Vichy Democrats: Pelosi and the Politics of Collaboration

[Wiley50]

By DON SANTINA

As the Bush Administration’s economic stimulus plan sailed through Congress last month, a few Democratic senators timidly raised objections to the legislation that Nancy Pelosi’s House had approved, particularly in relation to certain provisions deleted by the House. These provisions, which would have provided critical assistance to people most hard hit by the continuing recession included an extension of unemployment insurance, expansion of food stamps, and rebates to the working poor whose incomes fall below the radar of income tax requirements.

They lost.

“There’s no reason for any more delay on this,” House Speaker Pelosi said as the Senate approved the plan.

In a not-surprising move earlier in the legislative process, Pelosi had surrendered those provisions during a joint session with president’s budget crew. It was not surprising because in her fourteen month reign as Speaker of the House, Pelosi has collaborated incisively and repeatedly with the policies of the Bush Administration.

The term “collaboration” is popularly considered to be a construct of WWII, but the phenomenon is certainly older than Judas and threads through recorded history to its penultimate high point in Vichy France after the German conquest in 1940. In Vichy France, the collaborators appeared in basically two forms: active and passive collaboration with the German masters. Simply stated, the active collaborators identified Jews and resisters for the Nazis to take to the concentration camps, and the passive collaborators watched it happen and made excuses about why they could do nothing about it.

Through the power of her office, Speaker Pelosi’s collaboration with the White House Agenda has been both active and passive. For the sake of identification, the White House Agenda can be defined as: aggression overseas, suppression of dissent at home, and the transfer of wealth upward to the richest segment of society.

http://www.counterpunch.org/santina03142008.html