4 Amendments & a Funeral & The Courageous Fight...U.S. House of Horrors

[paineinthearse]

Received by email from Sanders for Senate

From: "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>
To: me
Subject: Bernie in Rolling Stone magazine
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 22:14:34 +0000

I wanted to make sure you had a chance to see this very interesting piece, "Four Amendments and a Funeral", in today's "Rolling Stone" by Matt Taibbi, about Bernie and how Congress works-- or more accurately, doesn't work.

Also check out David Sirota's column in "The Huffington Post", "The Courageous Fight Inside the U.S. House of Horrors".

As always, please forward this to others who want to see a real progressive elected to the U.S. Senate.

Thanks.

Phil Fiermonte
Campaign Director
Sanders for Senate
www.bernie.org

The Rolling Stone article:

http://bernie.org/documents/20050810_rolling_stone.asp

Four Amendments & a Funeral

A month inside the house of horrors that is Congress

By MATT TAIBBI
8/10/05, Rolling Stone

It was a fairy-tale political season for George W. Bush, and it seemed like no one in the world noticed. Amid bombs in London, bloodshed in Iraq, a missing blonde in Aruba and a scandal curling up on the doorstep of Karl Rove, Bush's Republican Party quietly celebrated a massacre on Capitol Hill. Two of the most long-awaited legislative wet dreams of the Washington Insiders Club -- an energy bill and a much-delayed highway bill -- breezed into law. One mildly nervous evening was all it took to pass through the House the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for years now a primary strategic focus of the battle-in-Seattle activist scene. And accompanied by scarcely a whimper from the Democratic opposition, a second version of the notorious USA Patriot Act passed triumphantly through both houses of Congress, with most of the law being made permanent this time.

Bush's summer bills were extraordinary pieces of legislation, broad in scope, transparently brazen and audaciously indulgent. They gave an energy industry drowning in the most obscene profits in its history billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks, including $2.9 billion for the coal industry. The highway bill set new standards for monstrous and indefensibly wasteful spending, with Congress allocating $100,000 for a single traffic light in Canoga Park, California, and $223 million for the construction of a bridge linking the mainland an Alaskan island with a population of just fifty.

It was a veritable bonfire of public money, and it raged with all the brilliance of an Alabama book-burning. And what fueled it all were the little details you never heard about. The energy bill alone was 1,724 pages long. By the time the newspapers reduced this Tolstoyan monster to the size of a single headline announcing its passage, only a very few Americans understood that it was an ambitious giveaway to energy interests. But the drama of the legislative process is never in the broad strokes but in the bloody skirmishes and power plays that happen behind the scenes.

To understand the breadth of Bush's summer sweep, you had to watch the hand-fighting at close range. You had to watch opposition gambits die slow deaths in afternoon committee hearings, listen as members fell on their swords in exchange for favors and be there to see hordes of lobbyists rush in to reverse key votes at the last minute. All of these things I did -- with the help of a tour guide. Nobody knows how this place is run," says Rep. Bernie Sanders. "If they did, they'd go nuts." Sanders is a tall, angular man with a messy head of gull-white hair and a circa-1977 set of big-framed eyeglasses. Minus the austere congressional office, you might mistake him for a physics professor or a journalist of the Jimmy Breslin school.

more......

& the Huffington Post article

http://bernie.org/documents/20050810_huffington.asp

ROLLING STONE EXPOSE: The Courageous Fight Inside the U.S. House of Horrors

By David Sirota
8/10/05, The Huffington Post

Rolling Stone magazine today released an absolutely awesome and epic 8,000 word piece that sheds light on how Congress really works - or doesn't work - these days. The narrative follows four bipartisan amendments authored by Vermont's Independent Congressman Bernie Sanders (a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2006) who the writer notes "is the amendment king of the current House of Representatives." That's right - "since the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, no other lawmaker -- not Tom DeLay, not Nancy Pelosi -- has passed more roll-call amendments than Bernie Sanders."

The magazine takes us on a one-month journey in which Sanders almost passed four separate amendments. We get an up-close and nauseating view of how Congress - which purports to be a democracy - now resembles a corrupt third world politburo. Only instead of an authoritarian ideological dictatorship running the place, it is Big Money that calls the shots on every issue.

What is particularly interesting is how these amendments actually passed by wide margins when they were brought to a vote. Yet, because the Republican leadership has hardwired ways to kill even the most well-supported bills, these amendments were ultimately stripped out behind closed doors. Consider this excerpt about just one of Sanders' bills - legislation to prevent the American government from giving taxpayer subsidies to a British-owned company to transfer nuclear technology to China:

"The Ex-Im loan was a policy so dumb and violently opposed to American interests that lawmakers who voted for it had serious trouble coming up with a plausible excuse for approving it. In essence, the U.S. was giving $5 billion to a state-subsidized British utility (Westinghouse is a subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels) to build up the infrastructure of our biggest trade competitor, along the way sharing advanced nuclear technology with a Chinese conglomerate that had, in the past, shared nuclear know-how with Iran and Pakistan."

more......

Yes, we will carry Vermont on our way to control of the Congress!

[paineinthearse]

1. I've been advised this is better suited in another forum

If you are the one who gave it a nomination (or if you are not), it can be seen in GDP at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2002641

[jarab]

2. Locking -

Thanks. See the author's link.