Your Government Says: "Trust Us - We Have Your Best Interests At Heart"

The United States Government does not enjoy the same level of trust the people had in it 100 years ago... or even 50 years ago. Some of our politicians seem incapable of understanding how and why they lost that trust. Let's take a look at the history of the U.S. Government's ethical treatment of it's citizens -

1. This is the same Government that, between 1778 and 1894 made and (forced upon) Native American tribes more than 750 land cessation treaties. The government broke the majority of those treaties before the ink was dry.

2. This is the same Government that - authorized and conducted the "Tuskegee Experiment" - For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all.

3. This is the same Government that, in 1932 allowed units of the United States Army, commanded by Major General Douglas MacArthur to initiate a cavalry charge which was led by Major George S. Patton against the so-called Bonus Expeditionary Force. The BEF (also known as the Bonus Army) was made up of some 15,000 veterans and their civilian families, who had staged a protest in Washington, DC in hopes of obtaining payments of the World War I bonus which the Government had promised them.. and WWI ended in July of 1919.

4. This is the same Government that, on July 16th,1945, conducted testing of the atomic bomb on human subjects at White Sands Proving Ground, NM. Excess risk associated with radiation started to appear about ten years after exposure. (Although there were no reported serious injuries as a direct result of the testing, the military personnel that were in attendance eventually reported an extremely high incidence of various cancers.)

5. This is the same Government that, in the 1960's and early 1970s exposed our soldiers in Vietnam to Agent Orange (Thank You, Monsanto!), a defoliant herbicidal chemical for which the government had not developed protective gear. Agent Orange has been linked to cancers and other diseases in several epidemiological studies. The Agent Orange cancers and diseases include prostate cancer, respiratory cancers, (lung, trachea/bronchus, larynx), soft-tissue sarcoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Hodgkin disease, chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and multiple myeloma.

6.This is the same Government that controlled our Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security Programs... and bankrupted those programs!

7. This is the same Government that now asks us to trust them to manage our health care! How stupid do they think the American people are? Or, I suppose the proper question to ask is, "Are we just as stupid, complacent and gullible as the government thinks we are?"

Will Americans allow their loved ones to be led "like lambs to the slaughter" because they are chronically ill, developmentally or physically challenged, or because they have committed the sin of aging? Dr. Jack Kevorkian could have been the poster-boy for the Obama administration!(Remember, if you are 35 today you will be 65 in 2039, and that may just be the age at which your government decides you are to be recycled... unless you become chronically ill or disabled before then!)

I could be wrong about this... after all, we do have the best politicians that money can buy in the USA! I'm certain they have our best interests at heart... but then, I might have thought the Edsel was a good idea, too.