Progressives around the country have been shaking up the Democratic Party and most Democratic voters support them.

However, this grassroots movement is still viewed as just an embarrassing annoyance, rather than a real threat to the establishment's power (i.e. 'overblown hype').

That might be about to change.



“The time has passed when we can passively settle for the lesser of two evils,” reads the main political resolution passed Tuesday by the AFL-CIO convention delegates. Lee Saunders, chair of the AFL-CIO’s political committee and president of AFSCME, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, introduced the resolution. They lead the labor federation’s two largest unions. Convention managers yoked the resolution to another measure it also approved discussing a labor party, though not by name. “For decades the political system has failed working people,” Weingarten said. “Acting on behalf of corporations and the rich and powerful, the political system has been taking away, one after another, the pillars that support working people’s right to good jobs and secure benefits.” The two measures, adopted October 24, followed a late Monday-evening meeting of supporters of reviving the Labor Party idea. It attracted about 50 delegates to an upstairs meeting room at the convention’s lead hotel. Their contention: Both the Democrats and the Republicans are under corporate domination.

There was a time when labor unions could force the Democratic Party to bend to its will, but that was more than a generation ago.

Nevertheless, unions still have the ability to be the difference in close elections all over the country, not to mention being important sources of donations. Without unions the Dems have no chance of retaking Congress.

It's unlikely that the AFL-CIO is about to split from the Democrats and form their own party, but by officially registering their unhappiness with the status quo it's only a matter of time before they align themselves with the progressive insurgency against the Democratic establishment.

And then anything is possible.



“We had a vision to build a party of the working class. You have to have the labor movement at the table from the beginning,” of the effort, “or you’re building sand castles,” Dudzic explained. He was a leader in the original Labor Party effort of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Participants in the meeting agreed. “We cannot build a party of labor when the working class is in retreat,” he added. The question was how to move forward.

...Velasquez contended pro-Labor Party members should participate in electoral politics, but starting at the local and state levels. But all agreed, as he put it, the Democrats “are not doing us any favors, never have and never will.”

This is Joe Lieberman's nightmare, but the establishment Democrats have been daring the progressive wing to make it come true.

Just look at the recent DNC purge.



In 2016, reporting from The Intercept and the Sunlight Foundation (where I worked at the time) noted that dozens of these superdelegates were registered lobbyists. Many more were “shadow lobbyists,” who advocate on an issue but avoid disclosing this work under lobbying laws.

... The new members-at-large of the Democratic National Committee will vote on party rules and in 2020 will be convention delegates free to vote for a primary candidate of their choice. They include lobbyists for Venezuela’s national petroleum company and for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., according to a list obtained by Bloomberg News.

Two other lobbyists who disclosed corporate clients in their most recent public reports are Clinton White House veteran Harold Ickes and Manuel Ortiz. Ortiz’s clients this year include CITGO Petroleum Corp, owned by the Venezuelan government, and Citigroup Management Corp. Ortiz also lobbies for Puerto Rican interests.

Does this sound like a party of the working class? Or a party that laughs in the face of labor unions?