![](\"http:\/\/i.huffpost.com\/gen\/4397562\/images\/n-WASSERMAN-628x314.jpg\")
<\/span>JOSHUA ROBERTS \/ REUTERS<\/h5>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\nby Bill Moyers<\/p>\n
Return with us now to the saga of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the soul of the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nFirst, a quick recap: Rep. Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), chair of the Democratic National Committee, also has been an advocate for the payday loan industry. The website Think Progress<\/em> even described her as the \u201ctop Democratic ally\u201d of \u201cpredatory payday lenders.\u201d You know \u2014 the bottom-feeding bloodsuckers of the working poor. Yes, them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nLow-income workers living from paycheck to paycheck, especially women and minorities, are the payday lenders\u2019 prime targets \u2014 easy pickings because they\u2019re often desperate. Twelve million Americans reportedly borrow nearly $50 billion a year through payday loans, at rates that can soar above 300 percent, sometimes even beyond 500 percent. Bethany McLean at The Atlantic<\/em> recently reported that the government\u2019s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) studied millions of payday loans and found that \u201c67 percent went to borrowers with seven or more transactions a year and that a majority of those borrowers paid more in fees than the amount of their initial loan.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nYet when the CFPB was drawing up new rules to make it harder for payday predators to feast on the poor, Rep. Wasserman Schultz co-sponsored a bill to delay those new rules by two years. How, you ask, could the head of the party\u2019s national committee embrace such an appalling exploitation of working people?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nJust follow the money. Last year, the payday loan industry spent $3.5 million lobbying; and as we wrote two weeks ago, in Wasserman Schultz\u2019s home state, since 2009, payday lenders have bought protection from Democrats and Republicans alike by contributing $2.5 million or so to candidates from both parties, including her. That\u2019s how \u201cRepresentative\u201d Wasserman Schultz, among others, wound up representing the predators instead of the poor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nThat position became a major issue in her campaign for reelection to the House this year \u2014 she has a primary opponent for the first time since she entered Congress \u2014 and was even threatening the prospect of her continuing as DNC chair and presiding over the Democratic National Convention next month in Philadelphia. More than 40,000 have signed a petition calling for her removal from that post.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nShe had become a symbol of the failure of Democratic elites to understand that there is an uprising in the land. Millions of Americans are rebelling against the leadership of both parties. They are fed up with inside-the-Beltway politicians who pay only lip service to the deep needs of everyday people and the country; fed up with incumbents who ask for their votes, are given them in good faith, and then return to Washington to do the bidding of the donor class and its lobbyists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nDonald Trump gets it. He has roiled and humiliated and conquered an out-of-touch Republican establishment in Washington that also ignored the popular uprising against corporate domination and crony capitalism, and now GOP titans such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, spear carriers for Big Money, are being hauled around the talk-show circuit in Trump\u2019s tumbrel, eating crow and swearing fealty to the misogynistic, bigoted and pathologically lying brute who bestrides their party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nDemocratic insiders like Wasserman Schultz, however, continued to whistle past the graveyard, believing that the well-funded and well-connected Clinton machine \u2014 and general fear of a Trump regime \u2014 were enough to carry them to victory in November, despite the grass-roots disgust with a party that reeks of rot from the top. Once the champions of people who came home from work with hands dirty from toil and sweat, too many establishment Democrats went over to the dark side, taking up the cause of the well-manicured executives (think: Goldman Sachs) who write the checks and the mercenaries who deliver them (for a substantial cut, of course).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nThe lust for loot, which now defines the Democratic establishment, became pronounced in the Bill Clinton years, when the Clinton-friendly Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) abandoned its liberal roots and embraced \u201cmarket-based solutions\u201d that led to deregulation, tax breaks, and subsidies for the 1 percent. Seeking to fill coffers emptied by the loss of support from a declining labor movement, Democrats rushed into the arms of big business and crony capitalists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nAnother case in point (and, alas, there are many): the Democratic governor of Connecticut, Dan Malloy, who seems to treat his state\u2019s corporate residents far better than the 1 in 10 of his citizens who live at or below the poverty line.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nAt International Business Times<\/em> last week, investigative reporter David Sirota analyzed the proposed merger of Cigna and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, a deal that would create the biggest health insurance company in the country. Cigna is based in Connecticut and Katharine Wade, the state\u2019s insurance commissioner, appointed by Governor Malloy, is a former Cigna lobbyist with deep family ties to the company.