Why I don't trust the government (and neither should you)

It seems these days that many times when there are outspoken critics of the government, particularly in relation to Covid presently, they get labeled as being conspiracy theory nutjobs and are even censored on various tech platforms as a result. This has not happened to me because I don't participate in all of the online forums / social media sites that are doing the censuring and haven't done so for quite some time. However, I am definitely in the category that is more inclined to believe that the government is definitely not looking out for your better interests and will lie to you more often than not.

I also believe that nearly all politicians are completely full of shit and are only looking to maintain and expand their own personal power under the guise of "helping the people."

I have very real reasons for feeling this way and I have been very hush-hush about this up until this point but now I am going to break my silence but do so in a very vague way that will require some level of just believing me (I'll get to that later.)

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_{Ahhh memes, you make every day brighter}

Before moving overseas I did what you are "supposed to do." I went to college, got a degree, then got another one when I was unhappy with the job offerings from a regular degree, then pursued a career. I started out in the private sector and then because of my interactions with the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) I was later offered a job with them - which i quickly accepted because at the time it seemed like a "cool" thing to do to be a Federal Agent and honestly, for a few years that I had that job it actually was.

I had a "company car' that simply said US Government on the tags and blackout window tint that would be otherwise illegal (never understood that) and this basically meant that I could park anywhere I wanted and never get a ticket. There were a lot of other perks such as getting fast-tracked at airports, being able to flash your fold-out government ID as if I was an FBI agent or something and even though private sector jobs potentially pay more, the health insurance benefits are immense when you work at the level I did inside the Federal government.

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Going back to the vehicle for a second: I was once speeding and a State Trooper got behind me to pull me over, turned on his flashy pull over lights for about 2 seconds, saw the US government tags and then switched his lights off stopped pursuing me. I'm didn't do this intentionally, but we are all guilty of "lead foot" every now and then.

While working with the EPA the allure quickly wore off and I think it would do so for anyone that has any sort of ethics or if not that, a general feeling of disdain towards taxation, which of course is what the EPA and any other government agency is funded by. The main thing I disliked after working for the EPA is the fact that we did very little as far as actually protecting the environment is concerned. I hesitate to get into specific details because I was forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement when I resigned but I'll speak in generalities so as to not incriminate myself.

The great asbestos cleanup!

The EPA makes a lot of information public as to what they are doing, but you can be assured that the information that is released to the public is not really what is going on. On one particular job that I was one of the project manager on we were spending hundreds of millions of dollars removing and replacing asbestos-contaminated soil from various locations around a rather large metropolitan area in the United States. I'm not going to say which one but just insert the name of any large US city and this is probably a project that has happened there.

When I was seeing truckload after truckload of asbestos-contaminated soil leave the various sites and being sent off to an area where it was meant to be decontaminated and then returned to the same location we took it from in the first place.

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_{FYI: This is NOT an image from said project}

The trucks that were leaving were numbered and logged and the exact same soil that was taken from each site was returned to exactly where it was taken from. I don't know why this was necessary because the government operates on a very "need to know" basis. As a project manager I was basically just a glorified accountant so I only needed to know how much everything costs, not whether or not it was a good deal or even what the purpose of said expenses were. 'Twas merely a bean counter with a spooky looking official vehicle. An ironic part of my vehicle, which was provided by the Environmental Protection Agency was the fact that it was a Chevy Suburban which if you are not aware of this is a "road yacht." You could put 12 people in this thing somewhat comfortably and I almost never had any passengers. Not a great start for an agency that is suppose to be protecting the environment.

Now let's get to the point where I first started to not trust the government.

One weekend, I was at a bar with one of the scientists that worked the same project and he was in charge of all the documentation that determined if the soil had a high enough level of asbestos in it to justify it being moved and "cleaned."

He was drunk and I don't know if he was trying to impress me but he told me that almost NONE of the soil that we were moving had any dangerous level of asbestos in it and a majority of it didn't have any at all. He revealed to me that he was told to doctor the papers so that all of the soil had the appearance of needing to be cleansed and that many of the trucks would return to the same site a few days later in the same vehicle and he suspected that it was never even removed from the trucks. To test this theory he took a particular sample and put a Snickers (candy bar) wrapper just under the dirt in one particular truck and then made certain he was there when it returned: The wrapper was still in exactly the same place.

He said he suspected that this entire project was a siphoning of public funds into private hands and that a group of politicians got together and determined that this project needed to be done and that the owners of the trucking companies as well as the soil decontamination plant (of which, there are very few of in the world) were all in on it together. We're not talking petty theft here folks, this was hundreds of millions of dollars and this was just one of many many many EPA projects that was taking place in the USA at the time.

The scientist who tole me this information had no reason to lie to me. I was not his boss. We were compartmentalized and reported to different branches of the EPA. This was done under the auspices of preventing theft on sites but it is actually the opposite: It is done to prevent any ethical person from putting a stop to the real theft, which is happening at the top levels and is why these projects are created in the first place.

There was no danger, there was no reason for this project to exist, yet it did exist, and projects similar to it continue to exist right now. This is frightening to me because the EPA is just one Federal agency and a relatively minor one at that. It would not surprise me at all if this same robbing of the public funds happens across the board in every single Federal agency.

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There is much much more to this story and I will get to it later, but for now, this is already long enough to I don't think most people will read all of it. Therefore consider this a "part 1."

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