The Needle & the Bernie Done

The online Clinton cult and, more recently, its KHive variant hold as articles of faith various talking-points programmed into them by Hillary Clinton, her underlings and her big-platform supporters. This writer has dubbed them "the Clinton Cult Rules," and these, a substitute for independent research or judgment, are endlessly parroted, day after day for years now, across social media. One holds that progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is just a blowhard who has never accomplished anything, accompanied by reference to a sparse number of bills Sanders has sponsored in congress that have been passed into law, usually with a dismissive reference to "naming post-offices." The attack is often expanded to include other progressive pols. Another is that Sanders "steals" ideas and tries to take credit for them--also regularly expanded to other progressives.

In a Twitter discussion last Summer, this writer pointed out that Sanders was responsible for mainstreaming the idea of a $15 minimum wage indexed to inflation and making it a part of the Democratic party platform, and those were the responses thrown at it, two twitterers even trying to give Hillary Clinton credit for the idea. This led me to launch a new thread intended to briefly set the record straight on the subject. I've decided to adapt it, slightly expand it, here.

The Clintonite objections from which I was working:

It's an article of faith among the Clinton cult that Bernie Sanders "steals" ideas in general and "stole" ideas from Hillary Clinton in particular. This is premised on an utterly bizarre notion of intellectual property in public policy that, if put to right, alone discredits it. No one holds any such property, that anyone ever could is a silly idea and, in any event, anyone who wants to see a policy enacted is delighted to see other people adopt and push for it. But it's also false on its own terms.

Clinton fed this nonsense in her revisionist 2017 book, "What Happened," wherein she claimed Sanders took ideas from her, offering bigger, more costly, less, in her characterization, realistic "magic abs" versions of things she'd proposed first. The reality, of course, is that Clinton spent that entire campaign following Sanders around, proposing awful, watered-down-to-nothing versions of whatever he'd proposed first, then triangulating against his, characterizing them as unrealistic pie-in-the-sky, hers as more "doable." I documented this in some detail when reviewing Clinton's false claim, which had appeared in excerpts of the book she'd leaked to the press in advance of its release.

The indexed $15 minimum wage was just another example of this. The idea prominently emerged from the progressive activist base in 2012. Sanders began calling for it at least as far back as Dec. 2014. He made the proposal a central feature of his presidential campaign, right from his his first major event in May 2015.

"Let us be honest and acknowledge that millions of Americans are now working for totally inadequate wages. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage and must be raised. The minimum wage must become a living wage--which means raising it to $15 an hour over the next few years--which is exactly what Los Angeles recently did--and I applaud them for doing that. Our goal as a nation must be to ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty."

At her first campaign event in June 2015--with Sanders on the record for months supporting $15--Clinton offered, as a throwaway line, "raising the minimum wage is a family issue," but didn't suggest any figure or even concretely propose raising the wage.

On 22 July, 2015, Sanders introduced legislation in the Senate to enact an indexed $15 minimum wage by the year 2020.

Eight days later, following her usual practice of peddling Diminished Sanders, Clinton, endorsed a bill in congress that provided for a $12/hour wage. She still had made no proposal herself but was already triangulating against Sanders':

"Let's not just do it for the sake of having a higher number out there," she said. "But let's get behind a proposal that actually has a chance of succeeding."

It wasn't until November 2015--many months after Sanders had introduced the indexed $15 into the campaign and at least 11 months after he'd first proposed it--that Clinton offered a concrete minimum wage proposal: raising the wage to only $12.

Clinton spent the next several months pushing $12, arguing that, while localities could raise the min. wage higher if they wanted, a $15 federal min. wage was too high, and she was opposed to it.

Clinton offered friendly tweets to the Fight For 15 campaign. Leaked Dem emails later revealed the cynical calculation that went into this, Clinton trying to reap the political benefit of siding with F415 without actually endorsing its goal--the $15.

Clinton continued pushing $12 and triangulating against Sanders' $15 but Sanders was winning the argument. From Feb. 2016:

"But instead of embracing $15, Mrs. Clinton fights on for $12, saying that states could set their own, higher minimums. That is cold comfort. Experience has shown that without a robust federal minimum, state minimums also tend to be inadequate. Today, 21 states still do not have minimums higher than the federal level, and of the 29 that do, none have minimums high enough to cover local living expenses for an individual worker.

"Worse, Mrs. Clinton’s stance misses the big picture, which is that the risk in keeping the minimum too low is bigger than the risk of raising it too high. One reason a third of Americans today live in or near poverty is that many jobs in the United States do not pay enough to live on. This is due in part to the steady erosion in the minimum wage--even as labor productivity, corporate profits and executive compensation have gone up. A raise to $12 an hour in 2022, or a mere $24,000 a year for a full-time job, would only lock in that dynamic. Even a $15 minimum works out to only $31,000 a year."

Clinton was eventually battered down on the issue, then, under pressure in an April 2016 debate with Sanders, she completely reversed course; within a few sentences, she abandoned the view she'd advocated throughout the entire campaign.

"At a Democratic debate, [Clinton] was asked if she, as president, would sign a $15 minimum wage if congress passed it. 'Well, of course I would,' she insisted, and then offered a master-class in multi-mawed mendacity in which she suggested she’d always supported $15. 'That's what I will do as president, go as quickly as possible to get to 15… [I]f we have a Democratic congress, we will go to 15!"

That's the first time Clinton supported--or apparently supported--a $15 federal minimum wage.

And, of course, as soon as that debate wrapped, her campaign immediately began prevaricating on the issue.

When the Dems began writing their 2016 platform, Clinton's surrogates would support only vague language saying the party hoped to "raise and index the minimum wage," with only an implication of $15.

Sanders' surrogates introduced language making unambiguous the platform's support for the indexed $15. This drew wild applause from the assembled audience but Clinton's delegates voted it down.

Sanders' delegates carried on, taking the fight to the full platform committee, which--in an absolutely remarkable move--overruled Clinton, sided with Sanders and made $15 the official position of the Democratic party.

The effectiveness of Sanders' advocacy on the $15 min. wage can be seen in the congressional support for it. When, in July 2015, Sanders introduced legislation to accomplish it, it drew only 5 co-sponsors. MN Rep. Keith Ellison introduced the mirror legislation in the House at the time; it drew 56 co-sponsors.

In 2017, after Sanders' presidential campaign, Sanders and Patty Murray reintroduced his 2015 bill in the Senate. This time, it drew 31 co-sponsors--more than 2/3 of the Senate Dem caucus. In the House, VA Rep. Bobby Scott introduced the mirror legislation; support from it had risen from 56 co-sponsors to 171--88% of the House Dem caucus.

The most recent version of Sanders' "Raise the Wage Act" was introduced in 2021 and now has 37 Senate co-sponsors (74% of the Senate caucus); the House mirror, introduced by VA Rep. Bobby Scott, now has 202 (over 90% of the House caucus), and 14 states and many more localities have enacted legislation that has raised (or will raise) their min. wage to $15. Joe Biden won the presidency supporting the policy and has already enacted it for federal employees.

That's the story of how Bernie Sanders moved the needle and, despite Hillary Clinton's furious opposition and extended efforts to undercut him, dragged the Democrats into making support for the indexed $15 minimum wage the official position of the party.

It's also an illustration of why Clinton cult smears of Sanders as an unaccomplished do-nothing so badly miss the boat (and, in fact, miss the entire ocean).[1] While I was adapting my Twitter thread into this article, I wanted to include some polling data on this matter, which I was convinced would show public support for the policy growing alongside Sanders' advocacy of it, but if there was any polling on it during that 2016 Democratic primaries, I've been unable to find it.[2] The oldest poll I could find that even asked about it was a a Pew Research poll from August 2016, many months after Sanders had left the presidential race.[3] Up until mid-2015, in fact, pollsters were only asking about a $10.10 wage. That's how ahead-of-the-curve Sanders was. That's something Sanders does: he takes up forward-looking progressive policies when they're virtually unimaginable inside our conservative, donor-driven political system and, taking on the burden of the scorn of others who, when they're novel, dismiss them as loopy, champions them until they go mainstream. He'll deserve some recognition for it when those policies are eventually passed into law but before that, he's merely been leading the way,

--j.

---

[1] In 2016, Clinton and her campaign were smearing Sanders as having accomplished little, pointing to the fact that 2 of the 3 bills Sanders has written that had been passed into law up until then involved naming post-offices. This entirely ignored Sander's' extensive record of passing changes via amendments (and ignored the fact that, by that standard, Clinton herself had, during her time in the Senate, only had 3 bills become law, none of them of any consequence), but it's also an effort to exploit public ignorance of how congress works. Sanders is no slacker when it comes to legislation. Over his years in the House then the Senate, he's credited as the author of 1,035 pieces of legislation. As a practical matter though, the congressional leadership controls what bills are considered, hashed out and brought to a floor vote. Sanders has worked under multiple leadership regimes from both parties and the one thing all of those regimes had in common was opposition to the kind of progressive reform Sanders advocates.

