They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows, and its taken me most of my life to understand what that even means and it wasn’t until this national election cycle, in fact, that I’ve come to fully understand its true meaning.
Take for instance long-time newsman, pundit and one-time politico for the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential administration Mr. Bill Moyers.
And after reading through Mr. Moyers & Company’s pleading (reported on The Daily Kos from BillMoyers.com today) it confirms for me, all along what I’ve been saying as well as so many others. That Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have “got to go! Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!”
As Moyers and a man named Michael Winship starts to write it:
“[T]here are two Democrats whose resignation from office right now would do their party and country a service.”
And in the wake of Trump presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s arrest. And subsequent calls for his ouster from the Trump campaign I thought it only fair to point out the irony in all this, especially on the Democratic side of the ledger, and its this particular irony that I happen to agree, on all counts.
Mr. Lewandoski should be fired – so should Wasserman-Schultz and Rahm Emanuel. You cannot knowingly or unknowingly put your hands on another human being and expect to get away with it.
And as luck would have it this is not the first time Mr. Lewandowski has had trouble with the law. In 1999 he was arrested after attempting to bring a loaded weapon into the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.
Before that he was charged with assault and battery after having bit a fellow campaign staffer’s ear according to this report from the PalmBeachPost.com in the early 1990’s while working on a Congressional campaign in his home state of New Hampshire, the first mainstream campaign he ever worked on.
What, I wonder, happened to three-strikes and you’re out?
By all rights and accounts Mr. Lewandowski shouldn’t just be in jail, BUT under it. Affluenza anyone? Anyone?
We are told though that all of this is just nuance. Side show. Carnival barker stuff. And to ignore the obvious for obvious sake. Act as if nothing ever happened. That this is all just make-believe. Pretend. For ratings in a presidential election year. Culminating into this sort of Max Von Sydow ‘Needful Things’ – esque “Hey these things happen,” moment:
No. These sort of things don’t just happen politically or otherwise. They are be design and purpose. Not to say that Ms. Fields, the reporter to which Mr. Lewandowski is alleged to have assaulted in Jupiter, FL. earlier this month, set all this up to happen, BUT that she was used and has been used as a message board for both the left and the right politically. Excused away, almost, by both; in lieu of her ’15 minutes of fame’ in the mosh pit known as social media.
For his part Mr. Lewandowski maintains his ‘innocence’ and his boss, Mr. Donald J. Trump, is ‘Standing by his man’. Watch.
Doubling down, as early as yesterday evening during a town hall event on CNN, on Lewandowski staying put in the presidential campaign:
And in the midst of this political circus are the voices of calm and reason. Myself. Mr. Bill Moyers and so many others.
Guys who are saying, “Whoa! Wait a minute. Hold on just one minute here. This guy – Lewandowski – needs to be put in jail! And damn it all to hell Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Rahm Emanuel need to exit stage left…”
And speaking further on the exit of Wasserman-Schultz and Rahm Emanuel Mr. Moyers & Mr. Winship wrote:
“Their disappearance might also help Hillary Clinton convince skeptical Democrats that her nomination, if it happens, is about the future, and not about resurrecting and ratifying the worst aspects of the first Clinton reign when she and her husband rarely met a donor to whom they wouldn’t try to auction a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom.”
That Mrs. Clinton in all her political resplendent should ‘man up’ and:
“… come right [on] out and ask for the resignations of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Democratic National Committee Chair — and Florida congresswoman — Debbie Wasserman Schultz.”
But because of their ties to Wall Street and the so-called ‘payday lenders’ the ‘deep-pocket donor class’ that Mrs. Wasserman-Schultz and Rahm Emanuel are connected to at the hip, Mrs. Clinton will ‘suffer in silence’ politically for the sake of big money and the opportunity to rub even more unknown elbows like that of Illinois Fat Cat Governor Bruce Rauner, a Republican for the sake of a ‘Few Dollars More’ – Allah Clint Eastwood and his Spaghetti Western of old.
Moyers and Winship point out that in the case of Emanuel he has raised ‘untold millions, if not billions of dollars’ for the Clinton’s’ [Bill and Hillary] since his early days as then Clinton hatchet man for the first presidential campaign there.
