Reply #21: Highly Recommended... Please read!

[Totally Committed]

Muzzling The African-American Agenda with Black Help: The DLC's Dollars of Destruction
by Bruce Dixon, Editor, Black Commentator

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.

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:

:graybox: investment in sustainable economic growth

:graybox: leaders who protect the environment

:graybox: enforcement of civil rights for all

:graybox: the right to join a union to be a civil right

:graybox: women to get equal pay for equal work

:graybox: everyone to be paid a living wage

:graybox: help for American families and children

:graybox: universal health care and retirement security for all

:graybox: to revive our cities and end poverty

:graybox: privacy and reproductive choice protected

:graybox: an Apollo project for energy independence

:graybox: America's young people to have a future

:graybox: government to be on your side

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

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.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/46/46_cover.html


This is a really long, but really good article. It has lots of info, and pulls very few punches. I highly recommend it!

TC