Who exactly ARE the bad guys?

 - Only a few weeks ago, Visa Inc, MasterCard Inc and banks that issue their credit cards agreed to a $7.25 billion settlement with US retailers in a lawsuit over the fixing of credit and debit card fees in what could be the largest antitrust settlement in US history. Shameful and criminal. But do we know exactly WHO did this? Do we ever get a name or hear of a long prison sentence for this kind of crime that affects us all?

 - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - the subprime mortgage crisis and scandal - as of Dec 16, 2011, no one has been charged with a crime. We know of company names but hardly any personnel names. Yet somebody sent memos, emails. Somebody had their name attached to those memos. We have been conditioned to accept that corporations are immune to the actions of their managers.

- The WTC attacks - Only six months before the towers disintegrated into cement dust from fire, the first time in the history of steel constructed buildings - Larry Silverstein acquired the lease for 3.2 billion - then insured the complex and after the dust settled, claimed 12.3 billion. Nice profit considering the whole complex was known to be a total losing proposition!

- The Enron Scandal - unfortunately all the information gathered as evidence by the FBI, was housed in their offices in WT7 when it too, in sympathy some say, also imploded into a convenient grey dust in 2001. So nothing exists to go forward with any prosecutions. Odd coincidence?

- The disastrous BP oil spill happened and only one BP executive stepped down while the BP security even kept the US Navy away from the site. BP simply defied the President of the United States and won. Reporters were chased away by armed security. So far no one even knows if the Deepwater Horizon is still leaking into the Gulf seabed and expanding the Gulf  'dead zone'!

- JP Morgan Chase has lost 5.7 billion in a trading blunder and no one knows where the money went. Almost a typical incident among banks these days who keep raising YOUR fees. Today banks can show a profit for each quarter of over a billion dollars, all with a straight face. And no one questions the fact that bank are parasites to YOUR money.

- The Plame Affair when Valerie Plame, an active CIA undercover asset was outed by journalist Robert Novak, through Karl Rove and at the instigation of George W. Bush because of a personal squabble. Rove was investigated but no one was jailed for this treasonous act. Robert Novak the Bush media puppet did what he was told, maybe at the cost of other CIA operative's lives!

- The Bailout of major automobile companies who took the money and still gave their executives million dollar bonuses of taxpayer money! Then flew to the Senate Hearings inquiring about the industry's problems in private jets and did nothing but exhibit their arrogance! How many got fired for NOT reaching their targets?

- Fukushima nuclear disaster. 3 Mile Island warned us all. Chernobyl confirmed the danger, and the danger will last for 1000 years, and yet even while the radiation particles blowing across the Pacific are registering higher than ever before, we have to search back pages to get an inkling that anything is wrong. Hondas continue rolling in. Business as usual. Is that the exact trouble with business?

Not to mention the invasion of Iraq on falsified WMD information. Or what the so called Federal Reserve is up to. Or Jeb Bush, Governer of Florida stealing the 2000 election for his brother. Or the fact that huge pharmaceutical companies now control the Food and Drug Administration of the US Government, (did you know that no matter what the drug does to you and your family, you cannot sue the drug manufacturer?) Or that Monsanto and agricultural companies like them are given free reign to engineer, manipulate and 'adjust' farm production of Frankenfood. For their profit while ignoring our health.

And I'm not looking for sex scandals or local scandals at all, that would take a series of volumes or a full hard disk just for the headings, nope only listing a very a few of the kind that ruin lives or steal away the life savings of ordinary working people, or the ones that make you sick instead of better, or the ones that take away your hope, or the those that send the brave young men and women of a country into harm's way for the stealthy designs of a few. Does any reporter ever tell you about depleted uranium bullets?

People used to trust reporters. How many great movies have shown courageous efforts of investigative reporters? But that's fiction now, isn't it? Deep-throats are grabbed and spirited away into incarceration like Bradly Manning. Julian Assange is persecuted by the cornerstone of democratic law respecting government, England, for revealing a slur by a diplomat about another diplomat? People once trusted their governments to look out for them. That trust has degraded into a wary suspicion of government in general and a questioning of everything they do and by what motives they do it.

We don't trust our health care anymore. Millions of doses of vaccines sit in warehouses because people no longer trust the drug companies to protect them. (In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have committed acts that forced them to pay the largest criminal fines in American history. In cases involving Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb and other drug companies, these fines and penalties have totaled over $7 billion)

Big agro is genetically modifying your food whether you want it or not, and the movement to buy and eat locally is growing exponentially, because of mistrust. Can you trust Monsanto to help bring up your children? Does the nutrition stay in that modified apple that will last a year without turning brown? Isn't that deterioration a warning signal that we need to see?

We citizens are constantly being warned about criminals and terrorists in our midst, necessitating changes to the way we live. The bogey man that was invented by Romans centuries ago when they warned, "Hannibal is at the gates," and has been perpetuated ever since to scare the people, evolving into 'the bogey man will get you.' Our internet actions are monitored and messages searched without warrants in the pretense of catching terrorist plans. CCV cameras appear everywhere so that bad guy schemers can be tracked and caught, by face recognition software and the sneaky by product is that everyone else is now watched and identified too. Virtually every message you send and every phone call you make is monitored and recorded in the name of 'protecting' us poor public people from the, bad guys. And so Hannibal is at the gates again. Two thousand years later.

Drones are now flying above you in urban neighborhoods. Watching, listening and they are being armed with weapons and tasers to attack you from above! Can we even trust our own police? They are the ones flying the drones! And now it is becoming WE the people who are the ones starting to live like those terrorists in the desert, hiding from electronic eavesdropping of drones and spy satellites! Keeping our shades drawn.Keeping our bodies cool so we don't send a thermal imaging silhouette.

But we must ask sometime; who are the real bad guys and why aren't governments protecting people against them? You need only to ask how badly have you been affected by criminals and terrorists? Does any of this compare to the guy who took your cash in an alleyway? Or the one who stole your car while you were sleeping? Does that compare with GMO food that could change the DNA of your children?
Ask how badly have you been affected by the white collar criminals? How badly are you being affected by governments and the corporations in collusion with them? The powers that be keep conditioning people to accept that the upper echelon of  “white-collar” crime as not crime and such people couldn’t possibly be criminals. They wear silk ties, not black hats. If you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear. Who defines wrong?
And your local News Hour reports on lost cats while staying clear of reality news or controversy. It is all beyond your understanding, they say. And most are going for the lie.
Life is just easier that way. So far.

There are other reasons for our fear of learning truths;
A reporter for Bloomberg News, investigating where the federal bailout (taxpayer) money was going, was well into enough info to expose the complexities of what was going on, when at aged 52, he unexpectedly died.
So did 20 witnesses to the Kennedy assassination die within three months of the event on November 22, 1963.

And what happened to so many witnesses of 9/11 when they wanted to talk about what they saw? Why did do many respected reporters who made candid observations on the day, Like Dan Rather, Aaron Brown and Peter Jennings change their opinions right afterward? To their continuing embarrassment today? Who got to them?

Who are the real bad guys?

You know the answer.