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nSirota reported, \u201cMalloy\u2019s decision to appoint Wade to such a powerful regulatory post on the eve of the merger was not made in a vacuum,\u201d Sirota reported. \u201cIt came after employees of Cigna, its lobbying firm Robinson & Cole and Anthem delivered more than $1.3 million to national and state political groups affiliated with Malloy, including the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), the Connecticut Democratic Party, Malloy\u2019s own gubernatorial campaign and a political action committee supporting Connecticut Democrats [our italics].<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n\u201cSince Malloy\u2019s first successful run for governor in the 2010 election cycle, donors from the insurance companies and the lobbying firm have given more than $2 million to Malloy-linked groups, according to the figures compiled by PoliticalMoneyLine and the National Institute on Money In State Politics. Almost half that cash has come in since 2015, the year the merger was announced.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nSirota now reports that since his investigation first was published, the state has \u201cformally denied open records requests for information about their meetings with Cigna and Anthem, and declared that \u2018any\u2019 documents about the health insurance companies\u2019 proposed merger that haven\u2019t already been made public will be kept secret.\u201d His FOIA request was turned down \u201cone day after Anthem requested [state insurance commissioner] Wade approve an average 26 percent increase in health insurance premiums for individual plans.\u201d So much for transparency.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nAnd while we\u2019re in Connecticut, let\u2019s also take a look at what Malloy is doing for the world\u2019s biggest hedge fund \u2014 Bridgewater Associates, based in his state, with an estimated worth of $150 billion. The founder of the firm, Ray Dalio, is the richest man in Connecticut, by one estimate weighing in at $14.3 billion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nDalio made $1.4 billion in 2015 alone, according to Institutional Investor\u2019s Alpha<\/em>magazine. That same year, his top two executives pulled in $250 million each. Yet as part of Connecticut\u2019s campaign to keep companies from leaving the state, Malloy is taking $22 million of the public\u2019s money and giving it to Dalio to stay put.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nYou might think a Democratic governor would have thrown down the gauntlet and told Bridgewater\u2019s top three, \u201cGet outta here! You guys made almost $2 billion among yourselves. Shake your piggy bank or look under your sofa cushions for the $22 million; we\u2019re not milking the public for it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nBut no, Malloy and his fellow Democrats buckled. Buckled to the one-tenth of the one-tenth of the one-hundredth percent of the rich. Ordinary taxpayers will now ante up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nSo given all of that, guess who\u2019s the chairman of the platform committee for the upcoming Democratic National Convention? Right: Dan Malloy, governor of Connecticut, subsidizer of billionaires. Guess who named him? Right again: Wasserman Schultz, \u201ctop Democratic ally\u201d of \u201cpredatory payday lenders.\u201d We\u2019re not making this up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nNot only will Malloy be presiding over the priorities of the Democratic platform at the convention next month, he doubtless will be making the rounds with Wasserman Schultz and other party elites as they genuflect before the corporate sponsors and lobbyists she has invited to pay for the lavish fun-and-games that will surround the coronation. Many of those corporate sponsors and lobbyists have actively lobbied against progressive policies like health-care reform and a Wall Street cleanup and even contributed large sums to Republicans. Yes, we know, shocking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nSo take the planks in the platform and the platitudes and promises in the speeches with a grain of salt. It\u2019s all about the money.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nExcept when it\u2019s not. Except for those moments when ordinary people rise up and declare: \u201cNot this time!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nWhich brings us back to predatory lenders and their buddy, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nLook around: There\u2019s an uprising in the land, remember, and it isn\u2019t going away after Hillary Clinton, now the presumptive nominee, is crowned. This year even Wasserman Schultz couldn\u2019t ignore the decibel level of an aroused public. Unaccustomed to a challenge in the Democratic \u201cwealth primary\u201d where money usually favors incumbents, she now finds herself called to account by an articulate opponent who champions working people, Tim Canova. Across the country tens of thousands of consumer advocates \u2014 and tens of thousands of other progressives angry at her perceived favoritism toward Hillary Clinton \u2014 have been demanding that Wasserman Schultz resign as the party\u2019s chair or be dumped before the convention opens Philadelphia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nSo last week the previously tone-deaf Wasserman Schultz perked up, did an about-face and announced she will go along with the proposed new rules on payday lending after all. At first blush, that\u2019s good; the rules are a step in the right direction. But all that lobbying cash must have had some effect, because the new rules only go so far. A New York Times editorial calls them \u201ca lame response\u201d to predatory loans and says the final version of the new regulations \u201cwill need stronger, more explicit consumer protections for the new regulatory system to be effective.