The Trouble With America

The Trouble with America is that there are a-holes like me. There are people who want the unfettered truth, not simply refined, homogenized, filtered pseudo-truths that serve to advance some agenda or political ideology. People like me don’t want to be CNN’d or Fox News’d (are those even words?).

I want to know about the toxic smoke that the refinery down the street is putting in the air, which in turn is giving me cancer. I want to know about the corporations that hire 8 year old kids and put them to work in their plants in Indonesia and Thailand for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. I want to know what billion-dollar companies my elected officials are taking money from (in the form of skiing trips, boats, $1000 bottles of wine, and whatever else the mega-rich can afford to buy for influential people in our government). I want to know that the oil industry and the auto industry paid off government officials in the 40s and 50s to destroy our communities and put highways in our back yards. I want to know how much money the drug companies gave our politicians to get the no-bulk-discounts medicare deal through the house and senate. I want to know why American oil companies’ yearly profits have quadrupled from the time the Iraq war started until now (5/2/2006), why fuel efficiency standards are basically the same as they were 21 years ago, and why over 2000 Americans, and between 30,000 and 100,000 Iraqis have died because of it.

I want to know it all. And I want everyone else to know, too. That’s why I’m starting this blog, The Trouble With America. It is for the purpose of taking the most raw of facts from major news outlets and independent media sources, and lay it out, as I see it. Without any particular bias, besides that of a person who is f**king fed up with corporate America owning America.

You may have concluded by the above remarks that I am probably ‘left of the spectrum.’ If you have, then you my friend, are caught up in the silly political divisiveness that is infesting America. We’re not all that divided, really. Sure, there’s the Iraq thing, the immigration thing, the abortion thing, and a host of other things, but that’s true of all countries – there’s always going to be differing opinions. That is the nature of free thought. It is innate of the human condition to disagree about things that matter to us. And I’ll spare you the suspense: the disagreements will continue.

This differing of opinion, however, is exploited by the politicians. They want us divided. They need us divided.

Politicians work for corporations, just like corporations work for shareholders. Since politicians work for corporations who give them millions of dollars (legally and illegally), they need to keep us occupied with red herrings, while corporations do the real damage, under the radar (think Halliburton, Exxon, Enron, and Walmart).

The above is a menagerie of thoughts. They’re not organized or particularly professional. They’re just the random thoughts of an American, who is proud to be an American, but is not proud of the politicians and corporations who represent him in the world. They’re f**king America up. That’s the Trouble with America.