Era of Responsibility

Obama said he will give “America a president who taught the Constitution and believes in the Constitution and will obey the Constitution of the United States”. Having said that he is obligated to investigate the abuse of power and attacks on our Constitution under George Bush and Dick Cheney.

When asked about supporting the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Cheney administration like torture and wire tapping Obama said “my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future as opposed to looking what we got wrong in the past”.

Russell Feingold chair of the Constitution subcommittee in a December letter to Obama outlining the need to restore the rule of law said “the need for a detailed accounting of what happened over the past eight years, and how the outgoing administration came to reject or ignore so many of the principles on which this nation was founded. It seems to me we must fully understand the mistakes of the past in order to learn from them, address them, and prevent them from recurring”.

Elizabeth Holtzman former district attorney in Brooklyn New York states “Failure to prosecute trivializes and encourages crimes. The same holds true of political abuses-failure to hold violators accountable condones the abuse and entrenches acceptability creating a climate in which it is likely to be repeated. The doctrine of impunity suggests, too, that there is a dual system of justice-one for the powerful and one for ordinary Americans. Because the concept of equal justice under the law is the foundation of democracy, impunity for high-level officials who abuse power and commit crimes erodes our democracy”.

George Bush as president could have any citizen arrested and jailed without due process of law guaranteed under the Constitution along with the Bill of Rights; and all because the president labeled them an enemy combatant. Without the proper investigation to correct this abuse, can Obama do the same? And if he can, do we have a president and a country as envisioned by the authors of the Constitution or a monarch who is the law like the one the Founders rebelled against?

If Bush and Cheney are allowed to be above the law, then Obama and all the future presidents will be above the law. Our democracy will be lost and the Constitution becomes a worthless piece of paper with nothing left to teach or obey.

In his inaugural address president Obama told us we are entering a "new era of responsibility". Without an investigation and an act of responsibility his words are meaningless.

One Man With Courage

My hope for the new president is that he can bring change to this country but I’m skeptical, after all, president elect Obama is a politician first and foremost, and politicians are more interested in keeping power than in doing what’s right for America.

The power and wealth are in the hands of the few because the same politicians who are in control are the same ones who helped bring this nation to the position we’re in, with the middle class on the verge of collapse.

According to an article in the Nation magazine by Eric Alterman, Charles Schumer as a member of the Banking and Finance Committees took steps to “protect industry players from government oversight and tougher rules…over the years, he has helped save financial institutions billions of dollars in higher taxes and fees.” “These included weakening banking regulations, undercutting efforts to regulate credit rating agencies and interfering with efforts to increase transparency of their balance sheets. And he scuttled his party’s efforts to demand that hedge fund billionaires pay an equivalent share of their earnings in taxes as do janitors, schoolteachers and the rest of us.” No wonder Schumer didn’t want to tax hedge fund billionaires, he received contributions from Bernie Madoff the now infamous hedge fund scammer. And Senator Schumer received $135,000 in campaign donations after attending a Democratic fund raiser with some 20 of the heaviest Wall Street hitters last year.

Obama’s pick for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner as president of the New York Federal Bank helped to broker some of the current deals in place to bail out Wall Street with little transparency so that we the tax payer don’t know where these trillions are going. What will he do as Secretary of the Treasury?

Barack Obama’s appointee to head the National Economics Council Lawrence Summers, was a champion for banking deregulation under President Clinton.

When George Stephanopoulos asked Rahm Emanuel if Obama was going to increase taxes on the rich he received no reply. No wonder Rahm Emanuel didn’t answer, considering he’s the Democrat who’s received the most in contributions from the financial sector.

With all these campaigners for the rich back in control how is Obama going to change the way things work in Washington?

A crack has already developed in Obama’s change rhetoric; during the campaign Obama said he would roll back the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Now he’s thinking of waiting until they expire rather than roll them back on his own.

Andrew Jackson said “one man with courage makes a majority“. It remains to be seen if Obama is the one man with the courage who can bring change to a country careening into a new gilded age of a few robber barons who continue to pilfer our capitalistic democracy, leaving a wake of desolation for the common man.

Manipulating Numbers

Recent unemployment numbers came out at 7.2 percent with a total job loss for 2008 at 2.6 million the highest since WWll.

According to economist Jared Bernstein in his book “Crunch, Why Do I Feel So Squeezed” who said “when all the people who are no longer collecting unemployment, those workers who have given up looking for work and all the part time workers who prefer full time are counted the real unemployment rate is around 12%”. And he said this before these numbers were released.

Now we’re hearing talk in the news that unemployment may reach double digits, it already is in double digits, so what will it really be, twenty five percent like during the Great Depression?

During the dust bowl in places like Oklahoma during the ‘30’s the California farmers would advertise for more jobs than they needed workers. This way if someone wanted ten cents an hour someone else would work for five cents an hour. Same thing today with the outsourcing of our jobs, we cannot compete with people who are willing to work for so much less than we can afford to work for. And it isn’t only blue collar jobs being outsourced, if your job can be digitized it can be outsourced, we’re losing all color jobs.

With the passage of NAFTA, CAFTA and with Bush as president changing the overtime laws to favor employers our federal government has helped to undermine the employment situation in this country, then they lie about the numbers.

Maybe if the Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had been more concerned about full employment rather than have all his attention fixated on inflation along with keeping interest rates too low for too long we wouldn’t be in the position we’re in now; with the financial crisis blamed on sub prime mortgage holders defaulting on their loans which led to all these job losses, which is questionable at best.

President elect Obama is already manipulating numbers, now he’s going to bring 4.1 million jobs to our country up from the three million he said he’d bring during his campaign.

It remains to be seen how many jobs he can actually bring, but as the saying goes, talk is cheap.

It's All in Attitude

When did Wall Street become a sure bet? Since the rules were changed in the 80’s which left us with no choice.

The interest on savings accounts went down to such low levels it wasn’t even worth putting money into a savings account, with inflation, one had to put all their money into investments on Wall Street to earn any return at all.

Subsequently, we’ve been herded into investing in the stock market. With the failures of the savings and loans people flocked to Wall Street for a “large return” on their savings so that we ended up with the few being in control of billions and look what happened, all the money is gone and we the taxpayer are giving them even more by bailing them out.

As everyone should have known investing in the stock market was never a sure bet. But that attitude was changed and if you didn’t invest your retirement in stocks you wouldn’t make any money so invest we did. Now not only have people not made money, they’ve lost big in one of the biggest schemes ever concocted by the rich, the few, the greedy, stealing our retirement funds.

What choices will we have now that we’ve been swindled out of our retirement money? Work forever or when our money runs out lie down and die? On top of our retirement money being stolen the federal government is telling us that Social Security is going to break the bank when the boomers start retiring.

A good friend of mine who was in three wars for this country used to say to me that “it’s all in attitude”, and he’s right. We should return to the attitude that investing in Wall Street is never a sure thing, and that Social Security, a program designed to protect against the poverty of old age is worth our investment.