This Is Who We Are?

“We tortured some folks,” Obama said. “But that’s not who we are.”

Really? Until people in the Bush administration who authorized tactics that the Nazis used in their death camps are not only held accountable for their policies, but are indicted, then yes, we are torturers. We are a nation that ignores the Geneva Convention, a nation that believes it is above the law. Until Bush, Cheney, John Yoo, Paul Wolfowitz and all the other political mafiosos of that administration are behind bars, then who are we? We’re a nation of hypocrites.

Who are we to cite China and North Korea and other countries on their human rights violations when we subjected detainees to waterboarding, rectal hydration, hypothermia so extreme that one prisoner died, and isolation that would drive any of us into utter madness?

Meanwhile, Bush in retirement has taken up painting. Cheney got a new heart and can be seen occasionally scowling on Fox News. John Yoo is teaching at Berkeley, a real puzzler, since Berkley is one of the most liberal universities in the country. John Brennan, the head of the CIA now, defends his agency’s tactics.

In reading through some of report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, I thought I would vomit. How can any human being subject another human being to 47 days in complete isolation? To waterboarding? To hundreds of hours without sleep? To standing on broken feet and legs with your arms tethered above your head while you are buck naked? To threats that your mother and sisters are going to be raped and dismembered unless you come clean?

From the Huffington Post:

During the George W. Bush years there was a brief public debate about whether or not waterboarding was “torture.” The late Christopher Hitchens, who was an important intellectual cheerleader for the Iraq War and an advocate for an aggressive “war on terror” wasn’t convinced that waterboarding was torture so he agreed to have it done to him. A few other reporters also willingly subjected themselves to waterboarding as a publicity stunt to “see what it was like.” I doubt if any pro-torture reporter or intellectual would agree to undergo rectal feeding as Hitchens did with waterboarding to find out if it’s really “torture.” We won’t see Dick Cheney on teevee with a blender and an enema bag any time soon.

And then, over the past few days, another kind of torture took place, a financial torture in Congress. The U.S. government was about to run out of money – again, after a government shutdown in 2013 that cost millions and affected millions. At the last moment, provisions were included that basically gutted the Dodd Frank provision. This is a biggie.

The financial meltdown of 2008 was due to the way banks handled your money – risky derivatives, fraudulent loans – and when the sky was falling, when Lehman Brothers went under and AIG didn’t have a life preserver and went under and many of the homes in your neighborhood went into foreclosure– the government bailed out the banks. At the taxpayers’ expense. With taxpayers’ money. The Dodd-Frank provision said, Hey, you want to engage in risky business? Fine. But you do it without the taxpayers bailing you out if your risk goes south.

With that gutted, many Democrats went ballistic. Elizabeth Warren,  my choice for the presidency in 2016, stepped up to the plate and did what she does best…laid out the perils and led a Democratic insurgency. Spend a little more than nine minutes to watch the barn-burning speech she gave on Friday that makes her a real contender for the presidency in 2016.

From Huff Post again:

After listing the top Citi executives who have gone on to work in the Obama administration, she addressed Citi directly, noting that she agreed that Wall Street reform wasn’t perfect. “I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect. It should have broken you into pieces,” she said.

Unfortunately, the new spending bill passed in the house. Now it’s up to the senate to either approve it or come up with an alternative that excises the Wall Street bailout by taxpayers. The bottom line here is simple. Republicans don’t give a shit about people. They are the Philip K Dick facilitators of Blade Runner, where corporations rule the world. The language in the amendment about the banks was written by Citicorp.

As of Saturday night, the senate passed the bill.

Rob and I were feeling pretty bad about all this  as we sat out by our fire pit, in the South Florida chill. “I feel like we’re de-evolving,” he said. “As a species, as a nation.”

“I kinda hoped the old paradigm would go out with a whimper,” I remarked. “But that’s not happening. Maybe we have to de-evolve before we evolve.”

My fear is that it may take us so long to evolve that neither Rob nor I will be here to see it happen.  But our daughter and her children will be here. And to those of you who say that politics don’t matter, that life goes on, I say: Everything is politics. From the food you eat, to the water you drink to drugs your doc prescribes to the TV shows and movies that entertain you, to the power you claim over your own body, color, ethnicity, religion, to the very identity you have as a human being, everything is politics.

If you don’t speak up, then others will gladly speak for you and you may not like what they have to say. So then, what’re you gonna do??