mirrored the social class makeup of the public.

As the old saying goes, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Now, defenders of America’s white-collar government will tell you that working-class people are unqualified to hold office, and that voters know it and rightly prefer more affluent candidates.

Alexander Hamilton said it (“[workers] are aware, that however great the confidence they may justly feel in their own good sense, their interests can be more effectually promoted by the merchant than by themselves”). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists have said it (“voters repeatedly reject insurrectionist candidates who parallel their own ordinariness ... in favor of candidates of proven character and competence”). Donald Trump has said it (“I love all people, rich or poor, but in [Cabinet-level] positions, I just don’t want a poor person.”).

However, this line of reasoning is flat wrong. The raw personal qualities that voters tend to want in a candidate-- honesty, intelligence, compassion, and work ethic-- are not qualities that the privileged have a monopoly on. (In fact, two of the traits voters say they most want in a politician, honesty and compassion, may actually be a little less common among the rich.)

When working-class people hold office, they tend to perform about as well as other leaders on objective measures; in an analysis of cities governed by majority-working-class city councils in 1996, I found that by 2001, those cities were indistinguishable from others in terms of how their debt, population, and education spending had changed.

When working-class people run, moreover, they tend to do just fine. In both real-world elections and hypothetical candidate randomized controlled trials embedded in surveys (which help to rule out the so-called Jackie Robinson effect), voters seem perfectly willing to cast their ballots for working-class candidates.

The real barrier to working-class representation seems to be that workers just don’t run in the first place. In national surveys of state legislative candidates in 2012 and 2014, for instance, former workers made up just 4 percent of candidates (and around 3 percent of winners).

So why do so few workers run for office? I’ve been researching this question for the past decade, and I think the answer is right under our noses: campaigns... [in which] groups with fewer resources are at a huge disadvantage.

In democratic elections, people can only be considered for office if they take time off work and out of their personal lives to campaign. Even in places where candidates don’t spend a lot of money on their campaigns, they still put in a lot of time and energy-- any candidate will tell you that running was a significant personal sacrifice. They give up their free time. They give up time with their families. Many of them have to take time off work.

For politically qualified working-class Americans, this feature of elections seems to be the barrier that uniquely distinguishes them from equally qualified professionals. In surveys, workers and professionals alike hate the thought of asking for donations. They say that the thought of giving up their privacy is a downside. They express similar concerns about whether they are qualified.

But it is the thought of losing income or taking time off work that uniquely screens out working-class Americans long before Election Day. When the price of competing is giving up your day job (or a chunk of it), usually only the very well-off will be able to throw their hats into the ring.

Elites recruit elites

But couldn’t party and interest group leaders help working-class Americans overcome these obstacles? Couldn’t foundations create special funds to encourage and support candidates from the working class?

Of course. But they usually don’t. The people who recruit new candidates often don’t see workers as viable options, and pass them over in favor of white-collar candidates. In surveys of county-level party leaders, for instance, officials say that they mostly recruit professionals and that they regard workers as worse candidates. Candidates say the same thing: In surveys of people running for state legislature, workers report getting less encouragement from activist organizations, civic leaders, and journalists.

The reasons are complicated. Some party leaders cite concerns about fundraising to explain why they don’t recruit workers, for instance, and in places where elections cost less, party officials really do seem to recruit more working-class candidates. However, by far the best predictor of whether local party leaders say they encourage working-class candidates is whether the party leader reports having a lower income him-- or herself and whether the party leader reports having any working-class people on the party’s executive committee.

Candidate recruitment is a deeply social activity, and political leaders are usually busy volunteers who look for new candidates within their own mostly white-collar personal and professional networks. The result is that working-class candidates are often passed over in favor of affluent professionals.

What about foundations, reformers, and pro-worker advocacy organizations? Couldn’t they help qualified working-class Americans run for office?

Of course. But they usually don’t. There are models out there for doing so, actually-- the New Jersey AFL-CIO has been running a program to recruit working-class candidates for more than two decades (and their graduates have a 75 percent win rate and close to 1,000 electoral victories). But the model has been slow to catch on in the larger pro-worker reform community.

To the contrary, the pro-worker community has focused on reforms aimed at addressing the oversize political influence of the wealthy that have historically tended to look at on inequalities in political voice, imbalances in the ways that citizens and groups pressure government from the outside. We’ve heard the same story for decades: If we could reform lobbying and campaign finance and get a handle on the flow of money in politics, the rich wouldn’t have as much of a say in government. If we could promote broader political participation, enlighten the public, and revitalize the labor movement, the poor would have more of a say.

The key to combating political inequality, in this view, is finding ways to make sure that everyone’s voices can be heard-- and the idea of giving workers influence inside government has never been a part of the mainstream reform conversation.