“Rahm Emanuel first came to prominence as head of the finance committee for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, browbeating ever-increasing amounts of money out of fat cat donors, and following [the] Clinton[‘s] into the White House as a senior adviser attuned to the wishes and profits of organized wealth.”
Pushing the edge of the envelope from the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the ‘New Deal’ to the party of Warren Buffett and the ‘Buffett Rule’.
“After alienating most of Washington with his arrogance and bluster Emanuel left in 1998 and went into investment banking in Chicago, making more than $16 million in less than three years.
He came back to Washington as a three-term Illinois congressman, chaired the fundraising Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (calling on his Wall Street sources to get in on the gravy by electing so-called New Democrats over New Deal Democrats), and soon was back in the White House as Barack Obama’s chief of staff.”
And now he’s mayor of Chicago, reelected last April for a second term, but, as historian Rick Perlstein wrote in The New Yorker a couple of months ago, “Chicagoan’s — and Democrats nationally — are suffering buyer’s remorse.”
Remember that shocking dash cam video of a black 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by a Chicago policeman while he was walking away? Of course you do; who can forget it? Remember, too, that for 400 days the police kept the existence of the video secret and did nothing about the shooting. Meanwhile, the City of Chicago paid five million dollars to McDonald’s family, who at that point had not filed a lawsuit. But despite the large sum of money coughed up by his own administration, Emanuel claims he never saw the video. If that’s true, he was guilty of dreadful mismanagement; if he did know, he’s guilty of far worse.
Only after his re-election was the cover-up of the murder revealed. In Perlstein’s words, “Given that he surely would not have been reelected had any of this come out before the balloting, a recent poll showed that only 17 percent of Chicagoan’s believe him. And a majority of Chicagoan’s now think he should resign.””
By this time you may well be asking, “what could be worse?” Great question! And here’s my answer:
There was a time, politically, when the author of this posting had a great deal of respect for Congressman Wasserman-Schultz and many others in the 109th Congress – the U.S. Congress with which she entered politically..
Respecting her, and former Florida Congressman Kendrick Meek and Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford, Jr.
These three, at one time, were the heavy-hitters, the ‘young guns’ of the Congress of the United States of America. That was until all of those scandals and troubles abounded out of the 109th Congress.
And rather than admit to those problems, and deal with them accordingly, the three-man tag team of Ford, Jr. Wasserman-Schultz and Meek, like so many of their colleagues, swept those controversies under the rug – passed the buck and left the American people to pay for the check.
Why am I not surprised?
“As for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she embodies the tactics that have eroded the ability of Democrats to once again be the party of the working class. As Democratic National Committee chair she has opened the floodgates for Big Money, brought lobbyists into the inner circle and oiled all the moving parts of the revolving door that twirls between government service and cushy jobs in the world of corporate influence.
She has played games with the party’s voter database, been accused of restricting the number of Democratic candidate debates and scheduling them at odd days and times to favor Hillary Clinton, and recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper that super delegates — strongly establishment and pro-Clinton — are necessary at the party’s convention so deserving incumbent officials and party leaders don’t have to run for delegate slots “against grassroots activists.” Let that sink in, but hold your nose against the aroma of entitlement.
[Wasserman-Schultz] has aligned herself with corporate interests out to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s effort to create national standards for the payday-lending industry, a business that in particular targets the poor. Payday loans, as Yuka Hayashi writes at The Wall Street Journal, “are quick credits of a few hundred dollars, with effective annual interest rates ranging between 300% and 500%. Loans are due in a lump sum on the borrower’s next payday, a structure that often sends people into cycles of debt by forcing them to take out new loans to repay the old ones.”
According to the nonpartisan Americans for Financial Reform, this tail-chasing cycle of “turned” loans to pay off previous loans makes up about 76 percent of the payday loan business. The Pew Charitable Trust found that in Wasserman Schultz’s home state, the average payday loan customer takes out nine such loans a year, which usually has them mired in debt for about half a year. … The very people, it must be acknowledged, who now have an ally in the chair of the Democratic National Committee, who has so engineered the rules of the current Democratic primary process so as to virtually assure her unlimited access to a Clinton White House where she can walk in freely to press the case for her … donors and pals.[..]”
