Both Republicans and Democrats Complicit in U.S. Decline

Neither side is without blame for the mess we’re in. Both sides voted for the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and both sides continue to support them. Both sides have intervened in the affairs of foreign nations and both sides spend money like sailors on shore leave in their attempts to buy the vote from one group or another.  

George Bush proposed a stimulus package and both the Republicans and Democrats voted for it. The new Democratic administration proposed another stimulus package and  the Democrats and Republicans voted for it and also asked for the funds knowing full well that those funds were adding to the deficit.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats have neglected to mandate balanced budgets or fiscal responsibility based on the financial realities that face every working citizen in this country every goddamned day. They are above such things and are actually exempt from the laws they themselves pass.

Since the advent of Medicare and the Great Society, each administration has been kicking another brick under the pyramid in order to prop up bad policy and to pass the debt for such on to a new generation. There isn’t a whole lot of difference between either party from what recent history reveals. Each change brings more spending on entitlements and increased costs for people who only want to get ahead in this world so they’ll have enough to raise and educate their children and have enough to live comfortably in their retirement years.

The government should have nothing to do with any of that.

But here they are, inside every major system in the country and making a shambles out of it. The public school systems across the nation are shameful in their costs and failure to deliver results on a par with other nations. To them it is all about the lunch programs or teaching diversity whereas in other nations it’s all about math and science. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the Federal Government, the people who are supposed to be providing for our common defense and creating a level playing field for business, should be involved with the day to day minutia of what’s going on in a public school. That’s for the States to provide.  And the result of the Federal Government buying its way into the public school system is increased requests now for them to fix it. Go figure. It's like asking an arsonist for help putting out a fire.

There is also no mandate for the government to be involved in your medical care but there they are stacking yet another bureaucratic plan on top of the other past bureaucratic plans before it and each infusing more money into it to cover for it's failures.

And throughout it all, each administration, Republican or Democrat, has added to the mess, raised the debt ceiling, voted for the unfunded mandate and attempted to fix the previous administrations fiscal missteps by either throwing more money at it or paying out less in benefits.

So now when a Republican  presidential hopeful comes along and says he wants to right the sinking ship, they have little to stand on. The Republicans like Paul Ryan actually asked for stimulus money for his state. Many Republicans have asked just like many Democrats have asked. Yes, to their credit there were also Republicans who refused stimulus funds, they get it, but they are but a cry in the wilderness.  And I'll only mention RomneyCare.

But ultimately, it’s just all about the dough to these bureaucrats, each clamoring for Federal money for their state and bowing to all the conditions and strings attached to it no matter whether it’s harmful to the nation and its people in the long run. The Congress has gone along with many hair brained spending scemes like "No Child Left Behind" and "Medicaid Plan B" prescription benefit plan.

The Federal Government has become a giant "Make Work" program and results are not as important as long as the government checks keep coming in. Since government doesn'ctually produce anything, this sends the country into deficit.

Even those crusaders for reform have skeletons in their closets voting for stimulus packages, requesting government money and voting for endless wars or crazy spending by past administrations. No one, it seems, has any moral high ground anymore. We’ve become a society too easily bought and it shows.

But there is now a nation of people the government has to support and much of it is mandated by law.  This is really what the people will decide in November: Which side can keep those checks coming?

By the way things are looking, the answer will probably be: Neither.

Doctors: Pushers in Lab Coats

This is the state of medicine in the United States today. I was at a pharmacy/mini mart last week and a kid jumped the counter, grabbed a bunch of prescriptions waiting to be picked up and attempted to escape on foot with them. He didn’t get out of the parking lot.

This poor sap was just doing what many of our fellow citizens are doing these days: Trying to get their fix. He must have run out of doctors to prescribe for him.

I changed doctors a few years back when my former GP offered me a certain male enhancement drug. I never expressed an interest in aquiring it nor did I ask. I was there for a checkup and we hadn’t even started yet. That was it for him.

I have always found it strange that people have so many prescription drugs lying around. There are a lot of drugs in cirulation these days and they're all prescription drugs.

I met a woman not too long ago who told me the story of how she came to be divorced. Her former husband had a thriving construction business. She told me that he injured his ankle on the job and the doctor prescribed Oxycondone for the pain. Doesn’t this man, a man with no history of addictive behavior, become hooked on this stuff? Doesn’t he lose the business, his marriage and ends up living on the street? Yep, scared the crap out of me to hear this. How can this be?

Legendary musician and self-proclaimed child porn researcher, Pete Townsend of the British rock band,The Who, once said about his heroin addiction that he was “Addicted the very first time” he used the drug and “chased the feeling of that first high” for the rest of the time he was involved with it.

Much like the American weapons industry and our national addiction to war, we have a huge economic interest in the manufacture and distribution of pharmascutical drugs. It’s big business! But these drugs are so powerful, they can take over a person’s life and negatively affect the lives of all they are involved with, their colleagues and their families. But what can you do, a customer is a customer.

I'm not going out on a limb when I say that most of the murder and robbery going on in this country is drug related.  Nobody wants to rob a bank if they don’t have to. These are acts of desperate people but with the wasted efforts of our penal coloney state, there are no resources to help people get clean. A jail cell, yes, a drug facility, no.

Drug companies have a huge sales force with the power of the “junket” and “seminars” that they get doctors to "teach" and to promote their “product” for big rewards. Who cares if it’s killing people? Certainly not the drug industry.

It has been reported that more Americans are now hooked on manufactured drugs than on the old tired stuff like Marijuana, Hashish, Cocaine and Heroin COMBINED. All that is oh, so yesterday. Your parents did those drugs way back in the 70s and 80s for crying out loud, why horse around with that stuff when you can get the good, clean high of a high quality pharmaceutical?

And it’s all LEGAL! Well most of it anyway. The manufacture and distribution methods are all above board at any rate. These are the "legitimate" drugs, the drugs allowed by the State. Those others are illigitimate. There's a big difference, see?

All good for the economy.  People gotta have good jobs so they can have good homes and nice communities with good schools to raise their kids in.

But these very same communities are in jeopardy and although the damage in dollars and cents may be harder to track, the toll outweighs the gains. Nobody grows up wanting to be a drug addict but we have plenty of drug addicts. Some are born but most are MADE.

There are few professions where the practitioners take an oath. Some swear to uphold the law, another swears to uphold the Constitution but one in particular vows to “do no harm”. All these oaths have been violated and this will continue no doubt. While people don’t trust the police much and certainly don’t trust the President, many people trust their doctors and believe what their doctor tells them. These drugs are “medicine” and most believe that it wouldn’t be recommended if they didn’t need it.

Yes, doctors take an oath but they don’t take a vow of poverty and in our society, as in any society, money does most of the talking. People, and doctors are people first, like to have things and what’s the harm in prescribing this stuff?

By the looks of what’s going on in our nation, plenty of harm.