Category: Congress

Let’s face it, we’re facing giving the bankster frauds and bosses another trillion (or two or, who knows where it will end). We all know that the Republicans will be happy to give that money to their natural allies, so we have to find a way to stiffen up what spine remains in the Democratic side of the duoparty (those who aren’t members already have shown spine). The question is, how to do this?

A reminder that change may have come to Washington, but it hasn’t made it to Iraq yet.

Iraq Moratorium #19 is only 10 days away, on Friday, Feb. 20.

Here’s one idea for action from United for Peace and Justice:  Schedule a meeting with your members of Congress, who will be home on a recess that week, and ask them to end the war and occupation of Iraq.

Of course you can always protest outside of their offices.  But why not ask for a face-to-face conversation and see what happens?  UFPJ says:

To make sure you can get appointments with your elected officials you need to call now. Go here to find out who your Representative or Senators are and their contact information.  We want members of Congress to know they are getting calls from UFPJ. We want legislators to know that we are connecting the issues of the war and the economy.

There are three messages we want to deliver to the members of Congress.

1) The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan must end! We believe that security will be forged internationally and diplomatically, not by the United States unilaterally occupying nations. Furthermore, the economic crisis has created and exposed tremendous human needs in our own country. Millions are without health care, stable housing, and living wage jobs. The priority of the national treasury must go from a war economy to a peace economy where the winners are all of us, rather than military contractors. A first step in this process must be to stop the funding for these wars! It is critically important that Congress knows the antiwar movement is as strong as ever.

2) It is time to fix our country’s health care system! We encourage you to support HR 676, the Single Payer Health Care bill. Passage of HR 676 would mean that health care is provided by a single source, rather than dozens of private insurance companies making profits. This would be a cheaper way to cover health care costs, as it is all over the world where governments guarantee health care. Health insurance being separated from employment would also help U.S. corporations who cannot compete with international corporations, who do not have to provide employee health care. For more information on this bill go here.

3) We support passage of the Employee Free Choice Act!  This bill allows workers to unionize when a majority of people demonstrates their support for a union representing them by signing union cards. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would result in more workplaces being unionized. With unionization, workers get the benefit of collective bargaining, which results in higher wages. Higher wages means more spending power that boosts the economy; higher wages means families can be supported without every adult working multiple jobs, which leaves little time for families, children, and being an informed citizen. For more information on this bill go to

AFL-CIO site.

Support for both HR 676 and EFCA is a good place to start. UFPJ member groups such as Progressive Democrats of America and US Labor Against the War are already working on them.

Everyone doesn’t live in a town where there is a Congressional office, of course. But you can bring cell phones and contact numbers to your Moratorium event and place calls from there. Keep the heat on.

This idea also ties in with the Raise Hell for Molly Ivins Campaign, which has been urging contact with members of Congress, in their home offices, on the Third Friday of the month and has produced a video with Vietnam vet Ron Kovic to promote it.

But we’re not telling you what to do to mark the Iraq Moratorium.  That’s not our role.  It’s simply to encourage people to do something, individually or collectively, on the Third Friday of the month to end the war and occupation.

Whatever you’re planning, please list it and share your plans with others. Here’s the link.

To see what others are doing, read reports from last month, get some new ideas, read about the peace movement, donate to Iraq Moratorium, buy a T-shirt, or just surf, visit the website/

Steve Burns at the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice asks a very timely question, as Congress takes it sweet time tinkering with a stimulus bill:

What is it the makes Democrats so committed to the Senate rule that allows the minority to tie things in knots?

Remember the "nuclear option" threat by the GOP when Republicans ruled the Senate? The threat, basically, was that if Dems didn't play ball they'd change the rules and eliminate the rule that says you need 60 votes to end debate and pass a bill.

It’s not like it was in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Says Burns:

After Democrats retook the Senate in the 2006, Republicans, now the minority, filibustered frequently, under a tacit agreement with Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid that they would never actually be required to go through exertions of Mr. Smith’s Senator Jefferson Smith. No thermos of hot coffee and wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches for them, Republican leaders merely needed to utter the word “filibuster” and Reid would quickly drop any proposed legislation that didn’t have a guarantee of 60 votes. This exercise became so routine that newspapers began to omit mention of the filibuster entirely, simply reporting that a piece of legislation failed because it didn’t have the “60 votes needed for passage.” An inattentive reader might be forgiven for thinking the Constitution had been quietly amended to require a three-fifths majority for passage of legislation in the Senate.

