Occupy Pelosi's Office

I would like to suggest that the Occupy Wall Street folks, especially the Occupy San Francisco demonstrators, seek to Occupy everything Pelosi.

If there is anything wrong with Congress, it is the idea that they are different from the rest of us. They love to give themselves special privileges. Nothing exemplifies this more than the manner in which Pelosi and her husband accepted an IPO stock deal with Visa and then Pelosi kept legislation for new regulation of the Credit Card industry bottled up, not allowing it to come to a vote in the House while she was Speaker. The current Speaker, John Boehner, is not better.

All you need to know came from Steve Kroft on 60 minutes this week, yet no one seems to pick this up. If it were Boehner, you know the crowd at MSNBC (O'Donnell, Maddow, Shultz) would be all over this were it a Republican Speaker, but Pelosi is the 2nd best fund raiser for the Democrats and that gives her a lot of power.

If Occupy San Francisco wants to be non-partisan, they should go after the powerful and that includes San Francisco's favorite Congresswoman. Maybe CA Greens need to nudge them a bit.

Who killed the Progressive Movement?

Well, I am not sure that the progressive movement is dead… or if it even really existed.  But Princeton's Cornell West is trying to breath life back into it and told Obama so. West's Letter to Obama was broadcast on BBC World News America this week and asks a fundamental question about the focus of Obama's administration."How deep is your love for poor and working people?" 

I think that the events of the last 12 months have shown that there is much which the President can not control, Professor.  Was it Obama's fault that Max Baucus (D-MT) allowed the medical insurance companies write the health care legislation?   Obama saw what happened to the Clintons when they went outside of Congress and wrote their own version of the legislation. 

Determined not to make the same mistake, Obama ended up with an indigestible sausage whose making was all too transparent. We saw just how much the U.S. Senate marches to the tune of corporate protection.  Offered a wide range of health care funding options from many countries with better systems than we have, they chose none of them.

Put aside the problems with health care legislation and try to imagine what will happen to climate change legislation this year.  Once again, we will have legislation written by the very industries whose excess exhalations we need to control. 

So, here is a list of reasons why Obama has not lived up to your hopes, Professor.
Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid…

need I go on?
Pete Stark, CA-13; Dennis Cardoza, CA-18; Jim Costa, CA-20

Beginning to get picture?
Max Bachus,  Evan Bayh,   Richard Dubin, Charles Schumer.

Here is a reminder, Professor.   Change from the top is always about power.  The direction of change must come from the people.  To the extent that we, the people, can rally around a few fundamental ideas, then we might accomplish what you desire.   Place your hope in the people, not the President.

Bail out at 10,000

I tend to be a contrarian when it comes to politics. As for politicians, I am a pessimist and rarely pleasantly surprised. But there is a long list of things that most commentators are not talking about.


I did appreciate the analysis of the House vote offered by Chuck Todd on NBC's Nightly News.
According to Todd,the yes no vote depended on whether the Representative was in a close race, or had one recently. Those is safe districts voted aye. Those facing a challenge listened to their constituency's fears and voted "nae".

Beyond that, if there was a failure of leadership here, I think that started with Nancy Pelosi who could not make up her mind whether to blame everything on the Republicans for the last 50 years, or to urge more bi-partisan work. As usual, her timing was terrible. Cindy Sheehan should be all over this as it is a great opportunity to trash Pelosi.

I don't know whether having Nader in town helps or hurts on that question. He will also trash the plan but the focus will be on Ralph, not Cindy.

Almost every staffer in Washington in working double overtime trying to protect their bosses backside.

When I heard the Republican plan for an mortgage insurance.

House Republicans negotiated a section into the bill that would establish an insurance program for toxic assets. Instead of selling troubled mortgage-backed securities to the Treasury, banks could instead purchase insurance from the Treasury on the assets.

That still leaves the situation without regulation and the lack of regulation is very much what got us into this mess. What makes them think that the industry that found creative ways to leverage the risk will show any more risk aversion with an insurance policy to bail them out. That is even worse than the Paulsen plan.

With all of the fear and uncertainty in the market, someone should be asking the House Republicans, beginning with Mike Pence (IN), what they think about privatizing Social Security. That never made sense to me, even though the long range track of such assets is upward, life circumstances happen when they happen and don't ask permission from the market first. It was a fraud when it was suggested and it is clearly not something that they want to talk about now.

Thanks to Dave Roberts at Grist, I got around to reading Chalmers Johnson at The Nation. It is not normally on my reading list, but this is one of the best commentaries that I have read.

Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on present and future wars that have nothing to do with our national security is simply obscene. And yet Congress has been corrupted by the military-industrial complex into believing that by voting for more defense spending, they are supplying "jobs" for the economy. In fact, they are only diverting scarce resources from the desperately needed rebuilding of the American infrastructure and other crucial spending necessities into utterly wasteful munitions. If we cannot cut back our long-standing, ever-increasing military spending in a major way, then the bankruptcy of the United States is inevitable. As the current Wall Street meltdown has demonstrated, that is no longer an abstract possibility but a growing likelihood. We do not have much time left.

