Do you feel that politicians see us as a means to an end?  How else can it be when this is coming? San Francisco Chronicle reporters Zachary Coile writes:

“They are the biggest hypocrites in the world,” said Medea Benjamin, the San Francisco-based founder of the anti-war group CodePink. “They want to paint the Republicans as warmongers and they want to keep funding the war, and they think we don’t see through this?”

What was it that Democratic candidates were elected to do?  End the war.  As many other commentators have noted that is the reason the Democratic controlled Congress is held in such low esteem.  They have singularly failed in carrying out the will of the people.  Coile continues:

Pelosi was pressed on the issue last week during a sit-down with CNN’s Larry King. “Your party became the majority in the House primarily pledging to end the war,” King said. “That didn’t happen.”

“No,” Pelosi acknowledged. “It didn’t happen because we had hoped that the president would listen to the will of the people and at least be willing to compromise on … how the war is conducted and some timetable for redeployment of our troops.”

Congress watchers said Democrats are still stung after losing repeated battles with the White House and Republicans over the war last year.

“Last year they tried a lot of confrontation and they went nowhere,” said Louis Fisher, a constitutional scholar at the Library of Congress and an expert on congressional war powers. He said Democrats still fear being portrayed as putting U.S. troops at risk if they try to shut off war funds.

Either Speaker Pelosi is ignorant or blind to what Mr. Bush sees the legislative branch as nothing more than an ATM for his war(s)?

As other campaigns have run like "The Backbone" and "Fighting Dems" to backstop and support Democratic candidates and elected officials.  But do they really listen to?  They listen to the inside the "Beltway" consultants that feed them b.s. about what is important, so important, that the lives of Americans are worth less.

Who supports their misperceptions about "strength and American patriotism" because that "voice" is louder than our voices who go to their offices to talk to them about getting out of Iraq?  Corporate media who bangs the bloody, Republican drum about "putting our troops at risk if funding is cut off" by offering their viewers no other views except the view that it is acceptable for Americans to die without cause.

It is high time that Pelosi and the other leaders in the Democratic Party have to face protests for life- the lives that too many have been cut short for a war that is without purpose- not only at their jobs but 24/7 now.  Remember what kind of reaction that Speaker Pelosi had in 2007?  WSWS journalist Patrick Martin writes:

“Look,” she said, “I had, for five months, people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things—Buddhas? I don’t know what they were—couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk.”

Pelosi’s remark—imagine that riffraff “sleeping on my sidewalk”—is reveals the enormous social distance between the masses of working people, housewives, students who oppose the war, and the privileged ruling elite. And her disparaging reference to the First Amendment demonstrates the hostility of a big business politician towards the democratic rights of the working class

It is time for those Democratically elected leaders know that their jobs are not for life but will face challenges because they are no longer a solution to the problem but enabling the problem.  They had a mandate and have failed. 

It is time for the working men and women to halt the machinery of war:

(h/t to my friend Michael for forwarding this)

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/03/01/18482849.php   ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan by Internationalist Group ( internationalistgroup [at] msn.com )
Saturday Mar 1st, 2008 4:13 PM

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!

For Workers Strikes Against the War! ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. In a February 22 letter to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath reported that at a recent coast-wide union meeting, “One of the resolutions adopted by caucus delegates called on longshore workers to stop work during the day shift on May 1, 2008 to express their opposition to the war in Iraq.”

This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. It is doubly important that this mobilization of labor’s power is to take place on May Day, the international workers day, which is not honored in the U.S. Moreover, the resolution voted by the ILWU delegates opposes not only the hugely unpopular war in Iraq, but also the war and occupation of Afghanistan (which Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain all want to expand). The motion to shut down the ports also demands the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the entire region, including the oil sheikdoms of the strategically important Persian/Arab Gulf......