Iran is the least of our problems. Our worst enemy is domestic.

I remember when I was young I was working laying sewers in the English countryside.  Just outside this village we were working was a poultry plant.  The guy that ran the place showed me the huge pens that held the chickens and I noticed that they just didn't look right.  We had chickens at my dad's place and their feathers were bright and healthy looking.  The cocks were majestic and quite aggressive if you tried to mess with them. But these chickens had lots of areas over their bodies where the feathers were missing and there was so many of them in this enclosed space.

As I remember it the guy told me that they kept the lights on all the time or at least a lot of the time. The bald spots were due to the chickens pecking and attacking  each other in such a confined space.  I think he said that the constant light was so they would lay more eggs but I thought it was a farm for breeding chickens for meat.  The point is that these chickens were industrialized animals not like the ones we had in our back yard.  They were going nuts due to their environment. I think that's what is a big part of the problem in US society, especially US society but in capitalist society in general

I had a short Facebook conversation with a friend in Lebanon the other day who made some comments about feeling sorry and some pity for Americans as we are so abused by our own government, lied to and mistreated. It made me think how I have often felt this way myself.  Although there are many innocent people throughout the world that suffer terrible violence and horror in the wake of a predatory US foreign policy, Americans are the first victims of US capitalism.  Sure we have an abundance (in most cases) of material possessions, we can play angry birds on the way to work, but we receive the worst bang for the buck of any other people's in the advanced capitalist economies, and in some cases, former colonial countries like Cuba which has a better infant mortality rate than the US and about the same life expectancy.

The US is the worst advanced economy to be poor in. We have the worst television although we can have 200 channels for which we pay $1000 a year for even though we only watch 6 of them.  We can't escape being bombarded with ads every three or four minutes in late night TV as even if we switch channels they have it timed so the ads are all pretty much on at the same time, sometimes the same ad is repeated and this invisible hand reaches in to our living rooms and turns up the volume when the ad comes on.  I turn to my wife sometimes before the ads finally drive me to bed and ask, "Didn't they just show me this one?"  No matter, they don't care. On top of that we have the worst social services, most expensive and least expansive health care system, poor public transit, work the longest hours and the most censored press in the so-called free world.

And I am not sure exactly what it is but something is wrong with the young men of America.  There seems to be an epidemic of erectile dysfunction and they have to take pills that give them erections that last four hours.  What the poor women go through I can't imagine.  Not to mention restless leg syndrome, excessive baldness syndrome, and possibly excessive shyness syndrome and other sorts of syndromes for which they have all sorts of names except I can't remember exactly what the various acronym's stand for. Is it ADD, ABD, DDA, FOB? I just lose track.  They have the pill for it though.

I was just in Europe and noticed that there weren't constant ads on the telly for the numerous diseases and syndromes we have with a guy dressed up like a doctor telling me to "call my doctor" to ask if this drug "is for you"; it's forbidden. My friend is a retired pediatrician and she was telling me that she used to get calls from patients who asked her about diseases she'd never heard of.  They had heard about them on TV.  This sort of advertising of prescription drugs is not permitted in most countries.

Yes, we are the first victims of US capitalism and we work longer hours with fewer benefits than workers in the other industrialized nations.  And look at this, a recent report finds the following, check it out:

"Every five hours a child dies from abuse or neglect in the US. The latest government figures show an estimated 1,770 children were killed as a result of maltreatment in 2009. A recent congressional report concludes the real number could be nearer 2,500.

In fact, America has the worst child abuse record in the industrialised world. Why? The BBC's Natalia Antelava investigates.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15288865

I don't think I buy this idea that Iran is the biggest danger to my health.