Why wasn’t Cheney impeached?

The Illinois State Senate voted unanimously on Jan. 29 to throw Gov. Rod Blagojevich out of office. Compared to Dick Cheney’s record, what Blagojevich is accused of amounts to peanuts. But Congress refused to touch Cheney or his fellow war criminal George W. Bush.

Everybody knows that Cheney got oodles of money from Halliburton, where he had been the CEO. In 2005 alone Cheney got $211,465 in “deferred compensation” from the huge Pentagon contractor, $6,000 more than his vice presidential salary. (mattb79.blogspot.com)

This was on top of stock options and a $20-million retirement bonus. Is it any wonder the Pentagon awarded Halliburton fabulously lucrative contracts without any competitive bidding? CBS News estimated that just one of these deals, for putting out oil well fires in occupied Iraq, was potentially worth $7 billion.

Unlike Cheney, Gov. Blagojevich was suddenly arrested on Dec. 9 by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. The day before, Blagojevich had come out in support of the Chicago workers who took over their Republic Windows factory.

Blagojevich is accused of seeking kickbacks in return for appointing a successor to President Barack Obama’s Senate seat. Politicians have been wheeling and dealing since before 1776. Was Blagojevich’s arrest by Bush’s appointee Fitzgerald part of an attempted smear campaign against President Obama?

As a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald let Bush’s top political advisor, Karl Rove, go free. Rove helped smear Valerie Plame and Charles Wilson, who exposed Bush’s lie that Iraq tried to acquire uranium from Niger. This falsehood was an essential part of the war propaganda that led to the invasion of Iraq.

Wall Street financier J.P. Morgan reputedly told his cronies that everything had a good reason—and a real reason. Capitalist society is corrupt from top to bottom. Whenever the capitalist government decides to indict a political official, we have to seek out the real reasons for it.

are retaliation, not justice

Blagojevich’s predecessor in Springfield, Ill., was Gov. George Ryan. Was Ryan sent to federal prison because of corruption or because he imposed a moratorium on the death penalty? Ryan was also outspoken in demanding an end to the blockade of Cuba. This Republican governor actually visited Cuba.

Another former Illinois governor—Otto Kerner—became the first sitting federal judge to be sent to jail. Kerner’s real crime was to declare, as chair of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, that white racism was the cause of the rebellions that swept the country in 1967.

Isn’t it interesting that not a single member of the Daley family, whose machine still runs Chicago, has ever been arrested?

Black and Latina/o elected officials have been special victims of selective prosecutions and outright frame-ups.

Eddie Perez, the first Latino mayor of Hartford, Conn., was arrested on Jan. 27 for using a city contractor to fix his home. Perez was indicted for bribery even though he paid the contractor for the work.

Was this indictment retaliation for Hartford declaring itself a sanctuary city for immigrants?

When Charles Diggs Jr. became Michigan’s first Black congressman in 1955, there were only two other African Americans in the House of Representatives. Diggs went to Mississippi to attend the phony trial of the killers of Black teenager Emmett Till, who was tortured to death.

Diggs became the first chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and demanded action against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Nixon put him on his “enemies list.”

Diggs was accused of taking campaign contributions from his paid staffers, a long-standing practice. Unlike the torturers of Emmett Till, Diggs was convicted on Oct. 7, 1978, and sent to prison.

Harlem Congressperson Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was also attacked for “corruption.” His real crime was raising the federal minimum wage as head of the House Education and Labor Committee.

Powell was actually expelled from the House of Representatives in 1967. He was demanding that construction unions be opened to Black and Latina/o workers. AFL-CIO President George Meany helped put the knife in Powell’s back.

Former Milwaukee Alderman Michael McGee Jr. is currently locked up. McGee fought police brutality, demanded Mumia Abu-Jamal’s freedom and requested heating oil assistance from Venezuela. This Black elected official wasn’t even allowed to post bail.

The feds have arrested Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner, a fighter for the poor and the oppressed, on the basis of an FBI “sting” operation.

The FBI hounded Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It conducted the Cointelpro program that tried to destroy Black and other progressive organizations. FBI sting operations aimed at framing up elected officials are in the same tradition.

New Jersey Sen. Harrison Williams was sent to jail in the “Abscam” case. This FBI-staged affair was a racist attack on Arab people. It involved a convicted con artist posing as an Arab sheik trying to entrap people. Its name derived from “Abdul Scam.”

Sen. Williams was a co-sponsor of OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Corporations hated this law and Republicans attacked it in the 1980 election.

Tens of thousands of lives have been saved because of OSHA regulations. Workers Memorial Day is held on April 28 every year to commemorate OSHA going into effect on April 28, 1971.