More Bad Advice

Dear Mr. President,

I read this morning that the 10 letters you read every day from ordinary citizens like me are handed to you in a purple file. Kinda’ cool, a purple file. Obviously, none of my letters make it into that purple file. I think the 10 letters you see are cherry picked, the thanks-for-the-great-job-you’re-doing-Mr. President kind of letters and the I’d-like-a-new-pony-for-Christmas sort of thing, not crank letters from pissed-off voters complaining about Kill Lists and drone strikes, war crimes and Bradley Manning’s torture, banksters and unfair taxes, injustice and.. well, if you’d read my letters you’d know what I mean. 65 since May 28 and not a peep from The White House. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Yeah, I know, you’re a busy guy what with campaigning and covert wars to run and drone strikes to approve and trying to squeeze Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorean embassy in London so the Brits can ship him to Sweden who’ll render him to the U.S. of A for prosecution by your InJustice Department (another whistle-blower’s scalp you can add to your collection). But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about is something I mentioned in yesterday’s letter. I said I thought you were getting really bad advice on Afghanistan from your generals and advisers and this morning, guess what? the New York Times said you got bad advice on the mortgage crisis from that dynamic duo, Geithner and Summers—not exactly Batman and Robin fighting crime, more like Messrs. 1% fighting to bail out the banksters and screw the rest of us. The article was about how they assured you the mortgage crisis would take care of itself once Wall Street was bailed out. They even left more than $300 billion earmarked for relief go back to the Treasury unspent. So 4 million homes foreclosed so far, a good chunk of them illegally, and you ignore it till election time when you realize you might be in trouble on the economy. I’ve written about this very topic any number of times over the past few years but it did no good. The only people you listen to are the fat cats who can cough up thirty or fifty grand for your campaign, the advisers and lobbyists who speak only for the 1% and the warmongers who profit from arms and death. My brother keeps telling me it’s useless: “Those letters aren’t going to change a goddamned thing,” he says. “They don’t listen.” But I’m going to keep on trying and maybe one morning I’ll make it into that purple file folder, one of the top 10.