[2] Back in Jan. 2016, Mitch Clark and I had assembled an article on polling regarding Sanders' major issues, showing most were quite popular, but we could find no polls up to then that had asked about $15; we had to rest the case, in that instance, on polls that asked about a smaller minimum wage hike.

[3] In it, 58% expressed support for $15. In a Marist poll released on 23 Feb., 2023, that's up to 64%.

Zombies, Dinosaurs & That Definition of Insanity: Clintonite-Right "Democratic Leadership" & Its Discontents

Last Summer--on Independence Day, no less--I began a Twitter thread devoted to a critique of the Clintonite-right "leadership" in the Democratic party and, more broadly, the baleful influence of its hegemony over same. In the months since, I've been irregularly returning to it, and it has become rather long and somewhat unwieldy, an ongoing commentary on the matter that intersperses observations on current events with digressions covering the last 3 decades of Clintonite-right activity. Cumulatively, it tells a sordid tale of corruption, conflicts of interest, serial self-foot-shooting incompetence and empty theatrics used to sell, to a progressive constituency desirous of reform, a profoundly conservative course. Several Twitterers have tried to run a thread capture on it but technical limitations stymie the effort. So, for what it's worth, I'm reproducing it here.

I've mostly done just that--reproduce it. It has all the limits of Twitter--written in both short bursts and shorthand that has "and"s turning into "&"s, "two"s to "2"s. It also sometimes relies on readers having some basic understanding of public affairs--that's the audience for which it was composed. Read as a single piece, there's some repetition--I re-cover some things in a "last week on Lost" way, for people who come across that part of the thread without having read the rest (a reader may, for example, get tired of my noting what the "Unbreakable 9" did). I've thrown in some editorial and explanatory notes in brackets [] along the way, added some links, merged some tweets in translation, corrected a few spelling and grammatical errors, probably missed some others, and I've added material here and there, both original and from other Twitter threads I've written--even for those who have been through the thread, there's some new stuff.


4 July, 2022

The era of the Clintonite right is long over but as is usually the case with such shifts, its zombie remnants still dominate the Dem party's elected officials and leadership--always the last to go. Still clinging to power, helping drag the U.S. to ruin.

For politicians, Clintonite rightism has always been a grift. Go pro-corporate, pro-finance Republican Lite (with occasional sprinklings of liberal views on "social issues" that don't affect those with power), in trade for lavish campaign contributions from the overclass.

The function of Clintonite right "Democrats" in the late-stage capitalist dystopia into which we're descending is keeping the state in service of the fortunes of capital and blunting, preventing, precluding, defeating any real, substantive reform that threatens same.

Bill Clinton was a key figure in convincing Democratic politicians to wholeheartedly embrace the corrupt bribery-and-donor-service system. Prior to his presidency, he led the Democratic Leadership Council, a corporate-funded group devoted to driving Dems to the right in order to attract the big bucks from entrenched interests. The DLC's foul offspring include corporate-backed conservative front-groups like Third Way and No Labels, the New Democrat Coalition, Problem Solvers Caucus and Blue Dog Coalition caucuses that make up a disturbingly large portion of the Democratic presence in congress and, of course, the hegemonic "Democratic leadership," both in the party apparatus and in government, for years now.

Clinton's major presidential priorities were all Republican--deregulation, "free trade," tough-on-crime-ism, welfare "reform," deficit-cutting austerity, warhawkishness in foreign affairs, facilitating wealth concentration. Capital was delighted. The dollars rolled in.

Bill's 1992 presidential victory was mythologized by the Clintonite right as having "saved" the Democratic party.

In reality, Clinton "won" in 1992 with 57% of voters voting against him. Having him at the top of the ticket and running as essentially a Republican brought on Democratic losses all over the U.S.. Clinton was reelected in 1996, but even with the tremendous advantages granted by incumbency, most voters still voted against him. Dems continued to lose ground every year of his presidency:

"When Clinton entered the White House, his party dominated the U.S. Senate, 57-43; the U.S. House, 258-176; the country’s governorships, 30-18, and a large majority of state legislatures. Today, Republicans control the Senate, 55-45; the House, 222-211; governorships, 30-18, and almost half of state legislatures."

Democrats ran Clintonite-right candidates in 2000 and 2004, losing both races, both with majorities voting against their candidates.

The 2008 Dem primaries saw Hillary Clinton, the Clintonite-right heir apparent, in combat with upstart Barack Obama. Clinton, using the playbook, was a whirlwind of triangulation, running to Obama's right & turning the race into the nastiest campaign America had seen in 20 years.

Obama broke with what had become SOP for Dem candidates and ran, instead, as progressive. He aggressively outflanked Clinton on the left, spoke boldly and eloquently for progressive values, of hope for the future, battered down Clinton's slanders and won the nomination.

Obama won the presidency, Dems riding his coattails to a massive sweep across the U.S.

Then, almost immediately, he began shifting to the Clintonite-right. And when he did, Dems again began losing ground at an alarming pace, which continued every year Obama was in office.

[The story of Obama's shift comes up again later in the thread]

The 2008 race should have been the belated political end of the Clintonite right. Voters, who had never been enthusiastic about it in the first place, had rejected it. America had moved--and was moving--left. People wanted--and increasingly needed--progressive reform.

Instead, Obama embraced the darkness, & 2016 saw the return of the Hillary Clinton, riding name-recognition through poorly-attended primaries to the nomination then losing to a protofascist reality-show joke, she & he finishing as the 2 most disliked candidates in polling history.

By the time Obama and then Hillary and her vanity campaign were through, Dems had lost the presidency and nearly a thousand seats across the U.S. and been reduced to their weakest state in a century--one of the weakest points in the party's existence.

At that point, Democrats had run Clintonite-right candidates in every presidential election for 24 years, except 2008, and only Obama's 2012 reelection campaign had drawn a (very small) majority of the vote (Obama 2012's margin over his Repub opponent was less than half what it had been when he'd run as progressive 4 years earlier).

[And--historical note--Bill Clinton himself was, in 1992, the 4th sequential presidential candidate from the right wing of the party, the only winner among his predecessors being Jimmy Carter in 1976, when, in the post-Watergate election, any Dem would have probably won. It's an indication of how far to the right the Dems have gone in the Clintonite era that Carter's policies would, today, be rejected out of hand by the dominant faction among the party's elected officials as "far-left."]

And even that didn't politically end the Clintonite right. The Trump regime drilled into Americans' heads the severe need to replace Trump and the press took over, convincing older voters that Joe Biden was the only one who could manage this.

In reality, Biden was another loser. Without the 8 months of hardship imposed by the covid pandemic--and Trump's persistent bungling of it--Trump probably would have beaten Biden. He nearly did anyway. And with Biden as the presidential candidate, Dems went back to losing seats.

In 2019, in remarks that were barely covered by the press, Biden told a gathering of his wealthy donors that if he was elected, "nothing would fundamentally change." As Americans drown in inflated groceries, sky-high gas prices, debt, medical bills and inadequate wages, this has been his guiding principle in office.

David Sirota just highlighted polling, which came and went without comment when it first appeared, showing that a large majority of Democrats are saying they want large-scale change:

This isn't new. During the 2020 Dem primaries, a CNN poll asked Dem if they preferred restoring the pre-Trump status quo or adopting "major changes." A huge majority preferred the latter.

A similar question sometimes appeared in exit-polls during that race. Even in conservative South Carolina, most Dems said that "the economic system in the United States needs a complete overhaul," but half who said so voted for "Nothing Will Fundamentally Change" Biden.

Decades of Dem inaction on securing abortion rights have just allowed Republicans to end abortion rights. In 2017, Nancy Pelosi said abortion "is kind of fading as an issue," and even complained that supporting abortion rights was hurting Dems.

In 2018, the entire Democratic leadership endorsed and financially supported anti-abortion conservative Blue Dog "Democrat" Dan Lipinski, then being challenged by a pro-choice progressive.

Lipinski won, faced another progressive primary challenge in 2020 and Pelosi and co. repeated this performance, Dem House Leader Steny Hoyer suggesting that those not backing Lipinski were helping Republicans.

In 2018, Pelosi's DCCC went to New Jersey's 2nd district and with a progressive Dem in the race for the vacant seat, recruited anti-abortion conservative Jeff Van Drew to defeat her. Van Drew won then was elected.

After less than a year in office, well...

In Texas in 2020, conservative anti-abortion congressman Henry Cuellar was challenged by progressive Jessica Cisneros. "We want this to be not only a victory," said Pelosi, campaigning for Cuellar, "but a resounding victory for Henry Cuellar."

Cuellar won and Cisneros returned for a rematch this year. Even after the Supreme Court's decision ending abortion rights was leaked to the press, the entire Dem leadership endorsed Cuellar, at least 18 members of congress donating to his campaign.

Only 2 days after the Supreme Court decision leaked, Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn went to Texas to campaign with Cuellar.

And so on. The story of the "leadership" recruiting and backing right-wing "Democrats" is a larger one than this thread aims to cover. The entire agenda Biden claimed as his own but about which he didn't seem to care was killed by 2 Senators who'd been recruited by the DSCC.

[As it evolved, however, the thread did eventually return to the story of the Dem "leadership" making war on progressive Dems.]

Add the loss of abortion rights to the growing, festering pile of problems in need of redress but that the current "Democratic leadership" isn't going to address (except to use them for fundraising).

Americans, many of whom are increasingly desperate for change, want no part of this. "Nothing Will Fundamentally Change" Biden and the "Democratic leadership" are leading their party to a major wipe-out in this year's congressional elections.


26 July, 2022

Continuing this thread, how out of touch are these "Democratic leaders"?

How outta touch ya' got?

With the U.S. Supreme Court taking a chainsaw to the liberal society and Repubs across the U.S. enthusiastically facilitating this by feeding the court a steady stream of civil liberties to hack up, Biden doesn't just oppose reforms to the court aimed at stopping this.

No, Biden has met this threat of a looming police state by throwing even more money into policing. Near the 2nd anniversary of George Floyd's murder, he encouraged state and local governments to spend money intended for covid relief on, instead, cops.

And now, while the court's chainsaw continues unimpeded and pressing domestic needs go unmet, Biden is pushing congress for billions more billions for police.

As detailed earlier, the Obama administration saw Dems suffering catastrophic losses across the U.S., capped off with the 2016 elections, in which Dems were reduced to their lowest level in a century. Pelosi's response to this? Nothin' to see here.

In this grim time for Dems, the one bright spot was a massive wave of enthusiastic, crowdfunded progressive candidates that, inspired by the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, appeared across the U.S.--the birth of  a major political realignment.

For Pelosi and the "Democratic leadership" though, it was back to business as usual, which included trying to decapitate this progressive upsurge and most of the reform agenda it supported.

Pelsoi's Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee [the DCCC] had long been closely aligned with the New Democrat Coalition, donor-serving conservative "Dems." In 2017, it moved to more closely align with the other major conservative "Dem" group, the Blue Dogs:

"Blue Dog and DCCC staffers now meet on a weekly basis, and leaders of the centrist coalition say the campaign arm is working hand in hand with them on recruitment."

In June 2018, Pelosi publicly announced that if Dems retook congress in that year's congressional elections, she would reinstitute PAYGO, an austerity rule requiring any new spending be immediately offset with budget cuts or tax hikes.

PAYGO would be a major obstacle to many of the progressive reforms on which Dems across the U.S. were then running, as was Pelosi's intent.

Pelosi was actively working against Medicare For All, a signature progressive issue. In May 2017--with polls showing most Americans support M4A--Pelosi asserted, "the comfort level [with M4A] with a broader base of the American people is not there yet."

In public, Pelosi pitched "public option" alternatives. Behind the scenes though, she circulated a memo urging Dems to focus on merely opposing the Repub healthcare plan and advising against advocating single payer or, indeed, any real healthcare reform.

"The Republican plan is extremely unpopular and Democrats have little to gain by shifting the spotlight to new Democratic proposals or fixes."

The memo urged only tinkering with the ACA [Obamacare], asserting that the public doesn't want to "repeal it or replace it with something radically different." To try to scare legislators away from Medicare For All, it included 2 pages of attacks on the policy, represented as "likely Republican attacks" on it.

Pelosi's DCCC, for which that memo was prepared, interferes in local primaries all over the U.S., recruiting conservative "Dems," trying to defeat not only M4A advocates but the surging crop of grassroots progressive candidates in general. It became what would have been a constant scandal in 2018 if any press outlets beyond the progressive press had shown any interest in it.

Earlier, I covered how the DCCC, fearing a progressive win in New Jersey's 2nd district, recruited Jeff Van Drew, an anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-death penalty state senator with a 100% rating by the NRA--the most conservative Dem official in the state.

In Texas' 7th District, the DCCC conducted an open smear-campaign against progressive Laura Moser, publicly releasing an oppo file on her and trying to push her out of the race in favor of a more conservative candidate.

In Colorado's 6th district, Steny Hoyer, the #2 Dem in the House, was caught on tape trying to push progressive Levi Tillemann out of the primary race against the more conservative Jason Crow, backed by the DCCC.

This was the story everywhere, the DCCC working to smear progressives, push them out of their races, deny them party resources, recruit more conservative candidates to defeat them. It was documented, in pieces and in general, by outlets like TNR...

The Intercept...

In These Times...

Progressive groups objected to this, for all the good it did.

In Arizona, Senate Dem leader Chuck Schumer's Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee [DSCC]--which operates on behalf of conservative "Democrats," just like the DCCC--recruited Kyrsten Sinema to run for the Senate.

The DSCC, which had backed Joe Manchin's election in West Virginia, backed his reelection in 2018.

Asked by the Austin-American Statesman about the DCCC's gangster tactics, Pelosi sounded like a Mafia don, asserting that she knew who could win general elections, & making it clear that progressives who win primaries could expect no help from her DCCC:

When Dems, riding an anti-Trump wave, wiped out Repubs in the 2018 midterms, Pelosi's reaction was arguably even more out-of-touch than in 2016; she decided the election results really meant voters wanted Dems to cooperate with Trump and the Republicans.

Pelosi has a very high opinion of herself. Back in 2017, she described herself: "I am a master legislator."

But Pelosi's only real talent--and the thing that has kept her in power--is aggressively prostituting the Dem caucus to every entrenched interest willing to cough up a bribe in return for favors. She's quite good at that. Not so good at anything else.

When, in the aftermath of the Dem wins in 2018, Pelosi was struggling to find the enough votes among Dems to become Speaker again, oligarchs who donate to the party tried to blackmail Dems into supporting her or face the withdrawal of their donations.

And then, there was the matter of Pelosi's highest-profile endorsement for the Speakership...

Like Trump, Pelosi continued to work against most progressive policies. Only weeks after Dems retook congress in 2018, she dispatched her top health policy aide Wendell Primus to assure health insurance executives not to worry about Medicare For All.

At that meeting, Primus "encourage[d] health policy groups to raise public concerns about 'Medicare for All'."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & the rest of the Squad had just been elected. Pelosi enthusiastically defends conservative "Dems" at every opportunity but with these progressive rising stars of the party, she chose, instead, to begin an ongoing public feud.

In March 2019, Pelosi's DCCC warned political strategists and vendors that, henceforth, if they worked for progressive candidates mounting challenges against incumbent Democrats, they'd be blacklisted.

Through all of this, Pelosi was infuriating progressives by pushing Donald Trump's major agenda items through the House. Trump's awful "emergency" border bill...

Trump's bloated military spending...

Trump's renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act...

Trump's rules-free coronavirus relief bill from March 2020, which Trump--with no rules having been imposed--proceeded to turn into yet another giveaway to Trump family-members, cronies, the wealthy, his own donors...

And so on. All possible because of Pelosi and the Dem leadership, while they made war on progressive reforms and reformers.

23 Oct., 2022

To continue this thread (hey, why not?), the failure of Build Back Better--the agenda Biden claimed as his own but in which he didn't seem particularly interested--is a great illustration of the Keystone Cops-level incompetence of the Dems' zombie Clintonite-right "leadership."

Build Back Better (BBB) began as a multi-trillion-dollar proposal of moderate and many fairly progressive reforms, encompassing the agenda Biden claimed to support.

In June 2021, a group of senators proposed separating from it a series of modest infrastructure measures, a package then larded up with corporate welfare provisions to draw Republican votes. Meeting with them, Biden said "We have a deal!"

Progressives warned (and warned & warned & warned) that breaking up the bill in this way was probably aimed at killing the larger package of reforms. Put on a show of trying to get support for both, then say the votes just weren't there, pass infrastructure and let the rest die.

But Biden and the leadership made it clear they would only accept simultaneous passage of both bills. They would leverage one another. That was the deal:

"The most powerful Democrat in the US House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, made clear they would not pass one bill without the other.

"'There ain't going to be a bipartisan bill without a reconciliation bill,' Mrs Pelosi said.

"Mr Biden echoed that sentiment in later remarks from the East Room of the White House: 'If this is the only thing that comes to me, I'm not signing it. It's in tandem.'"

Without that deal in place, the infrastructure package wouldn't have passed the Senate. With it, it did but then everything fell apart. BBB was a $6 trillion package. Progressives wanted even more but settled for that, then compromised further, cutting that down to $3.5 trillion.

In the Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema--two senators who had been recruited and backed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to run for their seats--became intransigent on the larger BBB proposal. Manchin's demands became a moving target.

This proved quite profitable to both senators, who were, throughout this period they were working to kill BBB, raking in a fortune from entrenched interests opposed to the progressive elements of BBB.

For killing BBB, "Manchin raised over $1.57 million in the fourth quarter of 2021, the highest total he’s ever raised in a year-end report, according to FEC records."

Sinema's opposition to BBB similarly set her coffers a'bulging.

