When Tim and I moved into our new home we had two of everything. This included our high-end Jura coffee makers so we put one in the Master Bathroom. I joked with him at the time that we would never use it (or the refrigerator full of alcohol) but I was wrong. There have been many mornings now where we wake up early, make coffee, tilt our bed up (yes we have one of those “old people” beds that tilts up) and read the news on our iPhones.
It’s a fantastic way to wake up. We get amazing morning light in our room, our dog is NOT a morning animal so she lols around in her bed staring at us with lazy eye, and we sip on our gourmet coffees and watch our Country being shamed into oblivion. Hey, if you’re going to be the embarrassment of the world you might as well be comfortable.
Seriously though, what the hell is happening?
Actually, before the election as the economy was “improving”, Tim and I had many discussions about what were seeing. Yes, more people had jobs but they were minimum wage jobs. Obviously entire segments of the Country were not recovering like we had out here and, sadly, they are sitting on their asses killing themselves with Heroin and Fentanyl making it next to impossible for people like me that might actually need a pain pill for the multiple broken bones, spine compressions, and kidney stones. More people are dying in Ohio from opiate overdoses than car crashes. What NOBODY points out is that they were addicted to Opiates by “Pain Clinics” and crooked doctors and when those got closed down they switched to Heroin which now has Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opiate in it, and are dropping like flies. It’s bad.
But what scares the crap out of me is the back story to all of this.
There are two drugs that can stop the Opiate problem dead in it’s tracks. Naloxone which kicks the Opiates off of the receptors in the Brain but also cause immediate opiate withdrawal. It’s good for saving someone that is overdosing but it’s not a great long-term solution. The other drug that I actually take in tiny quantities as an anti-depressant is called Suboxone. Without getting into the complexity of the chemistry of this drug, it basically makes it impossible for you to get high on Opiates by binding itself to the opiate receptors in your brain. In my case it acts as a fantastic mood leveler. I take 1/32nd the dose used for Opiate treatment.
The medical community should be giving this drug out like bubble gum but, instead, they make it almost impossible for rural dwellers to get because only certain doctors are certified to prescribe it and they can only have a fixed number of patients (50 I think). Why? Partly because the manufacturer of Naloxone is lobbying the crap out of State legislations to make their drug the drug of choice. Unfortunately the addicts hate Naloxone because it sends them into withdrawal and that can take months to recover from. Suboxone would stop all of the withdrawal symptoms, make it impossible for them to get high or overdose, and with counseling they could have a smooth path out of addiction. The short story here is that politics, greed and lobbying is literally killing thousands of people and even with all the furor over the “Opiate Epidemic”, the best solution is being held back.
I asked the Psychiatrist I get Suboxone from why it’s not being handed out and the answer was about as dumb as the current Senate Health Care Debate. The logic behind making it impossible to get is that heroin addicts will use it when they can’t get heroin to avoid withdrawal. Let me understand this. We are allowing tens of thousands of people to die because a percentage of them might abuse the best cure out there? In the meantime slimy pharmaceutical representatives are lobbying (and no doubt bribing) our faithful politicians making their nasty, cruel and not very effective drug the Gold Standard for opiate addicts. You can actually get Naloxone in some States without a prescription to be used to stop overdoses. But the underlying effort is to force addicts onto the drug which they WILL NOT stay on in lieu of a drug that does provide a path out of a nasty addiction.
The Opiate Epidemic which I guess is a real thing, is symptomatic of what is wrong with this country. Quite simply the gap between the rich and the poor has gotten too large, continues to get larger, and the Senate is about to enact legislation that will send tens of millions of people into health care hell and then enact new tax laws to lower taxes for the wealthy. I’ve said it before, Tim and I are 1%’ers so we will benefit from tax cuts but we don’t want them. It’s insane what is happening in this country but it’s not ALL the fault of our failing democratic system.