But as with anything, there is hope! Meet Mr. Tim Canova. Mr. Canova is challenging Mrs. Wasserman-Schultz in her bid for re-election in a ‘barn-burner’ of a Democratic primary process in 2016 down in South Florida.
As a long-time lawyer, educator and economics and policy adviser to Mr. Bernie Sanders and others Professor Canova has seen, first-hand, the devastating effects Wasserman-Schultz brand of governance on South Florida since he moved to Hollywood, FL. in 2012 from the greater Los Angeles, CA. area.
“I’m very unhappy with Wasserman Schultz’s representation of the district. Time and time again, she has voted to protect the pools of dark money in politics. My dissatisfaction with her has gone back many months, to when she voted to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
As an outspoken critic of Wall Street and Madison Avenue Professor Canova seems like the natural protagonist to Wasserman-Schultz soft-core political porn:
“Given his own experience as an outspoken Wall Street critic, Canova came to one conclusion: He ought to run to take Wasserman Schultz out. So, on January 8, he officially announced his candidacy in Florida’s 23rd District, which encompasses Hollywood and Miami Beach. … He grew up on Long Island, attended Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., and, after graduating, worked as a legislative aide to former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas. From there, he practiced commercial law at the then-prominent New York City law firm [of] Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander, and Ferguson. Among [the] other prominent alumni [who practiced law there along side the likes of] Richard Nixon and former Sen. Pat Buchanan [,who] worked for the firm before going into politics.”
As the New Times of Broward and Palm Beach put it:
“[While]he has not received any sort of endorsement from the Sanders campaign. … Canova is an outspoken liberal who believes the Federal Reserve should be reformed. While at Chapman [University], Canova was driving to a meeting with then-Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in 2011 when he noticed an encampment had emerged around Los Angeles City Hall. It turned out to be one of the nation’s largest #OccupyWallStreet protests. [And] I found it fascinating,” he says. “The encampment itself was a revelation. There were a lot of young kids, for most part, who had voted for Obama just a year or two earlier, but the new administration had not done much of anything for this generation. Many were homeless or out of work, but they were intelligent people.””
As a ‘Wall Street reformer’ Mr. Canova was called upon by Senator Sanders and eighteen other economists to study a 2011 report released by the Fed’s own Government Accountability Office which detailed that ’employees and big bank owners’ for corporations like Goldman Sachs:
“sat on the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks while their own firms received Fed [bailout] money.”
– What, I wonder, could ever be wrong with this picture? Well lets see.
CEO’s like Jamie Dimon and Heidi Cruz, wife of Texas Senator and 2016 Republican candidate for President Ted Cruz, benefited the most from Wasserman-Schultz governance and friendship in Congresses like the 109th in Washington, D.C…
Bailouts, balloon-payments and Golden parachutes that even former Hewlett-Packard CEO and newly minted Ted Cruz 2016 supporter Carly Fiorina have benefited from handsomely.
But such news hasn’t deterred or derailed Professor Canova to his ultimate goal, to become the next Congressman for the 23rd voting district for the State of Florida.
“After Wasserman Schultz voted to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership midway through 2015, Canova says he tried to contact the congresswoman’s office to explain his issues with the bill. He says he never heard back. So, he says, he had no choice but to try to remove her from office himself.”
And its news like this that should be a sole comfort to folks like Mr. Moyers and Winship. To know that there are people like Professor Canova, Tammy Baldwin, Alan Grayson, Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren fighting the good fight, the progressive fight , in this and future Congresses.
A choice instead of the ‘status quo’, OR as Moyers and Winship concluded in their pleading:
“This is why [politicians like] Emanuel and Wasserman Schultz must go. To millions, they are enablers of the one percent, perpetrators of the Washington mentality that the rest of the country has grown to hate. What a message such servants of plutocracy send: Democrats — a bridge to the past.”
–Rhett.
Say What News?! 