{"id":179825,"date":"2017-10-15T19:35:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-16T00:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/10\/15\/this-is-why-obamas-knifing-ellison-in-the-dnc-race-makes-a-difference\/"},"modified":"2017-10-15T19:35:00","modified_gmt":"2017-10-16T00:35:00","slug":"this-is-why-obamas-knifing-ellison-in-the-dnc-race-makes-a-difference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/10\/15\/this-is-why-obamas-knifing-ellison-in-the-dnc-race-makes-a-difference\/","title":{"rendered":"This is Why Obama’s Knifing Ellison in the DNC Race Makes a Difference"},"content":{"rendered":"

DNC Chairman Tom Perez has appointed a fierce opponent of the minimum wage to its finance committee<\/a>, because \u2026\u2026\u2026 Hell because the New Dem wing of the Democratic Party needs to accommodate abusive employers, slumlords, Wall Street, and evil people in general, because they want their money to pay for overpriced incompetent consultants:<\/p>\n

Various sources have reported that Tom Perez, the Chair of the Democratic National Committee, has appointed Atlanta native Dan Halpern to the finance committee of the party.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
Tom Perez just appointed a lobbyist for an anti-minimum wage group in the South as a DNC Finance Chair. I’m not joking.<\/span><\/div>\n

\u2014 spooky neesins\ud83c\udf39 (@LaDemSoc) October 12, 2017<\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Specifically, he will be part of a squad of deputy national finance chairs. As the<\/a> Atlanta Business Chronicle r<\/i>eports: <\/span>

<\/span>Halpern chaired Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed\u2019s mayoral campaign in 2009 and served as a trustee for then-President-elect Barack Obama<\/a>\u2019s 2008 inaugural committee. Halpern also is immediate past chairman of the Atlanta Housing Authority Board of Directors and a past chairman of the Georgia Restaurant Association. <\/span>

<\/span>In a party that says it\u2019s trying to be progressive, Halpern is a strange direction. As the head of Jackmont Hospitality and the GRA, Halpern has reliably opposed the minimum wage. His record thus far suggests a hostility towards the kind of worker-friendly policies that the Bernie-era Dems are supposedly pursuing. It suggests Perez, and Perez\u2019s backers and friends, have not gotten the memo about economic justice.<\/span>

<\/span>In Halpern\u2019s home state of Georgia, according<\/a> to Politifact \u201cSenate Bill 314 called for raising Georgia\u2019s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, but it didn\u2019t get so much as a hearing.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>Why? Halpern\u2019s people\u2014the Georgia Restaurant Association\u2014claimed that there would be a potential loss of 21,000 jobs, ignoring the increased possibility for consumer spending, for new jobs, for giving hungry people a hand up. Everything must benefit the boardroom, you see, or it\u2019s not worth doing. As Politifact helpfully reminds us, \u201cGeorgia\u2019s minimum wage is technically $5.15 an hour (Georgia Code 34-4-3) and has been since 2001. But the vast majority of Georgia employers (some say more than 99 percent) must comply with the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which means they have to pay their employees the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.\u201d If given god-like sway over the business, Halpern and his GRA would probably prefer to keep this amount even lower.<\/span>

<\/span>Hardly surprising. When a guy is described<\/a> by the Atlanta Journal Constitution<\/i> as a \u201cGeorgia Democratic moneyman,\u201d it\u2019s safe bet he couldn\u2019t give two hoots in hell for a single mother making minimum wage at McDonald\u2019s. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is it any wonder that the Democratic Party brand is in the sewer?<\/p>\n

This sort of crap is toxic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DNC Chairman Tom Perez has appointed a fierce opponent of the minimum wage to its finance committee, because \u2026\u2026\u2026 Hell because the New Dem wing of the Democratic Party needs to accommodate abusive employers, slumlords, Wall Street, and evil people in general, because they want their money to pay for overpriced incompetent consultants: Various sources …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[513,364,578,597,374],"class_list":["post-179825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-campaign-finance","tag-evil","tag-incompetence","tag-inequality","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179825"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}