In the House, there emerged the "Unbreakable 9," corporate-funded "Democratic" congressmen whose donors--and thus they--were opposed to BBB. They flat-out said they wouldn't even consider BBB until the deal for simultaneous passage was scrapped and the infrastructure bill was passed and signed into law.

And--the usual punchline--many of these congressmen working to kill the Democratic agenda were, in fact, put in place because Pelosi, the DCCC and the Dem leadership interfered in local elections on their behalf (to defeat progressive candidates).

Biden was AWOL through most of this, though still on record supporting both bills. Pelosi stood behind the 2 bills for 3 months, but that was all she could stand. She folded before even Biden had, broke the agreement and pushed for the infrastructure bill.

Infrastructure was passed, Biden folded and signed it into law and BBB--along with Dems' hopes for victory in the midterms and the Biden presidency--died instantly.

Now, Dems in the midterms have nothing to show the voters for 2 years of rule except a bill so inadequate and having so little impact on anyone's life that 8 months after its passage, only 24% of the public were even aware it had ever passed.

And it gets even better! With these clowns, it always does, right?

Upthread, I wrote about how Pelosi and the leadership backed right-wing "Democrat" Henry Cuellar in Texas: that was after Cuellar had been one of the "Unbreakable 9" that helped kill BBB.

Oregon congressclown Kurt Schrader, funded by healthcare industry interests, helped kill Biden's plan to allow Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices, a policy supported by 81% of the public and 97% of Democrats.

Schrader, likewise, was one of the "Unbreakable 9" that killed Biden's BBB. But when he faced a primary challenge from a more progressive candidate, he was endorsed for reelection by--wait for it--Joe Biden himself.

"[W]hen it has mattered most, Kurt has been there for me," said Biden, unintentionally giving the world a glimpse of exactly how much BBB mattered to him. Pelosi's House Majority PAC backed Schrader as well.

Thankfully, he lost anyway.


15 and 16 Nov., 2022

The midterms produced much more modest Repub wins than the massive "red wave" that looked, earlier in the year, to be building but as of this writing, it seems likely Dems will lose the House. Norman Solomon points out the obvious re:Joe Biden:

"No amount of post-election puffery about Joe Biden can change a key political reality: His approval ratings are far below the public's general positivity toward the Democratic Party. Overall, Democrats who won in the midterm elections did so despite Biden, not because of him. He's a drag on the party, a boon to Republicans, and--if he runs again--he'd be a weak candidate against the GOP nominee in the 2024 presidential campaign.

"While the electorate is evenly split between the two parties, there's no such close division about Biden. NBC News reported that its exit poll on Tuesday 'found that two-thirds of voters (68 percent) do not want Biden to run for president again in 2024.'

"This is nothing new. Biden's low public-approval ratings have been longstanding. A chart showing chronic disapproval now has him a dozen points underwater, with 53 percent disapproving and only 41 percent approving. The gap between Biden's approval ratings and those of his party underscores what a massive drag he is on Democratic electoral prospects."

"Biden's approval rating currently sits at 41.7 percent, while 53.1 percent of Americans disapprove of his presidency, according to FiveThirtyEight's aggregate of polls."

Not even Democrats want Biden to run for a 2nd term. See the Appendix below for details.

So, of course, Pelosi--ever in touch with the pulse of the nation and her party--says Biden should certainly run again, calling him a "great president for our country... He has just done so many things that are so great."

And then, there's Biden himself:

"I think everybody wants me to run... Our intention is to run again. That’s been our intention regardless of what the outcome of this election was."

It's like satire:

"Top-ranking Democrats [including Joe Biden and Senate Dem leader Chuck Schumer] are coalescing around House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and asking her to consider remaining in party leadership in the next Congress."

"Rep. James Clyburn" of South Carolina--for some time now the 3rd-ranking Dem in the House--says, at age 82, he plans to remain in the "Democratic leadership."

In reality, there is no "Rep. Jim Clyburn." The thing that uses that title is nothing more than a wholly-owned-and-operated mechanical subsidiary of the corporate interests who created and sustain it--as devoid of agency as a vending machine.

In the last cycle, Clyburn Inc got just under 65% of its funding from PACs. Nearly all of that--83.95%--came from business PACs. That's who owns Clyburn Inc.

Clyburn Inc. gets another 30.4% of its funding from large individual donors.

And how much grassroots support does "Rep. Jim Clyburn" get? His total take from ordinary people giving small donations: only 4.68%.

18 Nov., 2022

Mercifully, Pelosi has opted not to seek a leadership role in the next congress. The Clintonite right have greeted the news by slobbering all over her, pretending as if her appalling record was somehow admirable (while not actually addressing it).

Up until 2012, it was entirely legal for congresscritters to trade stocks based on non-public information to which they were privy in their official capacity--insider trading. They didn't even have to disclose it. CBS News' 60 MINUTES exposed the practice.

Nancy Pelosi, whose husband had made a fortune on this sort of trading while Pelosi was privy to such non-public information, was a featured attraction in that report, in which she, in her usual rambling, barely coherent way, lied and denied wrongdoing.

Congress passed a reform after that report but 10 years later, large numbers of congresscritters were found to be violating it, sometimes hundreds of times, with virtual impunity (violations only incur a small fine).

This led to public outrage and a further call for reform. But when asked if members of congress should be banned from trading stock, Pelosi said no. "We are a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that."

Over a period of 15 years, Pelosi's husband was making so much money on these shady stock trades that he was sometimes outperforming the S&P 500. The Wall Street Bets Reddit even launched a fund called "The Insider Portfolio," which mimics Pelosi's trades.

Pelosi  was eventually shamed into making a show of reversing herself and throwing her support behind what was represented as a reform to ban lawmakers from these shady activities but was, in fact, written with loopholes that rendered it meaningless.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal undertook a wider investigation of stock ownership by officials across federal agencies and found a swamp:

But even the legislation that was supposed to make a show of addressing some of this but didn't was then allowed to die in Pelosi's House. No loss, really, but the charade is appalling. And very Pelosi.


19-21 Nov., 2022

Pelosi is all about empty performativeness. With the praise of Pelosi continuing, Peter Daou--once vile arch-Clintonite, now reformed--offers a more realistic assessment.

"Pelosi," writes Daou, "is a master of performative opposition and political theatrics" who "engages in cynical and meaningless theatrics, clapping sideways, wearing shades, tearing speeches, and donning Kente cloth. These empty gestures are cheered by her adoring supporters."

With Pelosi stepping down, Hakeem Jeffries, the worthless Clintonite who chairs the House Dem caucus and who has been groomed to take over for Pelosi, has officially thrown his hat into the ring.

In effect, Jeffries, who is notorious for his attacks on the "hard left" (progressives), launched his bid to be Pelosi's replacement back in June 2021, when he teamed with other garbage Clintonites to launch Team Blue PAC.

Team Blue PAC was established as yet another illicit money-mill aimed at protecting incumbent conservative Dems in safe blue districts, who already have every mountainous advantage of incumbency, from primary challenges by progressive Dems.

Founding Team Blue PAC with Jeffries was Terri Sewell, a member of the conservative New Democrat caucus, and Josh Gottheimer, a member of all 3 major conservative "Dem" caucuses and the ringleader of the "Unbreakable 9," that worked to derail Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda.

Jeffries, Sewell and Gottheimer initially tried to sell Team Blue PAC as an effort to protect a Dem congressional majority, which was bizarre, as its work was explicitly directed toward protecting conservative incumbents in safely Democratic districts.

Jeffries, who now seeks to defeat primary challenges to incumbents, was once a corporate lawyer who got his own start in politics by repeatedly primarying a long-time state assemblyman, then got into congress by primarying a 3-decade incumbent. So... everyone's favorite "h" word.

As Sludge reported in Feb. 2022, Team Blue PAC has "relied almost exclusively on corporate PACs and lobbyists for its funding"--money to defeat progressive challengers from entrenched interests whose prerogatives are threatened by progressive reforms.

Jeffries himself is a Wall Street front, with most of his campaign coffers filled by large donors and business PACs and only 3.38% coming from grassroots small-donor fundraising.

Common with Clintonites, Jeffries performs as a progressive, even joining the Progressive Caucus, but while Jeffries is always ready to fight against progressives, he's M.I.A. when it comes to fighting for progressive priorities:

"While the CPC haggled with conservatives over health care, paid leave, drug pricing regulation--Biden's agenda and Pelosi's personal priorities--Jeffries, a CPC member, was publicly silent. While the CBC took on an outsized role in electioneering and crafting the police reform bill, Jeffries’s contribution was marginal, campaigning for New York's Eliot Engel, a white moderate, and Missouri's Lacy Clay, a Black moderate, both of whom fell to Black progressives in primaries, and staying away from those negotiations. When all New York City House Democrats sent a letter to Pelosi urging her to protect all $80 billion for public housing in the BBB, Jeffries was the only member not to sign that missive, especially surprising given that New York Dems are known to act as a bloc."