How about wealthy candidates who just outright try to buy congressional seats-- self-funders? These are the biggest self funders (over $2 million) this cycle along with the amount they've spent from their own purses and the percentage of their campaign that has been self-funders. The two political parties encourage them, not despite the personal cash and wealthy friends, but because of that. And, again-- alas-- they're not all Republicans.

• Rick Scott (R-FL)- $38,934,441 (71.3%)
• Bob Hugin (R-NJ)- $24,000,000 (91.5%)
• David Trone (D-MD)- $15,983,172 (96.8%)
• Scott Wallace (D-PA)- $8,856,892 (90.3%)
• Mike Braun (R-IN)- $8,114,377 (60.6%)
• Gil Cisneros (D-CA)- $8,052,762 (80.9%)
• Kathaleen Wall (R-TX)- $6,169,732 (99.4%)- lost primary
• Paul Kerr (D-CA)- $5,912,728 (98.2%)- lost primary
• Phil Bredesen (D-TN)- $5,508,140 (37.2%)
• John Kingston (R-MA)- $5,188,265 (82.2%)- lost primary
• Sandy Pensler (R-MI)- $5,009,578 (95.8%)- lost primary
• Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)- $5,006,050 (30.8%)
• Shiva Ayyadurai (I-MA)- $4,802,331 (96.3%)- lost primary
• Jim Renacci (R-OH)- $4,000,000 (54.9%)
• George Flinn Jr. (R-TN)- $3,068,270 (99.9%)- lost primary
• Dan Moody (R-GA)- $3,040,237 (96.9%)- lost special election
• Andy Thorburn (D-CA)- $2,860,900 (91.5%)- lost primary
• Mike Gibbons (R-OH)- $2,690,226 (86.7%)- lost primary
• Mel Hall (D-IN)- $2,122,000 (70.4%)
• Sara Jacobs (D-CA)- $2,117,987 (73.7%)- lost primary

Yesterday, Gaius did an excellent post that shows how an issue as absolutely crucial as dealing with climate change has been hopelessly distorted by a government controlled by the uber-wealthy. It's definitely worth reading if you haven't already. I love this video that CAP Action Fund just released. I wish there was a way to get it out more widely. Play it for your friends?

Odd There Are So Few Members Of The Working Class In Congress? Remember, The System Is Rigged

In the last few weeks, I've been complaining that the elites who control both parties recruit elites like themselves to recruit and to support. When someone from the working class self-selects and manages to win a primary, those elites are more likely to turn up their nose at them than to support them. After Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary about a member of the House elite club in New York, I sensed that the House Democrats were more vicious in their reaction than even the House Republicans were. I remember thinking to myself, self, I sure hope she has a thick skin! Ultimately though, I know what will happen. Pelosi and her cronies will try to coop her.

It was a similar story with Randy Bryce in Wisconsin. Bryce built his own @IronStache working class brand. The DCCC chuckled. Then he raised more money and got more press than any DCCC knucklehead they recruited from anywhere in the country. No one cared about any of their shit candidates-- most of whom seemed to be rolling off some kind of white collar assembly-line in the basement of DCCC headquarters in DC. Instead they cared about Bryce. The DCCC sniffed around to see if they could bottle what he was doing. Once they realized they couldn't-- and saw that he didn't "even" graduate from college and that he wore work boots to their soirees and wanted to talk about labor unions "too much," they dropped him like a hot potato. Ryan's corporately-sponsored SuperPAC saw a chance to keep the seat red. So far, they've poured $1.8 million into the district-- and announced today that they plan on spending another $1.2 million-- on behalf of their corporate lawyer Ryan clone, Bryan Steil (a complete nothing), almost all of it to smear Bryce. Neither the DCCC nor Pelosi's PAC has responded. They've decided to let him die on the vine, another damn member of the working class trying to crash their club. They want him to learn his place-- and fuck WI-01.


Nor, obviously, are Alexandria and Randy the only working class candidates being ignored by the DCCC. Nate McMurray has a good shot to win his western New York race. He's an excellent candidate and his Republican opponent was just indicted on dozens of serious fraud charges. But the DCCC isn't interested. Nate isn't their kind of guy. His dad died when he was young and his mom at age 35 was suddenly raising seven kids. They certainly struggled. Today, Nate, whose own struggle included working his way through college scrubbing bathrooms, told us he still cuts his own grass. "I know what it's like to work dead end jobs and worry about your family, about the finances of your family. My first priority is to help working families like mine growing up. I'm running against a man that inherited millions and exploited his public position to make money. I don't think he can relate to the people of this region. And that's why I want to go to Congress to fight for families like mine."

