Calling Congressman Roskam

There is a Main Street but no Wall Street in my Congressman Peter Roskam's DuPage County home town. But when it comes to serving the middle class of Main Street, Roskam's loyalty is 900 miles away on Wall Street. That's where the money to fund campaigns and buy political friends really resides. Thursday, Wall Street got Roskam and another 161 Republicans to vote for the $1.1 trillion Omnibus spending bill which has a poison pill for Main Street and ...a gilded pill for Wall Street. That is the provision, largely written by Citigroup and their Wall Street buddies, to roll back the provision in the Dodd Frank financial reform bill which restricted derivative trading, one of the biggest causes of the 2008 financial collapse. Jaime Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, personally called lawmakers to vote for the derivatives repeal measure.

I don't know if Roskam got one of Dimons's pleas. But during his first eight years in Congress...when Wall Street calls, Congressman Roskam answers.

Let Farnham die at home

Former state representative Keith Farnham, 67, looks like the walking dead. That's because he's clearly on his last legs, suffering from bladder cancer, Hepatitis C and in need of a lung transplant. But the distorted wheels of federal justice are set to give Farnham twelve to fifteen years in prison, more accurately a prison hospital, for doing bad things with his computer; things that help fuel the commission of horrific violent acts, the production o...f child pornography.

Farnham is most certainly not a danger to society. He's destroyed his career, indeed his life, illegally satiating his sexual fantasies. The feds can go ahead and sentence him to 12 to 15 on March 19. Then they should suspend the sentence pending his monitored agreement to never again so much as touch a computer. That will offer a Farnham a shred of dignity as he faces the Grim Reaper square in the kisser. It was also save US taxpayers about $24,000 yearly in unnecessary expense incarcerating a debilitated, dying man. It will also recognize that federal prisons, busting at the seams with many of our 2.3 million inmates, the most in the world, should be reserved for the most violent and dangerous offenders.

Toast Jeannette Rankin on first Patriots Day

While Jeannette Rankin existed, Patriots Day does not. More about Patriots Day later.

Monday marked the 73rd anniversary of Congresswoman Rankin's sole vote against the Declaration of War against Japan. Facing hisses and calls for her to change her vote to make it unanimous, she said "I can't go to war (as a woman) so I can't send anyone else." Then she ran from a mob out for blood; hiding in a phone both and calling the cops to save her.

If that was all she did in life she'd be a minor historical footnote. But Rankin, born in Montana, was a true groundbreaker. She got a BS in biology at a time few women attended college. Eschewing both a normal career and family, she joined the suffrage movement, organizing the NY Women's Suffrage Party and serving as lobbyist for the National American Women's Suffrage Association, facilitating suffrage victories in Montana and Washington. Improbably securing election as the first US Congresswomen ever (Montana), when women couldn't vote nationally, she cast the only female vote for universal suffrage. Then in April, 1917, Rankin was one of 50 members of Congress voting against President Wilson's Declaration of War against Germany in WWI. The majority vote for senseless war was one of the worst decisions in American history.

 

Her nay vote sealed her defeat in 1918. She spent the next 22 years working tirelessly for peace and the rights of women and children. In 1940, the cause of peace made her run for Congress again. She won and got the chance to vote against our last declared war. Bounced from Congress again in 1942, Rankin soldiered on for her causes of peace and justice for another 31 years. 

That brings us back to Patriots Day. Let's change Veterans Day to Patriots Day. Then it will not only honor our veterans and servicemen, but all the patriots who have worked for peace, justice and human values. Veterans Day has degenerated into a shameless commercial for the war party and their endless wars of empire. By including patriots such as Jeannette Rankin, the millions of us peace loving non military Americans will have our day of honor.

Inquiring minds want to know

Why do we still seek to prosecute 95 year old alleged Nazi war criminals and not 75 year old alleged Bush administration war criminals? Moral equivalency is not the issue. Justice for the dead and tortured is the issue, and a warning to future such war criminals.

To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: A war criminal is a war criminal... is a war criminal. Or Shakespeare: What's in a name? that which we call a war criminal, by any other name would still kill as murderously.

Pardon Bush, Cheney...taging them forever as war criminals

While George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will never be brought to justice for their war crimes, let's pre-emptively pardon them anyway. Then they will live out their lives and rest uneasily in posterity with this asterisk upon their brows:

Proclaimed: That George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, are pardoned now and forever, for any war crimes they may have committed, Including launching criminal wars and authorizing and/or condoning torture.

Release torture report

Hopefully, the Senate tomorrow will release the long awaited report condemning torture by the Central Intelligence Agency between 2002 and 2003. The whole world has known this occurred for some years but former Bush administration officials, former C.I.A. operatives and most of the Republican war party establishment are running around with their hair on fire over the reports release. They claim, preposterously, that the torture report is make up, and th...at its release will cause attacks against western interests in the Middle East, even getting people killed. What they ignore is that endless and senseless American warfare in that region for the past 13 years is getting people killed every day, including some of our own people. Fifty-three US soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan this year, bringing the 13 year total to 2,354, all for nothing, nada, zilch. Just last week President Obama authorized an additional 1,000 soldiers to stay in Afghanistan next year because our so called allies are saying "Nyet" to further involvement. American foreign policy can be summed up as "stupid is as stupid does."

We need to see the detailed torture report confirming and putting in the public record what we already know. The torture report will do nothing to sanction or bring the torturers to justice. It will drive a stake into the endless denial of international war crimes by the Bush administration and its C.I.A. torture arm. It will become part of the American story that American propagandists strive mightily to leave out of our history books. It may make a future rogue administration and rogue intelligence agency think multiple times before they are temped to embark upon a torture and criminal war repeat.

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