When someone invades your home, steals your property, and takes the things you need to adequately live your daily life, you do not call someone to ask if there was justification. You don’t seek another person’s opinion to see if you are right.
Your property is gone. This person stole it. If you have that evidence, you simply call the police. There is a trial and, if convicted, the criminal is punished. There is no discussion about whether you may have had some responsibility. That would be nonsense.
Between 2001 and 2008…the year before Barack Obama took office in 2009…the Neoconservative Bush-Cheney Administration stole $7 trillion dollars from the citizens of the United States and gave it in contracts and in tax breaks to their friends. Now they want to open the discussion as to whether it may have been our fault and Barack Obama’s fault (he didn’t even start until 2009) for what happened.
When Bernie Madoff stole $50 billion, he was quickly tried and went to jail. When ENRON clearly scammed a variety of people, and lost the pensions of employees and the stockholder value of something like $100 billion, Ken Lay, Andy Fastow and Jeff Skilling went to prison. When Dennis Koslowski used Tyco International as if it were his own personal piggy bank for up to a hundred million dollars, he went to jail.
So why should the political masterminds who perpetrated a gigantic theft on the American people—crooks like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Chris Cox and others get away Scot free?
Not only that, but the latest “tale told by an idiot” in the political sphere was pronounced recently when a Neocon Senator said that the current recession and the current deficit are Barack Obama’s fault. The idea is that somehow the drop of the Stock Market from its high of 14,000 down to 11,000 and then dropped, in market terms, overnight in the fall of 2008 to 6,600 did no cause a crash that added 8 million people to an already large 7 million person unemployment figure is ridiculous. It is more than that. It is an outright lie, because all Senators know what actually happened.
If we are going to prevent this from happening again, we cannot let the hugely rich backers of the Neocons and the responsible parties themselves–Bush, Cheney, Norton, Briles, Abramoff, DeLay, Cox, and others get off without punishment. This was theft, pure and simple, and embezzlement. Briles gave away land for tens of thousands of dollars which then was resold by those buyers for millions. Norton gave away National Park land for timber cutting, oil drilling, mining and shale oil development. Cheney approved no-bid contracts for Halliburton in the billions and when Department of Engineers’ purchasing agents complained, he had them transferred.
We are suffering today from what landed on us when Bush and Cheney ran away to their gated communities and all the neighbors that they made rich…rich beyond anything that most Americans could imagine…from the $7 trillion that they stole and gave to their private contractor friends. If Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Norton and the rest get away with this thievery it will be clear to the next Neocon Administration that they can take up right where the last Neocon administration left off. More lies, more theft, more good-old-boy no-bid, high-profit contracts and more trillions in debt.
These people are crooks. There is no debate. The evidence is clear, just like the example of the robber who came into your house. No debate. Call the law and have them charged, tried and, if convicted, imprisoned.
Does anyone remember the lies? Do you recall this: “Americans know how to spend their money better than government does? So we’re going to return tax surpluses to the American People!” That was the lie in 2000 when George W. Bush was elected by a nation of mindless sheep. A nation of sheep who elected a moron, a puppet whose strings were pulled by the master of government manipulation…Richard Cheney.
Richard Cheney, the former congressman, former White House aide to Richard Nixon, former aide to Gerry Ford, former Secretary of Defense under Bush the First. Dick Cheney is a many who had no scruples about taking a company, Halliburton, and enriching himself to the tune of $44 million from military contracts to Halliburton even before he became Vice President, guiding the evil policies of George W .Bush.
It would do us good to remember that when Barack Obama took office jobs were being lost at the rate of well over 700,000 per month by the end of 2008. In the early part of 2009, Obama’s first year, they were still falling. In March of 2009, he was able to finally get his stimulus plan passed. The stimulus plan not only added a lot of jobs but also saved millions of state jobs. Jobs continued to fall throughout the first half of 2009. But the $800 billion stimulus, after months, finally began to kick in and the unemployment numbers began to drop.
Every economist agrees that the Great Recession was caused by the policies of George W. Bush and the Republican Congresses from 2001 to 2007. In 2007 a Democratic Congress came into office and they immediately restored Paygo, they introduced legislation to regulate the financial industry somewhat. But the low interest rates maintained by Alan Greenspan and approved by Bush (via Cheney) created opportunities for speculation in real estate. Rather than recognizing the potential for damage, the Bush-Cheney administration deliberately encouraged it by reducing the number of regulators at SEC and the other regulatory agencies. In October of 2008, the markets came crashing down, just as they had in 1929.
Every American must remain vigilant and stay focused on what actually happened. They Neocons will continue to lie and say that this happened much later than it did. We should not only pursue remedies in legislation to return the monies stolen from us, but we should have a national investigation on just exactly what did happen to our tax dollars. If they were literally stolen, Bush and Cheney should be indicted, tried and, if found guilty, sent to prison like any other criminal.