David Sirota: Dem Freshmen Dig In for Battle Against Party Leadership

[babylonsister]

http://www.workingassetsblog.com/2007/09/dem_freshmen_dig_in_for_battle.html


Dem Freshmen Dig In for Battle Against Party Leadership

Illinois freshman Rep. Phil Hare (D) has thrown down the gauntlet today, authoring a scathing op-ed in the Politico indicting his party's leadership for joining with President Bush and corporate lobbyists to push a series of NAFTA-style trade deals with Peru, Panama, Colombia and South Korea (known as The Secret Trade Deal of 2007 for being forged behind closed doors and concealed from the public for months). Hare points out that his party won Congress on a promise to reform America's trade policy and that endorsing job-killing, wage-destroying trade pacts just months later is a travesty of the highest order.

Let's be clear: Hare's op-ed is an act of courage, because the fight he is waging faces David-versus-Goliath odds against huge corporate campaign contributors - the Money Party that influences both political parties. As just one example, the drug cartel-connected Colombian government has put an army of former Clinton administration officials on its payroll to help push the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. That money buys not only votes, it buys rhetoric.

On a conference call this week with reporters about the trade deal, Rep. Greg Meeks (D-NY) - one of the 15 Democrats who provided a key vote for CAFTA - insisted that Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is "an honest and courageous man." He said this just three months after the Associated Press reported that newly uncovered video shows Uribe "shaking hands with a militia leader who was arrested only weeks later on suspicion of involvement in multiple murders" and shows Uribe and the militia leader "together in a private meeting." As Hare notes in his op-ed, these militias have been responsible for executing some 2,000 union members in Colombia - "more than the rest of the world’s nations combined."

What little analysis that has been published in newspapers and magazines about this deal has been grossly skewed in favor of passing these deals - much like it was in the lead-up to NAFTA. And so my weekly national column for Creators Syndicate out tomorrow will explore these trade deals in some more depth - and in a way a Member of Congress like Hare simply cannot because of the confines of the office he holds. Stay tuned for that, and in the meantime, check out Hare's op-ed here:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5912.html

[Peregrine Took]

1. Who is he? I'm from Illinois and never heard of him. n/t

[antigop]

2. Thanks, but already posted here....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=3535128&mesg_id=3535128