In common with other Clintonite right pols, Jeffries calls himself a "progressive" while trying to redefine the word to cover the right wing of the Dem party but not the actual progressive wing, to which he's openly hostile & that he tries to marginalize.

Fossilized Clintonite "Democratic leader" Steny Hoyer has mercifully announced his retirement from leadership. On his way out, he endorsed Jeffries to be his successor.

Though Maryland's 5th District is safely Democratic, it's "represented," instead by "moderate" Hoyer, who is mostly owned by business PACs. The cut of Hoyer's campaign contributions from small grassroots donors in the last cycle: 0.68%.

The Hill article above reports that "Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), who heads the Congressional Black Caucus, said Thursday that the group was likely to vote unanimously for [Hakeem] Jeffries [for Dem leader]... over any potential challenger, including Hoyer."

Beatty is another corrupt shitbag who, while serving as Democratic leader in the Ohio state House, worked to defeat regulation of the predatory payday lenders preying on her constituents while her husband was working as a lobbyist for one.

Beatty and her husband (recently deceased) made themselves quite wealthy by screwing over their constituents via various gentrification schemes in the middle of an affordable housing shortage.

Last year, Beatty teamed with Josh Gottheimer, ringleader of the "Unbreakable 9" that helped kill Biden's Build Back Better agenda, to form a "victory fund" aimed at raising campaign contributions from private equity donors opposed to the reforms.

As with so many Clintonite "Democrats," Beatty's political career wouldn't even exist but for her aggressive prostituting of her office to entrenched interests. Nearly 70% of her campaign contributions come from PACs, over 80% of them business PACs.

On the take from, primarily, Wall Street and the insurance industry, Beatty gets almost no support from ordinary Americans; small donations made up only 3.09% of her campaign cash in the last cycle.

And yes, she also "represents" a safe, overwhelmingly Democratic district.

The Congressional Black Caucus PAC, meanwhile, has become just another tool of the Clintonites' war on progressives. CBC PAC endorses even white Clintonite-right "Democrats" over black progressives.


28 Nov., 2022

Clyburn Inc. has just invoked nothing less than the Bible to explain why he should remain in "leadership."


2-3 Dec., 2022

Clintonite-right "Dems" believe Clyburn's endorsement in 2020 won Joe Biden the South Carolina primary and thus the party nomination for president. Biden just pushed the DNC to recommend making SC the 1st state to vote in the 2024 Democratic primaries.

There have long been rumblings in the party about abandoning Iowa as the first Dem contest based on it being unrepresentative of the party's larger electorate. The New York Times reports that Biden's' plan "emphasized racial and geographic diversity."

But SC is one of the states least representative of the Dem party as a whole. When 538 broke this down by some of the demographic data, SC finishes 46th out of 50--behind both Iowa (at 42nd) and way behind New Hampshire (at 34th).

The real reason for the current push is simply to game the system. South Carolina is an elderly, profoundly conservative state. Putting it first in line in the Democratic contest advantages Clintonite-right candidates like Biden and disadvantages progressive contenders.

The pitch to make South Carolina the 1st Dem primary state is happening while SC native Jaime Harrison--a poster-boy for revolving-door corruption--is DNC chairman. He worked for Jim Clyburn--Clyburn Inc.--then transitioned directly into a long stint as a corporate lobbyist.

As a longtime lobbyist at Podesta Group, Harrison worked for a long line of corporate criminals, polluters, companies seeking to avoid public regulation. Sludge dredges up some of the dirty details:

"During the Obama administration and while Harrison was lobbying for them, Wells Fargo was hit with a steady stream of penalties for various forms of financial misconduct, such as having to pay $175 million in July 2012 to settle charges that it engaged in a pattern of discrimination against African-American and Hispanic borrowers in its mortgage lending.

"In November 2012, Harrison’s client BP America paid a $525 million settlement for securities fraud related to its Deepwater Horizon oil rig spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. The company had understated the flow rate to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Bank of America also faced a slew of penalties from the Obama administration, such as in August 2009 when it paid $33 million to settle SEC charges regarding more than $5 billion in bonuses that it paid to executives of the failing Merrill Lynch when it acquired the investment firm.

"Another of his clients, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which represents coal companies like Murray Energy and Peabody Energy, fought against President Obama’s Clean Power plan and other climate-related regulations during the period in which Harrison was registered to lobby for them."

While still working as a corporate lobbyist, Harrison became chairman of the South Carolina Democratic party, an entity that barely qualifies for the name. Over the course of his failed tenure, Repubs continued to make gains in the state, increasing their Senate majority by 8.

After a stunningly unsuccessful Senate run in 2020, Harrison then continued his upward plunge, being handpicked by Joe Biden to run the DNC, where he has continued shady practices such as putting corporate lobbyists, consultants and executives in key party positions.

Barack Obama had put in place various progressive anti-corruption measures at the DNC in the wake of his becoming the party standard-bearer in 2008. In the 2016 cycle though, the DNC began dismantling them, moving backwards, dirtying up the process for the dirty Hillary Clinton.

In July 2015, the DNC quietely lifted Obama's ban on donations from PACs and lobbyists in party-convention-related fundraising and accounts the org shares with presidential campaigns.

The immediate sequel to this: the DNC established a money-laundering operation for Hillary Clinton in that year's presidential primaries, raising money on the premise that it would go to state parties and downballot races, then, diverting it, instead, back for Clinton's use.

Using the state parties as fronts, this scheme was used to allow donors to give many times the legal amount to both Clinton and the DNC, while the state parties--the purported beneficiaries--were left with almost nothing.

When the press uncovered this, it was barely reported but what was reported led the DNC to attempt to cover up details of the operation.

In 2017, it was finally revealed that Clinton had, in 2015, secretly purchased operational control of the DNC. When the org was violating its charter by working to tilt the primaries in Clinton's favor and against her progressive opponent Bernie Sanders, she was calling the shots.

By Feb. 2016, it was reported that the DNC had stealthily eliminated the rest of Obama's restrictions on money from PACs and lobbyists.

In 2017, the progressive-backed Keith Ellison was on track to win the chairmanship of the DNC. The Clintonites, furious at this development, recruited the more compliant and conservative Tom Perez and launched a smear-campaign against Ellison.

It worked. Perez defeated Ellison and became chairman.

"Before this gets turned into another thing where the establishment Democrats posture as the reasonable adults victimized by the assaults of those left-wing baddies, let’s just be very clear about what happened here. It was the establishment wing that decided to recruit and then stand up a candidate in order to fight an internal battle against the left faction of the party. It was the establishment wing that then dumped massive piles of opposition research on one of their own party members. And it was the establishment wing that did all of this in the shadow of Trump, sowing disunity in order to contest a position whose leadership they insist does not really matter.

"The establishment wing has made it very clear that they will do anything and everything to hold down the left faction, even as they rather hilariously ask the left faction to look above their differences and unify in these trying times. They do not have any intent of ceding anything--even small things they claim are mostly irrelevant--to the left wing."

During his campaign for chairman, Perez had refused to say he'd support a ban on corporate lobbyists holding leadership roles in the party. As chair, Perez then carried out a very loud purge of progressives from the DNC, replacing them with Clintonites and corporate lobbyists.

Perez repeatedly said his DNC wouldn't intervene in Dem primaries--a sore-point after the DNC did just that in 2016. But when profoundly corrupt Dem New York governor Andrew Cuomo faced a spirited challenge from progressive Cynthia Nixon, Perez jumped into the race, endorsing Cuomo.

Cuomo went on to win, then was driven from office in scandal shortly after.

In what appears to have been some kind of bizarre publicity stunt, the DNC briefly voted, in July, 2018, to ban donations from fossil fuel companies. Less than 2 months later, Tom Perez insisted on reversing that ban and resuming those donations.

A year later, Sludge reported that the DNC was awash in fossil fuel company donations:

"Since January, the DNC has taken at least $60,750 from owners and executives of fossil fuel companies. The DNC’s fossil fuel industry donors include George Krumme, owner of Krumme Oil Company, who contributed $20,000, and Stephen Hightower, president and CEO of Hightower Petroleum Company, who contributed $35,500. Other donors include Duke Energy President CJ Triplette, Crystal Flash Energy executive Thomas Fehsenfeld, and Southern Petroleum Resources President David Simpkins."

Perez beat back efforts to reimpose the Obama-era ban on DNC use of corporate PAC money. He refused entreaties by activists--and nearly all of the Dem presidential candidates--to sanction a presidential debate on climate change (a decision backed by the corporate/Clintonite ghouls he'd put on the Resolutions Committee). In Jan. 2020, Perez rolled out his picks for that year's DNC convention committees, charged with overseeing the event. He stacked them "with a uniquely egregious assortment of corporate lobbyists and vocal opponents to progressive policies."

It showed. When the DNC was assembling its party platform, it, among other things, eliminated language that called for banning subsidies of fossil fuel companies, voted down a resolution calling for marijuana legalization and--in the midst of the covid pandemic--rejected party support for Medicare For All.

