What excuse do the "New Democrats" have?

[Moses]

The New York Times and the Washington Post even condemned this legislation:

www.tnr.com/etc.mhtml


FOR SHAME: This e-mail came in over the transom today from the House New Democrat Coalition. If you consider yourself a moderate Democrat, it should turn your stomach:

Washington, D.C.--With consumer debt reaching record highs of more than $2 trillion, members of the New Democrat Coalition (NDC) sent a letter today to Speaker Dennis Hastert, urging him to schedule House action on the bankruptcy reform legislation as soon as the Senate completes its consideration of the bill. The letter, signed by twenty NDC members, including the four NDC leaders, reiterates New Democrats' long-standing support for common-sense bankruptcy legislation and states an intention to work across the aisle to pass bankruptcy reform into law.

"I'm pleased to see so many New Democrats band together in calling for a mainstream solution to bankruptcy reform. I hope Speaker Hastert will heed our calls and move promptly to bring this legislation to the floor soon," said Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher.

"This bankruptcy bill strikes an equitable balance between essential protections and responsible reform necessary to curb abuses of the current code by people with the financial means to pay their debt," stated Rep. Kind. "As champions of both personal and fiscal responsibility, New Democrats supported bankruptcy reform in the past, and we stand ready to adopt this common-sense measure when it comes to the floor of the House."

"The bankruptcy legislation needs to be brought to the House floor," said U.S. Rep. Adam Smith. "Personal responsibility is an important value that must be part of our public policy. This legislation ensures that Americans must make good on their commitments while also protecting those who truly need help under Chapter 7 bankruptcy laws."

"Bankruptcy is an option that ruins credit and homeownership opportunities for too many Americans," said Rep. Artur Davis. "This legislation will deter bankruptcies that are unnecessary and ill considered, while still permitting a fair second chance for low-to-moderate income consumers who face financial hardship. Individual consumers and businesses will benefit from a more streamlined bankruptcy system."

# # #

The Honorable J. Dennis Hastert
Speaker
U.S. House of Representatives
H-232, The Capitol
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Mr. Speaker:

We write to encourage you to bring bankruptcy reform legislation to the House floor as soon as the Senate completes its consideration of the bill. The New Democrat Coalition has backed common sense bankruptcy reform in the past and helped in passing the bankruptcy reform bill by overwhelming margins in the House of Representatives during the 108th Congress.

Over the last several years, we have worked to advance reasonable and balanced legislation that would require individuals who have the ability to repay their debts to do so, while preserving the important safety net of bankruptcy under Chapter 7 for those who truly need it. We believe that responsible bankruptcy reform embodies the New Democrat principle of personal responsibility, while at the same time adding important new consumer protections such as requiring enhanced credit card disclosure information and encouraging participation in consumer credit counseling.

It is our hope that the House of Representatives will consider this important piece of legislation in an expedited manner. We stand ready to work with you and our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass bankruptcy reform into law.

Sincerely,

Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher
Rep. Adam Smith
Rep. Ron Kind
Rep. Artur Davis
Rep. Carolyn McCarthy
Rep. John Larson
Rep. Stephanie Herseth
Rep. Dennis Moore
Rep. Mike McIntyre
Rep. Joe Crowley
Rep. Jay Israel
Rep. David Wu
Rep. Diane Hooley
Rep. Melissa Bean
Rep. Jim Davis
Rep. Harold E. Ford, Jr.
Rep. Ed Case
Rep. Jay Inslee
Rep. Shelley Berkeley
Rep. Gregory W. Meeks

This magazine and multiple other opinion outlets on the center-left have written at length about how the bill in question is a truly contemptible piece of legislation. Worse, there is no plausible political rationale for supporting it other than to appease credit card companies. As Paul Krugman pointed out today, the bill makes no exceptions for families wiped out by medical expenses (which make up more than half of all bankruptcies) or for bankruptcy cases involving active-duty soldiers, yet it leaves any number of loopholes in place for large corporations. The political imagery here so obviously benefits anyone who'd oppose the bill you're left to conclude that the only way a congressman could possibly support it is through a craven and reflexive willingness to do the bidding of big business.


But, even worse than that, support for the bill by Democratic moderates betrays a striking obliviousness to the most important debate underway within the Democratic Party. Moderate Democrats have been under assault from grassroots liberals lately for selling out Democratic values in their rush to appease conservative interests. I normally think this criticism is highly misplaced, and that moderates have exactly the right instincts when it comes to social issues and foreign policy, even most economic issues. But in this case the moderates proved the liberals' point for them, which could set back the cause of moderates within the party for months, if not years. It really is a colossal, inexcusable mistake.

[Moses]

Issue 120 - January 6 2005

"You have to understand people like George Bush. He's a nice guy. We need to learn from him. Remember what Bill Clinton did: He figured out what Republicans were doing well, and instead of complaining about it, he figured out a way to do it better." – Rep. Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN)

The Black body politic has been invaded by corporate money, which seeks through its media arms to select a “new” Black leadership from among a small group of compliant and corrupt Democrats. Memphis Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. is a principal vector of the disease, an eager acolyte of the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), and now the point man among Black Democrats in the Republican mission to destroy Social Security.

