The problems that we face in this country are not just problems caused by the Bush administration. They are not caused by a corrupt and ineffective media. They are not caused by politicians that use their office for personal power and wealth. They are not just caused by a central bank that charges this country for the right to use its own money. They are not caused by the terrorists that according to our government, number in the millions and are behind every crime and evil deed done on the planet. So who is responsible? Why is this country falling apart morally and fiscally, not to mention that the nation’s infrastructure that is coming apart at the seams? Why now, and why is every facet of our society either crumbling or under attack from one side or another?

I have thinking about all of these questions, and everyday I find myself so preoccupied with the questions; I find little time to research the answers. It would be so easy to blame everything on the vacant mind that occupies the oval office. While Bush and his cronies have much to do with the sorry state of affairs we find ourselves in, he isn’t responsible for everything. There is nobody that is responsible for everything. Replacing George W. Bush with a new face, no matter whose face it is, won’t solve all of our problems. The truth as I see it, no matter who becomes President, providing that he doesn’t follow in the steps of the Pakistani President and cancels the elections by declaring martial law, is that the entire system is corrupt, from top to bottom.

The Republicans can blame it on the Democrats and vice-versa… and they do. The truth is that every nasty thing they say about each other is part of the show. The political infighting and bickering is all part of the arrangement designed for public consumption. In reality, most of the people holding elective positions in this 21st century America, except for a few principled people that haven’t gotten themselves neck deep in filth by returning political favors and keeping secrets, have many reasons for holding office; least of which is representing their constituents. That seems to be the only part of our Republic that remains truly transparent and can be readily understood by anyone that takes the time to think independently from the media. I bring the media into this for a very good reason. It seems as if a substantial portion of Americans have decided that they are much too busy to think for themselves on issues that are not personally important to them.

This, in and of itself, is one reason why we find ourselves in this situation. The American people seem to have put way to much trust in a media that is deathly afraid to speak out on anything that might be controversial, lest they offend anyone. A case in point was during the selection of the new Pope after Pope Paul died. I was in a hospital room after an operation and my wife and I were watching TV. I forget how many days they had been deliberating but the point was that if they selected a new Pope, the smoke coming from the Vatican was supposed to be white or black or if the College of Cardinals could not reach a consensus. I saw the smoke and I said to my wife that it was white, she agreed. The newsperson on TV couldn’t make that assumption, even though the smoke was obviously white. I flipped through the remote and it seemed as if every newsperson on television that day couldn’t tell black from white. It took almost fifteen minutes until one daring reporter ventured an opinion that the smoke was white. Once that was said, I flipped through the channels and at that particular point in time, the networks finally decided that they could tell black from white. I couldn’t make something like that up. This illustrates my point exactly. News isn’t based on fact anymore, it’s based on consensus. The media isn’t completely censored by its corporate sponsors or the government; it is also under a form of self-censorship.

The American people not only don’t demand coverage of political wrongdoing and corporate crime, they seem to fear and despise coverage of it. There are many Americans that would rather see coverage of celebrities and sports than deal with the war in Iraq and corporate scandal. The reason for this I believe is that they can talk around the water cooler at work about sports and celebrities. Talking about the war is a delicate subject with no clear solution, and thus makes it hard to discuss. The idea of bringing up the subject of a corporate controlled America in which our entire political system and the media are taken out of the control of the population and placed in the hands of corporations is another conversation killer. We were raised to believe that capitalism is the life-blood of this country. To suggest that this very same capitalism is killing our right to be informed citizen’s with the right to choose our own leaders sounds too much like a Marxist diatribe, even if it is the truth.

We seem to have fallen into a mind-set that there is nothing that we can accomplish even if we all agreed that this situation is bringing us to an Orwellian type of society where our rights and responsibilities are taken by a kind of corporate oligarchy. Our news will be filtered so that we become docile and undisturbed. Our leaders will be financed by those that see it in their best interests to spend heavily on those that will not impede the agenda of business. No longer will we see bright upstarts on the political scene. The only ones that will be nominated to run for office from the two corporate and special interest controlled political parties are the ones that can prove that they can be trusted to do the right thing by the people that finance their campaigns. This is already happening in this country. If things continue to go as planned, this nation will have had a President with the name of Bush or Clinton since 1989 and could well continue until 2016. Is this just a coincidence in a nation of 330,000,000 people?

We were led into a war with Iraq on the premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We found no such weapons so the rationale behind the war became “To bring Democracy to Iraq”. The media reported this without blinking its eyes. We are now told that Iran is a “State Sponsor of Terrorism”. The media is reporting this also with a straight face while we continue to give billions in military aid to a nation that has declared martial law on its citizens after they built nuclear weapons and put these weapons on-line without so much as a whimper from the American government. While we continue to ratchet up the rhetoric about Iran being a supplier of weapons to anti-American forces, we continue to be the world’s largest arms dealer. We continue to speculate on a decision to attack Iran even though Iraq’s WMD’s never existed. Since they weren’t to be found in Iraq, we brought along our own in the form of depleted uranium. Now along with the “democracy” we brought to Iraq, they can also deal with the radiation poisoning of their people. The media hasn’t yet informed America that this radiation also gets into the atmosphere by pulverized DU shells and missiles. Radiation has been found as far away as Great Britain with a radiation count over 5 times the normal amount.

While we export radiation sickness to the Iraqi people, we make sure that the media doesn’t report on this less the American people get too “disturbed” over it so that the defense contractors can continue to reap record profits. The oil companies that claim on their TV ads that they are bringing you a cleaner, less toxic biosphere push the Iraqi Parliament to pass the “Revenue Sharing Law” that would give 25% of Iraq’s only real natural resource to the people of that shattered nation while the multi-national oil companies get the other 75%. The media didn’t report on that either, and if it did, I never saw it.

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