U.S. Big Business is going all out to protect a favoured government agency, the 80-year-old Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im), from a full-fledged assault by the populist “Tea Party” wing of the Republican Party.

At stake is Congressional re-authorisation of the Bank, which provides loans, guarantees, and credit insurance to foreign buyers of U.S. exports. Last year, it approved nearly 4,000 such transactions with a record estimated value of 37.4 billion dollars in exports.“I think the business community is getting a little bit of a wake-up call because they’ve been thinking that Republicans are their friends on everything, and it just turns out that ideology is trumping pragmatism.” -- Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen

While the re-authorisation should easily pass the Senate, where it is supported by the majority Democrats and many, if not most, Republicans, the problem lies in the Republican-led House of Representatives, which has increasingly become a Tea Party stronghold.

Business groups were stunned over the weekend when the incoming House Majority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, announced he would oppose re-authorisation despite his two-decade-long record of supporting it.

When House Speaker John Boehner declined to take a position either pro or con, top executives of the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) went into overdrive on Capitol Hill.

“With Americans overwhelmingly focused on the need to create jobs and grow our economy, business owners are understandably perplexed by the inside-the-(Washington-)Beltway campaign against the Ex-Im Bank,” said Chamber president Thomas Donohue, in releasing a letter signed by more than 800 companies and industry associations in support of the re-authorisation.

Still, Tea Party advocates and lawmakers are not giving any ground. At a hearing on the Bank Wednesday, the chairman of the House Financial Services subcommittee, Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, charged that its programmes amounted to “corporate welfare” designed to benefit “some of the largest, richest, most politically connected corporations in the world.”

The battle has emerged as the latest focus of a persistent – and some say growing — split within the party between what is often referred to as “Wall Street” and “Main Street.”

Indeed, the Tea Party was born and energised by what its constituents viewed as the government’s giants “bail-outs” – under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — of Wall Street banks and other huge corporations following the Sep 2008 financial crisis.

The more-establishment and populist wing of the Republican Party have also clashed over immigration, fiscal, trade, and education policies. Consisting of both social conservatives and anti-government libertarians, the Tea Party – to the degree it has maintained any ideological coherence — has generally tried to move the Republican leadership to the far right.

While its forces have suffered a number of setbacks this spring during Republican primary elections for Congress, the surprise defeat earlier this month of Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who favoured slightly more-mainstream immigration and fiscal policies – by an obscure and poorly financed Tea Party challenger shocked Washington insiders.

The insurgent candidate, a college economics professor named Dave Brat, campaigned on an anti-government platform that strongly opposed liberalising immigration laws and what he called “crony capitalist programmes that benefit the rich and powerful.”

So strengthened were Tea Party forces within the House Republican caucus by Brat’s victory that many Capitol Hill observers credited it with McCarthy’s surprising reversal on Ex-Im funding. His change of heart appears to have been a condition for his election by key caucus members to succeed Cantor as Majority Leader.

Created in the early days of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal”, Ex-Im has survived and prospered under Republican and Democratic presidents alike. This, despite complaints from the right that its operations amounted to government interference in the free market and, from the left, that the Bank’s support for exporters amount to “corporate welfare”, a phrase ironically adopted by then-Sen. Barack Obama to describe the Bank when he ran for president in 2008.

As originally conceived, its mission has been to create jobs at home by financing sales of U.S. exports to buyers overseas. Over the years, it has become a model for similar institutions, called export credit agencies (ECAs), established by dozens of other major exporting nations.

In recent decades, its single biggest beneficiary by far has been the Boeing Co., the giant Chicago-based aerospace firm, which has long depended on Ex-Im’s support in its competition with Europe’s Aerobus Industries. Other major beneficiaries include Caterpillar, General Electric, and Bechtel.

While much of the Bank’s opposition in the past has come from Democrats who, like Obama in 2008, described it as a corporate giveaway, the party’s lawmakers voted for it unanimously two years ago and still support it, as does the Obama administration which has made boosting U.S. exports a top priority since taking office.

The country’s biggest labour union federation, the AFL-CIO, has also strongly supported re-authorisation.

While left-wing criticism is now virtually non-existent, the Bank has long been a target for Tea Party adherents, whose mobilisation played a critical role in giving Republicans their majority in the House since the 2010 Congressional elections.

