Big Money’s Conquest of Democratic Party By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

[imagine2015]

"The lust for loot, now defines the Democratic establishment"

Big Money’s Conquest of Democratic Party
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
June 8, 2016

Return with us now to the saga of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the soul of the Democratic Party. First, a quick recap: Rep. Wasserman Schultz, D-Florida, chair of the Democratic National Committee, also has been an advocate for the payday loan industry. The website Think Progress even described her as the “top Democratic ally” of “predatory payday lenders.” You know — the bottom-feeding bloodsuckers of the working poor. Yes, them.

Low-income workers living from paycheck to paycheck, especially women and minorities, are the payday lenders’ prime targets — easy pickings because they’re often desperate. Twelve million Americans reportedly borrow nearly $50 billion a year through payday loans, at rates that can soar above 300 percent, sometimes even beyond 500 percent.

Yet when the CFPB was drawing up new rules to make it harder for payday predators to feast on the poor, Rep. Wasserman Schultz co-sponsored a bill to delay those new rules by two years. How, you ask, could the head of the party’s national committee embrace such an appalling exploitation of working people?

Just follow the money. Last year, the payday loan industry spent $3.5 million lobbying; and as we wrote two weeks ago, in Wasserman Schultz’s home state, since 2009, payday lenders have bought protection from Democrats and Republicans alike by contributing $2.5 million or so to candidates from both parties, including her. That’s how “Representative” Wasserman Schultz, among others, wound up representing the predators instead of the poor.

She had become a symbol of the failure of Democratic elites to understand that there is an uprising in the land. Millions of Americans are rebelling against the leadership of both parties. They are fed up with inside-the-Beltway politicians who pay only lip service to the deep needs of everyday people and the country; fed up with incumbents who ask for their votes, are given them in good faith, and then return to Washington to do the bidding of the donor class and its lobbyists.

Democratic insiders like Wasserman Schultz, however, continued to whistle past the graveyard, believing that the well-funded and well-connected Clinton machine — and general fear of a Trump regime — were enough to carry them to victory in November, despite the grass-roots disgust with a party that reeks of rot from the top.

Once the champions of people who came home from work with hands dirty from toil and sweat, too many establishment Democrats went over to the dark side, taking up the cause of the well-manicured executives (think: Goldman Sachs) who write the checks and the mercenaries who deliver them (for a substantial cut, of course).

The lust for loot, which now defines the Democratic establishment, became pronounced in the Bill Clinton years, when the Clinton-friendly Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) abandoned its liberal roots and embraced “market-based solutions” that led to deregulation, tax breaks, and subsidies for the 1 percent. Seeking to fill coffers emptied by the loss of support from a declining labor movement, Democrats rushed into the arms of big business and crony capitalists.

The insurgency of popular discontent that has upended politics this year will continue no matter the results in November. For much too long now it’s been clear that money doesn’t just rule democracy, it is democracy.

Until we prove it isn’t.

Read the complete article at:

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/06/08/big-moneys-conquest-of-democratic-party/

[merrily]

1. Thank you for that. Moyers is a national treasure, IMO.

People who don't spend time on politics still don't know about the Democratic Leadership Council. However, most of us political postersknow by now where and what the Party is. I think we need to decide what to do next.

[bbgrunt]

2. thanks. Moyers always tells the hard truths.

[Doctor_J]

3. indeed. the party I've been a member of since jfk was in office is officially dead

sold out. the worst part is that in selling their collective soul, they have chased voters away in droves

[rhett o rick]

4. They want us to start a third party or capitulate to their authoritarianism.

We need to stay and fight for out Party. Throw the bastards out.