Why do the two parties have such differing levels of commitment to the filibuster? Republicans, when in the majority, are willing to discard it entirely, and agree to keep it only on the condition that it never be used, while Democrats cling stubbornly to the filibuster, even when it appears to ensure the defeat of their legislative program. Why?

I’ve thought for some time, during the last session of Congress, that Democrats should call the GOP bluff.  Make them actually filibuster.

I’ve been thinking it while watching this charade on the stimulus bill.  If Republicans want to stand up and talk for days to prevent passage of an economic stimulus package, while the economic handbasket careens closer to hell every day, let them do that.

Let the whole country see what they stand for.  Let the voters see that it’s not just Rush Limbaugh who is willing to put everyone at risk for the sake of political payback.

If they want to filibuster, I say bring it on.

It’s time for Dems to quit making nice and up the ante.

But WNPJ's Burns suggests that Harry Reid and others may actually like the rule, and the way it’s applied now, because it gives them a great excuse for inaction or half-assed action:

It places Senate Democrats in the enviable position of enjoying all the perks of being the majority party – like committee chairmanships and an increased ability to bring home the bacon – with none of the responsibilities that would normally accompany majority party status. “Want more money for Head Start? Sorry, we’d just love to do that, but those nasty Republicans won’t let us – the filibuster, you know,” is the standard Democratic refrain.

Read the rest of Burn's excellent piece on the WNPJ blog here.  

In his Inaugural Address, President Obama told the Muslim world, “We seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”  He told leaders around the globe “who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West” that their people will judge them on what they can build, not what they destroy.  He told those “who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, that they are on the wrong side of history, but that “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

It would have been more fitting to target Republicans with that message, Mr. President.  You’ve extended your hand to them, but they will not unclench their fists.  You’re offering a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect, but they will not unclench their fists.  You’ve given them three fucking cabinet positions, but they will not unclench their fists.  Those mouth breathers will never unclench their fists; beating Democrats, liberals, gays, minorities, and the poor and the powerless to a bloody pulp is what they do, it’s hardwired into their lizard brains.

 

Sen. Chuck Schumer wants a more activist federal government.

“You look at just about every policy difference between Obama and McCain,” he said. “Underlying it was a more active government.”

The senior senator from New York is profiled in the January/February 2009 issue of The Atlantic. In “The Man in the Middle“, Joshua Green writes of the November 2008 interviews he had with Sen. Schumer, focusing upon how the senator defines the American middle class and the challenges they face. He believes helping the middle class will be the vital to fixing our country, carrying out President Obama’s policies, and building the Democratic Party.

First, who are middle class Americans?

Sen. Schumer believes that federal programs that target families making the U.S. median household income of $48,000 or below means these programs do not reach middle class. The median-household-income static does not factor, for example, age or geography. Most Democrats, according to the article, see the middle class families as resting in an income range between $60,000 and $100,000.

I have supported Barack Obama, but every time he appoints a rightwinger or a centrist (who are nothing more than rightwingers with apologies IMO) I lose a little hope.

I quote my friend TocqueDeville in DrSteveB’s earlier diary, Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General – worse than I thought:

I see it as a continuation of the same battle (20+ / 0-)

I’ve been having for the last 20 plus years.

If this pans out then it will be just another failed Obama appointment, along with a couple of good ones – maybe.

All of his appointments combined demonstrate what the late professor Carroll Quigley, of Harvard Princeton and Georgetown described about how the American political system is rigged so that we can have a great big election and real power never really changes hands. [emphasis my own ~ OPOL]

by TocqueDeville

The real power never really changes hands.

From The People’s E-mail Network (“The Pen”):

Congress Must Debate The Implications Of A Bush Self-Pardon

Many people have been asking us, “Could Bush actually pardon himself?”.  Would it be despicable?  Sure it would.  Would it be shameless and cowardly?  Yes, that and that too.  But all those adjectives fit Bush like O.J.’s glove before it shrunk from being soaked completely in blood.  Which means he is absolutely is planning on doing it.

And only impeachment could stop it.  We need to talk about this.  We need Congress to talk about this.  And Congress is in session this week, so we need you to speak out this week while there is still time.

Impeach Now Action Page:  

Tens of thousands of you submitted the action page on this last week.  Do it again.  Please speak out again while we still can.  There is already a drum beat in the right wing media calling on Bush to pardon his whole administration.  Only our voices can raise the price of such action so that there would be real consequences.

We have not given up, and will never give up hope on justice.  We will be taking delivery of another huge shipment of the “Impeach Both!!!” caps that are still so popular.  But this might be the last batch.  So if you want to demonstrate your support for impeachment, please request yours now from the return page of the action page submission.