In 2012, they tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to kill the agency, arguing that the subsidies and other help provided by the Bank to U.S. exporters makes them “less and less competitive in the global market,” as their then-champion in the Senate, Jim DeMint, contended at the time.

DeMint, now head of the far-right Heritage Foundation, has, along with the Club for Growth, spearheaded the current campaign against re-authorisation.

The campaign gained more traction this week with the revelation by the Wall Street Journal that four Bank staff members have been suspended or removed amidst investigations into reported kickbacks.

But the major business groups are fighting back hard, arguing that U.S. companies would be placed at a severe disadvantage in competing for business abroad if the re-authorisation wasn’t approved.

“Failure to reauthorize Ex-Im would amount to unilateral disarmament in the face of other governments’ far more aggressive export credit programs, which have provided their own exporters with an estimated one trillion dollars in financing support in recent years,” according to the letter signed by the business organisations.

“Export credit agencies in China, France, Germany, Brazil, and Korea have provided significantly more support for their exporters than Ex-Im has provided to U.S. exporters – in some cases, more than seven times what Ex-Im Bank has provided on an annual basis.”

Most observers here believe that the Bank will be eventually be re-authorised, as the Chamber and NAM mobilise endorsements from small and medium-sized companies which have benefited from its largesse. That could include reducing the amounts Ex-Im can lend to foreign companies and limiting its authority to aid companies owned by foreign governments.

Democrats, meanwhile, are clearly enjoying this latest battle between the Tea Party and the business community.

“This is a perfect example of ideology run amok,” noted Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a rising star in the party, said Wednesday of the Tea Party’s campaign against the Bank. “I think the business community is getting a little bit of a wake-up call because they’ve been thinking that Republicans are their friends on everything, and it just turns out that ideology is trumping pragmatism.”

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Oct 31 2013 (Columnist Service)

Much has been written about U.S. brinkmanship with default, but the clear lesson that can be drawn from this unprecedented situation is that a lunatic fringe can block democracy.

Lawmakers belonging to the Tea Party movement, who forced the Republican Party to enter a war without fall-back positions, are not worried about their re-election.

The redrafting of electoral districts is now heavily in favour of incumbents, and makes electoral colleges safe for the large majority of senators in the seven states where Republicans had complete control over the redrafting process.

Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency. Credit: IPS

Republican Party candidates to the House of Representatives in the 2012 elections received 16.7 million votes while Democratic Party candidates received 16.4 million votes. The redistricting resulted in Republican victories in 73 of the 107 seats concerned.

The radical right wing enjoys a far superior electoral machine, financed by the two billionaire brothers Koch, who are intent to wipe out moderate Republicans, to get rid of President Barack Obama and the state, and restore a world where the American dream will again be possible.

That American dream is gone, and the U.S. political fabric is in tatters. At every election, the number of white voters declines by two percent, making it probable that the next president will be a Democrat and the Congress Republican, because of the district electoral system.

The Founding Fathers of the U.S. established a system of checks and balances between the legislative, executive and judiciary arms of the state, but they could not foresee the birth of the Tea Party movement. And they could not foresee that the judiciary (the Supreme Court) would become deeply politicised and give way to uncontrolled funding from corporations and billionaires, fundamentally altering democracy.

Of course, the Republican Party has taken a good beating, and perhaps the Tea Party movement is a passing fad. But, contrary to a myth running in the Left, crisis tends to reinforce the Right.

The Tea Party movement, therefore, is a signal of the crisis of the U.S., which is coming to realise that it no longer has an exceptional destiny, and that it is slipping from its position as the sole world power.

Social inequality is growing fast (every day there are 3,000 new poor), unemployment has become chronic, and there is ample depiction of a “new economy” in which labour would become minimal and finance would provide the economic lift. Gone is the dream that, by working hard, you can become a millionaire.

Insecurity and fear play a powerful role in the ascendancy of the Tea Party movement as a grassroots, anti-establishment, anti-globalisation, anti-state and anti-immigrant movement. But this is not just a U.S. phenomenon; it is happening all over the West, where populism is on the rise.

In Europe, there was also a dream: a decent job, a stable life, access to education and healthcare, and political stability. That dream is now vanishing as austerity and dismantlement of welfare are becoming a vicious circle everywhere, with the partial exception of Germany.

