MB Civic

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101906R.shtml

This is a must read – lots to digest. Here are some highlights:

…When bills do make it to the floor for a vote, the debate generally resembles what one House aide calls “preordained Kabuki.” Republican leaders in the Bush era have mastered a new congressional innovation: the one-vote victory. Rather than seeking broad consensus, the leadership cooks up some hideously expensive, favor-laden boondoggle and then scales it back bit by bit. Once they’re in striking range, they send the fucker to the floor and beat in the brains of the fence-sitters with threats and favors until enough members cave in and pass the damn thing. It is, in essence, a legislative microcosm of the electoral strategy that Karl Rove has employed to such devastating effect.

A classic example was the vote for the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the union-smashing, free-trade monstrosity passed in 2005. As has often been the case in the past six years, the vote was held late at night, away from the prying eyes of the public, who might be horrified by what they see. Thanks to such tactics, the 109th is known as the “Dracula” Congress: Twenty bills have been brought to a vote between midnight and 7 a.m…

…Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont comments on this rush to torture during the final, frenzied debate. “Over 200 years of jurisprudence in this country,” Leahy pleads, “and following an hour of debate, we get rid of it?”

Yawns, chatter, a few sets of rolling eyes – yeah, whatever, Pat. An hour later, the torture bill is law. Two hours after that, the diminutive chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Sen. Ted Stevens, reads off the summary of the military-spending bill to a mostly empty hall; since the members all need their sleep and most have left early, the “debate” on the biggest spending bill of the year is conducted before a largely phantom audience.

“Mr. President,” Stevens begins, eyeing the few members present. “There are only four days left in the fiscal year. The 2007 defense appropriations conference report must be signed into law by the president before Saturday at midnight….”

Watching Ted Stevens spend half a trillion dollars is like watching a junkie pull a belt around his biceps with his teeth. You get the sense he could do it just as fast in the dark. When he finishes his summary – $436 billion in defense spending, including $70 billion for the Iraq “emergency” – he fucks off and leaves the hall. A few minutes later, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma – one of the so-called honest Republicans who has clashed with his own party’s leadership on spending issues – appears in the hall and whines to the empty room about all the lavish pork projects and sheer unadulterated waste jammed into the bill. But aside from a bored-looking John Cornyn of Texas, who is acting as president pro tempore, and a couple of giggling, suit-clad pages, there is no one in the hall to listen to him…

…It took forty-two presidents before George W. Bush to borrow $1 trillion; under Bush, Congress has more than doubled that number in six years. And more often than not, we are borrowing from countries the sane among us would prefer not to be indebted to: The US shells out $77 billion a year in interest to foreign creditors, including payment on the $300 billion we currently owe China.

What do they spend that money on? In the age of Jack Abramoff, that is an ugly question to even contemplate. But let’s take just one bill, the so-called energy bill, a big, hairy, favor-laden bitch of a law that started out as the wet dream of Dick Cheney’s energy task force and spent four long years leaving grease-tracks on every set of palms in the Capitol before finally becoming law in 2005…

…Even worse, this may well be the first Congress ever to lose control of the government’s finances. For the past six years, it has essentially been writing checks without keeping an eye on its balance. When you do that, unpleasant notices eventually start appearing in the mail. In 2003, the inspector general of the Defense Department reported to Congress that the military’s financial-management systems did not comply with “generally accepted accounting principles” and that the department “cannot currently provide adequate evidence supporting various material amounts on the financial statements.”

Translation: The Defense Department can no longer account for its money. “It essentially can’t be audited,” says Wheeler, the former congressional staffer. “And nobody did anything about it. That’s the job of Congress, but they don’t care anymore.”

So not only does Congress not care what intelligence was used to get into the war, what the plan was supposed to be once we got there, what goes on in military prisons in Iraq and elsewhere, how military contracts are being given away and to whom – it doesn’t even give a shit what happens to the half-trillion bucks it throws at the military every year…

…Anyone who wants to get a feel for the kinds of beasts that have been roaming the grounds of the congressional zoo in the past six years need only look at the deranged, handwritten letter that convicted bribe-taker and GOP ex-congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham recently sent from prison to Marcus Stern, the reporter who helped bust him. In it, Cunningham – who was convicted last year of taking $2.4 million in cash, rugs, furniture and jewelry from a defense contractor called MZM – bitches out Stern in the broken, half-literate penmanship of a six-year-old put in time-out.

“Each time you print it hurts my family And now I have lost them Along with Everything I have worked for during my 64 years of life,” Cunningham wrote. “I am human not an Animal to keep whiping [sic]. I made some decissions [sic] Ill be sorry for the rest of my life.”

The amazing thing about Cunningham’s letter is not his utter lack of remorse, or his insistence on blaming defense contractor Mitchell Wade for ratting him out (“90% of what has happed [sic] is Wade,” he writes), but his frantic, almost epic battle with the English language. It is clear that the same Congress that put a drooling child-chaser like Mark Foley in charge of a House caucus on child exploitation also named Cunningham, a man who can barely write his own name in the ground with a stick, to a similarly appropriate position. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Human Intelligence Analysis and Counterintelligence:

“As truth will come out and you will find out how liablest [sic] you have & will be. Not once did you list the positives. Education Man of the Year … hospital funding, jobs, Hiway [sic] funding, border security, Megans law my bill, Tuna Dolfin [sic] my bill … and every time you wanted an expert on the wars who did you call. No Marcus you write About how I died.”

How liablest you have & will be? What the fuck does that even mean? This guy sat on the Appropriations Committee for years – no wonder Congress couldn’t pass any spending bills!…

Lots to laugh at and be disturbed by at the same time. This shit is deeply, deeply disfunctional. – MAB