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nNick Bourke, director of small-dollar loans for the Pew Charitable Trusts, is a man who closely follows these things and got to the heart of the matter: Not only do the proposed new rules \u201cfall short,\u201d they will allow payday lenders to lock out attempts at lower-cost bank loans.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nHis judgment is stark: \u201cAs drafted, the CFPB rule would allow lenders to continue to make high-cost loans, such as a line of credit with a 15-percent transaction fee and 299-percent interest rate, or a $1,250 loan on which the borrower would repay a total of $3,700 in fees, interest and principal,\u201d Bourke wrote. \u201cThese and many other high-cost payday installment loans are already on the market in most states, and they will thrive if the regulation takes effect without change.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nNonetheless, the new rules were improvement enough for Allied Progress, an organization that has taken on Wasserman Schultz in Florida\u2019s late August primary, to declare victory. And they were enough for Wasserman Schultz to do a 180-degree turn which she clearly hopes will not too dramatically reveal her hypocrisy. \u201cIt is clear to me,\u201d she said, \u201cthat the CFPB strikes the right balance and I look forward to working with my constituents and consumer groups as the CFPB works toward a final rule.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nAll well and good, but if she survives her primary to return to Washington, be sure to keep the lights on in those rooms where the final version of the rules are negotiated. A powerful member of Congress with support from a Democrat in the White House could seriously weaken a law or a rule when the outcome is decided behind closed doors and money whispers in the ear of a politician supplicant: \u201cI\u2019m still here. Remember. Or else.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nBut the times, they really may be a-changing, as the saga of Wasserman Schultz reveals. You can be deaf to the public\u2019s shouts for only so long. The insurgency of popular discontent that has upended politics this year will continue no matter the results in November. For much too long now it\u2019s been clear that money doesn\u2019t just rule democracy, it is democracy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
by Bill Moyers<\/p>\n
Return with us now to the saga of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the soul of the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
First, a quick recap: Rep. Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), chair of the Democratic National Committee, also has been an advocate for the payday loan industry. The website Think Progress<\/em> even described her as the \u201ctop Democratic ally\u201d of \u201cpredatory payday lenders.\u201d You know \u2014 the bottom-feeding bloodsuckers of the working poor. Yes, them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Low-income workers living from paycheck to paycheck, especially women and minorities, are the payday lenders\u2019 prime targets \u2014 easy pickings because they\u2019re often desperate. Twelve million Americans reportedly borrow nearly $50 billion a year through payday loans, at rates that can soar above 300 percent, sometimes even beyond 500 percent. Bethany McLean at The Atlantic<\/em> recently reported that the government\u2019s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) studied millions of payday loans and found that \u201c67 percent went to borrowers with seven or more transactions a year and that a majority of those borrowers paid more in fees than the amount of their initial loan.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yet when the CFPB was drawing up new rules to make it harder for payday predators to feast on the poor, Rep. Wasserman Schultz co-sponsored a bill to delay those new rules by two years. How, you ask, could the head of the party\u2019s national committee embrace such an appalling exploitation of working people?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Just follow the money. Last year, the payday loan industry spent $3.5 million lobbying; and as we wrote two weeks ago, in Wasserman Schultz\u2019s home state, since 2009, payday lenders have bought protection from Democrats and Republicans alike by contributing $2.5 million or so to candidates from both parties, including her. That\u2019s how \u201cRepresentative\u201d Wasserman Schultz, among others, wound up representing the predators instead of the poor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That position became a major issue in her campaign for reelection to the House this year \u2014 she has a primary opponent for the first time since she entered Congress \u2014 and was even threatening the prospect of her continuing as DNC chair and presiding over the Democratic National Convention next month in Philadelphia. More than 40,000 have signed a petition calling for her removal from that post.