The young are the most visible victims of this “new economy” and the sense of insecurity and fear is feeding the counterparts of the Tea Party movement.

Every crisis needs its scapegoats; today, they are immigrants and, in particular, the Roma, or gypsies. Economists agree that Europe needs at least 20 million new people to remain competitive internationally.

U.N. and European Union studies universally converge on the fact that immigrants take jobs that locals do not want, that they stimulate demand and improve economic performance, and that only by having more people than provided for by a negative birth rate can the pension system of an ageing population remain viable.

Yet, no government is making any attempt to educate its citizen about this reality. On the contrary, there is a general tendency to restrict immigration.

The simple fact is that, as a recent Financial Times survey showed, Europeans have lost their sense of solidarity. A total of 71 percent of those interviewed wanted their government to eliminate social benefits given to other European Union citizens living in their country.

Asked if they would vote for an anti-European party, 19 percent answered yes. This means that, with a probable low turnout, the result of next year’s European elections will be a dysfunctional European parliament – and this will provide the ground for common space among all the populist parties.

Will the traditional parties be able to stop this phenomenon? No more than the Republicans in the U.S. have been able to ignore the Tea Party movement. On the contrary, the trend is to erode the platform of those parties.

The problem is that the 13 progressive parties in power (out of the 28 countries of the European Union) are all following more or less the same strategy and, of course, people will prefer to vote for the original rather than the copy, as the polls indicate.

Centre-left parties are in serious crisis, reducing the social safety system, dismantling hospitals and affordable education, and applying austerity measures. The lack of economic growth eliminates redistribution and neoliberal globalisation continues to exert downward pressure on wages and working conditions, while the demographics of ageing societies with a shrinking young workforce make welfare benefits and pensions harder to sustain.

In all this, the statistics on growing social inequality are staggering. According to the London School of Economics, we will have returned to the times of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) within 20 years, wiping out a long period of social progress.

Populism was the ground from which Adolf Hitler sprang, and social injustice the ground from which Vladimir Lenin came. History does not repeat itself, but it will be interesting to see how a new solution will turn out for well-known old problems … hopefully without the blood and tears that humankind has shed since the days of Queen Victoria.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
MANASSAS, Virginia, U.S. , Oct 28 2013 (Columnist Service)

Political terrorism failed. The House Republicans used voting in one chamber to put the livelihoods of millions of people inside and outside the U.S. at risk, for their own political goals. And made the mistake of most terrorists, non-state or state: when people suffer they will join us, against our enemy; to find out that people turn against the terrorists instead.

And they were not a small group of Tea Party extremists but a clear majority of the House Republicans: 144 voted No in the end, only 87 Yes.

President Barack Obama has himself to thank for the general House Republican majority; having betrayed most groups voting for him in 2008 he was punished in the 2010 mid-term elections. Like the Republicans will be in 2014 for their political terrorism.

Johan Galtung

The budget deal postponed the government shutdown to Jan. 15 and the U.S. default to Feb. 7, solving nothing.

Worse, there was much reporting but few ideas floating in the media. Worse still, there was no massive million “Stop this Nonsense” March on Congress, but widespread apathy. Worst: the most clearly outspoken group was veterans and reserve officers (1.1 million strong) – indicative of a major threat should their Nov. 1 paychecks not arrive.

The two blocs hardly talk, but treat each other like they treat the Taliban. Terrorists are punished by not being listened to – a bad thing when the Republicans have arguments. The Health Care Act may not be affordable, there may be a coverage gap, etc.; work remains to be done.

There are solutions for a country as resourceful as the U.S. The government shutdown is about the federal budget deficit. Do as households do: decrease the expenditure, increase the income.

Three major parts of the federal budget are loan interest, the military, and Social Security-Medicare-Medicaid – all enormous.

The three giants are in a NATO vs Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) arms race; joint military terrorism putting humanity at risk. How about the U.S. making a deal with the Chinese and the Russians? Chinese forgiveness of 50 percent of the U.S. debt against a 50 percent U.S. reduction of the most offensive military components – the 800 bases around the world – over 5-10 years?

Accompanied by a similar multilateral and balanced reduction in offensive arms in all three, building on the Russian chemical arms momentum?

Social Security: let everybody at an older age who wants to work do so. More tax revenue, less expenditure.