One last thought. My wife was talking to one of her old college friends today. Her friend does not pay much attention to the news. When Rumiko mentioned that the stock market was down 777 points yesterday, that caught her friends attention. "That's terrible. All of my income is from dividends and interest." When anti-capitalist leftist talk about the scuttling the bailout, they need, at the same time, to say exactly what they will do with all of the 401-K plans, the corporate and union pension funds, that just lost as much money as the bailout will cost. That is our money, some of it is my money, and I would hate to see it disappear for lack of intelligent action.

Up Next: The 'NeoPombo' Democrats

This post is dedicated to my friend, Wes Rolley, webmaster of the "Pombo Watch" Web Site (see "MH Man Posts Pombo Watch on Website," Morgan-Hill Times, March 12, 2004).

I couldn't help thinking about Wes and the ordeal of being a Green activist in a polluted society, when I read these opening lines:

Published by the San Francisco Chronicle
Dems' Offshore Drilling Plan Comes With Catch
by Zachary Coile, Tuesday, September 9, 2008

(09-09) 04:00 PDT Washington - Just three years ago Richard Pombo, the cowboy boot-wearing Tracy Republican lawmaker, faced an outcry from Democrats for pushing a bill to lift the 27-year-old ban on drilling off the East and West coasts and let states choose whether to allow oil rigs off their shores.

In a sign of how much the energy debate has shifted in an era of nearly $4-a-gallon gasoline, virtually the same proposal that Pombo floated will be introduced on the House floor this month - by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Nancy Pelosi and the NeoPombo Democrats think they are being "clever" by giving the Republicans something they want now, namely, opening the door to offshore drilling, so they can get something back that the "liberals" supposedly want, repealing tax subsidies for oil companies and requiring electric utilities to get 15% of their energy from renewables by 2020.



Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid, says he'll allow a vote on an energy plan that would allow drilling off the coast of four states - Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia - while also revoking tax breaks for oil companies and offering new incentives for wind and solar, biofuels, coal-to-liquid fuels and nuclear energy.

Notice the inclusion of "clean" coal and nuclear with the other "nice" stuff.

The whole thing is a parliamentary charade anyway because Congress is set to adjourn in less than a month and Our Dear Leader, President Bush, has vowed to veto any bill that raises taxes on the poor, little, trillionaire oil companies.

If, indeed, the GOP gets what it wants -- and end to the ban to offshore drilling -- is anyone here naive enough to bet that the Bush-Cheney-McCain-Palin clique would ever follow through on their half of the bargain? Anyway, by the time to the year 2020, this "compromise" will be long forgotten, we will, of course, be in another "crisis," and everybody will be saying we environmental "extremists" should quit being so "rigid" and let the NeoPombos negotiate a "compromise" with what will then be the "Nuke, Baby, Nuke!" crowd.

Getting it right....er, correct?

I have more than once urged readers to contact their congress critters and request some action regarding a piece of legislation, normally one that was inspired by 19th Century Republicans or Dubya himself. This time, however, I want to turn that around. It is time to contact our President and ask him to veto a bill that passed Congress, one which is making true conservatives and true progressives nauseous just to think about it. I am talking of the current Farm Bill, a pork laden attack on our pocket books and common sense.

Before you do, you should read Carolyn Lockhead's story in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle.

It is the rarest of moments: President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are on a collision course over a giant farm bill, but it is Bush who is broadly aligned with liberal Bay Area activists pushing for reform, while the San Francisco Democrat is protecting billions of dollars in subsidies to the richest farmers.

The rest of Lockhead's story is a text book example of how nothing gets done in Washington for the needs of the people and everything happens in the way that it happens purely for the political advantage of one party or the other. Things are packaged together is such a way as to obscure what is really happening.

Pelosi touted a ban on payments to farm couples earning more than $2 million, 10 times higher than Bush's $200,000 income limit.

At the same time, she backed a 50 percent increase in the actual amount of money each farmer could get. The Senate added a new $3.8 billion "permanent disaster" program to bail out farmers of drought-prone land, intensifying the push to plow fragile prairie.

Probably nothing is as sneaky as putting an increase in food stamp programs in this package of pork and then threatening to blast the President over his treatment of the poor if he dared to veto it. Pure Pelosi playbook.

Pelosi threatened to blast Bush for killing the food-stamp increase if he vetoes the bill, issuing a statement urging Bush to sign the legislation to "ensure that 38 million Americans - especially children - have improved access to basic nutrition."

I have never seen a better reason to vote for Cindy Sheehan, since she is running.

If you want to make your voices heard, there is some possibility through the Conference Committee that is resolving difference between House and Senate Versions. There is a full list here. California members are Dennis Cardoza, Joe Baca and George Miller. All Democrats and all from areas with a vested interest in getting their own pork. It may help to comment on Lockhead's story at the Chronicle.

