Dear Leader Obama has said that we must look forward, not backward. Those who broke the law should not be held accountable, no matter how many suffered and died. It's just such a downer to burden your beautiful minds on negative thinking.
But those who protested and fought back against the crimes? Well, yeah, they have to be held accountable.
One of the most egregious examples is that of Tim DeChristopher, a student who went to a demonstration against a BLM auction in December 2008. The Bush/Cheney administration was trying to shovel through a last giveaway of American public land to oil companies. He decided that standing outside and protesting wouldn't really help that much, so he went inside, took an auction paddle and started bidding on land. He bought some land, and ran up the bidding on other pieces, cutting into the oil companies potential profits, so he was arrested. Wouldn't you think that disrupting an illegal proceeding in a legal way (bidding in an auction) would be a great place to apply the "looking forward, not backward" template? Especially because the Obama administration has decided that the entire auction was conducted illegally?
Just why is bidding in an auction illegal? When leveraged buy-outs are legal, that is, the buying of companies using the company's assets as collateral? When the buyer can then strip the company's assets, fire its workers, and raid the pension fund? Why is not having money to pay for oil leases illegal, when not having money to buy a corporation is fine?
What about the so-called collateralized debt obligations? In the last 10 years, the rich have gambled with money they didn't have, and now are blaming it on us. You know, the working class that bought houses "they couldn't afford", (after the mortgage resets, that is), which mortgages the rich speculated on for far more than they were worth. No one knows the numbers, but it's something like $500 billion of houses gambled into $65 trillion debts. How is that legal?
What about taking money from the government to do a job and then not doing it? Isn't that illegal?
What about selling stocks that you don't even own? While nominally illegal, it is widely done. How is bidding without money prosecutable, while selling that which you don't own is not?
But while the rich cheat, steal, loot and kill, only Tim DeChristopher continues to be prosecuted while Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield/Gonzalez/Yoo/Addington/Bybee, etal., carry on their privileged high paid lives.
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