Filibuster fails on Bankruptcy bill
by debcoop
Tue Mar 08, 2005 at 12:20:58 PM PDT
The cloture vote was terrible. It was 69-31 to invoke cloture. This means that only 30 Democrats and Jim Jeffords did the right thing.
- debcoop's diary :: ::
This is a vote that Democrats could have used to bash Republicans over the head with, but once again they have been bought by corporate interests.
There were more but I counted these Dems as voting to stop the filibuster.
Lieberman
Biden
Carper
Nelson of Neb.
Landrieu
Salazar?????
Conrad
but there were others.
I think this is a bill if we had more time, if we had mobilized sooner; we could have won this time with a filibuster.
The Bankruptcy Bill Extra hosted by TPM was a great idea. We should, however, have done this sooner - with a campaign of letters, faxes and phone calls. there should have been some grassroot lobbyists visiting those weak and foolish Dems in their Washington offices as well as their home districts during the recess.
And I do not mean to criticize Elizabeth Warren unduly, after all, she is a lawyer, not a political strategist. Certainly not one who has ever run a campaign like this before. We needed a war room and concerted, targeted lists of people to call. I called every wavering Sen. I got through to their offices too easily; I should have had difficulty. The phones should have been ringing off the hooks.
The other way we on the left have fallen short is not having organizations and think tanks that could come up with stories to tell about sympathetic people who had to declare bankruptcy.
These orgs. could get stories written and filmed and peddled to all the various media, from TV, newspapers, radio, etc.
The right has been doing this for years....Coming up with bad ideas and creating mawkish, moralistic stories ---half of which are rarely true. But in this are real and true heart rending stories of good people bought low by fate, circumstance and the vagaries of global capitalism. Narratives change people's minds. A sad and compelling story is often how people respond to issues and principles, we need to personalize their travails. We needed stories that speak to people's lives so they understand whom this hurts.
We have lost a valuable principle, and we have lost an issue that Dems could hang around the Republican's necks.
Next time we need to mobilize sooner, and not just the blogosphere. Other parts of the partyh have to help out. That is how we win and save America.
[editor's note, by debcoop] another horrible outcome. The Rethugs continue on their successful war to make Americans more insecure and have to live their lives with an increasingly higher chance of the danger of falling through the cracks into poverty. ( I posted this below as well)
Link:
http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/001205.html
_Meanwhile Max Sawicky has a question that brings it all together:_
_In a different vein, a good question is whether the private accounts and annuities under Bush's excellent Social Security privatization plan would be vulnerable to attachment by creditors, thereby opening up a new source of equity to the credit card industry, after they have sucked out all your blood._
_Presumably, the answer is "yes." These would be real assets, after all, your very own private personal account. So if you should happen to fall ill and lack adequate health insurance you could easily wind up needing to sign your entire account over to your credit card company. Meanwhile, your Social Security benefits will be cut and you'll have to accept the special private accounts offset cut. This is by no means a wildly unlikely scenario; over two million people go bankrupt in each year right now, almost one percent of the population._
-Matthew Yglesias_