Congress, worried that the war on Iraq might actually end one day, has turned its attention to funding the war on the environment. This week the House acquiescently passed the auto companies’ bailout — or as we are supposed to call it, “bridge loan” – memories already dimmed of the auto execs’ flying to D.C. in private jets last month. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/11/… The only reason the auto giants are not getting a check on Monday is that the Republicans in the Senate have since voted against the bill.

But, like the unpleasant memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Democrats’ memories seem to have been erased, and we heard nary a peep about all the times the car companies have sued and testified and spent a lot of energy to defeat any government limits on their planetary destruction. California has been especially affected by their litigiousness, as the state has tried to lead the way with progressive standards to curb auto emissions. In fact, the auto companies are in litigation against California right now. State Attorney General Jerry Brown asked Congress to place a very reasonable restriction on the bridge loan: that California and other states be ensured the authority to set auto emissions standards at the California level, which would make the lawsuit against the California government groundless. http://ag.ca.gov/newsalerts/re…

This is not a minor lawsuit that the attorney general’s office doesn’t have to devote many resources to — it’s a monster lawsuit in which 21 car companies have joined forces, and that definitely includes the Big Three who have had their hands out: GM, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler. (And don’t rest too easy on the Prius good vibes; Toyota is part of it, too.) It sure seems that if car companies are going broke  after years of Machiavellian scheming to stave off fuel efficiency — as depicted in the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? — then the very least their sugar daddy should require is that they don’t waste millions on a lawsuit to avoid having to follow the law. If the bailout is altruistic and intended to help the ‘little people’, then the California government should not be having to spend money to defend the right to enforce its own laws when clinics and schools are hurting for funds and people are losing their homes.

GM is one of the companies claiming to be on the verge of bankruptcy right now, and they figure prominently in Who Killed the Electric Car, as they aggressively remove their own electric cars from the road, hide them, and then physically crush the vehicles for fear that people might actually buy them. After finalizing auto bailout legislation for the Senate on Weds., Senator Chris Dodd (the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs) issued a public statement: “I wish that these companies had not gotten themselves into this situation.” Yes, and we also wish that they had not gotten us and the planet into this situation, Senator. http://banking.senate.gov/publ…  Is that the best you can do? Reward them for it?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can never remember that she herself actually is a California representative, under the impression instead that she’s Head Chauffeur at the ranch in Crawford, so maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that she came out in the forefront announcing the need for this particular handout. It wasn’t Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Bush didn’t have to pre-empt prime time; she was the mouthpiece. Since the White House has threatened to nix the auto bailout if there’s any tough love in it, and Pelosi seems to think the White House is doing us a favor, she decided not to rock the boat. Now that the Republicans in the Senate have refused to fall in line, she’s whining to Politico.com about the Senate vote: “To have just 32 Republicans, you think, ‘Why don’t we write our own bill?'” In short, she’s disappointed that Democrats’ sacrifices weren’t appreciated.

I think we’re all scratching our heads wondering why you didn’t write your own bill, Congresswoman, instead of passing a bill for the White House’s tastes. This is the White House which, amidst so many other offences it’s almost impossible to keep track, directed the EPA to oppose California’s emissions law in the first place. Because California was proposing tougher restrictions than the feds, the state needed a waiver to bypass the federal law, and the EPA refused, even though 17 other states wanted to follow the same standards. The Bush White House’s environmental policy, in short, is to actively violate states’ rights in order to aid the oil and auto companies in their quest to pollute. (One would think the purpose of the waiver requirement was to grant some allowances to states having trouble meeting strict environmental standards, not to stop them from protecting the environment.) Bush’s EPA has strenuously fought to do everything possible to enhance global warming, even against a Supreme Court ruling that put the P back in EPA. With all of this back and forth motored, if you will, by the auto companies, you would think Pelosi would be concerned, especially since fellow Northern Californian Barbara Boxer, Chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, publicly demanded that EPA head Stephen Johnson resign back in July, and also requested U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey begin a Dept. of Justice perjury investigation against him. http://epw.senate.gov/public/i…

Instead, Pelosi’s complaint to Politico about the Republicans’ obstruction of the auto bailout bill highlighted how she tried to accommodate the White House. It’s Dec. 12, 2008, and she’s still under the impression that bending over backwards for the least popular president anyone can recall is a virtue! Will somebody please tell her there’s a Democratic majority in both houses? About to be replaced after the holidays by an even larger Democratic majority in both houses? Oh yes, and I think the new president is a Democrat, too?

