Nathan, who wouldn’t give his real name out of fear of retaliation, asked his boss if he could start paying the interns. “I didn’t think I was going to get them federal minimum wage — that’s impossible in Washington,” he said. “But at least they could get a stipend.”

His boss refused, without offering much of a case for why they couldn’t afford to pay them.

Sucks to be you, Nathan.  

Nathan’s experience is emblematic of a growing concern on the left: For a movement that wants to reach young people, low-income workers and people of color, progressive organizations and candidates don’t offer many paid opportunities.

For decades, internships, fellowships and paid travel to conferences have acted like a tractor beam, drawing young people into political movements and holding them long enough to become researchers, strategists and candidates. But the funding to support those kinds of programs hasn’t kept up with the economic realities of the young people who today’s progressives are trying to reach.

A hip ideology only goes so far.  Maybe the kids of rich donors who still live off of daddy’s money or a trust fund can do that.  For the rest of these kids, working 80 hours a week and not being able to afford ramen gets old fast.

Progressives aren’t just out of sync with their own need to recruit and retain young people. They’re also lagging behind conservative interests. A 2017 study found that between 2008 and 2014, conservative donors gave three times more to millennial outreach groups than liberal donors. Much of that funding, Thompson says, went to things like paid fellowships, travel stipends and study grants ― creating the feeder system that will guide young people into actual jobs with political campaigns and think tanks.

Those crafty Republicans.  They are paying their interns for their work.  How dare they.  Don’t they know that interns are just little bits of dirt to be abused, used up, and tossed aside?  The only thing they need to keep them going is a steady stream of Lefty pablum and office coffee.

“The Republicans are building an army, while the Democrats are still paying you in ‘making the world a better place,’” said Carlos Vera, the executive director of Pay Our Interns, a watchdog group. “I’ve had older people say to me, ‘Well, I did unpaid internships and I was fine.’ Then you ask them when that was and they say, ‘1972.’ You could work your way through college back then. That simply is not the case anymore.”

Vera makes that sound like the Republicans are cheating.

Though harder to quantify than political donations, it appears that conservatives have built a recruitment, retention and leadership development apparatus that dwarfs that of the left. The Charles Koch Institute has an “associates program” that places young professionals in conservative think tanks and pays an average of $41,000 per year. The Leadership Institute, a conservative youth organization, offers interns free accommodation, free food, an $825-per-month stipend and a $200 “book allowance.

That’s not chump change either.

“We pride ourselves on supporting young people in our ideology, but then we don’t give them any options,” said Maxwell Love, a former president of the U.S. Student Association. He attended several left-wing political trainings as a student, he says, but there were few paid opportunities available. He’s watched many of his peers drift away from politics.

“We’re missing people at their most formative political years,” he said. “I’m blown away by all the people in student government who seemed like they would work in progressive politics and then boom, they’re working at Oracle or they’re a business consultant. I’m not going to blame anyone for doing that, but it means we can’t hold on to talent, especially working-class folks and people of color.”

You mean deep down inside, all those progressive college kids were really capitalists just looking for a hefty payday?

That can’t be.

I guess when you watch party big wigs host $100,000 per plate dinners with celebrities and you are working and unpaid internship and wondering how many means you can get out of a single cup-o-soup, jumping ship to someone with a salary and health care plan gets pretty tempting.

And that’s how we get you.

First we snag you with a salary.  Soon enough we’ve got you on limited goverment and gun rights.

The way this whole article is framed, it sounds like whining.

“It’s not fair that the Republicans are paying their interns and staffers for the work that they do.  Somebody should stop them.”

Except this has been a recurring problem.  From USA Today back in 2015.

Hillary, pay your interns: Column 

Our struggles are devalued as the first world problems of ungrateful children. At what point do the expectations that young people ought be grateful go too far? If we aren’t getting paid, we should be grateful to have the experience. If we don’t get the job, we should be grateful we even got the interview. If we’re passed up for a promotion, we should be grateful we have a job. If we lose our job, we should be grateful we have a spouse or parent who can take care of us. At what point is it actually worse?

It might make me sound like a Stockholm syndrome victim, but after all of this, Hillary is still the best chance we have. If there is to be a better world for my future children, she’s the only hope.

Hillary will get my free vote even if she will never have my free help.

Hillary spend $768 MILLION to lose a national election and she couldn’t pay her low level staffers.

But the best part of the HuffPo article was the comments.

Rowan here has a good point.  The reply by Deborah is nonsensical.  It is progressives and Democrats who are not paying the interns.  The Republicans are.  The Democrats are behind the “Fight for $15” but what is the point if the internship is still listed as unpaid?

This is the worst sort of moral licensing.  “My party wants to raise the minimum wage so we don’t have to pay our low level staffers.”

Deborah is not the only person who thinks this.

“Our movement is a righteous one, so it is morally justifiably if the work is done by slaves.”

Maybe the point of going to college and working an internship is so you don’t spend your life working at minimum wage.  This is the third person who has brought up minimum wage.  It is a pointless, red herring argument.

Really?  So which party is being led by the same geriatric millionaires who have been in office since before I was born?

Also, “sell out” is just “sour grapes” used by failures.

It seems to me that paying interns who are not living on a trust fund is the very definition of caring about people who are not rich.

Getting people who are being “paid in experience” to do the leg work organizing a “Fight for 15” march or to try an sell $325,000 tickets to have dinner with Hillary Clinton and George Clooney is just insulting.

“Join the GOP, we have paychecks” is a hell of a tactic.

No wonder HuffPo and its readers are all shitty about this. It is a winning strategy.