OK, let me say I thought Pelosi was pretty great on her first day as second in the line of presidential succession. She was succinct, composed, unwilling to retract her harsh descriptions of Bushian ineptitude, and clear that proper governance forward cannot occur without at least some hearings on past executive misconduct.
And yes, passing some kind of minimum wage increase is a good place to start, even an inevitable place to start given the "New Direction" pledge the top Democrats made avant the voting--and given the huge boost given to minimum wage politics by six state ballot measures Tuesday. So now: a minimum wage hike, some kind of health care fix, and somehow shortcircuiting the worst of the Bush tax cuts. Brava. A good starter kit.
But this is not a kit that will really blunt the Walmartization of the U.S. labor market or begin to take down the back-dating bond-trading hedge-funding IPO-floating vultures who can't quite seem to grasp the meaning of the common Anglo-Saxon word "enough."
Very much like Iraq, the soaring of the vultures is an issue that is sure to try the souls of newly-empowered Democrats. This is so because theirs is a party burdened not only with its own LieberClinton dead enders on Iraq and the Middle East but also a party whose economic thinking is now dominated is by overpaid winner-take-all types. Proto-populist election-time rhetoric aside, it's Wall Street and not Main Street that steers the DNC.
Here's a little test of how serious the Democrats will be about siding with working people and small proprietors: will they shut down the "Paulson Committee," as it's called? Will they stop the Sarbanes-Oxley wrecking crew whose proper title is the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation? This unofficial panel of "concerned private citizens," spurred on by Treasury's Henry Paulson, wants to block shareholder suits against corporations that defraud shareholders and also block state attorneys general like Eliot Spitzer from suing corporate defendants in securities cases. They want to let accounting firms off the liability hook when they do what Arthur Andersen did for Enron, namely collude in cooking the books. They want to gut Sarbanes-Oxley on the grounds that its rules are unduly burdensome despite all the evidence to the contrary of record corporate profits, an efflorescence of new IPOs, burgeoning executive pay, and the continuing open scandal of backdated stock options.
My prediction is that the Democrats won't do a thing to shut down Paulson's operation unless the people who this week turned thumbs down on the Republican culture of corruption are helped to understand how much deeper than Abramoff and DeLay the corruption actually goes, i.e. understand that those guys were bit players compared to the Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley types now pushing to eviscerate Sarbanes-Oxley.
A few of the new Democrats swept into power--Sherrod Brown comes to mind--do understand the challenge posed by powerful plutocrats within. The question is whether we can build a movement that keeps on voting until the deeper corruption is extinguished and until the lives of working people are no longer offered as carrion to vultures.