After his miserable tenure as DNC chair, Perez then went through the revolving door and went to work for a corporate law firm, while Joe Biden put corporate lobbyist Jaime Harrison in charge of the DNC.


9 Dec., 2022

In the wake of a Dem Senate victory in Georgia, cementing a Dem majority in the U.S. Senate, Arizona "Democratic" Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has just announced she's leaving the Democratic party and becoming an independent.

Sinema began her political career as a radical--a socialist affiliated with the Green party. She denounced capitalism, backed Ralph Nader's presidential campaign and stood--ultimately, unsuccessfully--as a Green candidate for the Arizona House in 2002.

When that failed, Sinema reinvented herself as a liberal Democrat and in that incarnation won a seat in the AZ House, the AZ Senate, then the U.S. House--a race in which Repubs denounced her as an "anti-American hippie" who "participated in pagan rituals."

Sinema then tacked hard to the right, reinventing herself still again as a very conservative "Democrat." She joined the New Democrat Coalition, the Problem Solvers Caucus and the Blue Dog Coalition--the trifecta.

As a congresswoman, Sinema racked up one of the most conservative voting records of anyone in the Democratic caucus, becoming, along the way, one of only 5 "Democrats" to be endorsed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

This was music to the ears of Senate Dem leader Chuck Schumer, who personally recruited Sinema to run for U.S. Senate from Arizona.

Sinema ran for Senate in 2018, refused to debate her progressive Dem primary opponent and with a massive war-chest sent her way by the Dem Establishment, won. In her 1st congress during Trump's presidency, she voted with Trump 62.6% of the time.

Once Biden became president, Sinema became one of the key senators who killed the progressive elements of the agenda Biden claimed as his own.

"Sinema, Manchin Curb Biden's Agenda"...

"Senator Kyrsten Sinema Privately Blew Up Biden's Nominee Needed To Enact Regulatory Agenda"...

"Scoop: Sinema Throws Cold Water On Build Back Better Revival"...

"Kyrsten Sinema's Combustible Thumb"...

"Sinema's Opposition To Raising the Corporate Tax Rate Leaves White House Scrambling To Pay For Biden's Agenda"...

And on into infinity. Opposing the progressive elements of Biden's agenda have proven quite lucrative for Sinema, who, while working to kill them, has raked in a corrupt fortune from entrenched interests opposed to them.

"Sinema Rakes In Pharma and Finance Cash Amid Reconciliation Negotiations"...

"Sinema Raking In Cash From MLMs. They Want To Kill Her Party's Labor Bill"...

"Sinema Took Wall Street Money While Killing Tax On Investors"...

Even the Republicans have been funding her in this.

These shenanigans have made Sinema toxic to a Dem electorate. Earlier this year, the Arizona Democratic party voted to censure her--their own sitting senator.

Only 8% of Arizona Dems view Sinema favorably; she has no future in the Democratic party.

Sinema's history suggests she would just move on to the next grift--make official what is already de facto and join the Republicans. Her problem: the AZ GOP has. itself, gone full MAGA, and would probably never accept a queer girl.

So the former socialist Green party girl who has spent years opportunistically grift-drifting across the political spectrum and whom the Dems spent millions to make a senator, is now, after less than a single term, an "independent."

The plentiful Dem howls of "betrayal" that have greeted Sinema's switch are grossly misplaced. Sinema was already firmly ensconced in the Republican wing of the Democratic party; that's why the "Dem leadership" backed her and indulges and defers to her.

And Howie Klein is right: The "Dem leadership" will either just find another worthless conservative to support in place of Sinema or cut some deal wherein, in exchange for her continuing to caucus with the Dems, they agree not to support a Dem opponent looking to unseat her.

27 Dec., 2022

Politico revealed that Sinema and fellow right-wing "Democratic" congresswomen Stephanie Murphy and Kathleen Rice "bought matching diamond-adorned thorn-shaped necklaces" to celebrate their purported roles as thorns in the side of the Dem leadership.

The article is a good example of how much of politics--and journalism--in late-stage capitalism is black-is-white, up-is-down theater. It treats the outgoing Murphy and Rice as heroic, plainspoken rebels, bashing progressives and bucking leadership's efforts to impose conformity.

The reality: both Murphy and Rice were handpicked by the DCCC, the official organ of the Dem House leadership they make a show of thorning in the side, and were elected with its backing, just as was Sinema with the DSCC. Rice in 2014 and Murphy in 2016.

Both Rice & Murphy were in the New Democrat Coalition; Murphy was also a Blue Dog & a Problem Solver. Like most of that pedigree, they were, as congresswomen, basically just fronts for business interests.

Over 55% of Rice's campaign funds came from PACs, and over 90% of that was from business PACs.

Over 77% of Murphy's funding came from PACs, over 93% of them business PACs.

Nancy Pelosi, in her feud with the progressive Dems, made an ugly public show of passing over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a seat on the House Energy and Commerce committee, giving it to Rice instead.

Rice then became one of 3 "Democrats" on that committee that joined with Republicans in voting to kill the effort to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. Had AOC been given the seat, the measure would have passed.

Murphy helped kill the Build Back Better package, demanding that the deal for simultaneous passage of it with infrastructure be broken.

"Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., told NPR's Ailsa Chang on Thursday that she's called for an immediate vote on the Senate-passed infrastructure bill.

"'The investment into our infrastructure is so critically important--it needs to happen now,' she said. 'And I am open to having a conversation about the reconciliation bill and what the contents of that will be. But it's really wrong to tie a bill that has been completed and passed in a bipartisan way out of the Senate with a bill that has just top-line numbers and no details.'"

Now appallingly celebrated by Politico as "diamond-studded thorns," neither Rice nor Murphy will be returning in the next congress. Neither will be missed, except by the Republicans and some in the corporate press.


4 Jan., 2023

An absolutely awful article by Jill Lawrence asserting that "overall, the trend lines are clear: Moderate Democrats are killing it, and the stronger they grow, the better the outlook for the party."

The stable bloc of Clintonite-right "Democrats" in congress come from safely blue districts. They're far more conservative than their constituents but hold office because of the huge money advantage given them by prostituting that office to the donor class.

Once they've established themselves, the benefits of incumbency accrue to them, making them even more difficult to remove.

The other Clintonite-right "Dem" are far more transient. They win in blue-wave years, when any Dem would have won the same seats they do, then, after causing endless damage while in office, lose in non-blue-wave years. Their performance in 2020, with Biden atop the ticket:

In the just-concluded 2022 cycle, all 6 Dem incumbents defeated in the general elections were members of the conservative caucuses:

That's how Clintonite-right "Democrats" are, as Lawrence put it, "killing it." While Lawrence echoes Nancy Pelosi in calling them the "majority makers," they were just the major contributor to killing Dems' House majority--the reason Republicans are now running the body.

And, of course, Lawrence sees the disastrous "new" leadership decisions by the Dem caucus, which is only going to perpetuate this, as worthy of great cheer.

"Pelosi's successor as the leader of House Democrats, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, has made clear he gets it. He named Rep. Suzan DelBene of Washington, a former tech executive and former chair of the House’s moderate New Democrat Coalition, to lead the DCCC going into the 2024 campaign. Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger will look out for the interests of 'frontliners' in swing districts like her own in a newly created Democratic leadership position called 'battleground leadership representative.' And Rep. Pete Aguilar, a California centrist known for working across the aisle with Republicans, will move up to the No. 3 position of caucus chair."

14 Jan., 2023

While governor of New York, profoundly corrupt Clintonite Andrew Cuomo backed a slate of right-wing "Democrats" for the state legislature with the idea that they would team with Repubs to block progressive legislation. The scheme worked for a long time.

Now, Cuomo's Clintonite successor Kathy Hochul is trying a new such scheme, appointing a conservative judge to the state supreme court. If confirmed, it would give conservatives a majority that would allow them to kill any progressive legislation in the state.

And here's why this ended up in this thread: new "Democratic leader" Hakeem Jeffries just endorsed Hochul's scheme.


31 Jan., 2023

Perry Bacon Jr. offers a good--but flawed--article on "the problem with the black Democratic leadership class"--that it tends to be "overly wedded" to the Clintonite right, thus too hostile to progressive policies that would benefit black Americans.

Bacon says that some of this is ideological but writes, "I don’t think ideology is the chief dynamic at play" in this. Rather, he argues, black pols suck up to centers of power in pursuit of "incremental" change:

"What's really going on is a divide on tactics and strategy. More centrist Black politicians tend to think that the best way to make advances in policy, particularly on issues that disproportionately affect Black people, is by working incrementally through traditional power structures. So they maintain strong ties with businesses, the police and in particular the center-left bloc that dominates the Democratic Party. This political approach puts these Black leaders in conflict with the left wing of the Democratic Party, which is more antagonistic to those power centers."

What's missing here is what is so often missing in all of these analyses: simple corruption. Black Clintonite-right "Democratic" pols are up to their neck in it just as deeply as their white Clintonite-right counterparts.

