Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA and scads of state and local organizations, the Department of Immigration and federal agencies that we don't even know about exist, what do they all have in common? Some might say law enforcement and that is what the answer should be, but the real answer is incompetence. I am not talking about your average cop or agent here, I am talking about the people that run these agencies, some of which, like Homeland Security that was created just to give someone an important title and make the public think that it was being protected from terrorists. What has this agency done for us lately, or for that matter, ever? We were told that the agency was formed to coordinate actions between other federal agencies that didn't share data. I was reading an article the other day and it claimed that those agencies in question still resist doing this. The reason for this is that each of these agencies has politicians as their head and each politician doesn't want to share credit for anything that their agency accomplishes. The public be dammed.

These kinds of appointments and believe me there have been so many that it is almost impossible to count, are strictly made to reward loyal supporters of the administration and their friends. It certainly doesn't matter if a person is qualified for that position or not and most of the time they don't have the foggiest about what is going on. To realize what I am talking about, look at the head of Homeland Security. I won't mention any names, but you know who he is. He was the former head of FEMA when New Orleans was almost wiped out. He is a guy that possesses dual citizenship. He is also a guy that couldn't get water to New Orleans for weeks or even ice. His agency purchased 35,000 trailers that were contaminated and couldn't be used. He couldn't even get the proper support forces to that area for weeks. So what do you do with someone like this? Apparently you give him a bigger position to screw up, because he was responsible for getting your campaign big bucks and the family may need him again. It doesn't matter that he can't do the job, all that matters is that you reward him and make him feel like a big wig.

The Department of Immigration is another mess. In the beginning of this year, a government oversight agency discovered that in 2005 the agency couldn't locate or find over 111,000 files. What effect does this have? It means that many people became citizens without their criminal records being able to be checked. Could this have been caused by corruption in that agency or others? It is always a possibility. Aside from this, many illegal aliens are not even picked up when they are reported. Different local agencies complain that when they arrest an illegal alien and turn them over to Immigration, they find the same people out on the street again, because they weren't deported. The other side of the coin is that they are not always picked up from the local authorities. What is the sense of having an immigration department if it isn't going to do anything? We had all this talk about building walls to keep out aliens and we were told that the border patrol was doing it's best against a wave of illegals trying to cross our borders, yet when a drug dealer tried to cross over and was in a gun battle with border guards, they were arrested and still sit in jail as thanks for doing their work. It seems the drug dealer had a deal with the feds to cooperate. What is this country coming to?

The Food and Drug Administration is another agency that couldn't find it's way out of a paper bag. Every day embarrassing scandals are hitting the papers. The very latest was the tomato scare. We were told that there was a problem with tomatoes, that was after people were getting sick. At that point did we need them at all, their job is to stop this from ever happening, by the use of inspections? Anyway the great tomato scare lasted for months until they found out it wasn't tomatoes, but jalapeño peppers. This is only the last in a very long line of food and consumer problems. One has only to look at all the problems with products coming from China, that didn't seem to be inspected properly. This ran the gambit from fish to toothpaste, to even dog food. Forget the drugs, we seem to be finding out every month or so that drugs, that we thought were helping us, are really killing us. How can one not ask, who is running this agency and why is there not a congressional investigation to find out why this stuff is happening? The president doesn't seem to mention it, why should he? He is the guy that appoints the heads of these agencies. In slight defense of the FDA, I have to admit that they have been made responsible for far too much with their limited resources. That doesn't excuse the fact that no one is fighting to increase manpower there.

Social Security is constantly being attacked. The funny thing is, well it really isn't funny, is that people will need this even more in the future, because the amount of jobs featuring pensions that people can live on, when they retire, has decreased and people will need to supplement their retirement even more. So what is the current government trying to do for us? They want to cut the benefits. They gave us a drug plan that is almost useless and only benefits the drug companies. They tried and are still trying to force us to use private companies to manage a retirement plan. Sure this would once again give a windfall to the friends of the administration that run these types of companies. They have a long record of this type of behavior. There are now at least 44,000,000 people in the U.S. without hospitalization, it is a national disgrace. Almost every western country is better off in this area than we are. Even if these people are lucky enough to get some treatment at a hospital, the funding is really coming from us, because it shows itself in the form of higher rates and fees, after all, the money has to come from somewhere to cover these treatments.

I saved the very worst and most abusive agencies for last. They are the military establishment. The U.S. Is actually bankrupt. If other countries called in our debt, we would not be able to pay it all. The debt is so large that it now equals over 2/3 of the gross national product for one year and that is a heck of a lot of money. So where does all this money go? Billions upon billions went and is still going for a missile defense system that doesn't work and everyone knows this, but we have to keep the defense companies humming, don't we? In tests where we knew where and when a missile was in the sky, we missed it three out of five times, so the military switched the tests to computer simulations and now they say that we had great success. Boy do they think we are stupid. Companies that service troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were given contracts worth billions of dollars and it just happens that some of these companies had contacts with the administration in private life. When it was shown that one in particular overcharged by BILLIONS of dollars, they were only made to pay it back and were still used. What do you think would happen to you if you overcharged someone by a huge amount? Let me tell you, you would be in jail. Many inferior weapons were sold to us with the idea that they would get them to work later. That is like selling someone a can opener and telling them that it doesn't open any cans now, but wait, I will work on it and sometime in the future it will. I hate to say this, but there should be a special place to incarcerate these people and they should all be sent there immediately. Not only are these people and companies crooks, as are the people that contracted with them, but they are unpatriotic and have hurt our country. Lastly there are all these wars that we are fighting, that we were lied to about. How come the president was not impeached. If Clinton had done this, don't you think that he would have been? He was almost impeached over something far less important.

The citizens of this country, the greatest country in the world, have been treated very badly lately. We all know that political games are played in Washington, but it has gotten out of hand. I heard one person on the radio, an economist, state that the real problem now is that wages have not increased much in the last eight years. Could this have anything to do with current governmental policies? Companies have gotten too strong and they seem to be no longer accountable for their actions. I believe that the last eight years have set this country back to the time of Teddy Roosevelt, when he had to break up the monopolies. We are at that point again, only this time the companies have gone international to try and protect themselves. We also have the added burden of trying to dig ourselves out of debt that is the biggest in the world and accounts for over 600,000 dollars for every man, woman and child in this country. Just look around at the fuel companies, the drug companies, medical field, the dairy farmers and so forth. On top of everything else, we are one of the worst polluters of all countries. We need to straighten things out and we need to do it before it is too late.