Response to Obama Letter

Dear Mr. President,

Got a 2-page computer-generated letter yesterday. The financial one about your tough new regulations that guarantee we’ll never again have to bail out Wall Street. All the articles I read however, tell a different story; that Wall Street lobbyists gutted the Dodd-Frank bill, that Dodd sold out and the Banksters continue on their merry way. Dodd-Frank doesn’t do much except for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and you trumpet that in your letter as though your administration was responsible for it. Ironically, I just read “The Professor,” in the September 17 New Yorker which details how Elizabeth Warren, an outsider, was the driving force behind the CFPB, not you, not Dodd and certainly not Wall Street’s lap dog, Timothy Geithner, your Treasury Secretary. She fought and publicly embarrassed Geithner and the Republicrats in her relentless defense of taxpayers and that doomed her chances of heading the bureau she created; they wanted no one in charge who might actually police their Bankster friends. However, it made her a hero outside Washington and now she’s running for the Senate in Massachusetts against Scott Brown. I hope she wins but if she does I also hope she doesn’t get corrupted by what Jeff Connaughton calls the “slow immersion in moral compromise” (“Washington Man,” this week’s New Yorker). But as I read your letter, it suddenly struck me that most of my 116 letters over the last 5 months are about Afghanistan, kill lists, drones and your disregard of law, the Constitution and human rights, and I have yet to receive one letter on those issues. Maybe you think silence will make them go away, but it won’t. Maybe you think it’s a matter of national security but it isn’t, it’s a matter of morality and moral injury to the nation’s psyche. Your undeclared wars of aggression, your institutionalization of permanent war, of Kill Lists (renamed Disposition Matrix), and the power you have amassed in the name of national security should terrify every American but it doesn’t. As a joke. a friend, an Obama campaign volunteer, sent me an image of your 2008 Hope poster with “Hope You Don’t Get Indefinitely Detained” super-imposed across the bottom. Indefinite detention is not a joke however, for it signals both the elimination of Constitutional protections and a deep denial of reality. Maybe people will come out of denial only when they or their friends and family are indefinitely detained. But then it’s too late.