Let all the bells in the land ring out!! Let the voices of the oppressed be heard!!

Only two more months till the current loathsome regime is gone and it is replaced by another, hopefully much more enlightened, group of people chosen by the people.

We can only hope that the politicians behind the ruination of the country's treasury and prestige are held legally accountable for some of the crimes they committed while in office. If there is no accounting, it will happen again...and soon...for America still has elections...let us hope they can continue...alas, my fear is that they will not if the laws of the country are not enforced. The past eight years have seen a selective enforcement of the laws, amoral behavior by the American Administration, both at home and abroad. If there is no accounting, there will be nothing to stop the same players from attempt once again to turn our country into a one party state, a police state. We're already more than half-way there, thanks to the past 30 years of political bungling by our own political system. We need to stop the countenancing of bungling and we need to stop acting like having our head in the sand when it comes to the endemic problems in the two major parties, the lack of ideas, and the lack of introspection, the ignorance, is swept away.

We need accountability for anyone, anyone who thought that our money was their friends money to play with. We need accountability for those who turned our effort in the middle east into a windfall for private corporations; we need to move away from privatizing war, to the building of paramilitary corporations backed by private armies, by the contracting of these same private armies to protect our own government officials in Iraq. We need to move back from the brink when it comes to the Blackwaters and the people who think they should decide what is done with our money by hiding the process of disbursing that money from us, we the people, we who paid the taxes that led to the debacles of our interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And we need a Congress and a government that is not afraid to police itself. For, while we can vote people in and out of office, it appears that we have less and less control over the parties that back those people. Less and less control of how little they police themselves and how little they and the people that pay them care for our laws and our Constitution...how little these special interests, the super rich, the industrialists, and the investment bankers and their ilk actually care for the Republic.

There must be an accounting...or we will not survive as a representative democracy much longer...at least not in the modern sense of the word.

Finally, we also need to come to grips with the fact that we are no longer the policeman of the world. The pax Americana is no longer evident on the world stage like it was when the Bush Regime stole into town. We need to build up diplomatic and political, economics based relationships that make sense with China, India, Europe, and Russia, with South America, and with our other traditional allies and our neighbors. We need to make some amends for all of the pollution we spew out, all the inefficiencies that our economic model leads to in the fair and reasonable distribution of resource from around the world to the other countries of the world. American leadership can still be...but if we don't change course drastically from the path of the past eight years, China and Europe, and probably Russia and India will eventually catch up and overtake us, economically, culturally, and politically. Already the rise of China is apparent.

Stopping China is no longer an option without the possibility of another world war. That cannot happen. No one, no one sane anyways, wants such a war...but it will occur if we do not engage the world in a dialog that leads to progress for the entire world. Not the progress of flim-flam securties based on America's under-regulated real estate markets, but an economy and progress based on real value being added to the world health, to the world's sustainability.

May that goal be the goal of our country from now on.