The USA is suffering from serious problems in governance. This item
by Nick Hodge lists a litany of unchallenged abuses driven by
mandated agencies literally running amok. It presents a public
sector were everything can be gamed with money.
It is also obvious that suicide by cop is becoming the method of
choice.
Last night I took in a Seattle local newscast. There were three
separate incidents reported in which a gang of cops piled on a
suspect all guns blazing and the target giving as good as he got. A
hundred miles north, we are hard put to have one such scenario a
year. There is a huge training issue here or the lack of it.
It is just not that so much is wrong, but that errors are
accumulating year after year and there is no demonstrative will to
fix anything. The drug trade fuels organized crime, better described
as organized barbarism, and a bloated public security system that
drains the public coffers with absolutely no change in the terms of
engagement or visible progress.
The medical monopoly has ballooned its depredations on the public
purse and the top two thirds of the population while effectively
abandoning the third who cannot pay the dollars involved. This is
all done while charging a third more per capita than anyone else.
The Banking casino hardly needs an introduction. They are all
waiting for the statutes of limitations run out before they go at it
again.
The persuasive sense of corruption pervades the legislative bodies
and almost no one steps up or if they do they are viciously attacked.
This cannot endure.
America Sucks
By Nick Hodge |
Wednesday, September 26th, 2012
America sucks.
It hasn't always. But
it does right now.
And it doesn't have to
stay that way. You can change it...
Of course, some people
won't agree with me. They'll say it's the greatest nation on earth.
The freest. Home of the brave.
To them I ask: Would
the freest nation on earth publicly execute a wheelchair-bound double
amputee at a home for the mentally ill?
It happened last week
in Houston. The courageous men in blue there opened fire on the man
who was wielding a pen after he demanded a cigarette and a soda.
This guy had one arm
and one leg and was mentally ill. Houston cops shot him in the head.
How brave they were.
How free we are.
Six Michigan police
fired 46 bullets at a mentally ill homeless man in July.
Michigan's finest,
well-trained, and noble officers hit the man 11 times — with
fewer than 25% of their shots. Two of those fine Michigan men have
been reprimanded; one has been demoted. Their names were not
released.
These are the kind of
militarized morons policing our country. Protecting us no more, their
job is to instill fear and keep the populace at bay.
But that's how it is,
isn't it? A veil of secrecy has been erected between the government
(and its enforcers) and the people.
You vote for a
candidate who pledges to do X or to repeal Y, and what do you
get?Nothing. Their agenda is their own, formulated at the
request of the highest bidder, meant only to further entrench their
power and line their pockets...
Big Pharma. Big
Retail. Big Tobacco. Big Health Care. Big Oil. Big Agriculture. Big
Banks. Big Government.
Take Two Every 8
Hours, Stay Off Drugs
Prescription pills
kill 140,000 people every year in the United States, severely injure
one million, and send two million to the hospital.
Side effects include
brain damage, stroke, pulmonary disease, cardiac arrest, perforated
ulcers, cancer, liver failure, and addiction.
Those are legal
drugs.
Illegal drugs kill
about 5,000 Americans per year, mostly from cocaine and heroine.
Tell me, on which
drugs should we wage a war?
The facts are clear.
But Big Government and Big Pharma — which spends $100 million
per year lobbying (bribing) politicians — can't get a cut from the
“bad” drugs.
So 1.5 million
Americans are locked up each year for illegal drug-related crimes,
while Big Pharma drug reps make great livings taking doctors out for
expensive lunches every day so they push their pills.
And 80% of those 1.5
million arrests are for possession, so those fine cops mentioned
earlier aren't even getting the distributors.
What's more, 44% of
possession arrests are for marijuana — which kills no one —
rather than for the harder stuff that does.
Yet since the 1980s
over a quarter-trillion of your taxes have gone to fight a
war on drugs that kills millions fewer people than the legal ones
executives and congressmen are profiting from.
Drug dealing isn't
drug dealing when it's state sanctioned.
To quote Gerald
Celente, whose book What Zizi Gave Honeyboy inspired this
essay: “It actually all makes perfect sense in a system in
which justice is measured by the size of political campaign
contributions."
And it's not only
pharmaceutical drugs; the hypocrisy is multiplied when you inspect
alcohol and tobacco, which do tens of billions each year in sales and
spend hundreds of millions bribing so-called 'lawmakers.'
Smoking kills about
450,000 Americans each year. Alcohol kills another 150,000.
But remember, kids,
Altria (Philip Morris), Anheuser-Busch, and Pfizer bribe the
government. They have sales goals to meet. Pot growers don't.
Shit: It's What's for
Dinner
Lamar Carter is a
cattle farmer. He feeds his cows shit.
He's cited in a U.S.
News & World report as buying 745 tons of chicken scat and
stacking it 12 feet high on his farm. After it sits for seven to 10
days, it's mixed with a small amount of soy bran... and fed to his
hundreds of cows.
He's quoted as saying:
“My cows are fat as butterballs. If I didn't have chicken litter,
I'd have to sell half my herd. Other feed's too expensive.”
You may have also
heard the recent story going around about another cattle farmer
feeding candy to his cows.
And I shouldn't have
to recount the squalid conditions your beef and chicken inhabit while
alive, injected with hormones and antibiotics (half of the
antibiotics made in the U.S. are for animals), starved, and then
force-fed to produce bigger eggs, wading in their own feces
until they die.
I won't even tell you
where millions of euthanized dogs and cats end up.