The guy in the video up top, Nick Carnes, wrote a book about why Congress has virtually no one who made a living with his or her hands, The Cash Ceiling: Why Only the Rich Run for Office-- and What We Can Do About It and yesterday The Guardian published a piece by him Why are so few US politicians from the working class? "Contrary to the ideal of a government of and by the people," he wrote, "new research shows Americans are almost always governed by the very privileged." He understands the significance of Bryce and Ocasio-Cortez. "This year," he continued, "at least two races for seats in the US House of Representatives will feature high-profile candidates with significant experience in working-class jobs – the manual labor, service industry and clerical jobs that make up over half of the American labor force. In Wisconsin’s first congressional district, the Democratic nominee is a delivery-driver-turned-ironworker named Randy Bryce, nicknamed “Ironstache”, who takes credit for “scaring off” Paul Ryan. In New York’s 14th congressional district, a former bartender and waitress named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently made headlines for her stunning primary-election upset over incumbent Democrat Joe Crowley. Candidates like Bryce and Ocasio-Cortez-- politicians with significant experience in the kinds of jobs most Americans punch in for every day-- are genuine anomalies in 2018, and in US politics more generally."

The president is the billionaire head of a global business empire. His cabinet is mostly millionaires. Most members of Congress are millionaires. Most supreme court justices are millionaires. Millionaires make up less than 3% of the general public, but have unified majority control of all three branches of the federal government. Working-class Americans, on the other hand, make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded.

The root cause-- and one of the reasons that candidates such as Bryce and Ocasio-Cortez raise eyebrows-- is that workers almost never run, even at the state and local levels. In nationwide surveys of people campaigning for state legislatures in 2012 and 2014, candidates from working-class jobs made up just 4% of both Republican and Democratic candidates. In California-- the one state that offers detailed data on the occupational backgrounds of candidates at the local level-- between 1995 and 2011, workers made up just 4% of candidates for county and local office.

So why are so few workers running? In a democracy like ours where almost any citizen can stand for elected office, why are the vast majority of candidates drawn from the ranks of white-collar professionals, and usually affluent or wealthy ones at that?... Just as working-class people in the general public tend to be more pro-worker (and business owners tend to be more pro-business, farmers tend to be more pro-farm, etc), politicians from different social classes tend to bring different perspectives with them to public office, especially when it comes to economic issues. In confidential surveys of state legislators, leaders from the working class in both parties are 20 to 50 percentage points more likely to support policies such as social welfare programs, regulation of the private sector, government-backed healthcare and efforts to reduce economic inequality. In scorecards that rank how members of Congress vote on economic legislation, those from the working class consistently earn significantly higher marks from pro-worker groups like the AFL-CIO and lower marks from business groups like the Chamber of Commerce.

Bryce: "There’s no question: if we want people in Congress who will legislate on our behalf they need to understand what working people go through. The problem is that we have auctions, not elections. Until we have meaningful campaign election reform we probably won’t see many working people drop their lives and try to run. It’s not easy, but it needs to be done."

These differences, coupled with the virtual absence of working-class people in our political institutions, ultimately have enormous consequences for public policy. States with fewer legislators from the working class spend billions less on social welfare each year, offer less generous unemployment benefits and tax corporations at lower rates. Towns with fewer working-class people on their city councils devote smaller shares of their budgets to social safety net programs; an analysis I conducted in 2013 suggested that cities nationwide would spend approximately $22.5bn more on social assistance programs each year if their councils were made up of the same mix of classes as the people they represent. Unfortunately, we can’t write off white-collar government as politically inconsequential. As the old saying goes, when the working class isn’t at the table, it’s often on the menu.

We also can’t dismiss government by the privileged as an inevitable byproduct of some deficiency on the part of working-class people themselves. It sounds odd to have to state this, but to the contrary, workers and professionals alike tend to have the qualities voters want – traits like honesty, compassion and a strong work ethic – at about the same rates. And when working-class Americans hold office, they tend to do about as well as professionals on objective measures of government performance. Between 1996 and 2001, for instance, towns governed by majority-working-class city councils were indistinguishable from other cities in terms of their rates of population growth, revenue growth, school spending, and debt. The idea that workers don’t hold office because they lack the necessary skills simply doesn’t add up. If just 1% of working-class Americans had what it takes to govern, that would be more than enough potential politicians to staff every office in the United States.

