Wall Street Dems

As you know, there is no more "one" type of Democrat than there is one type of Republican. Some are more palatable than others, while some really cannot be distinguished from their brethren on the other side of the voting aisle.

With this in mind, take a gander at David Sirota commenting on WaPo's story about Wall Street Dems:

A stunning piece by Washington Post business reporter Steve Pearlstein (attached) today shows that the real agenda of these Big Money insiders is to pretend to care about stagnating wages, slashed pensions, and job outsourcing - but not actually be willing to attack the "free" trade policies that are causing those hardships.

Pearlstein notes the nefariousness of it all, after attending a conference by the so-called "Hamilton Project" - the group of Wall-Street-backed Washington, D.C. Democratic insiders working to crush unions, limit citizens legal rights and, of course, perpetuate our corporate-written trade policy:

"The problem is that, when you scratch the surface, the free-trade members of the Democratic establishment turn out to be more committed to Part A of the formula, more globalization, than they are to Part B, making sure the benefits from globalization are widely shared. For them, it's really not a package deal.

And if push comes to shove, which it always does in trade politics, they'd welcome more globalization even without the compensatory social policies. How do I know this? Because they said so. At the conference's closing session, I asked former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and former deputy Treasury secretary Roger Altman if any of them would be willing to support the idea of a "time out" on new free-trade initiatives until there was some tangible progress toward greater economic security for U.S. workers. To a man, they recoiled at the idea."

Pearlstein describes the powerful moment America finds itself in - we have enough economic power to actually create a race to the top, instead of fueling a race to the bottom. But only if our government actually starts representing ordinary citizens, rather than Big Money:

"The idea here isn't to kill free trade. It's to take it hostage. Right now, the defection of formerly free-trade Democrats has made it impossible to get any trade treaty or trade-negotiating authority through Congress.

That's a big problem for the business community, particularly big corporations such as Lucent, AIG and General Electric. Democrats now have a perfect opportunity to deliver what the business community wants -- and to demand in exchange programs designed to provide workers more economic security. But such negotiations will never succeed if influential Democrats give away the store in advance by signaling they support all trade liberalization, unconditionally. No guarantees of health care, pensions, expanded unemployment insurance -- no more trade deals. It's a simple message even chief executives can understand. Voters, too."