If you want to send a message to Bush, then I would ask you to call and leave comments. Here are the numbers:

• Comments: 202-456-1111
• Switchboard: 202-456-1414
• FAX: 202-456-2461

One more reason that Pelosi is failing us.

I received the following this AM from the Center for Rural Affairs. I am reproducing the text of this message in it's entirety. It is my view that this is just one more reason that Pelosi is failing not only her district, but then entire country as she triangulates her way through the web of Washington political power.

---

Dear Californians,

Final farm bill funding decisions are being made, and Speaker Pelosi is playing a significant role in the debate. Now is the time for Speaker Pelosi to stand up for $5 billion in new mandatory funding for conservation and environmental priorities in the farm bill.

Will you urge Speaker Pelosi to fight $5 billion in new funding for conservation programs in the farm bill?

The U.S. House and Senate each passed a version of the farm bill that includes $5 billion in new funding for conservation programs. Now conference committee members are negotiating the final bill, and conservation programs are under fire. Speaker Pelosi can step in and ensure that gains made in the House and Senate are not lost in the conference committee.

Programs being targeted for cuts include:

• Conservation Security Program
• Wetlands Reserve Program
• Farmland Protection Program

Speaker Pelosi is playing a critical role in funding decisions for the final bill. Write to her online today and urge her to protect the gains already made.

We are at the last stages of the farm bill debate. Your action today can play an important role in ensuring that the final bill makes conservation and environment a priority.

Thank you!

Speaker Pelosi needs to hear from you today -- she needs to hear that funding conservation programs in the Farm Bill is important to you.

Write Online Today

Or Act by Calling:

Dial (202) 225-4965 and leave this message with the receptionist.

I am a Californian, and I am calling to urge Speaker Pelosi to fight for $5 billion in new mandatory funding for conservation programs in the farm bill.

California's Greenwashed Leaders

I am truly amazed that California's political leadership has so easily donned the mantle of "green" and have been allowed to get away with it without criticism. In fact, Schwarzenegger, Boxer and Pelosi have become the darlings of the environmental movement while selling out the public with flamboyant speech and flawed policies.

The list of examples is long. I will only focus on what they have said and what they have done regarding energy policy. The House of Representatives has just passed the CLEAN Energy Act of 2007 (HR 6). Speaker Pelosi announced this triumph with much rhetorical flamboyancy, calling it the "shot heard round the world" and holding up the baseball with which Bobby Thompson ended the dream of the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers. It was truly an example of major arm twisting by a Speaker who rules with a heavy gavel.

I will admit that some of the bill is moving in the right direction. It does include new Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standards for the first time in many years. It also has major flaws specifically in the manner that it has implemented a Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Pelosi considered that part of it's significant achievements.

MSNBC tempers their reporting of some of the benefits with the following:

"We will send our energy dollars to the Midwest, not the Middle East," countered House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, referring to the bill's emphasis on promoting renewable energy sources, especially ethanol, which would see a sevenfold increase by 2022 to 36 billion gallons a year.

Republican Roscoe Bartlett (MD-06), the most articulate and environmentally responsible Republican in Congress, found RFS to be a fatal flaw in this bill and voted, surprisingly to some, against the bill.

What Pelosi is not saying, but what everyone knowledgeable understands, is that you have to be very careful about the choice of technologies and the food vs. energy issues. Every kernel of corn that goes into ethanol is not going into our food supply where it is the primary food for raising livestock, it is a primary food for dairy cattle, it is a major ingredient in most packaged foods. The result, higher food prices for everyone and no reduction in polluting greenhouse gases. It is too bad we can not legislate away the gaseous content of political speech.

As for Boxer, one need look no further than her refusal to take substantive action against commodity subsidies. I have commented on this before. What I did not do there was to make the case that failure to act on subsidies has major environmental implications. We are facing serious water problems in California. The Federal Government and the California Water Project are subsidizing the water to farmers, subsidizing the electric power costs to pump that water and then we are subsidizing the growing of cotton in the desert with it's large scale need for irrigation. This is practicing environmental stupidity for the slight chance that Boxer will get a few more votes in farm country.

And don't get me started on our "green" governor. He is like the Hulk, green when he has to be. Yes, his efforts to improve the transportation sector are beneficial. But he has ignored the building sector and that uses almost twice as much energy as does transportation. In one situation after another, he has acted as a cheerleader for development, even in the flood plains of our rivers, even when we don't have the water to support it. His proposals for a peripheral canal, necessary in his mind to support continued population growth in So Cal, would be a long term disaster for the delta, for agriculture in that area.

Restore the Delta's most recent (12/03/07) newsletter should be an eyeopener to anyone who thinks that Schwarzenegger really cares about the environment. The conclusion here:

Without a doubt those who are pushing for a peripheral conveyance system are influencing each and every process currently unfolding. Yet, we still do not know how freshwater must pass through the Delta in order for the estuary to have good water quality.

At a time when "green" is the word everywhere, when even Honda declares that they are the "greenest car company in America" we need more than greenwashing. We need better leadership.