Accountability

In the video above, Elizabeth Warren explains why she introduced the Truth in Settlements Act (S.1898) as soon as Congress got back to work last January. She also explains why it was never sent to President Obama's desk to be signed.

As close to prison as Cheney will ever getDespite our best hopes, of course there is no chance Cheney or any of his criminally-minded torturers will be held accountable form anything in the Torture Report. And there's no chance the Wall Street banksters will be held accountable for pillaging the economy.

The redacted, but still horrifying, Torture Report that the Senate Intelligence Committee released Tuesday, isn't the same as the stunning revelations that Senator Mark Udall made on the Senate floor yesterday. The disclosure of portions of an internal CIA review, the so-called Panetta Review, by Udall was absolutely riveting-- and stunning. The review backs up the Senate report and puts to the lie all the Cheney, Yoo, Hayden apologist palaver dominating corporate media since the release Tuesday.

(An example of just how redacted the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA detention and torture is. And don’t forget it was the CIA itself who redacted the report, even though they are the ones who are the subject of the report).

"Clean water is one of California’s most crucial resources, and these documents make it clear that state regulators have utterly failed to protect our water from oil industry pollution. Much more testing is needed to gauge the full extent of water pollution and the threat to public health.

I understood the concept of class enemies from the very beginning. The son of a working class family, I never entertained the idea of identifying with conservatives-- never ever. That said, the first scholarship I ever won was a prize in a UN-sponsored elementary school contest about the death penalty.

In January 2009, the newly elected President Obama said that "transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency." Watch the video above. He also said that "The way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable. And the way to make government accountable is to make it transparent so that the American people know exactly what decisions are being made, how they're being made and whether their interests are being well-served… For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in this city.

Roland and I are spending September watching every episode of Breaking Bad on the wall of his living room. I never watched it before and we just finished sea on one… pretty heavy. Roland says I ain't seen nothing yet. The other thing we're both doing this month is finishing our copies of Rick Perlstein's epic history, The Invisible Bridge.

What better vehicle to declare Wall Street banksters no longer villains than the Wall Street Journal? And that's exactly what Patrick O'Conner did this morning. "As political villains go," he wrote, "Wall Street seems to be enjoying something of a reprieve." He claims "its image is on the mend" and that only about a third of Americans view Wall Street negatively.

Nixon may or may not have made a deal with Jerry Ford, but he got a pardon and never faced a trial, let alone a prison sentence. He said what many politicians feel about politicians who get caught breaking the law: "the punishment of resignation is more than adequate for the crime." Our corporate elites couldn't agree more. Accountability is for poor people with no power, but for elites with lots of it.Only 15 senators and 5 congressmen have ever been expelled-- and almost all of them were Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War.