Last, we also can’t blame government by the privileged on some preference for affluent leaders on the part of American voters. When working-class candidates run, voters tend to like them just fine. Between 1945 and 2008, members of Congress from the working class earned about as many votes as those from white-collar careers. In surveys embedded with randomized control trials, voters are just as likely to say that they would vote for a working-class candidate as they are to pick an otherwise-identical white-collar candidate. When voters are asked directly why they think so few working-class people hold office, “workers are less qualified” is the least popular answer; around 75% of people surveyed in 2014 said that working-class candidates tended to be at least as qualified as white-collar professionals. When workers run, they don’t face a class-biased electorate.

Nonetheless, they seldom run. But researchers and reformers are starting to understand why-- and to identify interventions that might give working-class Americans more of a seat at the table in government.

...First, workers seldom run for public office in the US because of the fundamental personal burdens associated with campaigning – doing so always takes a great deal of time and energy, and working-class Americans are far less likely to have the time and energy to spare. When I surveyed seemingly qualified working-class and white-collar citizens, the biggest gap in their reported concerns about running wasn’t a fear about being able to raise enough money, or a difference in raw political ambition, it was a more fundamental concern about losing out on income and work in order to campaign. As one worker (who herself had run for city council and won) put it, “When you are working 40 hours a week and working 40 hours on the campaign, it’s too much.”

Second, and partly as a result, the party and interest group leaders who help people launch political careers often pass over workers in favor of more familiar white-collar candidates. In a 2013 survey of the leaders of county-level political parties, most were quite open about their preference for white-collar candidates. More than 30% said workers are worse at campaigning, more than half said that workers were harder to recruit and two-thirds of local party leaders worried that workers would make bad fundraisers. One survey item even asked party leaders to compare two hypothetical candidates; when evaluating equally qualified workers and professionals, party leaders were consistently more likely to back the white-collar candidate. Qualified working-class Americans almost never appear on your ballot in part because powerful people are less likely to encourage or support them.

White-collar government isn’t caused by voters, or some deficiency on the part of workers or even the soaring costs associated with political campaigns. It is caused by the simple reality that campaigning requires taking time off work and getting help from political elites, and working-class Americans often can’t do either.

From a reform standpoint, that is actually good news. Making public office more accessible to a broad cross-section of the economy won’t require significantly changing our laws or electoral institutions. People who work in and around government just need to devote more attention and resources to qualified working-class candidates.

Political parties and activist organizations already know how to do exactly that. Just a generation ago, women made up around 2% of Congress-- today that number is closer to 20%. What changed? Party leaders and interest groups began devoting time and resources to female candidates, working to identify talented women, and helping them overcome the obstacles that prevented them from running.

When pro-worker organizations have attempted similar interventions targeting working-class candidates, the results have been extremely promising. In New Jersey, for instance, the state affiliate of the AFL-CIO runs a well-established “labor candidates school” that has trained working-class candidates for more than 700 state and local elections. Graduates of this pioneering program have won 75% of the elections in which they have run and have gone on to have long and effective careers in public office. Organizations that understand the challenges facing workers and that invest in overcoming them seem to have found the key to helping the working class break through America’s cash ceiling.

A half century ago, women were anomalies in congressional elections, and in American political institutions more generally. Today they aren’t. Ironworkers and restaurant servers don’t have to be either.

Alan Grayson, who devoted much of his political life protecting and trying to improve Social Security and Medicare, grew up in the Bronx, a stone's throw from Alexandria Ocasio's district. Years ago he told me how he had put himself through Harvard by cleaning the toilets at night his classmates used. This morning I asked him if he thought this whole thing is a genuine problem. Oh, he does. This is what he told me.

First, working-class leaders can be great leaders. Think of Lech Walesa, an electrician, who almost brought down the entire Communist system.

Second, the absence of the working class from elected office has a huge impact on public policy. That’s why mortgage interest is deductible and rent is not, for instance.

Third, the great majority of candidates in both parties are people who don’t have to show up for work each day, whether they are lawyers, businessmen, retired, or simply rich. It’s very difficult to campaign for a major office and work full-time at the same time. In some cases, it’s also difficult for an elected official to live on the official salary. For instance, when Bill Clinton was elected governor, his salary was $35,000 a year [insert inevitable Hillary-futures-trading snark here].

Finally, both parties do discriminate against working-class candidates, not so much on the basis of elitism, but primarily because working-class candidates can’t self-fund, which is a fundamental consideration on both sides. (Another unspoken consideration is that workers have much lower turnout in elections.)  Despite the fact that both parties raise more than a quarter of a billion dollars for House candidates alone each cycle, they still have the mindset of being money-takers, not money-givers. There is no infrastructure whatsoever to raise money for working-class candidates, the way that there is for women, minority and LGBT candidates. It doesn’t have to be that way; if the unions were to decide, for instance, that they would back only working-class candidates (the way that some women donors give only to women candidates), then that alone would make a huge difference.

