Most of the glowing mainstream media news about California’s Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, and her Congressional Democrats, is centered on their "100 hour" agenda and reforms they intend to implement, including raising the minimum wage, "ethics" reforms to restrict receipt of gifts of travel, and a new "earmarking" reform that would require indentification of the Member of Congress pushing a last minute earmark to fund that highway to nowhere.
But one item the MSM has missed, is research published by the Capital Research Center, that demonstrates that 70 far-left Democrats in the Congress, members of the "Congressional Progressive Caucus," ("CPC") seven of whom will chair powerful committees in the new Congress, will be using a charitable fundraising arm named the "American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation" to raise funds from lobbyists to help them advance anti-war and far left-oriented public policies in the new Congress. Leaders of this effort include California Congressmembers Lynn Woolsey (Marin and Sonoma Counties) and Barbara Lee (Berkeley and Oakland), who are co-chairs of this emerging center of left-wing activism and political power in the new Congress.
The CPC was founded in 1991 by Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders, who was elected to the Congress as an independent, but who has described himself to a Washington Post reporter as a "democratic socialist" as recently as last November. Other members include Congressman Danny Davis of Illinois, who states "I’m a member of the Democratic Socialists of America," along with New York’s Congressman Major Owens, also a CPC member. California CPC members expected to head powerful committees include Pete Stark, as chair of the Ways and Means subcommittee on health; Henry Waxman as chair of the Governmental Reform Commttee, and Maxine Walters, who will chair the housing subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee. According to Capital Research Center, Walters suggested CIA involvement in causing the proliferation of high level of crack cocaine sales in inner cities.
Capital Research Center reports that the chief staff member for the CPC charity is Bill Goold, a former senior AFL-CIO official and staffer for Sanders and Iowa Democrat Senator Tom Harkin. CPC is expected to use the charity for support and research to continue to publish an "Alternate" state of the union agenda that includes calls for high taxes, less capitalism, opposition to U.S. foreign policy, policies to thwart global warming, more affordable housing, strengthening unions, debt relief for poor countries, and bringing troops back from Iraq.
With almost one-third of her Caucus as members of the CPC, and many of them from her own home state of California, Pelosi will surely find herself in support of at least some of the policy objectives of the CPC, if anything to maintain her leadership position. Thus, while the first "100 hours" of her reign may be reflected in a so-called mandate for a higher minimum wage, the spectre of the following 100 hours being focused on, for example, Maxine Walter’s call for hearings on all the CIA cocaine sales in the inner cities, may be something the MSM won’t be missing in future.