Democratic 2020 hopefuls pay lip service to the left. Don't be fooled..$$$$$$$

[jodymarie aimee]

Democratic 2020 hopefuls pay lip service to the left. Don't be fooled
Bhaskar Sunkara THE GUARDIAN FULL ARTICLE

Likely candidates are begging for Wall Street’s support – and reminding us who really owns American democracy

Tue 15 Jan 2019 06.00 EST Last modified on Tue 15 Jan 2019 06.02 EST

Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are among those who have been making a very different pitch of late – on Wall Street. Photograph: Pool/Getty Images

It’s a framing that’s been everywhere over the past two years: the Resistance v Donald Trump. By some definitions that “resistance” even includes people like Mitt Romney and George W Bush. By almost all definitions it encompasses mainstream Democrats, such as the likely presidential hopefuls Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand.

In their rhetoric and policy advocacy, this trio has been steadily moving to the left to keep pace with a leftward-moving Democratic party. Booker, Harris, and Gillibrand know that voters demand action and are more supportive than ever of Medicare for All and universal child care.
Gillibrand, long considered a moderate, has even gone as far as to endorse abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and, along with Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders’ single-payer healthcare bill. Harris has also backed universal healthcare and free college tuition for most Americans.

But outward appearances aren’t everything. Booker, Harris, and Gillibrand have been making a very different pitch of late – on Wall Street. According to CNBC, all three potential candidates have met with financial executives lately, including Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray, Robert Wolf from 32 Advisors and the Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly.

Wall Street, after all, played an important role getting the senators where they are today. During his 2014 senate run, in which just 7% of his contributions came from small donors, Booker raised $2.2m from the securities and investment industry. Harris and Gillibrand weren’t far behind in 2018, and even the progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown has solicited donations from Gallogly and other powerful executives.

When CNBC’s story about Gillibrand’s courting of Wall Street came out, her team responded defensively, noting her support for financial regulation and promising that if she did run she would take “no corporate Pac money”. But what’s most telling isn’t that Gillibrand and others want Wall Street’s money, it’s that they want the blessings of financial CEOs. Even if she doesn’t take their contributions, she’s signaling that she’s just playing politics with populist rhetoric. That will allow capitalists to focus their attention on candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have shown a real willingness to abandon the traditional coziness of the Democratic party with the finance, insurance and real estate industries.


Gillibrand and others are behaving perfectly rationally. The last presidential election cost $6.6bn – advertising, staff, and conventions are expensive. But even more important than that, they know that while leftwing stances might help win Democratic primaries, the path of least resistance in the general election is capitulation to the big forces of capital that run this country. Those elites might allow some progressive tinkering on the margins, but nothing that challenges the inequities that keep them wealthy and their victims weak.

Big business is likely to bet heavily on the Democratic party in 2020, maybe even more so than it did in 2016. In normal circumstances, the Democratic party is the second-favorite party of capital; with an erratic Trump around, it is often the first.

The American ruling class has a nice hustle going with elections. We don’t have a labor-backed social-democratic party that could create barriers to avoid capture by monied interests. It’s telling that when asked about the former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper’s recent chats with Wall Street political financiers, a staff member told CNBC: “We meet with a wide range of donors with shared values across sectors.”

Plenty of Democratic leaders believe in the neoliberal growth model. Many have gotten personally wealthy off of it. Others think there is no alternative to allying with finance and then trying to create progressive social policy on the margins. But with sentiments like that, it doesn’t take fake news to convince working-class Americans that Democrats don’t really have their interests at heart.

Of course, the Democratic party isn’t a monolith. But the insurgency waged by newly elected representatives such as the democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna, and others is still in its infancy. At this stage, it isn’t going to scare capital away from the Democratic party, it’s going to make Wall Street invest more heavily to maintain its stake in it.

Men like Mark Gallogly know who their real enemy is: more than anyone else, the establishment is wary of Bernie Sanders. It seems likely that he will run for president, but he’s been dismissed as a 2020 frontrunner despite his high favorability rates, name recognition, small-donor fundraising ability, appeal to independent voters, and his team’s experience running a competitive national campaign. As 2019 goes on, that dismissal will morph into all-out war.

Wall Street isn’t afraid of corporate Democrats gaining power. It’s afraid of the Democrats who will take them on – and those, unfortunately, are few and far between.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

1. Like the "few and far between."

[LuvLoogie]

2. Progressive Democrats have moved on and beyond Bernie.

The legislative process matters. AOC is smart enough to know that, in the long run, it is better to work with established Democrats than join sideliners in undermining them.

[George II]

3. The author of this article (don't see a link to the source) has a weak knowledge and understanding..

..of campaign finance laws and what he says is fraught with inaccuracies.

Let's take Cory Booker, for example. I won't go all the way back to 2014, but here in 2018/2019, below are some numbers that are inconsistent with what the author uses to smear Booker. Could it be that he didn't use current numbers because they didn't confirm the premise that he was trying to attribute to Booker?

REAL numbers:

22% of his contributions come from small donors
4% of his contributions come from retired donors
4% of his contributions come from "not employed" donors
3% of his contributions come from "homemaker" donors

And there are other categories.

That's a far cry from only 7% that is being portrayed as being from other than the "securities and investment industry". I wonder if he realized that any contributions from maintenance and housekeeping departments of a "securities company" are lumped into that big bad category of "securities and investment industry". Same thing for tellers, bookkeepers, secretarial, and clerical workers.

What is GOOD about Booker's contributions is that the state from which the most contributions come is his home state, and more than half were from his state and his neighboring state (NY) - Newark is less than six miles from NYC.

I don't know why this author feels the need to skew and misrepresent the finances of candidates to discredit their "progressiveness". I wonder what he would say if he learned that one of the politicians he mentioned in this hit piece received only 1% of contributions from within it's own district, and only 23% from it's own state.

[jodymarie aimee]

4. sorry you skimmed reading it...

both are in 2nd line...

[George II]

5. I read it through. Not sure what the "both" are that you're referring. The author and publication?

[still_one]

7. Bhaskar Sunkara is a former vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and currently is

publisher of the far left journal "Jacobin".

Sunkara, is a Socialist, Marxist, and anti-capitalist.

This opinion piece is typical Jill Stein rhetoric

[George II]

8. And poorly versed in campaign finance laws.

[still_one]

9. Anything to rationalize his bias George, even if it is inaccurate

[George II]

6. By the way, I didn't even notice until now that this is in the Wisconsin Group? None...

...of the people mentioned in the article are from Wisconsin (the only one I'm not familiar with is Gallogly)