The following post was originally published on Delaware Liberal by our excellent contributor, El Somnambulo.
Delawareans can no longer afford the risk of having Tom Carper in the United States Senate. He is, in his own way, as dangerous as Donald Trump because he does not represent the people of this state, but rather represents those who control the lives of ordinary people through undue influence.
We have long referred to Carper's corporatist leanings, but we perhaps haven't spelled them out so that people truly understood the extent of them, and the extent of the damage he has caused and can cause.
Today we begin.
Tom Carper is the Honorary Vice-Chairman of The Third Way. The Third Way is a self-described 'centrist think tank that offers fresh thinking and modern solutions to the most challenging problems in U.S. public policy', but even that is grossly misleading. It is actually largely a product of corporate America expressly designed to keep populism out of the rigged game of government and to promote useful idiots like Tom Carper.
For context, here's an excellent story from the Boston Globe (read it!) describing how The Third Way went after Elizabeth Warren.
Oh, and this might as well have come out of a Tom Carper playbook:
They insist on deficit reduction and entitlement cuts as conditions for key tax hikes on the wealthy.
That is a sharp contrast from many other Democrats, including Warren, who speak about taxing the wealthy as a matter of fairness and who would support raising their tax rates as stand-alone measures.
Third Way’s insistence on linking tax hikes to a grand bargain — which has been impossible to obtain in the Obama era — has a direct bearing on the wallets of the group’s wealthy funders.
Tom Carper's own words mirror exactly the position of the Third Way, as well as the 'Catfood Commission':
I favor the approach put forward in 2010 by the president's bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which was co-chaired by former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) and President Clinton's former Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles. The commission proposed reducing the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years. I believe this "grand bargain" approach is our best chance to bring Republicans and Democrats together because it puts everything on the table: discretionary spending, defense spending, entitlement programs, and taxes.
Key donors to the Third Way include the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and AT&T. Oh, and pretty much every wealthy financier who supports the Clintons, which, IMHO, is why Hillary virtually ignored the Democratic platform on her way to defeat. More than anything, the Third Way was founded as a way to keep Clintonian Corporate coziness at the center of the power structure. BTW, the article notes that the Third Way got $850,000 from the Clintons' favorite, Goldman Sachs, in 2010/11. Oh, and here's another sleazy way that the Third Way raises money:
Buried inside the annual report for Third Way is a revelation that the group relies on a peculiar DC consulting firm to raise half a million a year: Peck, Madigan, Jones & Stewart. Peck Madigan is no ordinary nonprofit buckraiser. The group is, in fact, a corporate lobbying firm that represents Deutsche Bank, Intel, the Business Roundtable, Amgen, AT&T, the International Swaps & Derivatives Association, MasterCard, New York Life Insurance, PhRMA and the US Chamber of Commerce, among others.
The two organizations complement each other well. Peck Madigan signs as a lobbyist for the government of New Zealand on the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal; Third Way aggressively promotes the deal. Peck Madigan clients push for entitlement cuts, and so does Third Way.
Notice that Humana, a major health insurance company, lists its $50,000 donation to Third Way not as a donation to a think tank but as part of its yearly budget spent on lobbying activity, up there with the Florida Chamber and other trade associations. The company views financial gifts to Third Way as part of its strategy for increasing its profit-making political influence.
Did I mention that Tom Carper is the Honorary Co-Chair of the Third Way? Right now, Tom Carper represents an existential threat to Medicare and Social Security. Remember when he said he cried real tears when the proposed Grand Bargain with the Obama Administration fell through? Apparently, failing to gut Medicare and Social Security is the only thing that can cause Carper to cry. As opposed to, say, the pain and suffering this would have inflicted on real people.
Tom Carper must be stopped. We face the strong possibility that he will be the first D legislator to help Trump to gut the social safety net more than it has already been gutted. All of you progressives who have enjoyed sharing cocktails with this guy need a swat in the face. Which this article, the first in a series outlining why we need a progressive to run and defeat this DINOsaur, aims to accomplish.
More to come.