But it gets better. The other anti-environment White House proviso to which Pelosi buckled under is that the auto company rescue be paid for from a fund to build greener cars.

I’m not kidding.

Not only was Pelosi fine with giving money to an industry that considers one of its business expenses a protracted lawsuit against California taxpayers, but she is actually letting the White House plead poverty now (though they never did when demanding that Congress fund the war, reward reckless Wall Street operatives, or cut rich people’s taxes). But now all of a sudden it’s necessary to raid the fund set aside to produce cars that are more environmentally friendly. Granted, Pelosi initially “resisted using” the green fund, ABC News reports,

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/sto…

and I’m sure she’ll be the first to mention that when asked about it (unless she’s able to avoid answering the question.) https://calitics.com/showDi…

However, afraid that she wouldn’t get the job as Silverware Burnisher at Bush’s new home in “whites-only” Dallas suburb Preston Hollow, she “changed her mind under White House pressure.” http://cbs11tv.com/local/bush….

Not to criticize ABC News (not about this story, anyway), but they could have just borrowed their reporting from any report filed about Congress during the last two years: Isn’t “Pelosi resisted but changed her mind under White House pressure” always the theme? I think we could add a word to the dictionary: PELOSI, v.: “to initially resist and then change one’s mind under White House pressure.” We could install a Commemorative Barometer at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and name it “the Pelosi”, so its reading can change with White House pressure in perpetuity. In years to come, any political history scholar who is able to find a single instance during the Bush Administration when Pelosi did not “change her mind under White House pressure” will automatically become famous.

By contrast, Jerry Brown showed what bold, creative leadership actually looks like shortly after being elected state attorney general by launching a lawsuit against the car companies for contributing to global warming. A judge dismissed the suit, but you don’t have to win every struggle to make the attempt worthwhile. The pro-war crowd certainly believes in the nobility of fighting to the finish on the battlefield. (The Democratic ‘leaders’ in Congress, whose arguments against the Iraq War were based on what they thought would make the smoothest sound bites, argued only that we were losing, not that the war is immoral or illegal, thus allowing the ‘fighting against the odds’ mentality to perpetuate the war.) And now the Republicans in the Senate have just shown an astonishing ability to make a stand — only 10 of them voting for the auto bailout – even against their own President.

It seems as if, were it not for the Republicans, the next thing we’ll see is Big Tobacco asking for a handout, complaining that the cost of damaging public health has really put a crimp in their style.

*

If you don’t want to leave the environment up to another Republican filibuster, I suggest contacting your representatives and telling them the lawsuit against California law and the use of the green cars fund are deal-breakers.

www.house.gov

www.senate.gov

I spent the night of Aug. 11th in jail in South L.A. because Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t want to read Vincent Bugliosi’s book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Or she didn’t want to be seen accepting it, because then she couldn’t feign ignorance. She had stated on ABC’s The View just a couple of weeks before “If somebody had a crime that the President had committed, that would be a different story”, so I waited in line at her book-signing (for her ironically-titled memoir Know Your Power) and gently laid former L.A. District Attorney Bugliosi’s book on the table in front of her. But as soon as I tried to tell her – very politely – that it proved how Bush had committed the crime of fraud by taking us to war on a “false premise” (the two words she herself has used), her smile dropped, she turned from me, and I was instantly surrounded by shouting secret service, police, and security guards. Do I think her desire to hide in an opaque bubble justifies my being arrested and placed in custody for 13 hours? I sure don’t, and though my charges were dropped, oh, how I’ve considered moving back to the Bay Area to vote for her opponent, Independent candidate Cindy Sheehan.

With a fraction of Pelosi’s formal power, Sheehan challenged Bush a hundred times more powerfully. Sheehan confronted him overtly, camped outside his ranch during his 5-week vacation. Contrast that with Pelosi, who’s on video laughing at Bush’s correspondents’ dinner joke-slideshow about vanished WMDs, even though she claims she knew the intel didn’t support the war. Pelosi has also repeatedly re-funded the war while muttering “Let’s hope this is the last time”; she has put up with the White House obstructing congress and sneering at subpoenas while wishing that Bush would be “more co-operative”; and she was ready to fork over $700 billion with just a little bit of griping – unaware that others in her party actually listen to their constituents and didn’t immediately want to come along. When it comes to knowing her power, Pelosi seems to be mainly aware of the power she can wield against those who would seek to impeach — she even intervened in an effort in L.A. City Council to pass a  purely symbolic resolution for impeachment, I’m told by one of the councilmembers. Her team’s insistence throughout her book tour this summer on shielding her from citizens’ questions as well as from pieces of paper citizens might want to hand to her — the staff at the L.A. book-signing even rifled through the books people held in line “to make sure there are no pictures” — is certainly a display of power.

