Last night I was listening to an interesting interview with an author of a book (no, I don't recall his name or the name of the book - that would be far too easy). He was talking about the huge waste of money and resources that have been poured into Iraq. By way of illustration, he said that at the beginning of the "war" we sent cargo planes full of money. I believe it was 1600 tons of $100 bills! (Around $20 billion dollars) This money was to be used as needed, basically without any requirement for accountability or tracking - it was just the pocket money for keeping things going. At one time our leader over there had $600 million in $100 in his office to be handed out has he saw fit. The net outcome of all of this cash without accountability was that it was wasted, it basically just disappeared into thin air (I suppose a lot of it was eventually used to buy weapons to point back at us). Because of the environment of free wheeling spending with so much cash floating around, we managed to create a situation where corruption and graft are so prevalent that it is almost impossible to do business or deal with the government without bribes and other forms of illegal activities and payoffs. So we managed to set up another corrupt government.
This got me to thinking about what is happening to the government in general. It feels to me like the current administration is making a giant grab for the wealth of the United States. They are in the process of taking as much as they can get (which appears to be a LOT), without any consideration of what happens to those of us who they are taking from. There are many examples that lead me to this conclusion. Little issues like the person who makes secret deals with the energy companies concerning national energy policy happens to be a huge player in energy (oil). The folks in the administration who are playing chicken little with bird flu and are ordering hundreds of millions of units of a vaccine that has been shown to not work happen to own the company that makes the vaccine. The folks who get non-bid contracts for rebuilding everything (Iraq, New Orleans, etc), happen to be big players in the companies who get those very same contracts. It just keeps going on and on. Every time there is a really big spending of money, it amazingly goes to the folks who are making the decisions on how to spend the money. I find it odd that nobody seems to ask the question of who is going to get extremely rich should the Social Security be changed to require putting the money into private investments. Also, when we hear anything about fixing the medical mess it is always in the form of making it so everyone can buy private insurance - this is the source of the problem, not a solution. But it will make the insurance companies much richer.
All of the decisions being made by the administration seem to be geared toward making rich people richer, they have nothing to do with the welfare of the country, the people, the environment, the world political situation, improving education or anything else even vaguely connected to what there job is.
It amazes me that this is invisible to the vast majority of our population. What is it that prevents them from seeing that they are being ripped off and are headed for a disaster? I suspect it is related to their own greed. For one thing, they keep thinking that they (each individual person) will somehow get in on the scam. In addition, they believe that they will get their personal way with regard to religious matters. They are willing to do anything if they feel that their religious issues will get supported. They really want everyone to be like they are and don't like the idea of other approaches, that means sharing and being tolerant, and that doesn't feel good.
It looks to me like unless something is done quickly, we are spiraling into a huge and deadly problem. Maybe it is already too late. We keep asking ourselves why the Roman empire collapsed and could it happen to us. It looks like we get a front row seat, and yes it can happen to us.
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