CAFTA and the energy bill
I’m outraged over the House of Representatives’ passage of both CAFTA and the energy bill in the past week.
First, CAFTA. The final vote was 217-215. The first vote, 47 min. before that was 180-175. In that 47 minutes, pro-CAFTA Republican lawmakers scrambled around the floor and out in the hallways to bribe other Reps over to their side. “GOP leaders told their rank and file that if they wanted anything, now was the time to ask…” Yup, this is what democracy looks like in America. Count on CAFTA to extend all the rotten impacts of NAFTA. This really sucks.
Second, the energy bill. I found it tragically ironic that the night I was talking with new people at our latest Portland Peak Oil meeting on the imperative of conservation and preparedness for the future of scarce fossil fuels, the energy bill had just passed - bloated to the gills with oil and gas industry perqs and stripped of even the acknowledgement that climate change exists, much less stipulating any action in facing it. At the last moment, after conference had ended, Tom DeLay went and inserted $1.5 billion in pork. Uncommon Thought has the full scoop here. It’s amazing to me that the vast majority of Americans will have no idea what kind of legislation passed.