The Bible teaches that the love of money is the root of all evil. Money tears apart marriages, breaks up families and corrupts governments. Big business and the bottom lines are what really run this country, and big business money makes our laws. I would not be surprised if there was some secret seminar every freshman congressional member attends where they are told, “You laid out a lot of rhetoric when you campaigned, but this is really how ball is played here on the Hill.” Just take Enron for example. We will probably never know how many millions were spent in contributions trying to get energy deregulated. I feel this is why they tried to hide their debt. The profits they were set to make if the deals with lawmakers came through would more than cover their creditors’ demands. The cancer of big money or big business will never be cut out of government, and here are just a few examples of why.
Law enforcement agencies are a source of big business. This is why the National Firearms Act was created-not to keep fully automatic weapons out of the hands of criminals, but to keep the agents of Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms hired after there were no more stills to bust up and prohibition of alcohol to enforce. Things that were available at hardware stores and mail-order catalogs, such as suppressors, Tommy guns, and shotguns less than 18″ long, were legal to own one day, then the next you had to pay $200 in 1930s currency for a stamp that said you could own a $2 suppressor, a $100 Tommy gun or a $20 shotgun.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “A man that gives up his liberty for safety, he deserves neither liberty or safety.” What I see happening in this country and what has been going on makes me sick.
After the Sept. 11 tragedy, the first thing coming out of the talking heads was, “Are Americans ready to give up their freedom?” Let’s think with an open mind about what is going on with this “war on terror” and who stands to benefit from the attack. The CIA, National Security Agency, FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, and all the other alphabet-soup organizations were about to see some of their budgets cut.
As I read in a French newspaper article linked from www.infowars.com, Osama bin Laden was treated for 10 days in an American hospital in France during July 2001. There he had daily contact with CIA operatives, and I think the CIA knew about the Sept. 11 attack and allowed it to happen. After all, they were set to make billions of dollars off the increase in their budget and all the opium being grown in Afghanistan. They were set to make a killing and did not care if 10,000 people died in the attacks.
The whole situation has a terrible odor, from the president being on the anti-Anthrax drug, Cipro, to the proposed future budgets for the alphabet-soup organizations that are set to get billions over the next five years-almost 1/5 of the gross domestic product.
Another note on Cipro-isn’t it funny that right after a $300 million contract was signed to Bayer Aspirin Corp. to make the anti-Anthrax drug, there were no more Anthrax deaths reported in the news? This is strictly theory and sad to say, but when it comes to the amount of money in this contract, in a Fortune 500 executive’s mind, a handful of lives from people he/she considers bottom-feeders is negligible.
Up until the early 1900s, a person could go to a general store and buy his choice of narcotic-marijuana, cocaine, heroine, opium and many other varieties of mind-altering concoctions. It is a fact that drug abuse is a big problem in this nation, but what causes this is human nature. Why do teen-agers drink? Why do people do drugs? You tell them they can’t. That’s why marijuana should be legalized.
Big business is the reason why marijuana was made illegal in the first place. A process called decorification was developed that would allow paper to be made cheaper by using hemp rather than hauling in pulpwood. Methods of making rubber and a fuel oil similar to crude oil were found. All these factors would have disrupted big business, so there was a smear campaign and the word marijuana appeared along with the propaganda that black men were smoking hemp and raping white women.
In the time this campaign started, whether you lived north or south of the Mason-Dixon line, if a black man was even thought to have done something of that sort, he would have been lynched; therefore, the public support for banning hemp was great, and to this day, in this nation, you can’t grow hemp commercially.
If hemp was made legal, cheaper but better paper could be made and trees could be saved. Law enforcement, as a business, would fail since most of the crimes committed and resources of crime prevention are put into anti-drug campaigns. We should legalize it and make some tax money off it.
Terror has now become big business. Everyday, millions of dollars flow through the terror networks. This is going to be like the farce we call the “war on drugs”-it is only going to get worse, and the big business and bureaucracy will keep getting bigger while our freedoms will continue to shrink.