Clintonite-right pols oppose progressive policies because they prostitute their offices to a donor class that pays them to oppose those policies. Talk of "incrementalism" is nonsense used to sell to a public in need of reform a "politics" that exists solely to block that reform.

"Black leaders should stop bashing progressives," writes Bacon, "and instead join them...  [They should] spend less time trying to be beloved by the political establishment and more time trying to push that establishment to make meaningful change."

But corrupt politicians aren't going to be swayed by appeals to the public good. Jim Clyburn's career wouldn't even exist without his prostituting his office to the entrenched interests who finance his campaigns. He doesn't care about the public good.

The solution to that isn't appeals to the better angels of pols who are bereft of that heavenly proportion; it's to get rid of the corrupt pols and--if such a thing is even possible--institute reforms that prevent any recurrence of their hegemony over our politics & government.

Bacon credits Jim Clyburn "in part" with Joe Biden's decision to elevate Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, but KBJ wasn't who Clyburn wanted to fill that vacancy. Clyburn lobbied hard, instead, for J. Michelle Childs.

Childs' horrendous record on, among other things, labor and criminal justice issues more closely resembled that of the reactionary majority already in place on the court and working to gut civil society.

Fortunately, Biden uncharacteristically rejected Clyburn's entreaties, but this is who Clyburn wanted to inflict on America.


2 Feb., 2023

The priority of the "new" House Republican leadership proved to be this bit of trolling:

"Resolved... that Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America."

There are lots of "whereas" clauses railing against "the horrors" of various Bolshevist dictatorships, but, of course, Republicans call every Dem policy proposal "socialism," and their resolution was intended to troll the Dem caucus, which includes democratic socialists.

Maxine Waters was charged with opposition to the resolution, ensuring little actual "debate" happened. None of the democratic socialists actually in congress spoke on the matter.

Those "Dems" in the conservative New Democrat Coalition--96 members--preemptively announced they'd be voting for the Republican resolution:

This meant that, rather than refusing to play this game, most Dems--109--joined every Republican in voting for the resolution.

The "yeas" included new "Dem leader" Hakeem Jeffries, assistant Dem leader Jim Clyburn, new Dem whip Katherine Clark, new DCCC chief Suzan DelBene, new caucus chair Pete Aguilar, new caucus vice-chair Ted Lieu and Abigail Spanberger, "Battleground Leadership Representative" (a new post charged with looking out for Dems in swing districts)--the entire "Democratic leadership."

Beforehand, Hakeem Jeffries--who, himself, regularly tars progressives as "socialists" as a means of trying to marginalize them--declared, out of one side of his mouth, that "the goal of this phony, fake & fraudulent resolution" was to "undermine an agenda that is designed to lift up the health, safety & well-being of the American people."

And then he voted it.


3 Feb., 2023

Part "what a world we live in" exasperation and part genuine curiosity, this, from yesterday, is sentiment one encounters fairly regularly. It drew lots of replies, including a lot of unhelpful ones that seemed as if they belonged in this thread.

Whenever the subject is raised, Clintonites reflexively reach for "racism," sometimes "sexism" as the explanation, but that's the least helpful, maybe most dishonest explanation imaginable (and, for the Clintonites, entirely self-serving).

As covered upthread, the 2008 Dem primaries between Hillary Clinton and Obama saw Clinton pull out all the stops, she "a whirlwind of triangulation, running to Obama's right & turning the race into the nastiest campaign America had seen in 20 years."

Obama ran as progressive, aggressively outflanking Clinton on the left. Speaking "boldly and eloquently for progressive values, of hope for the future," he "battered down Clinton's slanders and won the nomination."

Obama went on to a huge win in the general, drawing the highest cut of the popular vote of any Dem in 44 years. Dem candidates around the U.S. rode his coattails to a huge victory that included, among other things, a near-supermajority in the U.S. Senate.

It wasn't just a big win; it was a reversal of decades of ever-rightward politics and seemed like the beginning of a major political realignment. Change--increasingly desperately needed change--was finally going to happen.

Then, almost immediately, Obama "began shifting to the Clintonite-right."

Only days after his election, Obama began naming officials for his upcoming administration, all of them conservative, nary a progressive in sight:

Obama had won at a time when people were sick to death of his predecessor, George Bush Jr. He'd been through a brutal primary against Clinton, then a hard-fought general against John McCain.

Then, within weeks, Obama had appointed, as his key foreign policy team, Hillary Clinton, Bush's Sec. of Defense (and Iran-contra criminal) Robert Gates & James Jones, John McCain's best friend of over 30 years.

For those following all of this, it was as if he hadn't won at all.

Eight days after the election when Obama held his first news conference with some of his new picks, Tom Engelhardt described it as "a political zombie movie"--all "been there, done that":

"You could scan that gathering and not see a genuine rogue thinker in sight; no off-the-reservation figures who might represent a breath of fresh air and fresh thinking..."

It was later revealed that Wall Street had essentially chosen Obama's cabinet.

"One month before the presidential election of 2008, the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama campaign a list of its preferred candidates for cabinet positions in an Obama administration. This list corresponds almost exactly to the eventual composition of Barack Obama’s cabinet."

Consider reactionary "pastor" Rick Warren, who compared abortion rights to the Holocaust and same-sex marriage to incest and pedophilia and spent the 2008 election cycle crusading for California's noxious Prop. 8, which stripped away such marriage rights for gay couples.

Obama invited Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration--that's who he chose to be one of the first voices Americans would hear when he was sworn in.

It was all a sign of things--everything--to come from Obama. Obama refused to prosecute the Wall Street criminals who had, the year prior, crashed the U.S. economy.

Obama tried to make healthcare his signature. Before running for president, he'd advocated single-payer, which, even though he didn't run on this in the 2008 cycle, gave supporters hope. All dashed, of course.

During the 2008 campaign, Hillary Clinton was pushing the individual mandate. Obama ran hard to her left in opposition to it. Then, once in office, he reversed himself and supported it.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama supported the creation of a "public option"--a public health insurance program that would compete with private insurance. Once in office, he threw that away in a backroom deal with lobbyists.

In another backroom deal, this one with Big Pharma, Obama "agreed to oppose any congressional efforts to use the government's leverage to bargain for lower drug prices or import drugs from Canada."

The Affordable Care Act--Obamacare--was an industry-friendly law written by Liz Fowler, a former executive of health insurance giant WellPoint.

Obama then hired Fowler to run the implementation of the law.

And, of course, those who created the law went on to lucrative careers as healthcare lobbyists:

"More than 30 former administration officials, lawmakers and congressional staffers who worked on the healthcare law have set up shop on K Street since 2010."

While Americans' needs continued to go unmet, the Obama regime just made things worse, with more War On Terror[tm], more tax-cuts for the rich, more "free trade," more fossil fuels, toothless financial regulation, trying to engineer massive cuts to Social Security, etc.

"Obama the Conservative" does a good, compact job of matching Obama's progressive rhetoric against the reality of his conservative presidency.

The results of this were covered upthread--Dems voted into office with such enthusiasm began losing ground with every cycle, a thousand seats across the U.S. and finally, the presidency itself, reducing the party to one of the weakest points in its history.

Trump appeared in 2015, a sewer of racism, xenophobia and conspiracism but at the same time also running to Hillary Clinton's left on a wide range of issues, trying to appeal to progressive values shared by most Americans.

Politically astute progressives were never fooled by Trump--they were calling him out all along--but  those progressive values Trump was trying to exploit--more on that here--are very broadly held by Americans of all political persuasions.

How much of a role these efforts by Trump played in his victory remains a subject of debate. But something that isn't in dispute is the massive scale of the exodus of former Obama voters to Trump in 2016. The American National Election Study estimated that 8.4 million Obama voters voted Trump in 2016. The UVA Center for Politics estimates 9.2 million.

This means former Obama voters made up a staggering 13.3% to 14.6% of Trump’s total voters.

A lot went into Trump's ascension to the presidency, but without the support of a massive portion of the Obama coalition, Trump would have lost and badly. Characterizing those who voted for the 1st black president, often twice, as "racists" seems a fairly dubious enterprise.

The "racism" explanation does, however, free Clintonites from ever having to seriously address the fact that a president who ran things exactly as they would prefer was succeeded by a reality-show clown.

Clinton 2016 wasn't the aspirational, progressive "Yes, We Can" Obama the electorate had loved in 2008; she was the "No, We Can't" candidate who peddled diminished expectations via defeatist rhetoric.

Clinton wanted to be seen as Obama 2.0, but she was the living--or, more to the point, living-dead--face of a tired Clintonite-right politics voters thought they'd rejected 8 years earlier, something of which they had grown quite tired of getting from Obama.

Not because Obama was black or Clinton was a woman but because they both sucked, and offered voters nothing that would improve their lives, just more of the status quo that was wearing them down.


5 Feb., 2023

Yeah, the Democrats just voted to make uber-conservative South Carolina the first primary in the 2024 presidential race.