Nice song, huh? Ready for another version?



Great, huh? Now are you ready for a Senate candidate with a working class background? When's the last time any of us saw that? It's been a while. As on the June 30 FEC reporting deadline, Kevin de León had raised $1,310,851. His opponent, Dianne Feinstein, wrote herself a check for $5 million-- and then raised another ten million, only $886,109 from the kind of small donors who have given to Kevin's campaign.

If there a too few men and women with working class backgrounds in the House, you can imagine the scarcity in the Senate. It's what drew Blue America so strongly to Jeff Merkley of Oregon. Today our working class hero is even closer to home, like I said, Kevin de León here in California. Earlier today, Kevin told us that "for a very long time, wealth and privilege were prerequisites for any U.S. Senate hopeful. And while I don't begrudge my opponent her background, I take a different perspective as the youngest child of a single immigrant mother with a third-grade education, a woman who worked her fingers to the bone in very wealthy enclaves near San Diego. I learned the value of hard work by watching my mother’s ethic. She didn’t have access to venture capital for a startup that would potentially change the world as we know it. But she changed the world in the sense that I was born from her, and I became the only person of color in 133 years to lead the California State Senate. And ever since, I have passed laws that lift up working people like my mother. At the end of the day, my politics are about opportunity. That’s what people want, and right now we have a system that’s rigged against the majority of Americans."

You're getting an idea why we're so enthusiastic about Kevin's campaign, why we endorsed him and why we're urging DWT readers to contribute to that campaign by clicking on the 2018 Senate thermometer just above. Before you watch the stunning video below, just read one more quick paragraph, from Kevin:

"I shouldn’t be critiqued for my situation, and no one should besmirch the senior senator from California for being one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, or for being a billionaire. It is what it is. But, just as my background has informed my priorities, California's senior senator's background has influenced hers. For a very long time, the incumbent senior senator from California has had an anti-immigrant record and used anti-immigrant rhetoric. And that has helped feed this anti-immigrant hysteria at a national level for a very long time-- voting for a wall back in 2006, before Donald Trump entered the scene. And that is something I can't help but criticize."

Are You Ready To See The Democratic Party Turn Its Back On The Working Class Entirely-- Without A Fight?

I can't believe what I'm seeing with my own eyes-- and it's playing out glacially-- but the Democrats and Republicans seem to be switching their essences again. Remember, from history books, when the Democrats were the bad guys defending slavery and the Republicans were the anti-slavery party? A 100 years later, the Republicans were the party of bigotry and racism and the Democrats were the aspirational party for people of color. But what I want to talk about-- think through really-- has more to do with class than race per se.

The a big giant chunk of the FDR coalition, basically shattered and buried by Bill Clinton and Obama, were working class voters. Unions were strong and they delivered elections to Democrats on every level. The Republicans were barely a serious party in the '30s and '40s and were busy being reborn during the '50s and '60s. Fortunately for them-- though not for the Democrats:

Pointed threats they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn

From the fools gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born

 Is busy dying

But, no, it wasn't alright, ma. The GOP gradually started reaching the white working class, while the corporate Democrats saw a "business-friendly" a better strategy, abandoning unions to the not so tender mercies of the Republicans, and paying less and less attention to workers and more attention to a new identity-oriented coalition they were stitching together of minorities, women, gays, wealthy people and suburbanites. Hillary's 2016 campaign was, in effect, the New Democratic Party. If it wasn't because the Kremlin fixed it, she lost Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Michigan because her outreach to the white working class was perfunctory and inauthentic. She seemed happy enough winning every Orange County district while losing traditionally Democratic white working class districts like ME-02, IA-01, WI-01, MI-11 and IL-17.

As I've mentioned before, when I was growing up, the Democrats used to be called the Santa Claus party-- because they gave things away, like Social Security, Medicare, food stamps-- while the Republicans were the Scrooge party. With Pelosi's lunk-headed announcement last month that one of her top 3 priorities when the Dems regain the House in January will be to reinstate the reactionary PAYGO, the 180 degree switch is now complete.

Just look at the midterm candidates the DCCC has recruited this cycle-- virtually NO WORKING CLASS CANDIDATES at all... instead all upper middle class corporate lawyers, business types and military-industrial complex goons. The few working class candidates who made it past the primaries often had to fight the DCCC every step of the way. The DC Establishment hates the working class and reacts to candidates who make living with their hands as if they were being invaded by aliens. It's their elite club and they do not want working class men and women in it. And it's not just the Republicans any longer. Pelosi's worth $16 million and there are so many millionaires in the Democratic caucus that it's no wonder they don't represent-- or even want to represent-- the interests of the working class anymore.

