I'd take all fifteen of those Democratic CAFTA voters.......

[Wetzelbill]

and send a message. Nancy Pelosi said they may review their committee assignments and so on. I heard she was pissed and she did stand up and talk about accountability. However, I hope she actually does something, not just hold a steering meeting. If it were me, I would take each and every one of those traitors off of their committee assignments. Starting with NY Rep. Greg Meeks who sells out on all of these issues, whether it's CAFTA or the Bankruptcy bill. Make an example out of these fifteen.

I think Pelosi should work with Howard Dean or whoever else and starting working up potential primary challengers to each and every one of them. The message should be, if you want to sell out and undermine our party then you are part of the problem not part of the solution.

I'm sick of these weak, middle-of-the-road, milquetoast Democrats wimping out on everything. One reason we can't get a discernible message is because a small portion of our party is selling everything we believe in up the river. We will forever be a minority party as long as we allow bought off weaklings to be safely in our midst.

I say axe these fuckers.

Start kicking ass and taking names later.

We need to start playing to win.

Now.

[Old_Fart]

1. "Wolves in sheep's clothing"

Do you have a list of all 15 of them?

[Wetzelbill]

5. Right here

Melissa Bean (IL)
Jim Cooper (TN)
Henry Cuellar (TX)
Norm Dicks (WA)
Ruben Hinojosa (TX)
William Jefferson (LA)
Jim Matheson (UT)
Greg Meeks (NY)
Dennis Moore (KS)
Jim Moran (VA)
Solomon Ortiz (TX)
Ike Skelton (MO)
Vic Snyder (AR)
John Tanner (TN)
Ed Towns (NY)

[Old_Fart]

7. Wow

1/4 of the list are from Texas. Seems kind of odd to me :argh:

[Wetzelbill]

9. enough to drive you batty huh?

this stuff really jerks my chain. If only one voted the other way it would have been deadlocked. Pretty much all of them are safe in their districts too. Pathetic.

[Old_Fart]

10. How long have they been in office?

In the back of my mind I keep thinking that the wingers have placed their own in office under our parties name. Another question? Are they the same ones that keep voting along the republican party lines?

[Wetzelbill]

11. I can't say for sure how long they've been in office

but several of them vote this way on economic issues all the time. I think if you click on the link to my blog below, I have a lot of articles in my latest entry - which is the same as this post just with article links - that may say just which ones vote against our party on these big issues. Many of them voted for the Bankruptcy bill among others. If you need more info go ahead and PM me and I'll search it out. I love this stuff, it gets me charged up, lol.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/billwetzel/

[wakeme2008]

12. delay

may have offered them $$$$$ from one of his funds.

[Wetzelbill]

13. he offered something that's for sure

Some Democrats are going to file complaints or are thinking about it because of all the deals offered to vote for this thing. Greg Meeks, one of the traitors, said deals were flying from both sides. As if that justifies being a sellout. But, I'd definitely say you hit it right on.

[Oerdin]

2. It may shock you

But some of us are Democrats who do believe in free trade instead of protectionism and as a secular humanist I want to spread prosparity to our neighbors to the south. In any event Central America is to small with to small of a population to effect us much one way or the other.

[Wetzelbill]

4. the problem isn't that I'm against free trade

It's that CAFTA was written by corporate America.

It destroys jobs in America. It isn't free trade either. There are hundreds of pages in it devoted to protectionist rules and regulations, except they only protect corporate interests. It doesn't help the people of Central America it exploits them because there are no labor, environmental or human rights standards in it. It's a bad bill. I'm all for free trade as long as it's free trade, not a farce subsidized on the backs of American and Central American workers.

[Oerdin]

17. I just got back from Costa Rica last month.

Please realize that Costa Rica is the richest and most developed of the Central American states and even there jobs are scarious and many men sell fruit or cigerettes on the roads sides while the women line up to be hookers because there are no jobs what so ever. They, and I, would consider even low wage jobs to be better then trying to hussle on the streets or selling their bodies to foreign tourists.

The jobs in question are mostly textile jobs which are either gone from America or soon will be gone from America. The end of the textile quota system which the 1st world used up until last year has resulted in a massive 400% surge in Chinese textile output in the last year. Textile factories in Pakistan and Burma are closing because their wages are to high compared to the $0.20 per hour Chinese textile workers get. How well do you think US textile companies can compete against that? These jobs will not stay in America no matter what we do so the question is do we let China have them all or do we try to spread the employment around in a slightly fairer manner?

