The End of Naivete When I was a child and well into my early adulthood there were a lot of things I thought were on the level. I had the utmost respect for politicians, yeah can you believe that? We had a lot of respect for anyone in authority. It wasn’t only me who felt this way. The common folk, I was one of, mostly felt the way I did. It was a different time. We were all very patriotic and if laws were passed we figured they had to be good laws meant to make us safer. I remember my first brush with a politician. A man running for district leader asked my mother, who was poor, to make phone calls for him and told her he would reimburse her for the price of the calls. Phone calls in those days were a lot more money than today and there were only landlines. She made the calls and had me help and when he won the election we never heard from him again and were stuck with the phone bills. Since then my disgust with politicians has grown. The corruption, seems to be increasing. We used to think if a drug was on the market it must be okay to use it, especially if no prescription was needed. After we took a bath when we were young our mothers would sprinkle Johnsons baby powder on us and make sure we were fully covered. No one would have ever thought this stuff could be bad for you. Johnson’s Baby Powder has been around since 1893 and we have only found out recently it could cause cancer. Two doctors in the mid-1980s warned baby powder was unsafe to inhale and it was down hill for baby powder after that. When it came to prescription drugs we used to think if it is a prescription it must have been thoroughly checked out and therefore it must be completely safe. Boy were we naïve. Dozens of drugs have been taken off the FDA approved list and withdrawn from sale, because of the different dangers they possess. Some were even taken off because companies hid bad results for the drug during testing. Even some genetic drugs could be dangerous. European authorities have banned some of the genetic drugs sold in this country. When it came time to serve my country I thought it was the right thing to do so when I received the draft notice, I joined and served an extra year. Little did I know the Vietnam War was a farce and based on a lie told by our very own president, Lyndon Johnson when he said the North Vietnamese had attacked one of our ship in the Gulf of Tonkin which was a blatant lie which he admitted to later. As I got older I began to notice the corruption in military spending and how sometimes billions of dollars were being spent for weapons that didn’t work or were inferior to other weapons which we could have bought, but didn’t because the industry creating them was not in a powerful congressman’s district or state. All this was very disappointing to me and as I wrote about these things I began to realize how much money was being wasted and how much money must have been crossing palms in these schemes. I think the culmination of this corruption had to have happened on 9/11 when the Pentagon was attacked and mysteriously the computers that housed the Defense Department’s accounts were blown up. The day before, the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had announced the Defense Department couldn’t account for around 2 TRILLION dollars it spent. One of the things which seemed to help reverse one downward spiral was the foreign car companies. Before they were a power here, when you bought an American car, you had to hope nothing went wrong with it, because taking it back to a dealer was a crap shoot. We had a couple of Fords in our family and one, a Mustang had three transmissions put in it by Ford in just a couple of years and each time the car went to the dealer they kept it from four to six weeks. Lest you think it was only Ford doing this at the time, I had a Plymouth and it had a problem and I brought it to the dealer and was told it would take a while to be fixed. After several weeks I went to the dealer and noticed the car in the same spot I drove it into. I questioned the dealer and he said the car was fixed and they just happened to park it in the same space. I picked up the car, got home and noticed the car still had the same problem. Nothing had been done to it. If you were near the end a warranty, even if it was 6 weeks away or more, some dealers would park the car and wait for the warranty to run out. This was called Sunshine Parking. I don’t think any auto dealer would try this today, because of the competition. Many foreign car dealers changed things by putting out coffee and donuts and repairing cars when they could while people waited in comfort in a waiting room with television and newspapers. I never had much money to do investing myself, but I have heard and read stories about people becoming targets of unscrupulous stock brokers. The brokers were operating on commission so what they would do is try and get you to turn over you stocks as often as they could get away with. They made money when you bought a stock and when you sold it. The best thing for them and the worst thing for you was to keep churning your stocks giving them a steady income. I thought the last bastion of honesty was the medical profession and hospitals at one time. I had to change my mind about this after a couple of bad experiences. First, I want to tell you when these things happened to me I was fully insured. When my wife got pregnant with my second child, the hospital she was in, which has been replaced with luxury apartments, wanted to keep her until I paid the bill. They told me I had to pay at the time and they would reimburse me when the insurance check came. I told them I was going to the District Attorney’s office and charge them with kidnapping, because they said they wouldn’t let my wife out until they got the money. After they heard me say this, they released my wife and waited for their insurance check. The second event happened when my wife had an operation. An anesthesiologist who was listed as accepting my insurance, insisted after the operation he wanted cash. I told him no way and he would have to wait for the insurance reimbursement. Apparently, he was trying to get more out of me than the insurance would allow. I have learned one thing and learned it well. A lot of people have made it their life’s work to try and beat us out of money. Many of them don’t care if they sell you dangerous drugs. Others will lie to you and try and get you to do things citing patriotism and yet when you look into their background some lied about their military service or just dodged going into the service during times of strife. Remember those politicians who had the nerve to make believe they served in Iraq and got caught lying? This just happens to be part of life today. |
