What is wrong with us? I know this has to be the craziest question anyone ever asked, because everyone will have their own ideas. Maybe the first question should be what country has the most influence on the world at this present moment in time. When Rome was at its peak, Roman ideas ruled the world. Some were great ideas while others were cruel. Sort of what we have today. There always seems to have been one country which was responsible for its ideas being adopted by much of the rest of civilization. I use the word civilization loosely. Even today one cannot say the entire world is civilized and this is about 2,000 years after the Romans disappeared, if we don’t count the Eastern Empire, but that is a different story. It seems almost all countries who led the world had good points and bad. The Romans would absorb a country into their empire and they would be treated mostly the same as any other Romans, but if they resisted they would be attacked viciously and their broken country absorbed anyway and many would become slaves.

History shows us there will always be at least one dominant country. The United States has been dominant since World War II, but was exerting influence even before that time. If we look around the world we will see much of the world’s population wearing jeans, sneakers and drinking Coke or Pepsi. We have had a profound effect on the world’s culture and many in the world still want to be like us, but many hate us. We have squandered much of our influence by supporting dictators who trampled on the rights of the citizens of those countries. One of the basic reasons for what we did was we are basically a corporate backed economy. What I mean by that is companies and corporations are always looking for ways to increase profits from around the world and many are willing to do anything to accomplish this. One example is our conquering of Hawaii. When a large pineapple plantation owner named Dole convinced the U.S. military to invade and take over Hawaii the rightful government gave up without a fight, because the queen didn’t want her citizens to be slaughtered.

Other countries saw this and many western countries who also had large corporations played the same game. They began to join in with foreign corporations to do different things which would benefit them all, such as making sure prices were standard across the board. If we look at the oil companies both foreign and domestic we see their gasoline outlets selling gas for approximately the same price as every other brand. I love to ask this question, do you ever see a sale on gasoline such as buy two gallons and get one free? No and the reason is the oil companies don’t allow that to happen. There are laws against price fixing and the oil companies will tell you they just happen to all be selling at around the same price. Common sense has to tell us there is something wrong here. Why is it even mom and pop grocery stores can have sales, but large oil companies and their gasoline outlets cannot vary more than a few cents on a gallon of gas?

We know these companies have very powerful lobbies. Corruption seems to be the coin of the day in many if not most governments around the world. All sorts of deals are made between countries behind closed door and many of these deals are to the detriment of other countries. Unfortunately the United States has destroyed a few countries. Take Iraq for example. We know there were supposed to be weapons of mass destruction there and weren’t, but we invaded and now one could certainly argue that country is far worse off than it was before we invaded. Worse yet we caused the Middle East to erupt and continued to make things even worse by killing Muammar Gaddafi which turned Libya into a country without a capable ruler. We have to keep in mind we may not have liked Saddam Hussein and with good reason he was a killer and cruel leader, but his rule kept the Middle East in check and we knew he had no connection to Al Queda, but we lied and said he did. Did we learn our lesson? We certainly did not and tried to do the same thing in Syria and that is topple the government which would have given terrorists more territory to move into to. So how does all this happen and why?

It happens because of several different reasons and one big one is we have an incompetent government when it comes world affairs and even balancing the budget. I saw this first hand. Many of the people who went into government were people who were there, because they couldn’t make it on their own, they were just too stupid. The government is full of failed lawyers, relatives of politicians who are not smart enough to get good jobs on their own and people who don’t seem to have good judgment. Some are so full of themselves they think those around them are way below them. There are plenty of politicians who give their girlfriends and boyfriends positions of importance over others when they wouldn’t be qualified to sweep the floor and yet these same people are affecting the course of this country.

Next there are those who believe the best thing to do is ingratiate themselves with important and rich people and this is their goal, so when they leave government they can feather their nest. They could care less about those they might represent or have a duty to protect. There are plenty of these types in government and anyone who has been in government for any length of time has met them. They are in the higher positions, you won’t find them delivering the mail or guarding our boarders, they will be in charge of things they have no business being in charge of. I personally saw this a couple of times and believe me you wouldn’t want to have to deal with people like this.

Sometimes it looks like those in government are trying to bring this country down on purpose. How can any politicians allow the debt to keep getting higher when it is destroying us? How long could you run your home if you had to take a loan of 20 percent of your income to break even every year? It is said we owe about 20 trillion dollars, but others say it is more like double that and all our gold reserves are really gone and that is why we are not giving gold back to countries we are holding it for. Yes that is correct, countries are being told if they request their gold they have to wait at least 7 years to get it back, according to sources online. There is something definitely wrong with how this country is being run and I can only hope someone will spark change, but it doesn’t look too hopeful. At least the Romans made it for about 400 plus years on top of the heap, we never will.