I grew up under the shadow of Watergate.

Richard Nixon’s resignation sent a powerful message: There is no place for dirty tricks and cover-ups in America, that even people in power will be held accountable, that even the President is not above the law.

America stood proudly for truth, integrity and honesty.

Oh, how times have changed.

At first, many of us believed Bush and Cheney when they told us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Why would our leaders so blatantly lie?

But lie they did. And with impunity.

And thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died because of this lie.

And this lie ushered in billions of dollars of systemic fraud against the American taxpayer carried out by the military contractors like Halliburton and KBR.

And this lie ushered in torture and human rights abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

We became a nation that accepted lies and fraud, a nation indifferent to the pain we caused.

Our moral core was rotting.

The 2007 financial crisis should not then have come as a surprise.

The banks lied about the value of mortgages. Scamming mortgage brokers lied to homeowners. Credit agencies lied about the value of bonds. And co-opted regulators turned a blind eye. Millions of people lost their homes and their jobs.

The US National Commission blamed the crisis on a “systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics.” In other words, more lies, more fraud and more indifference to pain.

Obama ran in 2008 on a message of hope and change.

Would the liars, fraudsters and torturers be held accountable?

Would America’s moral core be restored?

As Hillary Clinton continually repeats, Barack Obama accepted more money from Wall Street than any other President.

It should not then have come as a surprise that he stacked his Treasury Department and economic advisors with men from Wall Street (read about it here).

I remember clearly that day just three weeks after he was elected President on November, 4, 2008, when he announced he was nominating Wall Street banker Timothy Geithner as his Treasury Secretary. I was so frustrated. The writing was on the wall. More of the same.

It should not then have come as a surprise when the Wall Street banks who created the crisis were bailed out, but not the suffering homeowners, not the people who lost their jobs and their homes.

Barack Obama strikes me as a good man trying to do the right thing. Yet, why is it that:

Under Obama, no banker or mortgage broker has been held accountable, even after the banking institutions admitted fraud and paid billions in fines.

Under Obama, no war profiteer who fleeced America has been held accountable

Under Obama, no torturer of human bodies has been held accountable.

Our corrupt campaign finance system has impeded Obama from standing up and holding the fraudsters, profiteers and torturers accountable.

Our corrupt campaign finance system has ensured that America still stands for lies, fraud and torture with impunity.

This situation is not acceptable.

Today, in 2016, we need a President who stands up for truth, honesty and care for others.

We need a President who stands up for what is right, not what is expedient.

We need a President not tainted and co-opted by our corrupt campaign system.

We need a President who is supported by the people and is not owned by corporations, Wall Street and billionaires.

And because Bernie Sanders stands up for what is right, and not what is expedient, he has bravely, and often solely, stood on the right side of history:

• 1994: Speaking out against the crime bill which incarcerated millions of African Americans
• 1995: Speaking up for gay members of the military when they were attacked and silenced.
• 1999: Speaking out against banking deregulation and the elimination of Glass Steagall
• 2002: Speaking out against the Iraq war
• 2002: Speaking out against unconstitutional provisions of the Patriot Act
• 2004: Speaking out against outsourcing and the havoc it was wrecking
• 2009: Confronting Bernanke about why the financial bailout is not giving aid to ordinary Americans
• 2011: Speaking out against the US Panama Free Trade Deal (to rein in offshore tax evasion), 2011

We need a President who believes in transparency and openness, and doesn’t, for some unknown reason, decide to erase 30,000 emails while under investigation (reminiscent of Nixon’s erasure of 18 minutes of tape).

We need a President who finances their campaign from grass roots supporters, not someone who twists the letter of the law limiting personal contributions to $2700, by “legally” laundering contributions to their campaign through state DNCs in order to accept $350,000 per wealthy individual.

We need a President who does not court conflict of interest, supporting as Secretary of State the same brutal dictators who donate to her charitable foundation, a foundation that has turned her from a public servant into a multi-millionaire.

We need a President who does not see regime change — either through military force or covert operations — as the go to answer to foreign policy challenges.

We need a President who speaks truth without regard to mainstream thinking, whether speaking about institutional racism, fracking, guns or Israel.

We need a President whose guiding principle as a human being is that we are all in this together.

Bernie Sanders: “We are in this together, when you hurt, when your children hurt, I hurt, I hurt. And when my kids hurt, you hurt. It is very easy to turn our backs on kids that are hungry and veterans who are sleeping out on the street, and we can develop a psyche, a psychology which is…I don’t have to worry about them, all I’m going to worry about is myself and I need to make another $5 billion. But I believe that what human nature is about is that everyone in this room impacts everybody else in all kind of ways that we can’t even understand. It’s beyond intellect. It’s a spiritual, emotional thing. So I believe when we do the right the thing, when we try to treat people with respect and dignity, when we say that that child who is hungry is my child. I think we are more human when we do that.”

We impact each other.

Our leaders have an overwhelming impact on all of us.

Our Presidents set the moral and ethical tone of our nation.

Bush and Cheney created a nation where it was okay to lie, commit fraud and torture.

Elected on hope and change, Obama choose not to hold the liars, the fraudsters and the torturers accountable. And the message has been that people can still get away with lying, fraud and torture. And so the rot in our nation continues.

Do we want more of the same or do we want a leader who will bring America back to truth, honesty and care for others?

America needs a brave, moral person as President.

America needs Bernie Sanders as President.