Did you read Ron Brownstein's report for CNN yesterday? He pointed out that this year Democrats' "opportunities in blue-collar and small-town districts appear to be stalled or even receding. Given Trump's continued strength with working-class whites, Democrats were targeting far fewer of these seats to begin with... If this pattern persists through Election Day, it would widen the trench between major metropolitan areas increasingly dominated by Democrats and less densely populated areas beyond them where Republicans still rule. "If you look back over 20 years, these alignments are very pronounced, as the Republican base has migrated from the country club to the country," says Tom Davis, a former Republican representative who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. "This is entirely consistent with a 20-year movement that Trump is putting an exclamation point on... [W]hile the blue-collar terrain remains rocky, Democratic opportunities seem to be expanding in white-collar seats."

As you might expect, Chris Hedges was far harsher in his American Anomie post at TruthDig! yesterday. "The belief," he wrote, "that if we work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes a lie. The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color, nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered some Americans-- especially those from the white working and middle class-- modest social and economic advancement. But the capture of political and economic power by the corporate elites, along with the redirecting of all institutions toward the further consolidation of their power and wealth, has broken the social bonds that held the American society together. This rupture has unleashed a widespread malaise... The reconfiguring of American society into an oligarchy and the collapse of our democratic institutions have left most of the population disempowered. The elites, predatory by nature, have discarded all restraint."

The political process, as the research by professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page underscores, no longer advances the interests of the average citizen. It has turned the consent of the governed into a cruel joke. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” This facade of democratic process eviscerates one of the primary social bonds in a democratic state and abolishes the vital shared belief that citizens have the power to govern themselves, that government exists to promote and protect their rights and interests.

The economic structures, like the political structures, have been reconfigured to mock the belief in a meritocracy and that hard work leads to a productive and valued role in society. American productivity, as the New York Times pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay has grown only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now, not $7.25. Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less than $12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times wrote, the average middle class family’s net worth is more than $40,000 below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is down 40 percent, and for Latino families the figure has dropped 46 percent.

That's the very first meme I ever used-- actually I created it-- when writing about Randy Bryce for the first time. I noted that he used that messaging again in a new e-mail to his supporters yesterday." They think I'm unfit," he wrote. "I'm a father and a son. I'm a veteran and a cancer survivor. I've spent my career building things with my own two hands. I'll never quit fighting for what working families need because I'm a working person myself.

But according to the head of Paul Ryan's super PAC, I'm "unfit" to serve.

Instead, they think Bryan Steil, a corporate attorney and former Capitol Hill aide who literally spent his career outsourcing jobs from Wisconsin while he was hand-groomed by career politicians, is more qualified.

In Congress, I'll work to protect Social Security, to make Medicare for All a reality, to bring back good jobs, to protect workers with strong unions, to stand with women and families with access to reproductive care, and to make our children's future brighter by reinvesting in public schools. I'll fight for working people because I am one-- and I don't know about you, but I think that makes me pretty darn fit to serve.

I see that Ryan's corporately-funded SuperPAC has spent $1.8 million intensely smearing Randy. The DCCC's response? The DCCC isn't spending on working class candidates. They haven't spent anything, let alone $1.8 million, countering Ryan's SuperPAC. I should note, though, that the DCCC has reserved $3 million in airtime to defend multimillionaire lottery winner Gil Cisneros, a Republican who conveniently claims he's now a "Democrat" and who was recruited by the DCCC because they love multimillionaires who live in beachfront mansions. Iron-workers who didn't graduate from college but who have struggled the way ordinary Americans struggle... not so much.

You'd think the DCCC would be supporting Ammar Campa-Najjar, now that his opponent, Drunken Hunter, has been indicted for dozens of serious crimes. But if you did, you'd be wrong. Even though the two are tied 46-46% in the polls, the DCCC is not supporting him. My contention is that it's because he's another working class kid they don't want in their exclusive club. But a friend at the DCCC told me that's less a factor than the virulent racism that still infects the DCCC going all the way back to Rahm Emanuel and Steve Israel days. Hard to know. But there is a pattern-- two in fact. (And, remember Bryce is half Mexican too.) Other working class kinds the DCCC is shunning include J.D. Scholten-- no, the DCCC does not want to rid Congress of cash-cow Steve King-- Jess King and James Thompson. Interestingly, there's some correlation between candidates who back Medicare-For-All-- oposed by the DCCC-- and working class candidates. We'll talk more about this as the election proceeds and as it becomes more apparent which candidates the DCCC spends money on and which they grind into the dust.

