Reality and Truth
The American reality is forcing us to accept some harsh truths. If there is any hope for this country it lies in our ability to examine the reality, face the truth and stop what is happening in its tracks. Let’s star by making a list of realities that face America today and then we will match them with a list of truths that are responsible for creating and maintaining the realities as status quo.
I will start the list with a grocery list of immediate problems and then will deal with some issues that you may be on either side of depending on your ideology. I will deal with each problem before moving onto the next even though some may intertwine along the way..
Unemployment: The reality is that unemployment is not a new problem. It has been going up and down for decades and we have been losing jobs overseas since the 1980s’ when corporations were given incentives to move their manufacturing plants and jobs abroad. The truth is that corporations wanted to take advantage of cheap labor, child labor, no benefit packages, no environmental concerns and no tariffs on their goods when they bring them home to sell to the people who used to make them. In the 1990s this practice became etched in stone by trade agreements that are unfair to Americans and that have created massive debt in the form of massive trade deficits or trade imbalances between the majority of our major trade partners and our country. By the way, I am trying to place the events in time frame of decades rather than who was in office because this is not an attempt to challenge the left or the right because in the end you will see that Republicans and Democrats have been working hand in hand to reshape America to the desires of Corporate America and the ruling class who we never see in public office. Back to unemployment. Manufacturing jobs are lost forever in this country at least at the levels they used to pay. As unemployment went up and down in the last thirty years wages primarily went down. Most of the job creation was in the service sector and were not high paying jobs. When our factories were being moved abroad we were told not to worry because the coming age of technology belonged to America and it would be the new Industrial Age and America would lead the way in this new field of high paying jobs. Well the New Age of technology has arrived and these jobs have been outsourced abroad to cheaper workforce with no health care or retirement packages. Over the past thirty years this mess was created by the cooperation of both parties. During that period both parties along the way enjoyed the presidecy with a Congressional majority which would allow one of the two parties to do the right thing and rescue the American workers as the job market ship was sinking. Both politacal parties regardless of their rhetoric helped corporate America abandon the laborforce that made them what they were at the time. We will return to some aspects of unemployment as we discuss other realities of the American tragedy.
Defecit: Deficit and national debt are two separate issue. One leads to the other. Deficit spending leads to the national debt. Spending beyond ones means is only one way to incur debt. This is where government budget differs from household budgets because in a household budget you are spending your money but in our national budget Congress spends taxpayers money. You would wouldn't spend seven hundred dollars for a hammer but the government would. You don't depend on contributions from the people with whom you spend money to maintain your position as head of household Congress does. Congress alone has not created our massive debt but they do hold the purse strings. The Pentagon is notorious for paying outrageous prices for goods. They have also bought thing that were obsolete before they were delivered. We could go down a long road of the military industrial relationship, even as far as to suggest that the industrial complex is instrumental in causing wars. But I am more concerned on showing how much this relatioship costs the taxpayer in fraudulant spending. On the day before 911 Rumsfeld was on T.V. declaring that there was 2.3 trillion dollars unaccounted for at the Pentagon. It was never investigated. The next morning on 911 the portion of the Pentagon that housed the accounting department with all the hardware and software that contained all the financial records was destroyed by fire. I am not going to pursue a conspiracy theory about what actually hit the penteagon so strategically as to destroy these records but I did want to show how easily they dismissed 2.3 trillion dollars at a time when the administration was reporting that Medicare and Social Security were in danger. During the early stages of the Iraq War 9 billion dollars was unaccouted for by Haliburton that was taxpayer money entrusted to them by the government. No investigation was done by our government. Every department of government overpays and overspends. Govenrment agencies that are budgeted attempt to spend every dime of their budget because if they were to turn money back in at the end of the fiscal year their budget would be cut for the next fiscal year. That is the small reason for budget abuse the larger reasons are waste and fraud. We have seen FEMA spend millions of dollars on trailers that we never inhabited, while paying for people to be housed on cruiseships. FEMA continues wasteful spending on their FEMA camps that have dubious purposes. Do a google search of FEMA camps for further details, Homeland security spent millions of dollars to creat a color chart to show us the intensity of the daily threat of terrorism. Haliburton was paid billions of dollars for hospitals that never opened and an airport that never landed a plane. Just the tips of the iceburg with Haliburton waste and fraud. Individual state budgets are fraught with the same waste and fruad as the Federa gov't but on a smaller scale. The Ohio Lottery prints its tickets on rolls of paper. I don't know who provides the paper and I am not going to research that for this article but if you play the lottery you will notice that the size of your ticket could be cut in half and still contain the pertinant information. So the supplying of this paper is a cash cow for some one who I am sure has ties to some government official. There are thousands of outlets in Ohio for lottery tickets and they all house a large supply of the paper rolls. I noticed when they load the paper how much is wasted in the process. One girl told me that in essence they are encouraged to waste this paper in many of the processes involved in operating the lottery machine. And because there is a tax on winners above 600 dollars people are encouraged to play seperate tickets for every dollar played on the three digit number which negates the collection of tax on that winner and wastes paper. We have covered the big picture and the small picture of spendind abuses . It hasn't been an indepthexposure that could be done. But nationwide these budget practices cost tax payers billions of dollars and again if either party had your and my interests at heart these would be easy practices to stop.
Speaking of stopping. I am going to stop hear and continue with part II soon. In part two we will look at health care with the reality that they will never fix the problem with the truth being that the health care industry is another large industry that owns politicians and that politicians don't have to worry because their health care is free and guaranteed to follow them into retirement. We will also examine foreign trade and immigration two other factors that impact unemployment and the deficit. Feel free to post comments.
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