Watch the news. Entire regions of toothless diabetics whining that they can’t get a factory job making $60,000/yr with crazy benefits after graduating from High School. Worse yet, even after decades of watching those jobs evolve away from reality they still believed Trump when he said he would bring them back. Unbelievably they still believe that Trump is going to do something for them. How?
Fake News.
But not CNN, the New York Times or the Washington Post. Websites like Breitbart and, worse yet, Facebook and Twitter. Some people will believe anything as long as it’s what they want to believe. Add to that the absolutely incredulous behavior of our Senate. Drafting a Health Care Bill in secrecy then trying to shove a vote down the throats of the rest of the Senate. Fortunately there are (barely) enough decent people left in the Senate or, at least enough that are terrified they will get voted out in 2018 if they capitulate, that the entire Health Care Debate has become a spectacle and an embarrassment of indescribable dimension. If they do manage to vote out the Affordable Care Act stripping tens of millions of people of Health Insurance they will have gotten away with the most malicious stunt in political history in this country. At some point the toothless diabetics are going to start to riot.
We already had one nut job take pot shots at a bunch of Republican Senators playing baseball. Man they are lucky he was a bad shot. Even a moderate marksman would have taken out several people. I am NOT endorsing this act; it was heinous but what do most people think is going to happen when the entitlement programs that have helped keep anarchy from this Country for decades are stripped away?
I have no idea if Trump really conspired with the Russians to get elected. The signs are there and I do hope the evidence follows but if I was Putin and I wanted to turn America upside down I would do exactly what Trump is trying to do. To my knowledge he has not fulfilled any of his major election promises and, in fact, he’s doing the exact opposite of many of them. Remember how he was going to support the LGBT Community and not touch Medicaid? Today they announced that he will bar transexuals from serving in the Military and the Republican Health Care Plan will strip away 800 billion dollars over the next 10 years from Medicaid. Many, many people will die but at what point where we start to get anarchy?
When our Supreme Court ruled that Gay Marriage was legal I was actually proud to be an American. When Trump got elected and quickly made it clear that he was a buffoon I became embarrassed but now I’m starting to get worried. If you aren’t worried then you aren’t really reading the news and you aren’t driving around our Country.
It’s approaching obvious that something is rotten in the Trump White House. Is it collusion with the Russians or was that just Putin’s way of pulling off a sick joke? Forget the Russians for a moment. Our Attorney General is being humiliated by our President which is poetic justice because the idiot supported Trump. One of the Presidents top advisors is a right wing bigot nationalist (Breitbart) and another is a baby faced family member that would probably have a hard time getting a job at a K-Mart, much less at the West Wing as a top advisor. The news media is eviscerating him for either being a liar or an idiot or both. Trump’s 39 year old son is also an idiot or a liar or both and his daughter continues to support her Father although she seems to have gone quiet along with the First Lady. I suspect the entire family is horrified at what is happening to their “Brand” because, after all, to these people it is all about money and power. How could anybody honestly think they care about the less fortunate much less the toothless diabetics.
Did you see any of the coverage of the Trump speech to the Boy Scouts? I’m sorry but I agree with the assessment that it looked a lot like a speech made by Hitler to the Hitler Youth. That impressionable barely pubescent audience laughed and booed on cue from Trump just like Hitler’s Youth did. Replace Hilary & Obama with Jews and Gays and you have a dangerous fascist. The scary part is the parts of the media that are defending him……again. The guy can do no wrong.
During the election campaign he said he could go down to 5th Ave and shoot somebody and still get elected. That sounds like somebody that was awfully sure of the outcome of the election. By then the entire RNC Database had somehow been leaked to Russian hackers that were furiously creating Twitter Bots to spread “Fake News” to the precise demographics that needed to be pushed over the line to vote against Hilary. Note the way that was worded. They voted “against Hilary”, not “for Trump”. She won by 3,000,000 votes but our twisted Electoral College which is exceedingly complex had somehow been perfectly manipulated to give a blustering sociopath the White House.