Medicare-Medicaid: create a more healthy population. The decrease in smoking, mainly thanks to the U.S., was a great step forward. Next in line: sodas. Selling and serving sodas should become as illegitimate as smoking in public; much more to gain than from outlawing marijuana.

The debt ceiling is a deeper problem, affecting an economy that does not produce a surplus sufficient to run a modern society with an acceptable livelihood for all of its citizens. A sixth or even a fifth of the population lives in misery.

A source of much new income, at the individual, family, local community, state and federal levels. Politically difficult, but economically simple: lift the bottom up. Identify the poorest local communities, give short-term credit to cooperatives for growing and selling cheap, organic food, build affordable housing, and provide simple polyclinics for the common diseases.

Employing the neediest. Make people fend for themselves rather than depend on taxation. Like any small business, they need some initial credit; unlike small businesses they need the protection of cooperative production and consumption.

Learn from positive experiences in Spain; Mondragon, Marinaleda: a small investment in people marginalised by the mainstream economy, and they (re-)enter and become consumers and producers.

Reduce suffering, decrease inequality, and make the real economy grow; three huge flies with one huge stroke. Is the U.S. up to it?

The U.S. economy is strong on goods – with decreasing unit costs due to high resource-labour-capital-technical-administration efficiency – but weak on services, with skyrocketing costs in education, health and old age care.

Credits are needed, but not from money banks: from time banks with people exchanging services on a one hour = one hour basis.

The U.S. real economy is weak today relative to the Wall Street finance economy – and Washington bail-out rather than stimulus – using money to make more money, directly, not via cumbersome investments; in seconds, not in years, at tremendous risk; with more 2008’s lining up. Stop it.

Remedy No. 1: The five or six financial behemoths are too big to use. To stop feeding them money is like stopping to serve alcohol to an alcoholic. Let thousands of local saving banks grow for people to put their savings in, not risking that they will be used for betting, but for local investment.

Remedy No. 2: A much overdue one percent sales tax on the stock exchange.

Remedy No. 3: Outlaw money trafficking, like trafficking in drugs and women.

No such items on the table by January-February, only small-scale budget bickering and the Chinese approach comes up: de-Americanise the world economy. A “world reserve currency” – the dollar – from just one country is madness anyhow; from a country with cyclical shutdowns and ceilings – like the U.S.- it is insanity.

Strong leadership has to emerge from the White House and Congress, but especially from people – the local level, local banks and businesses. The future is above all in their hands.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Three days into the partial shutdown of the federal government, foreign policy mavens are voicing growing concern about the closure’s impact on U.S. credibility overseas.

“This sends a message to allies that they’re somewhat on their own,” according to Richard Haass, a former senior diplomat and president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the New York-based think tank which has long been considered the leading institution of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

“It sends a message to adversaries, or would-be adversaries, that you’ve got a more unpredictable America,” he said in an interview featured on the CFR’s website in which he noted that the timing of the budgetary crisis, “coming on the heels of what happened and didn’t happen around Syria …reinforces the sense of American unpredictability.”

“Imagine if you had grown up anywhere else and knew America only from a distance,” sighed David Rothkopf, CEO of foreignpolicy.com in a long, woeful essay. “You may have heard of the country that led its allies to victories in two world wars. Or you may have heard of a country that was a Cold War adversary, an imperialist manipulator, a source of aid, a bully, but nonetheless a source of strength.

“Whatever the America you imagined,” he went on, “it was almost certainly not the one you see via the headlines today, a laughingstock a subject of scorn, and the inspiration not for hopes as before, but for such doubts as have never existed before.”

The immediate cause of this teeth-gnashing, of course, was the manoeuvre by a minority of Republicans in the House of Representatives associated with the extreme right-wing “Tea Party” movement – and the refusal thus far by the party’s leadership to rein them in — to hold hostage the funding of the federal government to their demands to delay or repeal a major health-care law, sometimes called “Obamacare”, approved by Congress three years ago.

The immediate result is that nearly a million “non-essential” federal workers are being furloughed pending passage of a “continuing resolution” that funds the government.

Among other things, that means the country’s national parks and museums are closed, while administrative and support services for most federal agencies, ranging from those that provide poor families with supplemental food allowances to others that work on national security, are severely short-staffed.

