Unfinished Business: Tasks Ignored During the Bush Reign of Horror

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UNFINISHED BUSINESS

What's so funny? Must be an inside joke. Image cc

Tasks Ignored During the Bush Reign of Horror

Michael Collins

What Obama promised matters. What the people expect matters more. What matters most is the crucial statement of the people. This election was a resounding no vote on executive lying, misdirection, deception, fabrication, and non stop failures. It was also a clear no vote on the unrestrained exercise of power used to attack individual rights promised in the Constitution and the willful neglect of the collective needs of citizens made manifest by their daily struggles.

Snip

There has been nothing but lies from start to finish during the eight year reign of horror with only a few brave politicians speaking truth to corrupt power. They were ridiculed and marginalized as a reward for their bravery.

Snip

Now it's over and there's unfinished business that requires our attention. This business includes the following and much more:

End the Iraq occupation. Assign responsibility and consequences. Put a stop the fantasies of empire and actions that will lead to more ruinous overseas adventures.

Care for the wounded. Admit the losses and provide for healing.

Admit that the planet is in peril. Acknowledge our role in causing the problem. Accept leadership in solving it and get to work.

Revive the economy based on real products and services and make sure everyone does well. End the looting by banks and other dubious enterprises and punish those responsible.

Rebuild the United States of America wherever needed.

Provide health care services to citizens and disregard the nonsense about not being able to afford it. It's only fair to ask those who say it can't be done to sacrifice their own health care until they find a solution.

More: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0811/S00237.htm

[ihavenobias]

1. K & R, happy to be the first rec.

[autorank]

2. Thanks. Lots of work ahead.

[truedelphi]

3. A most telling prophecy from a prosecuter of the BCCI (INSLAW -

And Iran Contra Bank of record)

In his concluding remarks to American bankers Clifford and Altman, on Sept 11 1991, Roth stated:
"I think that the insiders in this country are milking - they are milking the system as they know it, and eventually the People are going to get as upset with our government and with what is going on in our government as did the people inside the Soviet Union, and they are gonna come and clean up Washington one of these days."

Fellow visionaries, we must tear down this wall of corruption!! And never rest until it is gone.

Both George W Bush and the Clintons were involved on certain levels with BCCI.

And now Paulson, Erlichman's former assisstant, is praised by Obama for "working hard"

This means that we all have to work that much harder.

PS K & R number 6.

[autorank]

9. Great quote

That's what is about to happen - the people are upset and it's time to throw out the insiders.

It is a monumental process. Closing GITMO is a start, next School of the Americas.

And people need to be held accountable, as in court, for "grand theft America."

[puebloknot]

13. "As in court," yes! Your laundry list of things we need to do ...

... to begin living with civility again is spot on, but let it not be like Nancy Pelosi's "To Do" list when she took over and declared that justice (impeachment) was off the table.

After WWII, there was sufficient energy to carry out the Marshall Plan while holding the Nuremberg trials.

I hope that legal accountability will not become overshadowed by our amazement that we've pulled it off and elected a Dem and a black man to boot, and our crying need to take care of the populace here in America, and Over There where we have inflicted great suffering on innocent people.

We can bind up our own wounds and theirs and get ourselves down to the court of justice, somewhere, and lend our voices to the cry for what we and the world know is right.

The world is watching and waiting to see if we, like George Bush, think we can just pardon ourselves and move on.

[Seldona]

4. K&R

There will be more unfinished business than finished I think.

[Hubert Flottz]

5. Bush will go down as one of America's greatest calamities IF

the truth is told.

Let the swamp draining begin.

[autorank]

10. and you know what happens when you drain a swamp.

It really starts to stink. That's what we're in for. The murky water hides a lot of toxic
waste and we're going to start seeing it.

By removing Bush, we created a situation where you can actually see what's happening and where
more information flows, like the Jaun Cole blog on the new documentary regarding bin Laden.
That's just one of corpses rotting in the swamp. There are many more. I don't think any faction
will be able to control the release of information once it starts, maybe slow it but rigid control
of information and a quiescent public are a thing of a past.

