"Stunning piece" on WaPo biz section

David Sirota of The Huffington Post was shocked at reading a column in Thursday’s Washington Post business section by Steve Pearlstein about Democrats on Wall Street.

Sirota wrote, “A stunning piece by Washington Post business reporter Steve Pearlstein today shows that the real agenda of these Big Money insiders is to pretend to care about stagnating wages, slashed pensions, and job outsourcing – but not actually be willing to attack the ‘free’ trade policies that are causing those hardships. Pearlstein notes the nefariousness of it all, after attending a conference by the so-called ‘Hamilton Project’ – the group of Wall-Street-backed Washington, D.C. Democratic insiders working to crush unions, limit citizens legal rights and, of course, perpetuate our corporate-written trade policy:

“The problem is that, when you scratch the surface, the free-trade members of the Democratic establishment turn out to be more committed to Part A of the formula, more globalization, than they are to Part B, making sure the benefits from globalization are widely shared. For them, it’s really not a package deal. And if push comes to shove, which it always does in trade politics, they’d welcome more globalization even without the compensatory social policies. How do I know this? Because they said so. At the conference’s closing session, I asked former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and former deputy Treasury secretary Roger Altman if any of them would be willing to support the idea of a ‘time out’ on new free-trade initiatives until there was some tangible progress toward greater economic security for U.S. workers. To a man, they recoiled at the idea.”

“Pearlstein describes the powerful moment America finds itself in – we have enough economic power to actually create a race to the top, instead of fueling a race to the bottom. But only if our government actually starts representing ordinary citizens, rather than Big Money.”

Read more here.