Ford should also be known as the “Black Man Who Dances With Blue Dogs” – one of only two Black congressional members of the Blue Dog Democratic Coalition (the other Black and Blue Dog is Georgia Rep. Sanford Bishop). C-span congressional scholar Ilona Nickles aptly describes the Blue Dogs as “closer in purpose to a former coalition of southern Members of the House known as the ‘Boll Weevils,’ whose heyday was in the early 1980's. These Members defected as a group from the Democratic party to vote with Congressional Republicans on budgetary and tax bills.”<br>
Harold Ford is preparing to defect from the Democratic and Congressional Black caucuses in service to George Bush’s Social Security privatization scheme, which he has embraced in principle. Blue Dog and DLC congresspersons form the core of the Democrats that Ford hopes will join Republicans, like South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, “to create an ownership society in a variety of creative ways, and move away from ‘if you’re for privatization, you’re with the Republicans’ and ‘if you’re against it, you’re with the Democrats,’” in Ford’s words.

Printer friendly version of Harold Ford/Social Security cartoon

“Ownership society” is, of course, the slogan George Bush has deployed in his campaign to transfer trillions of Social Security dollars to Wall Street. White House guru Karl Rove must be giving Harold Ford copies of Bush’s scripts. The 34-year-old congressman has been mimicking Bush on Social Security since at least April of last year, when Ford addressed a forum organized by Centrists.Org, the Concord Coalition, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at the New America Foundation, and the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security. The latter is a front set up by the National Association of Manufacturers specifically to undermine Social Security. Centrists.Org is the Blue Dog Coalition’s think tank, the Concord Coalition opposes “entitlements” of all kinds and spreads hysteria about the coming “bankruptcy” of Social Security, while the New America Foundation’s Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is a public policy factory for a mix of DLC Democrats and “moderate” Republicans. All are slaves of corporate funding.

What do these people have to do with Rep. Ford’s mostly Black constituents in the 9th Congressional District in Memphis, Tennessee? Nothing. They are denizens of purely corporate constructs that share no constituencies on Ford’s home turf or in any significant sector of Black America. The congressman has journeyed far afield to inhabit a Neverland much more dangerous and alien to Black interests than anything Michael Jackson could conjure or imagine. Harold Ford has crossed over to the corporate side of the world, beyond redemption. And he’s not alone. As we wrote in our December 2, 2004 Cover Story, “Black Dems Must Clean Up Their Own Act “:


”One-fifth of the CBC are members of the DLC. These include Harold Ford, Jr. (TN)…Artur Davis (AL), beneficiary of the 2002 corporate cash offensive that also ousted Cynthia McKinney in neighboring Georgia; David Scott (GA), possibly the most conservative-voting member of the CBC, also a 2002 Black “New Democrat”;  Gregory Meeks (NY), Juanita Millender-McDonald (CA) and James E. Clyburn (SC), an otherwise decent man who nevertheless finds it useful to co-chair his state’s DLC; and Albert R. Wynn (MD),who is proud to have “represented the Congressional Black Caucus on the [House Democratic] Caucus Democratic Leadership Council.”<br>

Not all of these tainted Black politicians will abandon the historical Black Political Consensus to support privatization of Social Security – the founding program of the New Deal – but Harold Ford has already sprinted across the great divide. Ford’s personal ambitions and utter lack of principle have propelled him beyond the boundaries of the Black Consensus and, therefore, outside of the African American conversation. The problem is: Black people don’t control the terms of their own conversations. Corporate dominion over media is just as endemic to the Black airwaves and print outlets as to general media, and these media corporations celebrate crossover dreams even when they are the product of treachery against historical and current Black aspirations.

More troubling, progressive Blacks, including the 18 members of the Congressional Black Caucus (out of 43) that belong to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are loathe to confront treason in the ranks, and thus allow malefactors like Harold Ford to work their show for the rich white corporate folks, without political penalty. Ford’s constituents in Memphis don’t even know that he’s stabbing them in the back. Yet Harold Ford’s cut is the deepest cut of all: "I'm a Democrat because I think we are more often right,” Ford told the Nashville Scene, back in March. “But there are some things some Democrats believe that I don't. I don't think government is an insurance program."

With that statement, the well-educated but ill-raised Harold Ford reveals that he either misunderstands or opposes the very premise of Social Security, which is an insurance program against the vissisitudes of the stock market.

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described his new Social Security Act to the U.S. Congress in these words:


"[It] represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means completed – a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions, to act as a protection to future administrations of the Government against the necessity of going deeply into debt to funding relief to the needy, -úa law to flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation – in other words, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness."


Social Security was conceived as an insurance policy against the inevitable booms and busts of capitalism – economic tremors, and sometimes earthquakes, that wreak excessive damage among African Americans like Harold Ford’s Memphis constituents. In his zeal to position himself to run for Bill Frist’s Senate seat in 2006, Ford would destroy the last major government program that gives the United States any claim to civilization among industrial nations. He is already embarked on a crime of historic proportions.

(more at link)