Impeach Now Action Page

Will Congress now act?  That is not the yardstick of the worth of our activism.  We speak out because we must speak out, whether we are heeded or not.  Let history record that we spoke out until the last minute to the eternal shame of those who did not.  Because when enough of us speak out at once, the worst thing that can possibly happen is that we are building the progressive base for the REAL change of the future.

So Bush most certainly is planning on pardoning himself.  And all the right wing lock down ideologues in the corporate controlled media will call it “healing”.  Let’s all make nice with war criminals?  Shall we all make nice with the gang rape of our economy, our environment and our Constitution?  We think not.

And one more thing.  You know that come January 20th the right wing will start calling for the impeachment of our new president, over a endless litany of the most ridiculous of trivial trifles.  In fact it has already started even though he has not even taken office.  If they are so hot on impeaching someone, let them speak out now, when it truly is called for, or shut the hell up in 65 days.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

There’s more!  

Original article, via Ronald Hardy, via Green Party Watch:

Louisiana turned out one of the better showings for Cynthia McKinney on November 4, which may have been due to her embracing of the Reconstruction Platform and strong post-Katrina positions.

On Tuesday voters will go to the polls to participate in what shall undoubtedly be yet another sham election in which the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is determined (but not necessarily by the voters).  Either Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama is going to be dictator, but regardless of who it is come January, we’re still screwed.

This entry assumes Barack Obama shall become dictator Tuesday, but it can just as easily be applied to McCain should he cheat his way into office.

We had our chance to get Obama to listen, but far too many Democrats decided it was better to shut up and get in line behind him rather than force him to adopt left-wing policy positions.  What’s worse, we frittered away our chance to hold Congressional candidates to the proverbial fire.  I think the only way we can shape things is to work toward 2010 by making sure progressive independents and Democrats are elected.

Primary runs are only half the equation.  If they succeed (as they did in states such as Maryland), great, but we also need to have independent candidates ready to challenge recalcitrant Democrats in general elections.  If politicians don’t fear losing the elected seats they hold, they won’t have any incentive to represent their constituents.  I can’t think of a better way to put the fear of electoral loss in right-wing Democrats than the prospect of losing their seats of power to strong independent candidates or, if those persons fail to win, the Republican candidates.

If you haven’t already started locally, and I presume people have done this across the country, I strongly suggest spending the next two years building up to state-level offices.  Pick a local political party that has a record of getting results (e.g Progressives in Vermont and Washington, Greens in California, and so forth), and get disenfranchised progressives to join and organize.  Hold meetings to figure out which members are best suited to run for public office and then pool money to get them on the ballots in your communities.  Candidates should be screened for potential scandals, have records to match their rhetoric, and be able not only to communicate effectively, but seize and maintain control of the discussion.

Do that and you may be able to shape things in time for the 2010 midterm elections.  The time to start is not then, but now, in 2008.  Time’s wasting, so let’s get busy!

Hey! Remember back when Obama was elected and the Democrats swept?

Well, that’s all in the past now. The future lies before us.

What say you? Let’s have the Dems-in-the-DC-Bubble set how that plays out.

Pelosi, Hoyer, Reid, Blue Dogs, … who can doubt that the Dem Leadership is deeply on our side? Who could possibly be more vigorous in protecting the Constitution? In enacting the people’s will? In protecting the people’s interests?

I dunno. Unless it’s the people. ‘Cause come to think of it, the Dem Leadership ain’t been doing that, in the main. Yep, comes down to us people.

So, bearing in mind that “as the twig is bent, so grows the tree”; recognizing that this very day starts the shaping of our future government; how shall we immediately train the emerging government so it bears a beneficient fruit for the people?

Surely, “business-as-usual” among our Electeds has rendered our nation barren, bleak, and endangered. Whatever has been done in the past, can be done no longer. And chief among those things from the past is…

Well, first things first. Let me digress for a moment…

The economic crisis can be summed up in three words TRUST, CREDIT and TERRORISM.  

Banks do not Trust each other so they are not willing to provide Credit to each other. During this economic panic, Paulson used terrorist tactics of threats and fear of economic collapse to coerce Congress to give him Czar like powers over our tax dollars.

Why don’t financial institutions trust each other?  Because for years they have been cooking the books, claiming they have more value than they really do.  So now that things have gotten tight no one is willing to issue Credit to anyone else because no believes what anyone claims they are worth (and rightly so).

From the House Clerk’s Office (the bailout vote):  http://clerk.house.gov/evs/200…