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n She had become a symbol of the failure of Democratic elites to understand that there is an uprising in the land. Millions of Americans are rebelling against the leadership of both parties. They are fed up with inside-the-Beltway politicians who pay only lip service to the deep needs of everyday people and the country; fed up with incumbents who ask for their votes, are given them in good faith, and then return to Washington to do the bidding of the donor class and its lobbyists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Donald Trump gets it. He has roiled and humiliated and conquered an out-of-touch Republican establishment in Washington that also ignored the popular uprising against corporate domination and crony capitalism, and now GOP titans such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, spear carriers for Big Money, are being hauled around the talk-show circuit in Trump\u2019s tumbrel, eating crow and swearing fealty to the misogynistic, bigoted and pathologically lying brute who bestrides their party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Democratic insiders like Wasserman Schultz, however, continued to whistle past the graveyard, believing that the well-funded and well-connected Clinton machine \u2014 and general fear of a Trump regime \u2014 were enough to carry them to victory in November, despite the grass-roots disgust with a party that reeks of rot from the top. Once the champions of people who came home from work with hands dirty from toil and sweat, too many establishment Democrats went over to the dark side, taking up the cause of the well-manicured executives (think: Goldman Sachs) who write the checks and the mercenaries who deliver them (for a substantial cut, of course).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The lust for loot, which now defines the Democratic establishment, became pronounced in the Bill Clinton years, when the Clinton-friendly Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) abandoned its liberal roots and embraced \u201cmarket-based solutions\u201d that led to deregulation, tax breaks, and subsidies for the 1 percent. Seeking to fill coffers emptied by the loss of support from a declining labor movement, Democrats rushed into the arms of big business and crony capitalists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Another case in point (and, alas, there are many): the Democratic governor of Connecticut, Dan Malloy, who seems to treat his state\u2019s corporate residents far better than the 1 in 10 of his citizens who live at or below the poverty line.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At International Business Times<\/em> last week, investigative reporter David Sirota analyzed the proposed merger of Cigna and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, a deal that would create the biggest health insurance company in the country. Cigna is based in Connecticut and Katharine Wade, the state\u2019s insurance commissioner, appointed by Governor Malloy, is a former Cigna lobbyist with deep family ties to the company.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sirota reported, \u201cMalloy\u2019s decision to appoint Wade to such a powerful regulatory post on the eve of the merger was not made in a vacuum,\u201d Sirota reported. \u201cIt came after employees of Cigna, its lobbying firm Robinson & Cole and Anthem delivered more than $1.3 million to national and state political groups affiliated with Malloy, including the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), the Connecticut Democratic Party, Malloy\u2019s own gubernatorial campaign and a political action committee supporting Connecticut Democrats [our italics].<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSince Malloy\u2019s first successful run for governor in the 2010 election cycle, donors from the insurance companies and the lobbying firm have given more than $2 million to Malloy-linked groups, according to the figures compiled by PoliticalMoneyLine and the National Institute on Money In State Politics. Almost half that cash has come in since 2015, the year the merger was announced.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sirota now reports that since his investigation first was published, the state has \u201cformally denied open records requests for information about their meetings with Cigna and Anthem, and declared that \u2018any\u2019 documents about the health insurance companies\u2019 proposed merger that haven\u2019t already been made public will be kept secret.\u201d His FOIA request was turned down \u201cone day after Anthem requested [state insurance commissioner] Wade approve an average 26 percent increase in health insurance premiums for individual plans.\u201d So much for transparency.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And while we\u2019re in Connecticut, let\u2019s also take a look at what Malloy is doing for the world\u2019s biggest hedge fund \u2014 Bridgewater Associates, based in his state, with an estimated worth of $150 billion. The founder of the firm, Ray Dalio, is the richest man in Connecticut, by one estimate weighing in at $14.3 billion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Dalio made $1.4 billion in 2015 alone, according to Institutional Investor\u2019s Alpha<\/em>magazine. That same year, his top two executives pulled in $250 million each. Yet as part of Connecticut\u2019s campaign to keep companies from leaving the state, Malloy is taking $22 million of the public\u2019s money and giving it to Dalio to stay put.