The deciding factor in my mind is that the Chinese have a merchantilist policy of only using Chinese grown cotton and Chinese made fabric whenever possible while the Latin Americans mostly use American woven fabrics made of American grown cotton. That isn't much but it is more then we'll get from the Chinese plus we'd be developing our own neighborhood and making lives slightly better for people who live close to America. Organized labor has made CAFTA out to be a black eyed demon but they were wrong about NAFTA and they're wrong about CAFTA. There was a time not long ago when being a leftist meant wanting to help your fellow man and not just being a narrow minded nationalist.

[stickdog]

21. Then how do you explain the fact that the only Costa Ricans who

supported this agreement are the same type of corporate whores who voted for it in our US Congress of the elite, by the elite and for the elite?

[Wetzelbill]

22. good then they can put

labor, environmental and human rights regulations in it so I can support it. Until then I will never support exploiting Central American workers. I'm for helping my fellow man. CAFTA doesn't do that and neither did NAFTA. If you think NAFTA worked then your wrong. There is a reason why Central Americans are vehemently and overwhelmingly against CAFTA, NAFTA and any other free trade deals. Neo-Liberalism doesn't work. It subjects them to chains put on by the WTO and the IMF and World Bank. They get their countries opened up, raped and pillaged by foreign investors. It leads to the privatization of utilities and exorbitant price gouging. That's why they have had riots in these countries, Argentina, Bolivia and so on. Because these policies destroy the middle class and only benfit a few. In Argentina, workers were rioting and setting cities on fire because they weren't getting paid by American companies and they had no protections whatsoever. They went 6 months without wages and had their utilities gouged in a way that made the California gouging look mild. This stuff is bad. No protections, no human rights and no conscience. I agree that we need to help people, but exploiting them isn't helping.

[rman]

6. Except that so-called Free Trade is a lie

It means that corporations are pretty much free to do as they please, while workers lose their jobs and their rights.

Free Trade proponents (mainly repubs) are hypocritical wrt protectionism, see the steel tariffs.

Those same proponents see things like Unions and environmental protection as "trade barriers" that have to be removed.

The only thing "Free Trade" has going for it, is that it sounds nice.

U.S. Blocked Release of CAFTA Reports
By Larry Margasak
Associated Press Writer
Published: Jun 29, 2005 1:09 PM EST
http://ap.lancasteronline.com/6/free_trade_studies

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Labor Department worked for more than a year to maintain secrecy for studies that were critical of working conditions in Central America, the region the Bush administration wants in a new trade pact.

The contractor hired by the department in 2002 to conduct the studies has become a major opponent of the administration's proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA.

The government-paid studies concluded that countries proposed for free-trade status have poor working environments and fail to protect workers' rights. The department dismissed the conclusions as inaccurate and biased, according to government and contractor documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

NAFTA's chapter 11

"...gives corporations rights to sue governments in special tribunals, for unlimited compensation for profits lost due to normal governments activities."

"...there have been cases, like "Metalclad".
An American company called "Metalclad" went down to Mexico to build a toxic waste dump on an aquafer; the local supply of water. The government said "no, this goes against our environmental laws".
The people are getting poisoned from the water - what corporation has a right to poison our water? The government passed a law that said "no, you can't operate this thing".
They said "that's to bad, we have rights as a corporation that outweigh your human rights". They sued them for 17.5 million dollars saying it was a barrier to fee trade.
This US corporation takes the Mexican government to a NAFTA court, sues under this chapter eleven, and the ruling is - the Mexican government has to pay millions of dollars in "penalties", for "lost profits" of this corporation."

from the documentary "Trading Freedom" (Indymedia)
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/01/284511.html

also documented at

Berkeley University
http://are.berkeley.edu/courses/EEP131/classpresentations/Metalclad.pdf (PDF)
(turns out the amount in penalties to be payed by the Mexican government was reduced, but "...the judge agreed with the NAFTA panel on the merits that the actions of the Governor constituted expropriation".

New York Law Journal
http://www.clm.com/pubs/pub-990359_1.html

Stop FTAA
http://www.stopftaa.org/article.php?id=37

"NAFTA Chapter 11 Investor-to-State Cases: Bankrupting Democracy"
http://are.berkeley.edu/courses/EEP131/Nafta_Chapter11.pdf (PDF)

Senator Hank Brown (R), Nader and WTO

http://www.amconmag.com/2004_06_21/cover.html

RN: Did you hear about my challenge to Senator Hank Brown?

We put a challenge out before WTO was voted in 1995 because we went all over Capitol Hill and had never found any Member of Congress or a staffer who had ever read the proposal. So I said, “I’ll give $10,000 to the favorite charity of any Member of Congress who will sign an affidavit that he or she has read the WTO agreement and will answer 10 questions in public.”

The deadline passed. Nobody. So I extended it a week. A quarter to 5:00 on Friday, the phone rings in our office. It is Hank Brown, and he said, “I don’t want the $10,000 to charity, but I will take you up on it. How much time do I have?” I said, “Take a month.” So he reserves the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the interrogation.