Is it any surprise 80
million Americans contract a foodborne illness annually (over a
quarter of the population), 9,000 of them meeting their maker because
of it?
Have you noticed there
were no warnings for eating undercooked meat or eggs 20 years ago?
But like drugs, where
does the regulator's hammer come down?
Surely not on the
Hormels, Cargills, Tysons, and Perdues who are so profit-hungry they
feed the animals you eat feces... but on the small mom-and-pop
farmers trying to make it on their own selling all-natural beef,
chicken, and vegetables.
In many states, it's
illegal to sell raw milk. In others, small farms have been raided at
gunpoint. (By whom? By those lovely militarized police we talked
about earlier.)
Guess which operations
have enough to bribe the lawmakers you elected?
And then those
politicians have the gumption to decry the loss of small businesses
during their election campaigns when it's them putting them out of
business.
America!
I could go on and on
about the current injustices plaguing the American system. (And I
will next week... and the one after that.)
Like how your Nobel
Peace Prize-winning president increased troop levels in Afghanistan,
a so-called “troop surge,” who are now coming home and “leaving
behind an uncertain landscape of rising violence and political
instability that threatens to undo considerable gains in security,”
as the NYT reported last week.
Last year was the
deadliest year for American troops in Afghanistan since the war
began. This year could rival it.
Soldier suicides are
at an all-time high, and are beginning to outpace deaths on the
battlefield. That's some kinda peace.
There was once a time
when leaders like Washington and Eisenhower actually led wars. And
they knew the desperation it caused — and that it should be
used only as a last result.
Now we carry on wars
for years, the suffering felt only by the lower classes, while
draft-dodgers, community organizers, and Mormon teachers decry its
necessity having never witnessed first-hand its atrocities. If they
want a war so bad, I say give them a rucksack and rifle and send them
out there.
Try to guess how much
money Lockheed and Raytheon and Northrup Grumman spend taking your
elected officials out to dinner. (It was up 11.5% in the first
quarter this year to just under $16 million.)
Or how about the
constant flow of banking scams at the highest level, only to never
see any major prosecutions or law changes...
You might understand
why if you knew the banks and their political action committees
(bribe squads) spent nearly $20 million on political candidates —
Democrat and Republican — in 2010.
Banks like JPMorgan,
Citigroup, and Bank of America have spent $16 million since 2011
trying to get people elected who make or bend laws in their favor.
Congressmen, on average, get $20,000 per year from the banks.
Senators get about $30,000, but it was up near $100,000 leading up to
the implosion of our economy.
No wonder they
continue to bill this as "the greatest nation on earth"...
They're making money
hand over fist while everyone else struggles.
What I don't
understand is why the majority continue to buy into it.
It was Hitler who said
if you repeat the same lie often enough, people will eventually
believe it.
So How Great Is It?
It's great enough that
Americans now work 160 more hours per year than they did 20 years
ago.
And for what?
How's your purchasing
power? Your home value? Your savings account?
It's no wonder a
majority of people think the country is suffering from a moral
breakdown.
To quote from
Celente's book:
If the “American
way” was working so well, why was “stress” cited as the primary
cause for the 25% increase in sick days? Why do stress-related
problems account for 60% to 90% of doctors' visits in the United
States?
If “life has gotten
better,” why are 5% of our children being fed Ritalin to calm them
down, and why are we gulping down more than a million dollars' worth
of Prozac a day to keep steady?
I think it's because
they're chasing a dream they know they can't attain — or
worse, no longer even exists.
Almost one-third of
Americans say they've been on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
For years now there's
been a growing sense of something being truly wrong with our country.
The Occupy Movement has been the most vocal about it, but they aren't
fully representing the problem.
Bankers, for all their
faults, are only leveraging the system they live in; the Supreme
Court, after all, has affirmed that companies are people, and can
donate limitlessly and anonymously to political campaigns.
We've allowed our
country to reach a point where we've sold our happiness and sense of
community to the highest bidder, and only those at the top of
industry and top of government get true profit.
A family of four could
once live well on one salary. Now two aren't enough to scrape by.
As Celente concludes
in the chapter entitled, “Make money your God and it will plague
you like the devil”:
If the facts show —
and the people say — they're unhappy and morally starved, and large
numbers are on the verge of cracking up, is the “American way”
delivering on its promise?
When the media and
politicians talk about other nations that don't have the financial
and material riches of the United States, they tell us the people in
those countries are “living in poverty,” but as any seasoned
world traveler will tell you, “poverty” is a relative term...
It can be argued that
while people living in poor nations lack our material comforts, many
of them possess the wealth of community and the family prosperity
that has dissipated in America and among her people.
A close friend of
mine, a mid-level derivatives manager at Citi, recently quit his job
to move to South America. An accountant here in my office is heading
to Melbourne next month.
Departing isn't the
only option, though it is increasingly appealing.
I'm going to stick it
out here for a while, perhaps on a remote farm, if I can swing it...
Of course, no matter
where you choose to live, acquiring and growing capital always makes
it easier.
I'll continue to try to help you do that every week — while also
wading through the events and policies of a stranger and stranger
world.
And I'll be taking the
stage at the New Orleans Investment Conference next month for
the same reason.
Call it like you see
it,
Nick Hodge
@nickchodge on Twitter
Nick is an editor
of Energy & Capital and the Investment Director of the
thousands-strong stock advisory, Early Advantage. Co-author of
the best-selling book Investing in Renewable Energy: Making
Money on Green Chip Stocks, his insights have been shared on news
programs and in magazines and newspapers around the world. For
more on Nick, take a look at his editor's page.
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