A Tale of Two News Stories - The first...

"'I have heard from no one within the DNC or other power brokers within the Democratic Party any reservation about Joe Biden,' one of the DNC members said."

...and the second:

58% of Dems "support the idea of nominating someone other than Biden... Just 31% said they would support Biden... Sixty-two percent of Americans say they would be 'dissatisfied' or 'angry' if Biden were reelected."

The same poll found that 62% of Americans think Biden has accomplished little or nothing. For an America that badly needs reform, the half-assed, less-than-half measures of the Clintonite-right that only get attaboys from party loyalists aren't cutting it.


9 Feb., 2023

In 2018, at the age of 85, "Diane" Dinosaur Feinstein sought what felt like her 923rd term as senator from California.

Feinstein wasn't so much a dinosaur because of her age but rather because of her conservative Clintonite politics--someone who probably never should have held that office in the first place.

"For progressives, the bottom line on Feinstein is that she prostitutes her office to Big Money, opposes single-payer healthcare, is wrong on "free trade," supports the death penalty, is a war-hawk who, among other things, supported Bush's Iraq misadveture, supports the USA PATRIOT Act, has an absolutely horrendous record on civil liberties, is a fierce and long-time defender of warrantless surveillance and has repeatedly voted to expand it, voted to gut Glass Steagall, voted for the Bush tax-cuts (from which she--one of the wealthiest members of the Senate--derived a huge windfall), is wrong on the drug war and on into infinity--a great example, actually, of a Democrat 'with dated, damaging values threatening to democracy and human rights.' California is one of the most liberal states in the Union; it can do much better than this."

There were good progressive alternatives in that race but they were drowned out. The state party backed Kevin de León, a less conservative but still problematic candidate, while the national party Establishment rallied around the Dinosaur, who went on to win.

Shortly thereafter, it began to leak out that Dinosaur Feinstein was in serious cognitive decline and that her staff, which wasn't elected to anything, has been running her senatorship.

Feinstien reportedly has trouble following conversations or remembering things she was just told. Nancy Pelosi, of course, put on a show of angrily dismissing the whole issue.

"Pelosi said it was 'unconscionable that, just weeks after losing her beloved husband of more than four decades and after decades of outstanding leadership to our City and State, she is being subjected to these ridiculous attacks that are beneath the dignity in which she has led and the esteem in which she is held.'"

Feinstein, who, if she lives to see the end of her current term, will be 92, has already filed the paperwork for another reelection run in 2024.

Feinstein says she'll announce her intentions by the Spring, but other candidates are already entering the field. Progressive Katie Porter has announced a run for the seat. Progressive Barbara Lee has suggested she may run. The appalling Adam Schiff has thrown his hat into the ring.

Pelosi offered a preemptive endorsement of the Dinosaur--"If Senator Feinstein decides to seek re-election, she has my whole-hearted support"--and a conditional endorsement (if the Dinosaur doesn't run again) of Schiff, the absolute worst conservative Blue Dog/New Dem so far running for the seat in one of the most Democratic states in the U.S..


11 Feb., 2023

Garbage Clintonite congressclown Sean Patrick Maloney was the latest in a long line of absolutely atrocious DCCC chiefs. After NY redistricted, he abandoned the 18th district, which included nearly all of the area he'd been representing for years, and decided to run in the 17th,

Maloney saw this as a golden opportunity to get rid of popular progressive Mondaire Jones, who represented the 17th. Maloney bigfooted Jones out of the district & ultimately out of congress. Then Maloney lost the 17th--a district Biden carried by 10 points--to Repub Mike Lawler.

Maloney pissed off the locals (who liked Jones), ran hard to the right of progressive primary challenger Alessandra Biaggi (thus rubbing in that urinal injustice), snubbed grassroots party activists and drained crucial party resources (after promising not to do so) to try to save himself.

Maloney, a New Democrat, was a failure as a congressman, a failure as head of the DCCC--Dems lost control of the House--and now, kicked out of office, there's a real danger that he may actually have to find a real job and work for a living.

Nancy Pelosi, horrified by this prospect, has stepped in and is lobbying Biden to appoint Maloney the new Labor Secretary, a job for which Maloney, a corporate "Democrat" long in the pay of anti-labor industries, has absolutely no qualifications.

Back in Sept. 2022, the DNC's Resolutions Committee blocked consideration of a ban, put forward by progressive Dem hands, on "dark money" in Dem primaries. The cycle's primaries had seen millions in unregulated, unaccountable dollars flood into those races, usually targeting progressive candidates.

Now, the same DNC panel once again blocked consideration of this ban.

"Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden, have repeatedly railed against the scourge of dark money, decried its corrupting influence, and pledged to rein it in--only to balk at pressure for substantive action."

No mystery in that:

"'Dark Money' Helped Pave Joe Biden's Path To the White House"

"The party's platform, adopted in 2020, states that 'we will bring an end to "dark money" by requiring full disclosure of contributors to any group that advocates for or against candidates.'"

...except...
"'Dark Money' Topped $1 Billion in 2020, Largely Boosting Democrats"

Jaime Harrison, the corporate lobbyist Biden put in charge of the DNC, isn't terribly interested in getting rid of one of the major weapons Clintonite-right "Democrats" use against progressive Dem challengers in primaries:

"Yet as the DNC leadership, headed by Chair Jaime Harrison, refuses to act on its rhetoric--and as congressional Republicans block broader legislative efforts to curtail dark money--Democratic incumbents continue to benefit from untraceable donations, which are frequently used to undercut progressive challengers.

"Last year, the newly formed dark money group Opportunity for All Action Fund spent around $600,000 to bolster Reps. Donald Payne Jr. (D-N.J.), Dina Titus (D-Nev.), and Danny Davis (D–Ill.).

"All three went on to defeat their progressive primary opponents and win reelection. That pattern played out across the country, though some candidates--including Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), who was aggressively targeted by AIPAC's super PAC--were able to overcome torrents of opposition spending and prevail in November."

That's the thread--as it now stands, and as I'll probably leave it.

--j.


APPENDIX
PRESIDENT WILE E. COYOTE, BY THE NUMBERS

Last Summer, one of the dimmer Twitter Clintonites wrote,

"And the people who kept telling us [Joe Biden] had no chance are now telling us he needs to step aside. Sigh."

My initial response to this became an ongoing thread cataloging some rather pertinent polling on this. Since Joe Biden seems, at present, determined to launch a reelection bid in 2024 (though this writer is still skeptical of the prospect that he will), I reproduce it here:

12 July, 2022 - The people saying Biden needs to step aside include the overwhelming majority of Democrats; only 26% of Democrats say they want their party to renominate Biden in 2024.

Huge majorities of Dems in every age group don't want their party to renominate Biden, except in the 65+ bracket, where a plurality agrees. Huge majorities at every educational level, a plurality of black voters and a majority of every other racial group don't want him back.

26 July, 2022 - Another poll, same conclusion:

"A new CNN poll finds 75% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters want the party to nominate someone other than President Joe Biden in the 2024 election..."

CNN's poll offers a breakdown on why Dems don't want Biden to run again:

--24% say they want someone else because they don't think Biden can win in 2024.
--32% (the plurality) said they didn't want Biden reelected.
--25% said they prefer Biden as the 2024 nominee.

15 Nov., 2022 - And so on...

Exit-polls on the 2022 midterm elections showed that 67% of voters--of all voters--don't want Biden to run in 2024.

1 Dec., 2022 - An Economist/YouGov poll of adults found that 56% didn't want Biden to run again, compared to 22% who said they did. This poll featued a sky-high-enough-to-be-very-questionable 22% saying they're "not sure."

A slight majority of black and Hispanic Americans don't want Biden to run again, while solid majorities of every other demographic group oppose his seeking reelection. 39% of Dems say he should run again with a very unlikely 29% saying they're not sure.

10 Dec., 2022 - A CNBC poll found that a whopping 70% of adult Americans don't want Biden to run again; only 19% said he should. Those who said Biden shouldn't run again include 57% of Democrats and 66% of independents (no breakdown on Dem-leaning indies).

14 Dec., 2022 - A CNN poll asked registered Dems and Dem-leaning indies who they thought the party should nominate in 2024; 40% chose Biden, while 59% said it should be someone else.

5 Feb., 2023 - 58% of Dems and Dem-leaners "support the idea of nominating someone other than Biden... Just 31% said they would support Biden... 62% of Americans say they would be 'dissatisfied' or 'angry' if Biden were reelected."

In the same poll, 62% say Biden has achieved little or nothing during his administration. Respondents' views of individual areas of policy yield equally dismal results.

7 Feb., 2023 - An Associated Press/NORC poll finds that 62% of Democrats don't want Biden to run for reelection in 2024 vs. only 37% who do. Overall, 78% of Americans don't want Biden to run again.

The poll understates how little Dems want Biden to run again, as those numbers segregate Dems from Dem-leaning independents. 88% of indies don't want Biden to run again.