Well, here’s some not so fake news.
- Coal Jobs are not coming back.
- Manufacturing jobs are not coming back.
- We are moving into a new realm that will require a whole new way of thinking.
- With so much wealth concentrated in such a small percentage of the population our tax system has to be re-worked so that the Government can afford to provide a modest living along with health care and housing to the tens of millions of Americans that have been displaced by the relatively sudden changes in our how society works.
- We need to take the stigma away from the word Socialism or come up with a new term because if we don’t start to lessen the gap between the rich and the poor or, at least allow 99.9% of the population to live a life where their basic needs are met the shit is going to hit the fan.
When Trump is kicked out of the White House (or resigns) it’s not going to get better quickly. Unless Pence and Ryan are thrown out with him then we are still going to have an ultra-right-wing Government, at least until 2018 when, God willing, the people will rise up and vote the Republicans out of power. Then we will have 2 years of continued stagnation until, again, God willing, one of the parties and I am NOT discounting a decent Republican candidate, puts someone in the White House that understands the new world paradigm.
That’s the best case scenario. Let’s not forget about the wars in Africa and the Middle East. Worse yet Iran and North Korea with ICBM’s and Nuclear Warheads. How long will it be before we are doing “Duck and Cover” Nuclear drills in our public schools again? The elementary school I attended had lead sheeting on the roof to protect us from radiation. If our school systems weren’t such a disaster they might start installing more lead sheeting but they don’t have any money because they too are so corrupt.
We have entire States teetering on the edge of Bankruptcy. I lived in one of them; Illinois. 3 out of the 4 previous Governors are in Prison and they just passed the first State Budget in 3 years. They are billions and billions of dollars in debt, can’t even pay their bills, have raised their property taxes so much that people and businesses are fleeing the State so they finally passed a tax increase to try and plug the leak. Illinois is large State with a lot of people and my experience there was not a good one. Corrupt Unions, Corrupt Government, unfathomable crime in Chicago or at least the part of Chicago occupied by African Americans. Nice people but most of them only spoke one language (I speak 2 and used to speak a 3rd, have been in over 30 countries and 200 cities and have lived overseas). Worse yet they had never left the Country. Absolutely no world view except for what they see on Fox News. Chew on that for a while. The taste of feces should start to work through that ball in your mouth.
I am surprised that the super wealthy and super intelligent people in this Country have not risen up and blasted the current Administration with the power of the billions of dollars they control. The Koch Brothers are billionaires but if you put Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet together you would have a formidable war chest; one that would put the fear of God into every politician in this Country. I really believe that most of us need to be saved and maybe I am naive to think that tens of billions of dollars of liquid threat would do the job but I’d at least like to see those that are truly in a position to do something do more than make an occasional negative remark about the state of affairs. For 6 months can they forget about their stock prices and whatever else it is that holds them back from exerting the enormous power they could assimilate and maybe drum up enough grass roots support so that we could take back our Country.
Our President is a pathological liar. Our Senate is on the verge of passing a Health Care Bill; they don’t know which one yet, but there are enough of them that are determined to pass anything so they can say they fulfilled an empty promise made years ago where they might just topple 1/6 of our national economy, the Stock Market is on a Bubble believing that the evisceration of regulations will stimulate (Greed) growth, but I feel the ground beneath my feet starting to quake.
I really don’t want to be right. Unfortunately I was when I wrote my “Idiocracy” post and the followup post was equally prescient. Let me be wrong here and let’s hope that we don’t crater one of the greatest societies in the history of mankind. Flawed yes but if you travel the world you could appreciate what we were before the largest exhibition of Greed sent the entire Global Financial System into a near free fall; one that we are arguably still suffering from. A Quantum reset was done on a huge segment of our population pushing them down from a standard of living that was barely tolerable before. Now they are starving, dying, angry, and they still support the President.
If that doesn’t scare the crap out of you then nothing will.
Joe Jeter / July 26, 2017
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