samedi, décembre 06, 2003

President Bush is now asking Congress to hastily approve one of the
biggest spending bills ever -- 820 billion dollars. Bush and his
people are also cutting lots of last-minute, back-room deals, doing
favors for their friends who run huge corporations, at our expense.

Last-minute giveaways in this bill include:

- Rolling back rules requiring that people be paid for overtime. Eight
million hard-working families count on these fair compensation rules.

- Allowing media giants to monopolize even more local media outlets
than before. Companies like Fox that have bought more outlets than
current law allows would now be allowed to keep them. In fact, this
bill raises the limit just the amount that Fox needs.

Please join me in calling on Congress to stop this bill, at:

http://www.moveon.org/looting/
Many of the bill's worst provisions have been inserted at the last
minute by top Republican negotiators. The final bill, more than 400
pages long, was first shared with Democrats the day they were leaving
for Thanksgiving (Tues. Nov. 25th), in an obvious attempt to force an
immediate vote, sight unseen.

Instead, Congress is returning for a special session next week. The
House is expected to vote on it on Monday, December 8th. The Senate
is being asked to approve it on Tuesday the 9th.

But as Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) said, "A legislator would have to have
rocks in their head to agree to something they haven't yet read."

I couldn't agree more.

Especially when you consider that majorities in both houses of Congress
have already rejected both the media ownership change and the overtime
rollback.

Process aside, the spending itself is also outrageous. It's part of a
long pattern of Bush spending billions of our tax dollars to reward his
friends and campaign contributors, a pattern the Nobel prize-winning
economist George Akerlof has described as "a form of looting."

Please join me in calling on Congress to stop it, at:

http://www.moveon.org/looting/
Thank you.