There's Working Class Solidarity-- And There's Also Betrayal

Working class candidates often point to their roots when they talk about why they can be trusted to represent the interests of working families. The best examples this cycle have been Randy Bryce (D-WI), Kaniela Ing (D-HI), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Jared Golden (D-ME), Tom Guild (D-OK) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Class has been integral to all of their campaigns-- both as  motivationally and in terms of goals. People in Queens and the Bronx are hearing her inspiring message which is bring hope to communities that have been largely ignored by an incumbent congressman who has nothing to do with the people he's supposed to be representing. Today Alexandria told me

"I was born to a working class family. At a very early age, I learned the injustice of a zip code determining your destiny. When I was four years old, my parents realized that the public school options in my area were severely lacking and we of course had no money for private schools. So my entire family-- my parents, my aunts, my uncles, my family in Puerto Rico-- chipped in to let my parents put a down payment on a small home 40 minutes north of the Bronx. This 40 minute drive shaped my world view at a very young age. I saw how just 40 minutes changed the opportunities I had versus what my cousins had in the Bronx. Those 40 minutes gave me the opportunity to go to college, get a job at Ted Kennedy's office, and have some economic opportunity. But in 2008, I also learned just how fragile economic opportunities are for working families like mine. At the same time the stock market crashed, my father passed away. I saw how even though my family had spent 20 years trying to build up some wealth, it could get wiped away in an instant because we didn't have a wealthy community or family to fall back on. We had no safety net. For the next few years, my mother had to go back to driving buses and cleaning and I started taking double shifts at night waitressing and bartending-- it was a fight to keep our home. We hear about an America where if you work hard and do everything right, you can make it, but the reality now is that unless you are born to the right family in the right zip code, the chances of making it with hard work are becoming slim to none. We need to change that."

But this isn't always the case. Paul Ryan wasn't exactly working class. His family was somewhat well-to do. His father was an attorney but at 16 years old Ryan found his 55 year old father dead in their home of a heart attack. From the time of his father's death until his 18th birthday, Ryan received Social Security survivors benefits, which were saved for his college education. In that period he worked at McDonald's operating a grill. He has spent his entire political career trying to pull up the ladder behind him that allowed him to prosper after his father's death. A devotee of Ayn Rand, Ryan doesn't believe in the kind of government help that allowed him to go to college. In that way, he differs fundamentally with Bryce, Ing, Tlaib, Golden, Guild and Ocasio-Cortez.

Below is a TV ad for Tom Guild. who has a primary a week from tomorrow and who has a very different approach from Paul Ryan's. He told me this morning that "As a small child our family survived mainly on government commodities, a precursor of the food stamp or SNAP program. My brother Robert and I would surely have starved and perished were it not for this godsend to our family that was existing well below the poverty level. Since this government program literally sustained our lives, I will fight for today’s poor children (and adults) and make sure that they are not nutritionally deprived, and don’t needlessly perish from this earth."



Over the weekend, Politico reported the GOP has given up-- at least for now-- on their goal of destroying Medicare. "Republicans on Capitol Hill," they reported, "are giving up on what might be their last best chance to overhaul Medicare, just as they’re losing their leading champion on the issue, House Speaker Paul Ryan. The quiet surrender on a subject that’s energized GOP fiscal hawks for the better part of a decade comes as new projections show Medicare’s trust fund in its worst shape since the recession, partly because of Republicans’ other chief obsession: their sweeping tax cuts."

That’s left conservatives unsure how to agitate for a politically unpopular Medicare overhaul-- one that President Donald Trump detests-- and raises new questions about who will take up the entitlement reform mantle as Ryan heads for the exits.

“It takes two houses of Congress and a president to want to do that,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), lamenting the party’s apathy over Medicare. “No matter who’s been in the House or who’s been speaker, we have not been able to get entitlement reform done.”

"Reform" might be lowering the age of Medicare to 55 or including treatment of eyes, ears and teeth, for example... extending it to all Americans is the goal for progressives. But when Republicans talk about "entitlement reform," it doesn't mean improving it; it means abolishing it, iultimately through privatization. That's what Blunt wants and what Ryan wants. The public doesn't.

[T]he GOP’s sweeping tax cuts will add $1.5 trillion to the deficit, slowing the flow of money into Medicare and putting the health care program on increasingly unstable financial ground, the report from Medicare’s trustees predicts. The decision to also repeal Obamacare’s deeply unpopular Medicare cost-containment panel, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, will put additional strain on Medicare’s finances, the trustees said. Medicare’s hospital trust fund is now projected to go broke by 2026, three years earlier than projected.

...The trustees' report, which was overseen by Cabinet officials, projected the GOP tax cuts would reduce the income taxes people pay on Social Security benefits, part of which are funneled toward Medicare. The tax law’s repeal of the Obamacare penalty for not having insurance will drive up the uninsured rate, increasing Medicare payments for uncompensated care, the report said.

