The U.S. has some of the top scientists, researchers, economists etc. in the world. There is only one problem - this administration isn’t listening to them.

The EPA, the FDA, the CDC, the NIH have all lost many people recently because their findings were not acceptable to big business and, thus, to the administration.

One of the senior scientists at the FDA said last year that people should know that the FDA is there to protect corporate interests, not the American people any more. This can been seen in the number of expensive and useless - at best - or lethal - at worst - drugs that are now being consumed by people every day. It has gotten to the point where if you’re NOT on medication, there must be something the matter with you. Popping pills has become normal.

Climate scientists have been blowing the whistle for decades, but no one listened. People carried on buying bigger and bigger cars to stroke their vanity or to build up their sense of adventure and outdoors pursuits, despite the fact that the only off-roading they ever do is when they park in the driveway. The bigger cars aren’t even safer than the small ones - just about the only good reason (if it were true) why anyone would buy such a hunk of junk and haul it all over the land.

The NIH and CDC have been forced by right wingnuts to remove birth control and disease prevention information from its websites, with the result that teenaged pregnancy is on the upswing again, as are venereal disease rates, and self-induced abortions in areas where abortion services have been curtailed or stopped altogether are starting to claim lives again.

People don’t know who to believe anymore. It is even difficult to educate yourself on the issues when websites with vested interests are everyone purporting to be legitimate scientific or medical sources of information.

The late lamented John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in 2004 in “The Economics of Innocent Fraud” :

“Wars are, one cannot doubt, a major modern threat to civilized existence, and corporate commmitment to weapons produrement and use nutures and supports this threat. It accords legitimancy and even heroic virtue to devastation and death.”

And yet George Bush said the other day, “We will not pull out until the job is done.” Despite the devastation and the death, the stirring up of hatred, the nurturing of angry young people willing to kill themselves for a cause, because, frankly, what do they have to look forward to in this life, somehow, militarization is being sold as a good thing.

And as to that quote of Bush’s, the obvious sexual connection is very discomfiting. He will “not pull out” although Iraq did everything it could to forestall the attack, did not want the U.S. anywhere within its borders, and certainly did not want Bush as the father of its nation. Bush had better practice coitus interruptus NOW, and GET THE HELL OUT.

These frauds, all of them, are lethal, and people simply don’t know where to turn anymore. Trust, once lost, takes a long time to reestablish, if it can be restored at all.