http://www.democrats.com/pelosi-arrests-citizens-who-challenge-her

And since the stories from activists who tried to approach her at her alleged meet-and-greet book-signings all over America tell of similar strict and aggressive barriers, it sure seems like deliberate policy. (Moreover, the L.A. venue that co-operated with her in this, the American Jewish University, doesn’t seem to mind Vincent Bugliosi’s book when she’s not around. He is giving a talk on The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder there this month.) She won’t even respond to questions from Cindy Sheehan’s campaign about why she won’t debate her opponent.

http://www.fogcityjournal.com/wordpress/2008/10/31/speaker-pelosi-heckled-during-press-confernceasked-why-she-refuses-to-debate-opponents/

It’s much like what happens when voters call Pelosi’s office — we’re cut off as soon as we reveal we have an issue to weigh in on, and we’re directed to the black hole of voicemail.

Contrast this with the accessibility, the passion for democracy and the respect for the Constitution, that we’ve seen from Cindy Sheehan. Sheehan, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominee in 2005, has been much more than a traveling keynote speaker for peace, though she has done that extensively despite much harassment. She has also shown bravery by frequently risking arrest, and true leadership by creating “Camp Casey” and by co-founding, for bereaved military parents, Gold Star Families for Peace. She has also gone on diplomatic missions to over 13 countries, for which she was recognized by congress and the Canadian, Scottish, and South Korean governments.

The trigger for Sheehan’s decision to run against Pelosi came in July 2007 when Bush commuted convicted Cheney aide “Scooter” Libby’s prison sentence. Sheehan labeled Bush’s act “treason”. By contrast, the Speaker, with the power of impeachment in the palm of her hand, merely wagged her finger. Pelosi’s refusal to impeach Bush, Cheney, or others has not only betrayed Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson, or other high-profile insiders like Richard Clarke and Paul O’Neill, but has betrayed the sacrifices of many other valiant whistleblowers who risked career, reputation, and freedom to bring Bush crimes to light.

People like Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., who exposed the neocon intel distortion; Sgt. Joe Darby, who broke the Abu Ghraib story and faced death threats; Matthew Diaz, Geneva Convention-defender who got a 6-month sentence for sending the names of 551 Guantanamo detainees to a human rights group; Stephen Heller, who warned of Diebold’s plan to skirt the law in California voting machines and got 3 years probation and a $10,000 fine; Bunnatine Greenhouse, who exposed Pentagon favoring of Halliburton and was demoted; Rick Plitz, who resigned as a government scientist over the alteration of research papers on climate change; Mark Klein, telecom whistleblower; and Sibel Edmonds, who is under a gag order to keep from telling what she knows, which she hints includes spying on Congress.

How great it would be if the first woman Speaker didn’t go down in history for doing her job so badly that she allowed a dictatorial president to hold the country hostage. But she was handed her mission in Nov. 2006 and chose not to accept it. Instead of stopping the war, repealing the Patriot Act, curbing global warming, protecting our privacy, ensuring the integrity of elections or passing other important legislation  – despite her frequent claim legislative “priorities” left no time for impeachment – she seems to have been principally devoted to letting things get as bad as possible so a Democrat would win. But if Obama makes it through the rampant election fraud we’re already seeing, and does try to reverse the radical right-wing damage to the country of the last eight years without Congress first clearing up the matter of how criminal it all was, he’s going to have a hell of a battle. And he’s going to need a much stronger ally in the House. Voting for Sheehan in San Francisco would mean the House could choose a replacement for Pelosi as their leader — Kucinich is my personal favorite, of course, but I’m not picky.

California’s 8th district has the chance to vote for a feminist who is pro-labor and anti-corporate, who will push for assistance for people losing their homes, increased regulation for key industries, and the repeal of No Child Left Behind; who will advocate for civil liberties, immigrant rights, gay rights, single-payer health care, a national energy system, a mass transit system, fair trade, free higher education, and an end to jailing millions of non-violent offenders. Or if they don’t like any of that, they could just stick with Pelosi.

But I’m all in favor of giving Madame Speaker a nice long vacation so she can read that Bugliosi book.