While active-duty members of the military are not affected, many of the Pentagon’s civilian employees have been sent home. Nearly three out of four of the vast intelligence community’s civilian workforce have also been furloughed, the director of national intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, told Congress Wednesday, prompting the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chair, Dianne Feinstein to call the shutdown “the biggest gift that we could possibly give our enemies.”

In strictly foreign-policy terms, the budget impasse is already having an impact. The State Department announced Wednesday that some U.S. contributions to U.N. and other international organisations, as well as peacekeeping operations, have been suspended. Similarly, the disbursement of funds used to buy military equipment and training for U.S. allies, including Israel, will be delayed.

The crisis is also disrupting the administration’s much-touted strategic “pivot” toward Asia.

The White House announced Wednesday that Malaysia and the Philippines – whose growing tensions with China over conflicting territorial claims in the South China Sea have given Washington a major opening – will be dropped from President Barack Obama’s scheduled trip to Southeast Asia next week. Just 12 hours later, it cancelled the rest of his trip – to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bali, Indonesia, and the East Asia Summit in Brunei – and sent Secretary of State John Kerry in his place.

That marks the third time in as many years that domestic problems have prevented presidential visits to Asia.

“The U.S. government shutdown and President Obama’s decision to truncate his trip to Asia will not change facts on the ground overnight,” according to Michael Mazza, an Asia specialist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), writing on the ‘National Interest’ website Thursday before the surviving two legs of the trip were cancelled.

“They will, however, reinforce two related narratives that have gained purchase in the region: that the pivot is a slogan more than a policy and that the United States is becoming the ‘paper tiger’ that Mao Zedong once described. Those narratives may not be accurate, but in the realm of geopolitics, perceptions matter.”

While the shutdown is already disrupting normal government operations, and particularly the lives of the “non-essential” and their families, of greater concern is the possibility that the ongoing stand-off could continue through Oct. 17, the date on which, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the federal government will run out of cash, possibly sending the country into default for the first time in its history.

“In the event that a debt limit impasse were to lead to a default, it could have a catastrophic effect on not just financial markets, but also on job creation, consumer spending and economic growth,” according to a Treasury report issued Thursday, which said the impact “could last for more than a generation.”

That concern was echoed a few blocks away by the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde. “The government shutdown is bad enough, but failure to raise the debt ceiling would be far worse, and could very seriously damage not only the U.S. economy, but the entire global economy,” she warned.

Just the fact that such a possibility looms larger each day the shutdown continues is harming Washington’s credibility as a “great power”, according to the CFR’s Haass.

“We’ve reached the point now where the greatest threat to our national security, for the immediate and the foreseeable future, is not some other country or organisation; it’s increasingly our own political dysfunction,” he said.

That assessment was echoed in part by Rothkopf who put the “great lion’s share” of the blame for the current crisis on the Republican Party that most observers now see as increasingly incoherent and hostage to its most radical elements.

The “watching world doesn’t see the details…. How can they think anything but that this is a political system in extremis, a country likely in decline?” he asked, complaining of an absence of leadership on virtually every level, including the administration’s and Congress’ recent fumbling over whether to take military action against Syria.

Indeed, the current budget impasse and the great risks it carries if it continues too long should be instructive to those hawks who have long identified Washington’s “credibility” overseas with its readiness to use military force, according to Micah Zenko, a senior CFR fellow.

“For those who claimed that attacking Syria with cruise missiles was required to maintain U.S. credibility in the eyes of Iran’s Supreme Leader, doesn’t Capitol Hill’s behaviour over the past week do more to demonstrate America’s incompetence?” he noted this week on the cfr.org site.

“If the foundations of functioning governance are impossible at home, shouldn’t U.S. allies question America’s commitments to their security thousands of miles away?”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

All signs are pointing to a more polarised, less moderate U.S. Congress in the near future.

These include some of the recent Congressional primary elections in states throughout the U.S.; the retirement of longtime senator Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican from Maine; and the decline of the Blue Dog Coalition of centrist Democrats.

A recent book, “The Last Great Senate” by Ira Shapiro, reminisces about decades past such as the 1970s and 1980s where Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate seemed better able to work together for the good of the country.

“The pattern that has been present since the 1930s where you had a big conservative element in the Democratic Party and a big moderate element in the Republican Party, those days are pretty well gone,” Randall Strahan, a professor of political science at Emory University, told IPS.

