Slack Jawed Corporate Tools by Cindy Sheehan

I am laid up today with a virus that I picked up from my grandbabies, so I finally took the opportunity to watch a movie I have been wanting to watch forever: 2004’s Iron Jawed Angels, starring Hillary Swank as badass woman’s suffragist, Alice Paul.

Alice Paul and her friend, Lucy Burns, were two educated, young, and modern women who moved to Washington, DC to lobby for a constitutional amendment giving the women the right to vote, over six-score years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, extending the right to vote to only propertied white men, and 50 years after black men received that right.

While we still live in a chauvinistic nation that hasn’t ratified an Equal Rights’ Amendment, the sacrifices and commitment that our early sisters made has advanced the female cause here in the U.S. dramatically. They were arrested protesting in front of the White House during a Democratic Wilson administration, imprisoned, tortured and force-fed while on hunger strike (this stuff didn’t just start under Bush/Cheney).

Even though I opposed Nancy “Impeachment off the Table” Pelosi when she ran for Congress in 2006 in the election that propelled her to the gavel of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, I couldn’t help but being a little emotional for the political cause that women have struggled for mightily. Then in 2008, I was honored to support the candidacy of a courageous black woman with integrity, Cynthia McKinney.

However, my brief innate pride quickly turned to anger as I saw Nancy Pelosi’s House support George Bush’s war crimes in the Middle East by supporting his surge in Iraq and fully funding the wars. Not only was impeachment “off the table,” but so has been peace.

During my campaign against Nancy Pelosi for Congress in 2008, the news was released that as House Minority Leader, she was fully briefed by the security establishment on the use of torture in such places as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, in particular, she was briefed on water-boarding, and although another Democrat on the committee did lodge a written protest against the procedure—Nancy did nothing. She reportedly wanted the measures to be harsher. When confronted about it, she couldn’t really recall, but that info was “classified” anyway. In my opinion, in a so-called Republic, justice should be transparent, not “even” in time of war—but ESPECIALLY in time of war!

Then, not only did Nancy's Democratic Congress pass the FISA Moderniztion Act and refused to repeal the USA PATRIOT ACT, she un-Constitutionally pushed through the bankster bailout at the end of the election season in 2008, and contrary to what the establishment wants you to believe, the bill, which was supported by the Junior Senator and Dem Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, did not “rescue” the economy.

It may have saved Goldman Sachs, but unemployment and foreclosures are higher than back then, while home value is reported to go down by 8% this month.

Nancy Pelosi has been such a failure for the people, but such a success for her corporate masters. Her list of donors on OpenSecrets.org reads like a directory for DC lobbyists.

Unlike the present U.S. antiwar movement, Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party (NWP) refused to co-operate with the Democratic Party that was working in opposition to their goals of universal suffrage as the present Democratic Party is working against our cause for peace.

The House is going to fall on the Wicked Witch of the West because she did nothing to follow in the audacious footsteps of giants like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. Pelosi has done nothing to help the cause of feminist politics, and, in fact, her willing complicity with the elite class has set our cause back.

The lives of our sister-suffragists are inspirational—to think that so many sacrificed so much when the few in Pelosi’s elite class have sacrificed way too little, if anything.

Despite Pelosi’s liberal use of plastic surgery, she is not an Iron Jawed Angel, she is a Slack Jawed Corporate Tool and no matter what happens on Election Day this year, her leadership is compromised and she will probably have to slink home in defeat (to her mansion on Broadway and her estate in wine country, to be sure).

I don’t want to pick on Pelosi just because she is a female with no integrity, but that’s the system that Alice Paul fought so hard to join—99% of our politicians are Slack Jawed Corporate Tools and it is up to us to hold them accountable.

The DC suffragists grew frustrated with the system even before they could fully participate in it and they formed the NWP to have more political power—well, we females have had political power for quite awhile and it is mostly misused to be able to play the game with the white guys—well, now it’s past time to form a Working Class Party to, not reform, but overthrow the present system in favor of one that works for us and against the Slack Jawed Corporate Tools.

Let's get to work