Are you confused and perplexed ? Have you felt like you have been time-warped back to a time before the Age of Reason? Well, I am confused and not amused, as I wait for someone to pinch me to wake me up from this nightmare I am living. Here, I thought we were living in a democracy, a republic, where we the people have the say. Sorry, I seem mistaken, welcome to America, the land of the Corporations, welcome to the government of the corporations, for the corporations and by the corporations.

In case you missed it last week, the Omnibus bill passed by the US Congress and supported by President Obama made it official we have officially given full power over to Banks and big donors.

Let me recap for you what was passed. First their was the removal of the restriction on banks regarding their investing in derivatives. The intent of Dodd-Frank, the banking reform law, was to separate banks into deposit banks and investment banks. Deposit banks have FDIC insurance, to protect depositors from risk and to insure that their money is safe.

Well, you remember the Great Recession, don’t you? Banks put your money at risk by taking chances with it by investing in derivatives and by doing credit default swaps. The thinking is and was under the prior law, Glass-Steagall, that banks that have deposits from you and I should not be allowed to gamble with it. The thinking is that investment banks should be the ones allowed to do that. Let investment banks take risks and if they lose their bet and go down, so be it. But no, we the tax payers needed to bail out the banks to big to fail because we no longer had the previous law that kept that from happening.

Now move forward to last week when Congress gave the power back to banks to put your money at risk. This is crazy!

The culmination of this picture of unmitigated greed run rampant and the purchase of our government by corporations was the donations allowed to political committees was increased in a two-year period to $1,550, 200 dollars and double that for a married couple. So here we have it, in the same bill you give the store to banks on one hand and pay them off on the other hand by increasing the amount of money the banks can give to their political cronies in Congress who voted for the bank gift. The banksters are now so confident about their purchase of our government, they are no longer keeping it a secret.

It is not much of a gift though, as the danger now exists that someday we will have to bail out the banks once more when the inevitable happens. The inevitable is that greed will triumph over safety and the banks will put us all on the hook for a potential Great Depression.

Another source of great confusion was to see on our corporate media, the faces and voices of those who gave us the torturing of our enemies. Cheney and John Yoo were on public display, touting their defense for indefensible acts of brutality. Cheney reasoned that rectal feeding was done for medical reasons. Sorry, I didn’t realize that we had gone back to the days of the Inquisition. Cheney even had the unmitigated gall to put his President George W. Bush under the bus, claiming that Bush knew all about the enhanced interrogation techniques. Isn’t language fascinating? You can find a nice sounding phrase to describe torture.

Yoo tried, in his time in the Executive Branch, to give a legal justification for torture. Now he claims that the use of torture was a success. Yah, they gave out a lot of pain, suffering and death to prisoners of war. They were successful in breaking the law and depriving people of their human rights. Even murderers and terrorists deserve their day in court.

In Texas, they are considering putting both creationism and having Moses listed as a founding father of America in their textbooks.

The list of reasons for feeling confused and perplexed goes on and on. I thought I was living in the United States, a place of laws and not men, a place where we regulated greed and gave to the people a government where they not the aristocracy had the say. Boy, was I confused! Pinch me! Wake me up from this nightmare!!!