Vichy Democrats: Pelosi and the Politics of Collaboration

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Fri Mar-14-08 11:41 AM
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Vichy Democrats: Pelosi and the Politics of Collaboration

Vichy Democrats: Pelosi and the Politics of Collaboration

By DON SANTINA

Through the power of her office, Speaker Pelosi’s collaboration with the White House Agenda has been both active and passive. For the sake of identification, the White House Agenda can be defined as: aggression overseas, suppression of dissent at home, and the transfer of wealth upward to the richest segment of society.

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Let’s look at the practice of active collaboration through the categories of the White House Agenda. For starters, there’s Speaker Pelosi’s continued funding of undeclared wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the illegal occupation of Haiti, support of the Colombian government’s reign of terror, Israel’s scorched earth policy in Lebanon, and aggressive posturing toward countries like Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. In lockstep with imperial White House policy, Pelosi called the democratically-elected president of Venezuela a “thug” for stating that our questionably-elected president was promoting a “democracy of bombs.”

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Speaker Pelosi actively trumpeted the Bush Administration’s Peru Free Trade Agreement, yet another an offspring of NAFTA. NAFTA, championed by President Clinton and supported by Pelosi in 1993, has become the poster child of the multinational corporations’ eternal quest for cheap non-union labor. In 2002, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that NAFTA had eliminated 879,000 American jobs. It also devastated Mexico by disrupting the work force and dumping subsidized American corn on its markets. The trade agreement passed the House with yes votes from all of the Republicans plus Pelosi and 108 other Vichy Democrats.

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In terms of passive collaboration with the White House Agenda, we encounter the fact that since Speaker Pelosi’s House held hearings on the steroid farce in baseball, Pelosi’s House Can Hold Hearings On Anything. That being the case, not calling for hearings on issues vital to the American public is an act of passive collaboration.

Where are the hearings on Katrina? Where are the hearings on the new American policy of torture? Who was responsible for Abu Graib and the secret prisons around the world? What about warrantless wiretapping and the removal of habeas corpus from the judicial system? No bid contracts to Halliburton, the vice president’s company? Who rigged the 2000 and 2004 Florida and Ohio elections? What about the fact that 35.5 million Americans went hungry in 2006? Why isn’t there an investigation into the predatory lending schemes and bundling that created the mortgage crisis? Bush’s signing statements and the Constitution? Why are the oil companies reaping vast profits while working people pour their pay checks into the gas pumps.

http://counterpunch.com/santina03142008.html">FULL TEXT