Inside the Horror Show That Is Congress BY MATT TAIBBI August 25, 2005

[LiberalArkie]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-horror-show-that-is-congress-20050825?page=2



It was a fairy-tale political season for George W. Bush, and it seemed like no one in the world noticed. Amid bombs in London, bloodshed in Iraq, a missing blonde in Aruba and a scandal curling up on the doorstep of Karl Rove, Bush's Republican Party quietly celebrated a massacre on Capitol Hill. Two of the most long-awaited legislative wet dreams of the Washington Insiders Club – an energy bill and a much-delayed highway bill – breezed into law. One mildly nervous evening was all it took to pass through the House the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for years now a primary strategic focus of the battle-in-Seattle activist scene. And accompanied by scarcely a whimper from the Democratic opposition, a second version of the notorious USA Patriot Act passed triumphantly through both houses of Congress, with most of the law being made permanent this time.

Bush's summer bills were extraordinary pieces of legislation, broad in scope, transparently brazen and audaciously indulgent. They gave an energy industry drowning in the most obscene profits in its history billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks, including $2.9 billion for the coal industry. The highway bill set new standards for monstrous and indefensibly wasteful spending, with Congress allocating $100,000 for a single traffic light in Canoga Park, California, and $223 million for the construction of a bridge linking the mainland an Alaskan island with a population of just fifty.

It was a veritable bonfire of public money, and it raged with all the brilliance of an Alabama book-burning. And what fueled it all were the little details you never heard about. The energy bill alone was 1,724 pages long. By the time the newspapers reduced this Tolstoyan monster to the size of a single headline announcing its passage, only a very few Americans understood that it was an ambitious giveaway to energy interests But the drama of the legislative process is never in the broad strokes but in the bloody skirmishes and power plays that happen behind the scenes.

To understand the breadth of Bush's summer sweep, you had to watch the hand-fighting at close range. You had to watch opposition gambits die slow deaths in afternoon committee hearings, listen as members fell on their swords in exchange for favors and be there to see hordes of lobbyists rush in to reverse key votes at the last minute. All of these things I did – with the help of a tour guide.


Snip

NOTE: This is a long article, but it is very well worth the effort and time to do it. One of Taibbi's best

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-horror-show-that-is-congress-20050825?page=2

[villager]

1. "....scarcely a whimper from the Democratic opposition..."

"Opposition" really needed to be quotes, however.

[daleanime]

2. +1

[nikto]

4. Ah, that's just the mystical, magical, 'Third Way'

[villager]

5. Remember, keep that powder dry!

You'll need it in the Rollerball world our "elected" "leaders" have, well, rolled over for...

[nikto]

6. Ah, the original "Rollerball" ---- flawed, but with so much to say

There was some rotten re-make around 2000 that had no social insight whatsoever, from what I heard.

Rollerball may be the elites' prototype for the future they will create for us.

Just replace John Houseman with Lloyd Blankfein and you're good to go.


The scene where the elite partygoers burn down the trees with a ray gun kinda' said it all, for me.

And the 13th Century?
Oops---I think we lost it.
Sorry.

[villager]

7. A "future" where corporations grew so big, they dispensed with governments and ran the world

...outright, without the current nation/state pretense.

And where they were so big, they didn't have to be branded by company name, only product: "Food," "Energy," etc. That's where we're headed -- about a half dozen prime/fundamental companies divvying up the planet...

And of course they stripped the politics out of the Clinton/Bush-era remake!

[L0oniX]

3. Most rich people will sell out everyone else.