by James Glaser
March 23, 2005

Some day soon we are going to have to ask ourselves if the either the Republican or the Democrat Party can give us what we want from our government. I have written about it and believe it to be true that the Republican Party is using abortion to get money and votes. This works so well for them that they can never stop abortions, because then they would lose their base.

It might even be a novel idea for the Republicans to explain to their base that 60 some percent of American voters are pro-choice and that chances of them really doing something are slim. Of course that would shut off that money valve.

Democrats have watched this ploy by the Republicans work so well that now they too are starting to jump on the abortion band wagon. Right now the GOP owns the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, but there is no big push to do anything about abortion and those people who have worked to get to this majority, are wondering when they will receive the payoff for all their years of work.

If the religious right wants to do something about abortion the first thing they should do is work on electing a pro-life President. George Bush proved while governor of Texas that he is pro-death by setting a record on State sanctioned murders with a record number of Capitol punishment executions. Now with the war in Iraq, his killing spree has reached into the tens of thousands, and remember, those are innocent civilians, women and children who have been getting killed. We don't even have to talk about America's torture of the suspects we held in Iraq and Afghanistan jails. Even by Pentagon figures, over 100 prisoners were killed and dozens were by Pentagon standards, murdered. George Bush is the Commander in Chief and he sets the tone for the war and our dogs have been let loose.

There are other questions too. Our country, The United States of America, has 5% of the world's population and we use over 25% of the world's oil and we consume over 30% of the gross world product. We claim that we want to help the rest of the world rise up, but if we do that our standard of living will have to come down. The rest of the world is going to need some of the oil we consume and they are going to want the products we take for granted, so if they come up to our level, it only makes sense that there will not be enough natural resources to go around. The American Empire will have to cut back on everything and the American people are going to find that hard to do.

Of course if we are not really trying to bring the rest of the world up to our level, we can maintain our life style for a while longer.

It isn't fun to think about these things, but you have to know that the billions of people living in China and India are. They are working as hard as they can so that their lives can be like what they see in Hollywood movies and on their televisions. Twenty five years ago most people in the world only heard stories of how well we live, now with satellite TV they can see it for themselves and they want it. People in other countries believe that most Americans live like the people in our television shows.

Both of our political parties are going along like nothing in this world is ever going to change. The Republicans are spending money like it will never end and China, yes China is loaning Washington the money it needs to keep our standard of living high. Someday, and that day is getting closer, we will have to pay off our debts.

George Bush won't be President then and most of the people in Congress will be retired living high on our hog with the retirement checks they vote to give themselves.

Think about this... When a loved one dies and you have to clean up their possessions, what is one real large segment you have to get rid of? All their financial paperwork. Americans have more "money" paperwork that they have to keep, than most people of the world have in their lifetimes. Most Americans have seven years of paper work, that is if they keep throwing out some every year. Bills and canceled checks can fill many cardboard boxes. We as a society are obsessed with the financial side of life, while it is reported that over a billion people on this globe live on less than a dollar a day and half the population, 3 billion, live on less than two dollars a day. Not much paperwork for them. Many Americans spend more buying coffee on the way to work than what half the world's population lives on.

You know we can't keep this up. Rome tried to, as did England, Spain, France, Germany, and even the Moors. They were all on top at one time and even with the knowledge of history they lost their power, because their decadence caught up with them. We can think of the 9/11 attackers as the first of the Mongol Hordes that made it this far.

All over America we have storage buildings because we don't have room for all of our possessions at home and have to store some of them in another location. Many pay more in storage fees each month than billions of the world's poor make in a month.

Well, if you really look at the figures and see where the rest of the world is headed, you have to know that we won't be able to live like this much longer and it is going to be hard on many Americans to cut back. The rich in America can see this coming and that is why George Bush and the Republicans are giving them a tax break, so that they can put a nest egg away large enough that their families will be able to live in opulence for generations. Compared to the rest of the world, that is how we all live now and it is going to end. Not tomorrow and maybe not ten years from now, but our children and grandchildren are not going to live as well as we have and if you look around the world you will see that is true.

So, even though our political parties keep their heads in the sand and refuse to ask questions about our nation's future, you and I should. Someplace along the line we are going to have to either change our leadership and political parties or get involved in what we have and prepare for the future.

Robert Jensen writes, "We have a choice: We can live on the top of the world or we can live in the world. The stakes are high; if we don't find a way to force the United States to live in the world, before too long there may well be no world left."

If just two more countries consumed what we consume, there would be nothing left for the other 195 or so countries and that is not going to work. Every third world country is trying to raise their standard of living a little bit each year and collectively they are going to catch up to us and then we will all be in trouble and with what we have leading us in Washington, we are going to be in big trouble. We can only keep the world at bay for so long with our military.

And some of you didn't think Iraq was about oil.

This "wanting" what we have by other nations is why George Bush and his administration are trying to stop any nation from getting atomic weapons. Nuclear weapons are the great equalizer and George thinks America's military will keep us on top if other countries don't get nukes. Napoleon thought the same a few hundred years ago. He thought he could stay on top with the power of his army. He did for a while but he had a small population and it was hard to replace troops. We have a small population when you think of the rest of the world and we are having a hard time subduing a report 20,000 fighters in Iraq.

Too many countries have nuclear arms now to stop their spread. Poor countries with nuclear weapons know that they are worth a lot of money and some day a few will be sold. We still have a chance, we could disarm, but Washington is afraid to. So it is a matter of time. Maybe it will be Weapons of Mass Destruction, maybe it will be our out of control spending, maybe it will be the floods of third world bodies coming to America, or it might be our countries moral decadence, but what ever it is, we are headed in the wrong direction under a government that isn't even looking where it is going.

Our leaders in Washington from both parties live the good life and many are rich in their own right. They have not a clue of what it is like to be poor and they can't see that the rest of the world is going to demand that they can have what we have and there isn't enough of that to go around.