Transparency in Government

Transparency in Government

A big problem we have in this country is that we lack transparency.  This subject completely eludes everybody.  Our government is mismanaged.  If it were being correctly managed, we would not be in our current dilemma.   Add global warming and demographic changes to the equation and everybody panics.  We are bombarded with hi profile ads about bridges, without complete facts – should we not be concentrating on getting, Michigan back?  We are saddled with a horrific burden.  Within a few years, our elected government wants to eliminate eighty percent of our tax base.  The idea that we elected people to write laws to work against the grain of everybody is baffling. 

We are facing our current dilemma, in part because our legislators put us there.  They hold a stick over our heads while we forage for food; and, forget about medicine, we cannot afford it.  The threats of cutting, Social Security loom, while some community town halls use their funds to remodel  and lavishly refurnish, at the burdens of their taxpayers.  Police departments were given a choice to refurbish their cruisers, chose to replace them with, Dodge Chargers.   They will tell you that it only amounts to a small percentage of our budget, just like their salaries that they can raise at will.  But, if you took just four percent and multiplied it by, twenty-five, it takes no time to spend one hundred percent.    They call themselves conservatives, but their motives are pure greed.  And, they have the law on their side, after all, they paid for it, and they wrote the law.  They are writing new laws today, none of which favor the working poor, and forgetting the poor.   That is part of the reason they want to prosecute Momar  Godaffi, for neglecting his people.

While Dick Cheney was, Vice President, he wrote a law to protect himself from what he was about to do.  It holds corporations unaccountable for carelessness.  They can create massive famine and be held unaccountable.  It is OK to kill off our oceans.  That makes it easier to drill.  His, Halliburton amassed great wealth at the expense of a great war that he promoted.  He charged us billions, while he made billions.  We were indebted to his companies.  Where they are today is anybody’s guess.   They vanished with the creators who left us in debt.  This scenario is replaying itself in Michigan and throughout our country.

Are we responsible for the way our state operates?  Our legislators would like us to believe that.  It is our fault that our legislators overspent, and, we have to pay for it.  We bailed out banks, but they won’t bail out their customers.  Nobody will help us.  We are responsible to them.  They paid for us with their ads for smear campaigns, fear mongering, and empty promises.   They can have caviar, while we cannot find work.  Discrimination is Ok.  Forget about negotiation, we can  trust them to do it for us – I have one question; are these the people we’d trust to do our surgeries?  If we can comfortably say that we can trust these people to not suffocate our societies (art, the number one reason for school and literary creation, is being removed from school menus), I guess we must be stunned in our heads.  I grew up in extreme poverty.  Art was the one thing that kept us and other families together.  We didn’t have money.  We had music and each other; but our current legislation would like to cut this non essential program from our public schools – notice, I did not mention private schools, where there is no dearth of funding that somehow finds its way into the programs.  I am not fomenting about this, our current situation.  But, if we allow this to happen to us, our loss of jobs, our governing bodies presenting themselves with armor plating and making stern demands on us, while dining on steak, we have not looked deep within our ranks.  Everybody knows, if combined with working, and working poor it might be conservative to say, we are a majority. 

I do not believe we are responsible for our economic problems.  We are responsible for what we can accomplish, not what legislation has done to us.  Our legislators are clearly representing corporations that rule our government by bogging it with regulations that burden ordinary citizens, while giving themselves loopholes to disregard their laws.  The damage they did to our nation may take years to correct.

While the White House worries about funds and funding, so do the states.  Can we borrow another couple trillion dollars? 

Our current legislators are working together to give themselves a break while bailing out on everybody else.  Social Security and health are taking a backseat to their agendas.  Their solutions are at best temporary with no long-term outlook.   The laws favor them, if not, they will write laws that do.  Our government is not even opaque; forget transparency, it is murky.

Truth and transparency would not allow a government to default.