Let the revelations begin!

[Agony]

6. We do need a blueprint... one day almost two years ago i started the following list

in no particular order and very much a crude, stream of consciousness, draft. I think I will drag it out again and work on it.

• defund NED (NDI CIPE IRI ACILS)
• implement FCC guidelines for any media entity that licenses or uses public airwaves for any business purpose to provide public access/universal election coverage/equal time coverage
• formulate labor law that allows any person wishing to form a labor union protection to do so (broaden rather than restrict definition of a person able to join/form a labor union)
• continuously graduated income tax from the first dollar (simplify tax code)
• capital gains taxes raised so that they are higher than taxes on labor
• fix the estate tax by raising limit (graduating?)
• make it illegal to profit from war industry
• war effort deprivatized (any activity in a war zone will be performed by the military not a contractor)
• implement government wide sunshine laws
• legalize industrial hemp
• universal single payer health care (end health care run as a for profit enterprise)
• public financing of elections
• make election day a national holiday
• military bases around the world
• return to public accountability for corporations force renewal of corporate charters (revoke the concept of corporate personhood) make it illegal for one corporation to buy another one
• more strictly define a corporate monopoly anti-trust laws

[Hubert Flottz]

7. Stop the endless "War On Drugs" and use that money for education

and rehab.

Let the potheads out of jail, to make room for corporate thieves crooked lying politicians election thieves and war criminals.

Take care of AMERICA first.

[Mr Rabble]

8. That is a good start Agony.

Those are also beliefs held by the majority of the public

[AtomicKitten]

11. Let the filibusters begin!

With Lieberman keeping his chairmanship and Clinton being considered for SoS, the center-right Dems have been invigorated and I see little hope that Obama will be able to push through anything in the neighborhood of progressive. Kyl has already promised to be a fly in the ointment vis a vis filibusters. Not hopeful about change today. :(

[autorank]

12. I'll be the optimist for a change

This is just a bench mark that will evolve and the additions to the list are good like the war on drugs and an explicit mention of ending union busting which I should have included.

Maybe this is what's going on. You bring the critics close because the source of their criticism is jealousy. It's a character flaw on the part of the jealous. If they're capable, give them a job and make them work for you. If they act up, fire them.

Obama said keep Lieberman in the caucus. That was a message to take his chairmanship if they wanted to. The cowards lacked the courage to do that, including the six newly elected Democratic Senators (like the new House members from 2006 who failed to oppose the war).

Right now the condemnation is on the Senators who destroyed the meaning of party loyalty in favor of their ultimate affiliation, The Money Party.

I'm in a "relief" mode ... no more ugliness. If the permanent power mavens think that the public will tolerate a repeat of the spineless behavior of the past, then it's on us to see that Obama, with his 70% approval, jumps on Congress, which is still at 14% or so. Never a better time to assert authority to make them do their job.

Opponents and Enemies
http://www.mrlincolnandfriends.org/inside.asp?pageID=26&subjectID=1

"He used to say to me when I talked to him about Chase & those who did him Evil - Do good to those who hate you and turn their ill will to friendship," Mrs. Lincoln said of Mr. Lincoln.1 "We must never sell old friends to buy old enemies,." Mr. Lincoln once wrote.2 Mr. Lincoln "was certainly a very poor hater," recalled friend Leonard Swett. "He never judged men by his like, or dislike for them. If any given act was to be performed, he could understand that his enemy could do it just as well as any one. If a man had maligned him, or been guilty of personal ill-treatment and abuse, and was the fittest man for the place, he would put him in his Cabinet just as soon as he would his friend."3

Snip

"Lincoln is the ablest and most honest."16 Capers quoted Douglas refuting a friend who criticized Mr. Lincoln as weak: "No, he is not that, Sir. But he is eminently a man of the atmosphere which surrounds him. He has not yet got out of Springfield...He does not know that he is President-elect of the United States. He does not see that the shadow he casts is any bigger now than it was last year. It will not take him long when he has got established in the White House. But he has not found it out yet.'"

:hi: