Will Al Wynn Get His Comeuppance for His Corporate Fealty?

By Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report. Posted February 9, 2008.

A lifelong Black progressive and a groveling tool of corporate power face off on February 12 -- a test of the power of the people to evict those who subvert their fundamental interest in peace and social justice. "Fat Albert" Wynn, the mis-Representative from Maryland's 4th Congressional District and supplicant to Big Business and nuclear power money, has stooped to describing challenger Donna Edwards and her supporters as a "left wing conspiracy" arrayed against him. But Fat Albert's desperate contortions cannot shake his past, especially his status as one of only four Black Caucus members to support War Powers for George Bush and one of ten who voted for the Republican bill on bankruptcy that has now come home to roost with millions of mortgage holders.

When "Fat Albert" Wynn, the notoriously corrupt congressman of Maryland's 4th district kicked off his re-election campaign seven months ago, he did what everybody else does.  He called in his friends, he leaned on his network.  Wynn brought in his political soul mate, the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council chairman and Fox News commentator Harold Ford, Jr., a Memphis politician so craven that in an appeal for white votes he once denied his own grandmother was Black.  But Harold Ford stood with Al Wynn as one of only four African Americans in Congress to vote for the invasion of Iraq.  Friends are friends.

Al Wynn's network has done a lot for him over the years, and the congressman has more than returned their favors.

When Big Oil, Giant Coal and the nuclear industry, joined by hedge funds and speculators demanding repeal of the laws that kept them from buying utility companies, they showered Congress with $115 million between 2001 and 2005.  In return for his share of the loot, Congressman Al Wynn was one of a minority of Democrats to join Republicans in passing the 2005 Bush Energy Bill.  Wynn voted $6 billion in federal subsidies to his benefactors in Big Oil; he put $9 billion in the Christmas stockings of giant coal companies, he bestowed another $12 billion in corporate welfare on the nuclear power industry, and voted for deregulatory steps that have already cost consumers and utility ratepayers additional tens of billions more in the short term.  But hey, that's what friends are for.

In 2006 and 2007, mammoth phone and cable companies like Time-Warner, AT&T and Verizon invested a few hundred million in congressional campaign contributions to preserve their right to digitally redline black and minority communities nationwide.  Congressman Wynn showed up for his cut, and faithfully repaid his donors by siding with House Republicans to keep broadband scarce and expensive in urban and rural minority communities.

On the eve of the Iraq war in 2003, a Gallup poll showed Black America to be the nation's most solidly antiwar constituency, with opinion running better than 70% opposed to the coming invasion.  But when George Bush needed a large Black exclamation point for his illegal and immoral aggression, Fat Albert Wynn was ready to defy the voters of Maryland's 4th district, in the mostly Black suburbs of Washington, DC.

In return for his share of another hundred million in campaign cash and favors from the banking and credit card industries, Al Wynn voted for Bush's odious 2005 bankruptcy bill, protecting predatory lenders, denying a fresh start to financially strapped families, and exacerbating the impact of the current mortgage meltdown. Wynn is such a loyal friend to the wealthy and powerful that he apes the political manners of Republicans, using staged interviews by fake reporters to field softball questions.

Fat Albert Wynn has worked to make it easier for his wealthy friends to dump ever larger sums of money into the campaign coffers of their favorite politicians. The 527 Reform Act which he co-sponsored with Republican Mike Pence was

"...designed to gut any limits on how much any single individual could contribute to political candidates and parties. As a June 24 Washington Post editorial noted, 'The Pence-Wynn 'reform' would let a single donor give more than $1 million to a single political party each election, not including checks to candidates themselves...'"

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Bruce Dixon is editor of The Black Commentator.

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