We constantly read of America’s progression to the welfare state, where Uncle Sam is more than willing to provide for all of your needs from cradle to grave.  The progression has been decades in the making, with pronounced developments during the Great Depression and again as an outgrowth of the Civil Rights movement.

    Indeed, the Welfare State has taken a decidedly rapid expansion under the current regime, with a combination of profligate entitlement spending for both individual and corporations.

    Alas, it is all too apparent to those who keep abreast of the news that the largess does not end with individuals.  Stories abound concerning other aspects of society that continue to feed at the Federal and state troughs.

    Post-secondary education is rife with grant after grant for useless studies to address issues and concerns that we, as a nation, do not need to be concerned with – particularly when they are paid for with tax dollars stolen from hardworking Americans.

    Social re-engineering organizations reap millions annually in efforts to dissuade Americans from their Christian roots, steering us to the precipitous edge that destroys the sanctity of life, demeans the sanctity of marriage, and erases the values of family.  From environmental causes to social issues, the feed trough continues to run.

    American corporations, once leery of federal oversight, now happily belly-up to the feeder hoping to garner just a small piece of America’s tax dollars.  While many point to the federal bailout of General Motors and the Banking industry during the recent recession as the root of the problem, the current path truly began many years ago when the Federal government deemed Chrysler was too big to fail and orchestrated a government guarantee loan program in the mid-1970s.

    Beyond the Corporate feeding frenzy apparent with so many firms trying to stave off failure (GM, JP Morgan, Chrysler – again); the list of Corporate hog farmers runs the entire gamut of industries – not for salvation but for guaranteed contracts and research money.  Any attempt to list the names of companies that individually received hundreds of millions of federal dollars annually would take several volumes (and would begin to mirror the length of the Affordable Health Care for America Act – a.k.a. ObamaCare).

    Even then, the handouts from the Federal government to private industry for sustainability and research are dwarfed by the benevolence extended toward pushing ideals, through such arbitrary and capricious generosity extended to firms like Solyndra.  The graft it must have taken to acquire sufficient political duplicity to be awarded hundreds of millions of dollars even as your firm is in its death throes.

    Yet, one element of the American welfare system has received scant little attention – until now.  Community after community, covering the entire spectrum of America – rural, suburban, and urban, reaches into the public till every day. 

    The needs are real – from roads to economic development – but they are the direct result of a paucity of local foresight and leadership for decades (and, in some cases, for generations).  When the founding fathers of many communities established towns and burgs, some with far-sounding names and others as a tribute to their own legacies, they did so with an idea in mind.

   

systems, schools built to teach future generations, and buildings intended to stand as monuments to the city’s greatness.  Infrastructure was a key element of those ideals.

    Yet, somewhere along the way, the vision was lost and the communities found other ways to fritter away local tax dollars.  Rather than continuing to invest in the future by preserving what they had, community after community learned simply to make do.

    Now, generations or decades later, those decisions are coming home to roost.  Many communities, now starving for population because they lost the triple vision of growth, diversity, and sustainability are unable to maintain the infrastructure visionaries of the past had worked so hard to develop.

       In some cases, those decisions were made of expediency – it was easier to ignore the need for another year or two rather than establish priorities for more than simple maintenance.  Other instances, the decision to ignore vital city infrastructure was made of necessity brought about by the dual edge swords of declining population and dwindling tax revenues. 

    Myriad reasons exist for the dwindling revenue streams, but are the outgrowth of the same failure to look beyond the horizon.  As a result, communities were saddled with industries that were less labor intensive, more technology driven, and built on antiquated needs.

    Nevertheless, much of America is driving on roads unfit for modern transportation, with water and sewer systems unable to keep pace with modern demands, and with utility systems straining under the load.

    Enter our Federal government, promising once again to provide for the welfare of citizens who should have been concerned (and accountable) for providing for their own welfare. 

    Many is the rural community that lunges headlong into the welfare abyss for every need from roads to sewer systems to economic development – all issues that local leadership should have been concerned with decades previously.  Some communities have lunged so deeply that the Federal welfare checks for the current fiscal year exceed the entire local budget.

    Shame on us.  Shame on our leaders.  Shame on Washington for thinking local needs were the responsibility of far-off bureaucrats.

Enough already!

    Yet behind every criticism of what is wrong with our nation, there must be a vision for restoration.  Tomorrow’s visionaries are those who awake with a renewed sense of urgency, willing to tackle modern problems with local solutions. 

***

Each one of us – visionary or not – must awake to the reality that solutions to today’s problems are not going to be immediate nor will effective solutions come out of Washington.  We must be willing to step up and be counted as responsible, involved, and proactive.

    Each must ask when the last time we were actively involved in solutions for our community – and why we have been idle for so long.

    When we have answered those questions, it is time to roll up our sleeves, wipe the sweat off our brow, and get to work restoring greatness to our nation – apart from the deepening well of Federal community welfare programs.

    Careful thought was often given to how a town presents itself and how it would survive for generations to come.  The result was tree-lined boulevards, forwarding thinking sewer and water

Hackers associated with well known hacker-activist group “Anonymous Operations” have released a massive cache of data they say was obtained when they hacked a website belonging to the United States Department of Justice. “Today we are releasing 1.7GB of data that used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice, until now,” Anonymous wrote in a statement on its website. The hackers claim the file contains emails as well as “the entire database dump” from the DOJ website.

“We do not stand for any government or parties, we stand for freedom of people, freedom of speech and freedom of information,” the hackers wrote. ”We are releasing data to spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government. We are releasing it to end the corruption that exists, and truly make those who are being oppressed free.”

The Justice Department confirmed the breach in a statement given to ZDNet. “The department is looking into the unauthorized access of a website server operated by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that contained data from their public website,” a DOJ spokesperson said. “The Bureau of Justice Statistics website has remained operational throughout this time. The department’s main website, justice.gov, was not affected.”

The 1.7GB file containing data Anonymous says it obtained during the DOJ breach is available for download as a torrent.

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