Recipe for Disaster Contrary to the propaganda put out by Fox News and the Tea Party advocates, it is not government that is driving our country into becoming a third world land. One of their favorite sayings is that large corporations and wealthy people are job creators. Nothing could be further than the truth. For example, in the first ten years after Wal-Mart came to Iowa, that state lost 555 grocery stores, 298 building supply stores, 161 variety stores, 158 womens apparel stores, 116 drug stores, and 111 mens apparel stores. Now such huge retailers have multiplied all over the country. In addition, most of the products sold are made in countries outside the United States. And we wonder why unemployment is so high. Because government does not regulate polluters effectively, mainly due to obstructionism and lobbying by the advocates for big business, especially big oil, there are less than 4% of our original forests left, there are over 100,000 synthetic chemicals in commerce of which only a handful have been tested for human health impacts, and 4 billion pounds of toxic chemicals each year. Forty percent of the water in waterways in the US has become undrinkable. We are our own worst enemies. With 5% of the worlds population, Americans consume 80% of the resources and create 80% of the waste. If the entire world consumed as much as Americans, we would need three to five planets to sustain us. The average person in the US consumes twice as much as he or she did fifty years ago. We see more advertisements in one year than people saw in a lifetime fifty years ago. We spend three to four times as many hours shopping than our counterparts in Europe do. Average house size has doubled since the 1970s. Each person in the US makes 4.5 pounds of garbage a day, twice as much as we did 20 years ago. And for every one can of garbage a household puts out, 70 cans of garbage was required to make the junk we throw out.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 12:47:31 +0000
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