Monday, April 11, 2011

John Nichols: No Shutdown, But a Lot of Sellouts, Comment

From: Scott Peden
From: laamn@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2011 10:58 PM
 
I was thinking today, about how this stuff happens historically.

Say you're a script writer and have to make a living by selling sequels.

So how often can you sell the opposition party as a 'fall down and run
over me' party, while they whine, even when they have the majority, that
they can't do what the general population elected them to do, that they
need even more before they can supply the basics, where as the minority
party, the OPEN Corporation party, who wins at everything, can do it with a
third the voter support?

So to keep things interesting, you have to let them show a bit of
resistance at times, before they throw themselves in front of the
Freightliner, while screaming, he pushed me!

We already knew that the majority of Dems in Federal Office would sell us
out, while pretending they were powerless, they did that when they had all
the high cards in the deck, they've done this repeatedly since at least 1994
, and folded so the minority could still be in charge. They don't have a
super majority, so the vote Corporationist, insead of Social, as in We the
People, who obviously don't have 20% representation at the Federal level,
anymore.

So how many are still buying what appears to me as a farce, about the Dems
trying to protect planned parenthood and anything else that doesn't resemble
Corporationism?

We've simply got two branches of the Corporate party these days, the
voters can tell the difference between what they want as democrats and
republicans, but both sides get either Neo Con or Tea Party, or what
ever is the popular flavor of the distraction this week.

Scott

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/09-2

No Shutdown, But a Lot of Sellouts

by John Nichols
The Nation: April 9, 2011

If you had asked Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman or John
Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton what
Democrats would defend in a fight over the future of government, there's
no real question that funding for housing, public transportation,
community development programs and safe air travel would be high on the
list.

Yet, in order to achieve the Friday night deal that averted a government
shutdiown -- for a week and, potentially, longer if an anticipated
agreement is cobbled together and agreed to -- all of those programs
took serious hits.

The arrangement worked out Friday night averted the threatened shutdown with
a two-step process. First, the House and Senate passed a one-week spending
bill that addressed the immediate threat. That should give Congress and the
White House time to finalize a fiscal 2011 spending deal -- on which they
have agreed in principle -- before an April 15 deadline.

So who won the standoff? President Obama says the deal is good for the
future, and that might make some Democrats think that he and the
Democrats prevailed.

They didn't.

The one-week spending bill enacted by the House and Senate contains $2
billion in spending cuts to transportation, housing and community
development programs.

A Senate Appropriations Committee review says that most of the $2 billion in
cuts contained in the one-week bill come from a $1.5 billion slashing of the
Federal Railroad Administration' s High Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail
program. More cuts are achieved by hacking $220 million from the Department
of Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Fund. And research
into making air travel safer and more efficient took cuts as well.

In other words, precsiely the sort of programs that Democrats used to
defend were slashed.

The Senate agreed to the one-week plan by unanimous consent.

Seventy House members opposed the bill. Of those 70 "no" votes, 42 came
from Democrats. They did not want a shutdown, as some of the GOP "no"
voters did. But the dissenting Democrats said the cuts went too far.

They were right.

And we will need a lot more FDR Democrats to prevent the broader deal
from becoming the greatest triumph yet in the GOP campaign to end the
New Deal and bend the arc of history against progress.

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate
editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the
media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is co-author with Robert
W. McChesney of The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media
Revolution that Will Begin the World Again and Tragedy & Farce: How the
American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. Nichols
is also author of Dick: The Man Who is President and The Genius of
Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

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