Democratic Party Freezes Out Grassroots in Wisconsin, Nation

Updated - Someone should ask U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D-La Crosse) why the national and Wisconsin Democratic Parties (DPW) are shutting out grassroots primary challenges against congressional incumbents.

WisPolitics is holding a luncheon for Rep. Kind to discuss policy issues at The Madison Club, 5 East Wilson Street in Madison at 11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. on March 29 next Tuesday.

Rep. Kind is facing a tough primary challenger in retired teacher Myron Buchholz (D-Eau Claire).

Kind is chair of the corporatist New Democrat Coalition and a champion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) 'trade' agreement now before Congress.

Buchholz opposes the TPP and is making the loss of manufacturing jobs and campaign finance the centerpiece of his campaign. Buchholz launched his congressional run in February.

One would think in progressive Wisconsin, in the tradition of Bob La Follette, voters should pick their representatives, not Party bosses.

Candidate Buchholz found out the Democratic Party bosses protect entrenched incumbents like Kind, who has received over $16,000 from the Koch brothers, (Craver, The Capital Times).

Money Talks, La Follette Walks

Democratic Party of Wisconsin (DPW) Chair Martha Laning is protecting Kind and the special interests funding his six-figure gig as a nine-term member of Congress.

Laning tells the Democrat in good standing, Myron Buchholz, that the DPW's voters' list, (Voter Activation Network (VAN)), will not be made available to Buchholz for his challenge to Rep. Kind, (Blogging Blue), (Cognitive Dissidence).

It's about money.

The money from the Koch brothers is nothing compared to the top four special interest sectors forking over money to Kind—Insurance, Pharmaceuticals/Health Products, Health Professionals and Securities and Investment—who have collectively donated over $391,000 in the 2015-16 election cycle alone, (Open Secrets, Center for Responsive Politics).

As of Dec. 31, 2015, Kind had over $2 million on hand and raised well over $1 million in 2015-16.

Name of the Game Is Money from Special Interests

Kind and the DPW are not unique. Shutting out, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hopes shutting down, grassroots challengers is a national phenomena.

"The Florida Democratic Party will not allow me access to our party's (voters') database and software because I am running against an incumbent Democrat," said Florida congressional candidate, Tim Canova (Fulton, Common Dreams). Sounds familiar.

Canova is mounting a grassroots challenge against the six-term congresswoman and chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida).

Message from the DNC, Schultz and the Party insiders' favorite, Hillary Clinton, to challengers fighting special interests is clear: Get lost, (Iannelli, Broward-Palm Beach New Times).

[Note: Breaking news out of Florida: "After being denied access to an important voter file that could help his campaign, Democrat Tim Canova, who is challenging incumbent Debbie Wasserman Schultz this August, will now get access to a campaign tool called the Voter Activation Network (VAN)," (Perry, Florida Politics).]

Missouri and other states report similar challenger obstruction by the state's Democratic Party.

"(N)ews outlets in Missouri reported last month on the fight over VAN access in that state, 'several Democratic candidates—who are also Ferguson movement leaders,' were blocked from the files by the state party. As one of the candidate's campaign managers put it, 'The sign almost says, 'Newcomers need not apply.'"

The DNC has become a funnel for special interests and Myron Buchholz and Tim Canova are not the right kind of special. The kind with a dollar sign and six figures to donate for services rendered.

This begs the question of Kind, posed by Myron Buchholz, which side are you on, Ron Kind?

Which Side Are You On, Ron Kind, Asks Congressional Challenger Myron Buchholtz

American industry moves manufacturing jobs overseas
as trade agreements championed by Rep. Ron Kind
(R-Wisconsin) have hollowed out the U.S. economy.
Now before congress, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
would move entire industries overseas, as American
manufacturing jobs move into endangered-species territory.
Pictured above is a shuttered facility from La Crosse
Footwear Inc. that shipped 100s of American jobs to the
Far-East circa 2000-01. Who would want to ship away
American jobs and why?
Myron Buchholz demands an answer.

Rep. Ron Kind is to manufacturing jobs what Gov. Scott Walker is to higher education: Hostile.

Brilliant campaign video is out by Myron Buchholz for Congress (D-Eau Claire), challenging nine-term incumbent Rep. Ron Kind (D- La Crosse).

Kind is the chair of the "New Democrat" Coalition and a champion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) 'trade' agreement now before Congress.

TPP like other trade agreements will hollow out the American economy, ship jobs and industry overseas, and drive down American wages.

TPP was negotiated in secret for years, is heavily supported by Republicans, the pharmaceutical industry, an array of corporate special interests and Wisconsin's own Ron Kind, (Wallach, Goodman; Democracy Now); (Conyers, The Nation).

Why would any politician even consider TPP? Rep. Kind has no answer.

Myron Buchholz pays homage to Bob Dylan's classic Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965) in a video asking Rep. Kind, Which side are you on, Ron?

The video features images of the homeless, shuttered factories and foreclosed homes, as Buchholz asks in a lamenting tone, Which side are you on, Ron?

Mitt Romney—a pioneer in offshoring, aka shipping jobs overseas

When Romney tells you Bain Capital is not
about money; it's about money

This news about Bain Capital being a pioneer in outsourcing, investing in some of the leading early companies that advised American companies in how to most effectively do it, is a pretty big deal on the face of it, but it has even deeper implications than many people realize.

Steel workers lost jobs when Bain came to town

Being in this kind of business when the vast majority of Americans are so upset by out-sourcing is just one of Mitt Romney's deep dark secrets that he has been trying to hide, and helps to powerfully make the case that Romney's entire business career has been fundamentally at odds with the interests of the American middle class.

