Sen. Levin,I think I'm a little impatient with him in light of a big lie he told about Iraq a few years back, that made it look like Democrats were knowingly complicit in the corporate looting of Iraq.
I appreciate the oversight hearings the Democrats have been doing since winning in November, but they are failing abysmally to do the two things Democrats want most: remove Bush & Cheney, and end the war in Iraq. Not only have you failed to take meaningful action on either of those two, you even failed to effectively block or even protest much their plans to invade Iran.
Frankly, you guys seem to take opinions and welfare of average Americans about as seriously as you do designating a national butterfly. You give us non-binding resolutions and empty platitudes. But when defense and oil companies come knocking, you hand out hundreds of billions of dollars and spill oceans of American and Iraqi blood.
If the Democrats want my money, they have to do more than just screw me 3% less than the GOP.
Love,
The Michigan senator, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a frequent visitor to Iraq, said that one of the few points on which the main Iraqi ethnic and sectarian political groups agree was that all want U.S. forces to remain in the country. The Bush administration should use that consensus to forge political compromise, Levin argued.
http://whatiraqiswant.blogspot.com
KEY EXCERPTS:RELATED ARTICLE
VOTE ALERT: Chamber of Commerce Pushes Lieberman Bill to Gut Sanders H-1B Bill
Here are a few excerpts of the [Chamber of Commerce] letter:It’s really unbelievable how shameless people are in Washington - it is a city where its just AOK to oppose legislation that would prevent abuse of the H-1B program by corporate executives who want to use it to lay off American workers and hire lower-paid foreign workers. And I’m still amazed (though I know I shouldn’t be) that Lieberman is carrying the bill to gut this commonsense proposal. His corruption is now just so out there for everyone to see, bringing him down to a new level of shamelessness. He’s pushing the poison pill as a pretty clear payback to the Chamber for the massive ad buy the organization did for him during his tough-fought re-election race. Here’s the New Haven Register’s details on that from 9/9/06:“On behalf of the United States Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation of more than three million businesses of every size, sector, and region, I urge you to oppose the Sanders-Grassley amendment ... Also, the Chamber urges you to support a side-by-side offered by Senator Lieberman. The Sanders-Grassley amendment is unnecessary…Further, this amendment sweeps too broadly, and is completely unworkable, as it would effectively bar an employer from using H-1B workers if it had a ‘mass layoff’ in the past year or anticipated one in the near future.”“The U.S. Chamber of Commerce ran an ad from Sept. 1-7 for Lieberman, part of a $10 million national campaign to back candidates responsive to business interests who are in competitive races…Geoff O’Hara, executive director for the Eastern Region of the chamber, cited the senator’s votes on free trade legislation, transportation funding, bankruptcy reform and class-action legal reform as particularly important to them.”
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Iraqi politicians have passed a resolution requiring the government to seek parliamentary permission before asking the UN to extend the mandate for US-led forces in Iraq.From Alternet.org:
The measure was approved on Tuesday and reflects a growing disenchantment with the US-backed government.
The Sadrist-drafted resolution passed with a vote of 85 to 59.
The members of parliament voted along party lines, with Sunnis joining the bloc loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shia leader, and another Shia party at odds with the leadership.
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...lawmakers reached in Baghdad today said that they do in fact plan on blocking the extension of the coalition's mandate when it comes up for renewal six months from now.Associated Press story on voteReached today by phone in Baghdad, Nassar al Rubaie, the head of Al-Sadr bloc in Iraq's Council of Representatives, said, "This new binding resolution will prevent the government from renewing the U.N. mandate without the parliament's permission. They'll need to come back to us by the end of the year, and we will definitely refuse to extend the U.N. mandate without conditions." Rubaie added: "There will be no such a thing as a blank check for renewing the U.N. mandate anymore, any renewal will be attached to a timetable for a complete withdrawal."
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posted June 1, 2007 (web only)
Hillary's Political Horror Story
Nicholas von Hoffman
Slowly, very slowly, Hillary Clinton's vote to invade Iraq is turning into a political horror story. It is the moldering hand of a murder victim coming out of the grave to grab her by the ankle.
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She may be concerned that a retraction will make her look weak. So her line of defense has been, "My vote was a sincere vote based on the facts and assurances that I had at the time." She says it over and over again.
The facts she had and the facts she could have had before she cast her vote for the war are two different things. We learn that from an article in The New York Times Magazine by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.
These two, who have made a career out of investigating Hillary, have dug up a couple of facts the Senator is going to have a hard time ignoring. The big fact is that she had access at the time to a highly classified report, the National Intelligence Estimate, which contained authoritative doubts that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Gerth and Van Natta have established that she did not read this report. Because it was classified, senators wishing to read it had to sign in, and Hillary did not. Although one of her Democratic colleagues, Bob Graham, then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged Hillary and all the other Democratic senators to read it, few did. Graham, however, read the ninety-page document and was so shaken by the questionable evidence for the existence of WMDs that he voted against going to war.
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Editorial
June 3, 2007, 6:59PM
Oily Law
Protesters from Iraq draw attention to a law they fear will give control of their oil to foreign investors.
On Tuesday Iraqi oil union leaders will protest in Washington outside the offices of a consulting firm called BearingPoint. A contingent from the 26,000-member union of oil workers is on a 14-city tour to bring to the American people a heartfelt plea: Please separate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq from the passage of an oil law by the Iraqi Parliament.
With Congress pushing for benchmarks, the Bush administration has been pressing Parliament to pass the oil law. Administration and media focus has been on the provision that states that oil and gas in Iraq are owned by all its people in all regions and governorates. Unfortunately, the law does not stipulate how to fairly distribute oil revenues. Distribution of the nation's vast oil reserves is vastly unequal, and there is no system of mineral rights, which weren't needed under Iraq's national oil company.
This familiar controversy is not the source of outrage for the visiting union members. Their fear centers around the provisions in the 33-page law that have received little scrutiny in the media. They say the law forces privatization of the Iraqi oil industry, an industry that is responsible for almost 70 percent of the gross domestic product.
The nation's five trade unions, representing hundreds of thousands of workers, issued a statement that the law would amount to handing control over oil to foreign companies and undermining the sovereignty of the state and the dignity of the Iraqi people.***
The union protesters pose an important question: To what degree will foreign investment be coerced, and to what degree will Iraq share in the wealth created by that investment? If oil profits wind up in the pockets of foreign investors, there might be little of the trillions in oil wealth for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to share.
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