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You might think a Democratic governor would have thrown down the gauntlet and told Bridgewater\u2019s top three, \u201cGet outta here! You guys made almost $2 billion among yourselves. Shake your piggy bank or look under your sofa cushions for the $22 million; we\u2019re not milking the public for it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But no, Malloy and his fellow Democrats buckled. Buckled to the one-tenth of the one-tenth of the one-hundredth percent of the rich. Ordinary taxpayers will now ante up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So given all of that, guess who\u2019s the chairman of the platform committee for the upcoming Democratic National Convention? Right: Dan Malloy, governor of Connecticut, subsidizer of billionaires. Guess who named him? Right again: Wasserman Schultz, \u201ctop Democratic ally\u201d of \u201cpredatory payday lenders.\u201d We\u2019re not making this up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Not only will Malloy be presiding over the priorities of the Democratic platform at the convention next month, he doubtless will be making the rounds with Wasserman Schultz and other party elites as they genuflect before the corporate sponsors and lobbyists she has invited to pay for the lavish fun-and-games that will surround the coronation. Many of those corporate sponsors and lobbyists have actively lobbied against progressive policies like health-care reform and a Wall Street cleanup and even contributed large sums to Republicans. Yes, we know, shocking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So take the planks in the platform and the platitudes and promises in the speeches with a grain of salt. It\u2019s all about the money.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Except when it\u2019s not. Except for those moments when ordinary people rise up and declare: \u201cNot this time!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Which brings us back to predatory lenders and their buddy, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Look around: There\u2019s an uprising in the land, remember, and it isn\u2019t going away after Hillary Clinton, now the presumptive nominee, is crowned. This year even Wasserman Schultz couldn\u2019t ignore the decibel level of an aroused public. Unaccustomed to a challenge in the Democratic \u201cwealth primary\u201d where money usually favors incumbents, she now finds herself called to account by an articulate opponent who champions working people, Tim Canova. Across the country tens of thousands of consumer advocates \u2014 and tens of thousands of other progressives angry at her perceived favoritism toward Hillary Clinton \u2014 have been demanding that Wasserman Schultz resign as the party\u2019s chair or be dumped before the convention opens Philadelphia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So last week the previously tone-deaf Wasserman Schultz perked up, did an about-face and announced she will go along with the proposed new rules on payday lending after all. At first blush, that\u2019s good; the rules are a step in the right direction. But all that lobbying cash must have had some effect, because the new rules only go so far. A New York Times editorial calls them \u201ca lame response\u201d to predatory loans and says the final version of the new regulations \u201cwill need stronger, more explicit consumer protections for the new regulatory system to be effective.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Nick Bourke, director of small-dollar loans for the Pew Charitable Trusts, is a man who closely follows these things and got to the heart of the matter: Not only do the proposed new rules \u201cfall short,\u201d they will allow payday lenders to lock out attempts at lower-cost bank loans.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n His judgment is stark: \u201cAs drafted, the CFPB rule would allow lenders to continue to make high-cost loans, such as a line of credit with a 15-percent transaction fee and 299-percent interest rate, or a $1,250 loan on which the borrower would repay a total of $3,700 in fees, interest and principal,\u201d Bourke wrote. \u201cThese and many other high-cost payday installment loans are already on the market in most states, and they will thrive if the regulation takes effect without change.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Nonetheless, the new rules were improvement enough for Allied Progress, an organization that has taken on Wasserman Schultz in Florida\u2019s late August primary, to declare victory. And they were enough for Wasserman Schultz to do a 180-degree turn which she clearly hopes will not too dramatically reveal her hypocrisy. \u201cIt is clear to me,\u201d she said, \u201cthat the CFPB strikes the right balance and I look forward to working with my constituents and consumer groups as the CFPB works toward a final rule.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n All well and good, but if she survives her primary to return to Washington, be sure to keep the lights on in those rooms where the final version of the rules are negotiated. A powerful member of Congress with support from a Democrat in the White House could seriously weaken a law or a rule when the outcome is decided behind closed doors and money whispers in the ear of a politician supplicant: \u201cI\u2019m still here. Remember. Or else.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But the times, they really may be a-changing, as the saga of Wasserman Schultz reveals. You can be deaf to the public\u2019s shouts for only so long. The insurgency of popular discontent that has upended politics this year will continue no matter the results in November. For much too long now it\u2019s been clear that money doesn\u2019t just rule democracy, it is democracy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n