It gets better. The press is all there, and in the witness chair is Hank Brown. We have 12 questions, and he answers every one. They weren’t all simple either. It was really impressive. And I said, “Thank you very much. That was really commendable,” and we start to get up and he says, “Wait. I have something to say.” He says, “You know, I am a free trader, and I voted for NAFTA, but after reading the WTO agreement, I was so appalled by the anti-democratic provisions that I am going to vote against it and urge everyone else to.”

The next day, almost no press. It shows you the bias against anybody who challenges those multinational systems of autocratic governance that we call “trade agreements.” And he didn’t convince one extra senator.


famous quote:
“Mr. Chairman, distinguished Members of the House Ways and Means Committee, it is indeed a pleasure to testify before a committee of Congress that has read this proposed trade agreement,” and the chair looks up and says, “What makes you think we did?”

[Old_Fart]

15. It might come to a shock to you

If they keep sending out jobs out of this country the only thing that we will have left to trade are animal skins, coal, and anything else that is left over from the Daniel Boone days. We are f*cked!

[cornermouse]

16. If you'd take a little time to look around, you'd see that a large number

of people in Central America didn't want CAFTA either.

[Oerdin]

18. The reason for that is...

Agriculture remains the economic engine of Central America but first world farm subsidies cause world prices to crash and third world farms to go bankrupt. If the US, the EU, and Japan would stop unfairly subsidizing their agricultural goods then you'd find other countries would love the idea of opening markets. Study after study have shown the largest factors in world poverty is 1st world trade restrictions &
agricultural subsidies.

You have to understand that the third world only really has three things to sell: raw materials, agricultural goods, or cheap labor. The rich countries use protectionist measures against their labor forces and use subsidies against their agricultural products while raw materials prices go up and down with the wind. IS it any wonder the third world finds themselves trapped in poverty? By us opening markets and ending unfair subsidies we can greatly speed up economic development around the world and slash global poverty. CAFTA will do at least half of that for Central America while preserving a few jobs in this hemisphere which other wise would have gone to China.

[stickdog]

23. And what did CAFTA do to solve ANYTHING?

All these bullshit corporate trade agreements do is lower wages across the board. That's the whole fucking point of them, and if you can't see that, then it's clearly and simply because you don't want to.

[Wetzelbill]

24. CAFTA makes that stuff worse it doesn't help it

I get your point but, CAFTA is a whore fest. It's simply bad policy with immoral motives, amoral at best.

[Wetzelbill]

28. btw, Welcome to DU Oerdin

Glad you responded to my post and it's nice hearing your views. I hope you like it here.

[lvx35]

3. And they'll say "you are trying to move the democrats to the left"

And that if we "move" too much to the left we will not win. What these assholes need to realize is that the Democratic party is not some big assed tent on wheels that can "move" from one stance to another at will, as they did by supporting CAFTA. For Christ's sake, Kerry last the lost election above all by being called flip flopper, for changing his stance. The party needs to make a stand, and these pansies aren't helping that at all!!!

[Wetzelbill]

8. the problem with the concept of moving too far left

Is we've been riding the middle for at least the last twelve years and it cost us 40 years of majority dominance in the House, plus two presidential elections and nearly every mid-term election in Congress. We keep losing our shirts with these guys. We don't win, because we don't stand firm and fight for what the Democratic party believes in. We let Republicans frame the debate and then guys like Lieberman et.al.... they acquiesce instead of fighting for the right thing. Yeah, you're right, that killed Kerry, we need to quit being weak and trying to be everything to everybody. It loses us elections.

[lvx35]

20. Yeah, Its not rocket science.

Its like being lost in the jungle. There's one guy who says he knows the way back to civilization with complete conviction, pointing to the right. He has no doubts. Then there is another guy who thinks that its to the left, but he's not sure, sometimes he seems to get confused, and agrees with the guy who says its to the right..then he flips back and says its to the left.

Who are you going to trust as your leader?

So we do we keep acting like the second guy when we know the first guy is an idiot?

[stickdog]

25. Because the first guy's pockets are full of blood money. (nt)

[Wetzelbill]

26. hell yeah they are

[Old_Fart]

14. By any chance

Are they the democrats that were held in a room or something like that by Delay? If so $$$$$$$ ;)

[Wetzelbill]

27. yeah, offers were being made definitely

[stickdog]

19. You are 100% right.

Every corporate whore who voted for SHAFTA needs to go down hard.

[DainBramaged]

29. The Thugs got CAFTA,, highway and energy bills passed

filled with pork for themselves this week And we get out maneuvered again with Bolton this weekend.

What the fuck is wrong with OUR party unity? Or is there any?