By Mike Lux

You shipped American jobs overseas? Offshored our families' futures? You cannot be president; you're out! Could be voters' verdict in November.

The other thing this news does is that it very likely ends the debate within the Democratic party as to whether it is okay to talk about Bain Capital's business practices.

Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India. ... Washington Post examination of securities filings shows the extent of Bain’s investment in firms that specialized in helping other companies move or expand operations overseas. While Bain was not the largest player in the outsourcing field, the private equity firm was involved early on, at a time when the departure of jobs from the United States was beginning to accelerate and new companies were emerging as handmaidens to this outflow of employment. Bain played several roles in helping these outsourcing companies, such as investing venture capital so they could grow and providing management and strategic business advice as they navigated this rapidly developing field. (Tom Hamburger. Washington Post)

There are still going to be Wall Street Democrats squeamish about beating up on this kind of wealthy financial company, but to defend a company that was literally a pioneer in helping American companies out-source jobs would be incredibly unpopular.

Given how deeply unhappy voters are about out-sourcing, given how it generally is one of the top issues mentioned by voters in any poll I have seen over the last decade, it would be political malpractice not to attack Bain and Romney over this news, and any honest Democrat will have to understand and acknowledge that fact.

The reason this story goes so deep is that Romney's entire political strategy is based on carrying blue collar white voters very heavily.

Obama won 53 percent of the vote in 2008 while losing white working class voters by 18 percent.

Even if you assume Obama doesn't do quite as well turning out his base voters, to win this election Romney will have win that white working class demographic by at least 62-38 percent.

Given how big a deal out-sourcing is to blue-collar workers, this story becomes close to a deal-breaker for Romney.

The Romney campaign's reaction to the story is hilarious: "This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring nor versus work done overseas to support U.S. exports."

The very incoherence of the quote speaks to their strategy: try to confuse the issue, try to make it sound complicated. The problem for Romney is that this is a remarkably simple story: whether you call it out-sourcing or off-shoring (and I don't see how the new word helps him), Romney was caring only about his company's profits and not at all about creating jobs here in the U.S., and he saw out-sourcing jobs as a great new way to make money.

Perhaps as interesting as the story itself is the fact that after four years as governor of Massachusetts, and more than six years of his running for the presidency non-stop, even with all his talk about his business career helping him understand job creation, this is the first time we have heard about these investments.

Mitt Romney is big into secrets, and is very good at keeping them. He has Swiss bank accounts, and Cayman Island accounts as well. His financial disclosure for years past has been unusually secretive in nature.

He won't say what his positions are on a whole range of critically important issues. I think we can guess why Romney tried to hide the news about his being a pioneer in out-sourcing, but why does he have secret off-shore bank accounts and so little information in his financial disclosure reports? What has he invested money in all those years that requires such skullduggery?

This is as secretive a man as has run for president at least since Dick Nixon with all his dirty little secrets. This is the candidate who said that we must only speak of issues about the concentration of wealth "in quiet rooms".

He prefers speaking about these kinds of things in quiet rooms, because to be open about how he made his money would be such an insult to the exact voters he most needs to win this election.

But Romney made his incredible fortune by doing insider deals in those quiet rooms, by quietly helping companies turn a profit by out-sourcing their workers.

After he made his money off these kinds of deals, he hid a great deal of it in secret Swiss and Caymans bank accounts. Is a man with these kinds of values -- and these kinds of secrets -- the kind of man we want to be president?

What Economy?

This morning, I was reading about Fond du Lac, Wisconsin praying to hell Mercury Marine keeps going and stays in Fondy.

"Merc," I grew up hearing the term Merc, a life entity as solid and predictable in Fondy as the Packers, beer, deer hunting in November, and Lake Winnebago.

I read about a national panel's mission to determine what caused the financial meltdown, and then I came to the prescient Paul Craig Roberts in CounterPunch.

Roberts, a Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and prolific writer, has been spot-on for the last decade, seemingly alone in predicting (several years ago) this economic disaster in which now we find ourselves.

His current piece is not reassuring unless you are vested in the Dow reaching 6,500. Here's an excerpt but read the whole thing. From Roberts:

There is no economy left to recover. The US manufacturing economy was lost to offshoring and free trade ideology. It was replaced by a mythical ‘New Economy.’

The ‘New Economy’ was based on services. Its artificial life was fed by the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates, which produced a real estate bubble, and by ‘free market’ financial deregulation, which unleashed financial gangsters to new heights of debt leverage and fraudulent financial products.

The real economy was traded away for a make-believe economy. When the make-believe economy collapsed, Americans’ wealth in their real estate, pensions, and savings collapsed dramatically while their jobs disappeared.

The debt economy caused Americans to leverage their assets. They refinanced their homes and spent the equity. They maxed out numerous credit cards. They worked as many jobs as they could find. Debt expansion and multiple family incomes kept the economy going.

And now suddenly Americans can’t borrow in order to spend. They are over their heads in debt. Jobs are disappearing. America’s consumer economy, approximately 70% of GDP, is dead. Those Americans who still have jobs are saving against the prospect of job loss. Millions are homeless. Some have moved in with family and friends; others are living in tent cities.

Meanwhile the US government’s budget deficit has jumped from $455 billion in 2008 to $2,000 billion this year, with another $2,000 billion on the books for 2010. And President Obama has intensified America’s expensive war of aggression in Afghanistan and initiated a new war in Pakistan.

There is no way for these deficits to be financed except by printing money or by further collapse in stock markets that would drive people out of equity into bonds. ...