Muzzling the African American Agenda With Black Help

From BlackCommentator.com Associate Editor Bruce A. Dixon

The sellout of progressive politics has been a total disgrace for the Democratic Party. Not only is it morally wrong and politically cheap, but it doesn’t even work.”
~ Rev. Al Sharpton

“We’re gonna rebuild America’s cities and we’re gonna do it with America’s steel .... Medicare for all, money pulled out of the Pentagon budget to pay for schools and other domestic programs, and total nuclear disarmament ... This war was wrong! This war was fraudulent! We must expose this administration!”
~ Rep. Dennis Kucinich

These are the voices of the Democratic Party’s base, the voices that the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is sworn and determined to smother in a sea of corporate dollars. They are those voices that brought down the house at the recent Take Back America conference, in Washington, organized by the Campaign for America’s Future. These are the messages that rocked the house of labor at AFSCME’s Democratic presidential candidate forum in Des Moines, Iowa, last month and have energized the party’s core constituencies at gatherings across the nation. Words like these, and the struggles they evoke, are the reasons that blacks and progressives remain Democrats.

The DLC’s mission is to erase the last vestiges of social democracy from the Democratic Party, so that the corporate consensus will never again be challenged in the United States. Acting as a Republican Trojan Horse in the bowels of the Democratic machinery, the DLC claims the “real” party lives somewhere off to the right, where George Bush dwells, and that minorities, unionists, environmentalists, feminists, men and women of peace — virtually every branch of the party except corporatists — must be purged or muzzled.

The Take Back America agenda, which would have seemed mild not so long ago, is too radical for the DLC:

• investment in sustainable economic growth

• leaders who protect the environment

• enforcement of civil rights for all

• the right to join a union to be a civil right

• women to get equal pay for equal work

• everyone to be paid a living wage

• help for American families and children

• universal health care and retirement security

• to revive our cities and end poverty

• privacy and reproductive choice protected

• an Apollo project for energy independence

• America’s young people to have a future

• government to be on your side

• American to be a force for peace and freedom in the world

Rev. Jesse Jackson, NAACP Chairman

Julian Bond, AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee and New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine endorsed the conference — but they are marginal figures, according to the DLC. Ascendant since the mid-eighties, the once “disgruntled,” “rump faction” of endangered white southern Democrats — as Robert Dreyfuss describes the early DLC in an excellent 2001 article — dole out millions of dollars from Republican corporations to buy the party out from under its core constituents. In a now infamous May 15 memo titled, “The Real Soul of the Democratic Party,” DLC founders, Al From and Bruce Reed, shamelessly steal the people’s very language to advance the corporate cause:

But the great myth of the current cycle is the misguided notion that the hopes and dreams of activists represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. Real Democrats are real people, not activist elites. The mission of the Democratic Party, as Bill Clinton pledged in

1992, is to provide “real answers to the real problems of real people.” Real Democrats who champion the mainstream values, national pride, and economic aspirations of middle-class and working people are the real soul of the Democratic Party, not activists and interest groups with narrow agendas.

Republicans have nothing on the DLC when it comes to slinging code words. In truth, this “rump faction” has no soul. It’s just a big, white corporate pocket. The only masses that count for the DLC are massed dead presidents, stacked high. The From-Reed crowd operates on a cash for favors basis, only. When a corporate deal is brokered for hungry Democrats, the DLC considers the agreement binding, on pain of later impoverishment.

Dreyfuss laid out the “New Democratic Network” fund-raising process in his American Prospect piece, “How the DLC Does It.”

NDN’s brochures sound like investment prospectuses. “NDN acts as a political venture capital fund to create a new generation of elected officials,” says the PAC. “NDN provides the political intelligence you need to make well-informed decisions on how to spend your political capital. Just like an investment advisor, NDN exhaustively vets candidates and endorses only those who meet our narrowly defined criteria ...”

To ensure that liberals don’t slip through the cracks, NDN requires each politician who seeks entree to its largesse and contacts to fill out a questionnaire that asks his or her views on trade, economics, education, welfare reform and other issues. The questions are detailed, forcing candidates to state clearly whether or not they support views associated with the New Democrat Coalition, and it concludes by asking, “Will you join the NDC when you come to Congress?” Next, [the DLC] interviews each candidate, and then NDN determines which candidacies are viable before providing financial support.

It is a textbook model of 21st Century political accountability — not to voters, but to corporations that spend most of their dollars with Republicans. The DLC is, at root, a candidate shakeout mechanism for big business, a clearinghouse for betrayal. Candidates must agree to support the “narrowly defined criteria” of the boardrooms, rather than the needs and aspirations of their constituencies. Every candidate that embraces the DLC has signed off on very specific points of the corporate agenda — a kind of political receipt for services rendered.

The DLC doesn’t represent any Democratic Party voters. Its masters include American and United Airlines, Aetna and New York Life Insurance, Microsoft, DuPont, the agribusiness and pharmaceutical industries, Citigroup and, until recently, Enron, among many others. The DLC is an organization conceived in the boardroom and dedicated to the proposition that moneyed interests trump all others. About two hundred corporations comprise its Board of Advisors (fee: $5,000), and nearly 100 pay the cost to be the boss on the DLC’s Policy Roundtable ($10,000 each). For $25,000, around 30 corporate executives pretend to be Democrats as members of the DLC Executive Council. Enron sat there, along with Philip Morris, Texaco, Chevron and Dupont.

The Democratic Leadership Council is the mother of all corporate Trojan horses, and despite its incompetence at persuading Democratic voters to come to the polls it has come to dominate today’s Democratic Party. These “New Democrats” bring their corporate assets to Philadelphia, July 19, for what they call a “National Conversation” — one in which money does all the talking. Look around for the black faces — they’re under contract or, as DLC founder Al From puts it, on display.

“The National Conversation is the premier event for New Democratic elected officials from around the country, where rising political stars gather to hear from leading national voices and discuss the ideas and strategies that will shape the country’s future. It is always a great testimonial to the strength, depth, and vitality of the New Democrat movement. Democrats who run, win and govern in every region of the country, including many swing states and red states, will be on display here.”

DLC boss From expects about 300 “New Democrat” elected officials to show up in Philadelphia. That’s about the same as the number of corporations represented in the national DLC, whose “ideas and strategies” the elected officials have signed on to serve. Theoretically, each elected “New Democrat” can buddy up with a corporate executive in Philadelphia, to carry on their own “national conversation” free from meddling by actual voters and, in Al From’s words, “the narrow concerns of interest groups and activists so visible in party caucuses.” •