Not “Corrupted” by DLC, Says Obama

Unrepentant, the Democratic Leadership Council has been unmoved by the spectacle of corporations extorting zoning, tax, pollution and regulatory breaks from their host communities and gutting wages, benefits and pensions of US workers under the threat of relocation. As recently as last year the DLC continued to champion “fast track” authority for a Republican president, and objected strenuously to even the tiniest weakening (see American Prospect, July 2002) of NAFTA’s infamous Chapter 11, which lets corporations invalidate union contracts or the zoning, banking, wage and hour, safety or environmental regulations of any state or country it deems “inconsistent with free trade” in secret international courts where the public is not represented.

The Democratic Leadership Council unequivocally opposes anything that smells like a national health insurance plan, let alone single payer. Here’s what DLC founder and chief honcho Al From thinks of Rep. Dick Gephardt’s proposal to let private insurers extend health care coverage to everyone, financed by federal tax credits:

We imagine that you’d want to advance the same goal in the U.S. Senate. Should you do so – or support any form of national health insurance – you will then become an object of scorn to the DLC, as a vector of “the pander virus.”

In the April 15 issue of the DLC house organ Blueprints, DLC founder Al From starts off likening the arguments of antiwar Democrats to what he calls the “blatantly anti-American sentiments of student radicals and the hard left” of the Vietnam era, and warns Democrats that they will suffer “guilt-by-failure-to-disassociate” with such types. He next endorses the president’s illegal war and occupation of Iraq and summons Democrats to do the same: