Embarrassed for US

 The third debate just ended.  I'm SO embarrassed to be from the United States of America right now I don't think I would confess it if I were traveling abroad.  No I'm sure of it.  "I was living in America for a long time but I've since returned to my homeland in the Netherlands...hope the accent goes away soon."  My Grandpa would kick me for saying that.  He was proud to be an American.
   It makes perfect sense to me that Capitalism would evolve into organized crime eventually and professional politicians would all be corrupt and a two party system within the confines of this type of democracy would eventually reign over it's people without regard to their welfare or lifestyle in the sole pursuit of money...I just didn't want to live long enough to see it first hand.
   A little trivia for you:  The Bill of Rights as we know it is the first ten amendments to our Constitution.  Everyone knows that.  The trivia...there were twelve proposed amendments hand written that same day on that same parchment.  All twelve were by design simple ideas that James Madison penned on behalf of the states.  The twelfth is the one that I think tells the American tale better than any other.  It was written so that no lawmaker could raise his own pay during the current election cycle.  They would indeed be able to pass a law that changed wages for lawmakers, but it couldn't take effect until the public had the chance to elect new leadership.  Makes sense to me.  Probably to you...it's a definite power check.  Cant just give yourself a raise whenever... Now:  It eventually passed becoming the 27th amendment to our Constitution but here's what I find so interesting.  The other 26 amendments were all ratified in 3 years or less.  The 12th proposed amendment took 202 years to be ratified.  For 202 years our lawmakers just couldn't bring themselves to give up the power to vote in their own pay raises before the coming election.  That's America in a nutshell to me.  By the time it did pass lawmakers had realized the longest tenures in American history and were drawing more of their money from special interest parties, lobbyists, big business, insider trading...salaries don't mean anything to our lawmakers now.
    Thinking about salaries...I was glancing at campaign spending the other day.  At the time Hillary Clinton had reported spending 700 million dollars in campaign money during her political career.  There are 534 other people (mostly averaging just a few million each year) that have the same type of campaigning habit.  I wonder how these people can spend 1.5 BILLION DOLLARS in a 5 year period to keep their $140,000 a year jobs...and talk to the American people about debt.  The spending now is higher than what I quoted ...but 10 years ago a 5 year campaign spend for OUR REPRESENTATIVES was 1.5 Billion Dollars.  So...150 Million a year spent by big business mostly to employ people to pass laws.  Hard for me to imagine that these representatives are genuinely concerned with the well being of the average American.  I don't believe it.
   So now.  The crook or the loon.  What will it be?  Does it really matter?  America is in a toilet because of greed.  Because of capitalism.  Because of capitalizing.  Because the Land of Opportunity is the Land of Opportunists.
   Unfortunately it's human nature to capitalize on others.  From our primal instincts we begin at infancy capitalizing on physical weakness and the more developed we become the farther reaching our dominant behavior becomes.  America is just a great breeding ground for that behavior and we watch it daily all around us and we struggle to take the scraps for ourselves and I think far too many people would fall right into the patterns of our current "leaders" if given the chance so I'm not sure there's any fixing it.  I'm afraid it will just have to broken before a new era can come to pass.  I'm afraid we're hinging upon that climax in history.  America is about to break.
   Our environment is a disaster.  Big business in America justifies it with profit margins.  Our happiness is a disaster.  Big business in America justifies it with profit margins.  Our home lives.  Our sense of obligation to our children.  Our compassion for animals.  Our respect for one another.
   We are represented by people who won't even pretend to respect one another for what should be one of the most highly regarded public debates that could occur on this planet.  How can people who act like THAT lead THIS Nation?  Be the icons of world leadership that our youth model their ideals from ?  How can these be the people we are choosing??  HOW????
    I'm going to go ahead and state some obvious things here:  Peace in the Middle East has never happened in all of human history.  It's not going to happen because we stick our noses into the hornets nest.  We're there and will remain there because Grumman and McDonald Douglas and Drug companies winning contracts with the government spend billions to buy votes.  More people in Iraq died of heart attacks than violence before we invaded and now violence kills 95% more people than heart attacks in Iraq.  Way to go us.  The Iraq body count is only slightly higher than the US murder rate but we get serious when there's a travel package involved.  It's good for Wall Street.
   A few years back I paid for insurance for myself, my wife and my children.  It was good insurance with a low deductible.  I can not afford insurance for my family now.  If I could afford it the deductible would be 5 times as high (I really have priced it) and the benefits significantly fewer.  Guess what industries top the campaign trail?  Pharmaceutical, Health Care, Lawyers, Tech, Arms...
I don't think it's a coincidence that when health care industries buy campaigns health costs go through the roof and become mandatory.  I'm not that foolish.
   Chicago is a funny place.  The highest individual contributor to political campaigns in America runs a few small newspapers like the Polish Times and such, as well as local radio and tv stations in Chicago.  College newspapers is where this guy earned so much money that Forbes doesn't know what he's worth but can track down 100 million dollars that he gave away last year...So if it seems funny to ME that Fred Eychaner can top Microsoft, Apple, Google and every other global giant in campaign contributions with the money he made selling newspapers in the 60's...why isn't anyone else looking into it?  I know...Chicago is just a nice place where historically people make their money milking unicorns for princesses and everyone is on the up and up...but newspapers????   Number one in the tech industry in Campaign contributions:  Newsweb Corp, Chicago.  go figure?
   When you're broke you stay at home.  America is broke.  Our military needs to be HERE.  Not spending billions to drive around the desert so somebody's stock will rise accordingly.
   Fracking will cause a major earthquake.  Then everybody will say "I knew it all along" and lie about who they supported when the votes are discussed.
   Our food sources will never be safe because the chemical industries that pay off politicians to legalize the pollution of our food will always have more money than the people forced to eat Americas garbage.  Our water sources are being depleted by super farms and other industries.  Our forests are being contaminated by crop dusting that would have long since been outlawed were it not for Big Businesses foothold in the farms and chemicals.
   We can't afford to be petitioning to bring in more immigrants.  Yes we're all immigrants here but we're broke and about to go hungry and can't manage our own people and don't have a military at home and I'm sorry...trying to be "NUMBER ONE" on the "Let's bring in more strangers from the most militant Nation we can think of" list is just asinine.   Somebody's making money at that I'm sure but I haven't figured out how we can justify it.  Oh yeah...profit margin.
   Marijuana???  really???  That's not even an issue worth talking about.
   Abortion? Guns? Race?  None of these issues matter as long as the people who are in control of this Country don't give a damn about it's backbone.  Don't give a damn about the people who make up the masses in this Nation.  Don't give a damn where we sleep or what we eat or if our children will have any respect left for their Nation or their leaders or for themselves come the next election.  The next generation.  None of it matters because America won't be a place we talk about in present context.
   America won't be great again.  We got that warm and fuzzy feeling when we were kicking Nazi ass and removing genocidal maniacs from the planet.  That's respectable work that needed to be done and I'm proud of those who sacrificed so that we could end that but those days are past.  Since the days of real regimes that threatened the world we've had to work at staying busy conquering our own people one industry at a time.  We work at digging up lost causes that we can invest our industries in.  We work at political Whack-A-Mole and the distraction of our citizens so they don't notice our failing system falling apart all around them.  Our leaders vote directly against their constituents, our Representatives get FREE health care for life and vote ours into oblivion, our representatives buy multi-million dollar homes while our lending system fails under the weight of an overextended middle and lower class.  Our Representatives send forces all over the world while violence and corruption in our back yards rise to an all time high.  Our Representatives lie to a generation which will be the first in human history to have a lower life expectancy than the previous generation about our leadership's commitment to a better environment and better food industry.  They lie about their commitment to better jobs and better pay.  Our Representatives prostitute their opportunity to affect change in this nation to the businesses with the most money and our food sources are victimized, our educational system is victimized, our Military is victimized, our neighbors are victimized, our environment is victimized, our freedoms are victimized, our public safety is victimized, our health care is victimized...
   and we're going to elect Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump now to take us further into the depth's of the Hell that America has made of itself.

 I'm sorry Grandpa.  I couldn't do it.  I'd lie my ass off.  "Not from America.  Those people are nuts."