In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Stop the looting
My friend Doug gets the same Move On pleas that I do, but he rewrites them with even more passion and sends them along to his friends with hopes that people will respond. Here's his latest message. Please do act. It is important.
The White House is now asking Congress to hastily approve one of the biggest spending bills ever - 820 billion dollars. Naturally, the White House is also cutting lots of last-minute, backroom deals, doing favors for their friends who run huge corporations, at our expense. These last‑minute giveaways include:
- Rolling back rules requiring that people be paid for overtime. Eight million hard-working families count on these fair compensation rules.
- Allowing media giants to monopolize even more local media outlets than before. Companies like Fox that have bought more outlets than current law allows would now be allowed to keep them. In fact, this bill raises the limit just the amount that Fox needs.
Please join me in calling on Congress to stop this bill, at:
moveon.org/looting/
Two beefs:
- Many of the bill's worst provisions have been inserted at the last minute by top Republican negotiators. The final bill, more than 400 pages long, was first shared with Democrats the day they were leaving for Thanksgiving (25 Nov.), in an attempt to force an immediate vote, sight unseen. Instead, Congress is returning for a special session next week. The House is expected to vote on it on Monday, 8 December. The Senate is being asked to approve it on Tuesday the 9th. But as Senator Harry Reid (D‑NV) said, "A legislator would have to have rocks in their head to agree to something they haven't yet read."
I couldn't agree more, especially when you consider that majorities in both houses of Congress have already rejected both the media ownership change and the overtime rollback. Now, guess what - they're back.
- Process aside, the spending itself is also outrageous. It's part of a long pattern of President Bush spending billions of our tax dollars to reward his friends and campaign contributors, a pattern the Nobel prize-winning economist George Akerlof has described as "a form of looting."
This fiscal irresponsibility must stop. If this irks you too, there's something you can do in three minutes flat. Please join me in calling on Congress to stop it, at:
moveon.org/looting/
Thanks Doug and Move On!
The hero again this hour is Senator Byrd:
Byrd to Block Omnibus Funding Bill
"Instead of sending 13 fiscally responsible appropriations bills to the president, we are being force-fed a bad piece of legislation dictated to the Congress by the Bush administration," Byrd said. "This is no way to govern. This is no way to serve the American people."
After a bipartisan start to negotiations on the bill, Republicans "took a balanced package and at the eleventh hour insisted on changes that were never considered when the individual bills passed the House and Senate," Byrd said. As examples, Byrd cited the elimination of provisions overturning regulatory and administration actions on overtime pay and the outsourcing of federal work to the private sector.
This doesn't end it though, so please go to: moveon.org/looting/
- rob 4:08 PM - [PermaLink] -
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