Medicare’s chief actuary, Paul Spitalnic, said lower-than-expected tax returns explained the “vast majority” of this year’s funding shortfall. The trustees found that payroll and income taxes simply aren’t enough to cover Medicare’s large budget gap, partly as a result of the GOP’s tax law. The results, Spitalnic said, are “largely a revenue story.”

The report also delivered grim news for Social Security: For the first time since 1982, the program is expected to spend more than it raises in revenue and collects in interest.

...Republican leaders have shown little appetite for tackling Medicare since taking full control of Washington last year. Though Ryan himself said a Medicare overhaul would be a priority for 2018, Republican leaders have abandoned the idea ahead of a midterm election that could determine control of Congress.

Neither chamber has firm plans to pass a budget blueprint this year, and some conservatives now fear GOP leaders may skip it entirely, leaving a big question mark about the GOP’s fiscal agenda.

...During the Obama administration, House Republicans approved belt-tightening budgets that would transform Medicare into a so-called premium support model giving beneficiaries a set amount to spend either on traditional Medicare coverage or private insurance plans. Critics contend the plan, dubbed Medicare privatization, would leave enrollees with higher costs and worse coverage. Other Republicans have supported raising Medicare’s eligibility age.

Democrats, who in the past have eagerly campaigned against the GOP‘s Medicare plans, claim Republicans have shed their concerns about fiscal restraint in pursuit of tax cuts.

“When Republicans want to cut taxes but don’t want to contain health care spending, they are yanking Medicare three years closer to insolvency,” said Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee.

GOP leaders, though, insist they haven’t taken their eye off entitlements. They just need a bit more time at the drawing board.

“It’s still a huge thing,” House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) said. “The question is, how do we address this thing?”

Alan Grayson grew up in a tenement in the Bronx and worked his way through college by cleaning bathrooms. He gave up his Orlando congressional seat to run for the Senate. He's seeking to win back his House seat now, currently in the hands of a do-nothing conservative New Dem. While Grayson was in the House he did the opposite of Ryan, working hard to perfect and try to persuade his colleagues to expand Medicare and Social Security, cut or eliminate taxes on working people and retirees, raise the minimum wage, provide paid sick leave and vacations to everyone, stop foreign military intervention, protect our privacy, block corporate "free trade" giveaways and make public college free-- among other things. This is the TV ad he's running in Orlando right now:

Pride: "Mining Communities Are Being Bullied, Just Like We Are"

Last night a film critic friend invited me to see a new movie being released Friday, Pride. It's a dramatization of a true story set in Thatcherite England (1984), during an historic year long coal mining strike. The movie is spectacular and is a celebration of a bond between humans in the face of cold, ugly corporate power being enforced by right-wing government. The film is set as a piece the brings together politically conscious London gays and Welsh miners. There is plenty of prejudice and hatred woven throughout the plot but when a miner goes to a London gay dance club to thank the community for raising funds to feed their families-- which the Thatcherites are trying to starve into submission-- he says, "When you're in a battle with an enemy so much bigger, so much stronger than you, to find out you have a friend you never knew existed… well, that's the best feeling in the world." What do they have in common, these rough-hewn Welsh miners-- think Appalachia-- and a gay community just coming to grips with the AIDS epidemic? Both recognize a bond built from fighting oppression by the neo-fascists, their police, their media and their manufactured public opinion.

I called Roland when I left the theater to tell him about it. I couldn't. I choked up every time I trued explaining when I spent much of the movie crying. He looked it up online. "It's a comedic drama," he said. "It looks funny." He's right, there was some humor in it-- thank God-- but, at least for me, there was the pride of unity that always chokes me up when I see communal efforts to resist the power of the Establishment, the power of the cannibals. And for me, the whole film got tied up in my mind with a miners benefit I had helped organize a few years before this one. It was in the summer of 1978 and the scraggly punk rock community around San Francisco's Mabuhay Gardens came together to do a benefit concert for Kentucky miners striking because of shit working conditions and black lung disease. We made that our battle in a similar way that the London gays made the miners' struggle in one small Welsh village their own. We managed to raise over $3,000 and almost a dozen bands played-- the Nuns, the Dils, the Avengers, the Sleepers, Negative Trend, UXA, the Mutants, the Liars, Seizure, SST, Tuxedomoon… I may have left some bands out.

The battle will never end, not so long as there are still selfish, greedy sociopathic conservatives trying to enslave everyone else so they can get a bigger share of the pie. Above is a trailer from the film; here's a clip from the Avengers playing "The American In Me" at the Mabuhay miners benefit. Do yourself a favor; go see the movie.