This Can't Be Happening!

It's not just the Constitution that's suffering because of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's nutty and unprincipled "impeachment-off-the-table" position blocking any effort to impeach President Bush or Vice President Cheney for their many crimes and abuses of power.

Her position on impeachment is killing the Democratic Party too, by driving away not just progressived members of the party, but independents who voted for Democrats last November expecting some action in defense of the Constitution.

I see this anger welling up among progressives and independents everywhere I travel, as people say they've simply had it with the Democrats. The support of the party for a bill continuing funding for the war through September was terrible. The Democrats' rush to pass a bill granting Bush the authority to spy without a warrant on Americans, and to expand the power to spy domestically well beyond phones and internet to even include break-ins was a last straw.

My own little call for people so sign an "I Quit This Party" petition has seen a jump from 400 to now over 500 signers. (Sign up on the column to the right.) When it gets to 527 (the "magic number" by which Bush supposedly won the Florida vote in 2000), I'll be sending the list off to Pelosi, as well as to the offices of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean.

Five hundred or so party defectors may seem like small loss, but it reflects a larger trend across the country.

Here's a letter I got from the head of a group of active Democrats in central Pennsylvania--the very kind of heartland area that Democrats will need if they are going to win the presidency and hang on to or make gains in Congress next year.

Writes Kathy Ember, a Democratic Committee member in Pennsylvania, and president of the Kutztown Democratic Club:

I am the president of a very active grassroots Democratic club just outside Philadelphia in PA.
Recently, I got an email from Nancy Pelosi, asking all of us to help build the grassroots.

EXCUSE ME Nancy, but we have been working our
butts off out here for years trying to do just that. WE are the ones that put that Democrats back in power in Congress.
We've been there for you, but you have let us down by not holding the current administration responsible for their crimes.

Not only are you losing us...you are making it impossible for us to "build the grassroots". Do you know how people look at you now when you ask them to join the Democrats? They laugh in your face. Why, they want to know, should we join or support a party that has done nothing toward getting out of Iraq or impeaching this president?

I am in contact with other Democratic clubs across PA. Some have recently changed the word "Democrats" in their name to a lower case "d". Others have abandoned their association with the Democrats altogether and have formed instead "citizen action groups."

When will the Democrats in Washington wake up and realize that it's not impeachment that will hurt the party...it is the lack of it.

I believe that the aptly named Ember is just one spark in a prairie fire that is going to sweep away the conservative Democratic establishment in 2008. Whether it is by turning to third party candidates, or just sitting out the next election, these angry and frustrated Democrats are showing that they've been betrayed one too many times by the Democratic Party.

Either Pelosi--who is facing an election challenge by Cindy Sheehan in her own San Francisco district--better do an about face and open the path to impeachment of Bush and/or Cheney. Otherwise, she and her fellow party leaders
are going to find themselves either ousted in primaries, or back in the position of minority "leaders" in 2009.

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Class Struggle and Revolution Come to America

Scientists are puzzling desperately over the reason for the disappearance of honeybees across most of the continental United States, talking direly of a collapse in agricultural production. All manner of theories are springing up--microwave radiation, pesticides, genetically engineered plants, global warming and what all.

Yet what seems most likely is that the bees are simply revolting at their exploitation by management.

Consider this: Beekeepers have been increasingly overworking their "workers," shipping them hither and yon, even cross country by semi-trailer, to boost their profits, all the while siphoning off ever more of the bees' surplus value--the honey they make. I suspect that as long ago predicted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the contractictions finally reached a point where the worker bees are revolting, just leaving the hive and going out on their own in what amounts to a "fly-out" strike.

So I say good for them. There's a lesson for us all in this militant response to a national "speed up."

Meanwhile, we should also note that honeybees are in fact interlopers--the insect equivalent of the immigrants that US capitalists ship or lure across the border to work for cheap wages here in the US. Just so were honeybees imported from Europe to be used by agribusiness here to boost production.

Meanwhile, the domestic workers of America--the native bees--have been pushed to near extinction by the wave of honeybee workers. Now that the honeybees are going native though, perhaps the local bees--ground bees, bumblebees, wood-boring bees, etc.--will come back to reclaim their natural niches. That won't help agribusiness, which needs the industrial-strength honeybee, but it will keep our forests and fields healthy.

So, here's to the rebellious honeybee workers! We should honor their bold action, learn from it, and endeavor to copy them ourselves.