Now, “the parties are more consistent in their programmatic and ideological views. It’s unrealistic to think any time in the near future partisan conflict will go away,” he said.

But Strahan argues that it is not entirely a bad thing.

“Some people say partisan conflict turns off voters. The evidence is just the opposite; hotly contested politics turns out voters. It (polarisation) clarifies choices for voters. When you have a Democratic Party all over the map, conservative segregationists in the South and liberals in the North, it’s very ambiguous when you vote for a Democrat what that means,” he said.

In fact, a highly polarised U.S. Congress has been typical throughout U.S. history, with the last several decades of moderation as the anomaly, Strahan said.

The conservative Tea Party celebrated last month when Thomas Massie, a Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for U.S. House in Kentucky, won the Republican primary there. He is expected to win in November’s general election.

Massie was backed by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican with libertarian ideology, also from Kentucky, who is attempting to strengthen the Tea Party Caucus. Rand Paul is the son of Representative Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican who has served Texas in the U.S. House for decades and ran for president multiple times. Rep. Paul is retiring this year.

Currently, there are four U.S. senators and 62 U.S. House members who are part of the Tea Party Caucus, including Senator Paul, as well as Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Mike Lee of Utah, and Jerry Moran of Kansas, all Republicans.

Another Tea Party-backed candidate, Richard Murdoch, created a big upset last month when he defeated Senator Richard Lugar, a moderate Republican from Indiana.

Murdoch may have a difficult time winning in the general election. He faces U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly, a Democrat from Indiana, this November, and the polls are currently tied.

On the left, progressive Democrats have made a some inroads by defeating moderate Democratic incumbents.

In late April 2012, Matt Cartwright and Rep. Mark Critz of Pennsylvania, progressive Democrats, defeated Tim Holden and Rep. Jason Altmire, centrist Democrats, respectively.

But progressive Democrats have not done well in all their races this year. State Senator Eric Griego, a progressive Democrat from New Mexico who had received the support of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, lost to a centrist Democrat earlier this week.

And U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a progressive Democrat from Ohio who made multiple runs for president of the U.S., was ousted from his Congressional seat by a moderate Democrat, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, in March. They had been redistricted to run against each other this year.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) currently has 73 voting U.S. House members, two non-voting House embers, and one U.S. senator, Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont.

The CPC is likely to gain senators this year, as CPC members U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii are both running for open Senate seats.

The Progressive Caucus and Tea Party Caucus are currently about the same size.

However, the once powerful Blue Dog Coalition (BDC), a group of centrist Democrats in the U.S. House, is seeing its members dwindling.

The Blue Dog Coalition’s membership was nearly cut in half in the 2010 election, in which 28 out of 54 members were defeated or chose not to run again.

The group’s membership is now down to 27 with the resignation of Rep. Jane Harman, a centrist Democrat from California. Rep. Janice Hahn was elected to fill the vacancy, and Hahn is now a member of the CPC.

Several of the remaining BDC members have said they will not run again; others, like Atmire and Holden, have already been defeated in Primaries.

Meanwhile, Rep. John Barrow of Georgia, the last remaining white Democrat in the U.S. south, and a BDC moderate, has been targeted for defeat by Republicans this year.

David Swanson, an activist who has supported numerous progressive candidates for Congress in the past, says that while he sees increasing polarisation in the legislature, overall, he believes Congress is moving to the right.

“I buy the right-warding of Congress, not necessarily the left-warding of Congress,” Swanson told IPS.

“I’m thrilled to have Rand Paul putting locks on measures that would start wars with Iran, regardless of what ideologies that’s coming from,” he added.

“You see a handful of liberals taking positions against wars and presidential power abuses, but not enough to make a real difference,” he said.

And he said that, despite partisan gridlock on many issues such as the federal budget, he sees Congress largely working together.

“When it comes to increasing military spending every goddamn year, enlarged war powers, letting presidents make lists of who they want to murder, sanctions on Iran… refusing to raise the minimum wage or protect the rights to organise or clean out the money and undo Citizens United, there’s pretty large bipartisan agreement,” he said.

The landmark and controversial Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission overturned longstanding election finance laws and permitted unlimited spending by corporations in elections.