Today, President Obama and Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner announced a pay cap for executives of companies receiving "exceptional assistance" from the government in the future at $500k. While it resembles the bill that Sen. Claire McCaskill recently introduced that would have capped pay for companies receiving government bailout funds at $400k -- the same salary as the president -- this proposal is hardly an original one. In fact, as David Sirota reminds us, Bernie Sanders back in October was seeking support for his Stop The Greed On Wall St. Act, which would have accomplished much the same thing as McCaskill's. Except, back then, Sanders was marginalized; now that his warnings have proven prescient, his idea has been co-opted. Now, certainly, I would have much preferred that Sanders had been taken seriously at the time and his fellow Senators had signed onto his bill, but let's look at what happened here. President Obama went from opposing executive pay caps, the non-progressive position, to not only supporting them but imposing them. In other words, because of a public outcry, the president moved from the less progressive position to the more progressive position. This is precisely how our movement is supposed to work, isn't it?

Now, Obama's plan is not perfect but is a step in the right direction. And as even he concedes, it is a first step.

The president said the executive-pay limits are a first step, to be followed by the unveiling next week of a sweeping new framework for spending what remains of the $700 billion financial industry bailout that Congress created last year.

As progressive ideas prove to be the prescient and popular ones and as our progressive leaders in congress get more and more media exposure and become less and less marginalized, we are moving in the right direction, toward a place where, ideally, the president won't need to be moved to our position, he will have begun there.

Watch Sanders get the credit he deserves on Rachel Maddow:

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