I had a feeling I would get at least one response along these lines. Let me clarify the situation, IMO.
"continually regressing in the moral and ethical obligations"
I am not proclaiming that there was a bygone golden age where everything was awesome. The word "regress" was chosen carefully for the sole fact that, yes, in this year 2010, there has been significant progress made in the United States and across the world in regards to the treatment of humanity on an ethical and moral scale. Each year that transpires produces an ever increasing sum of philosophical ideologies that could increase the standard of living for most of mankind. Amidst these discoveries and continual improvements by societies intellectuals, world governments continually ignore or simply forget these quality addendum's to the standard moral code of human life in the sake of profit. There never was a golden age of humanity. There probably never will be. But the fact remains that countless individuals and organizations refine and better our understanding of sociological problems on a yearly basis, yet world governments pay little to no regard to these developments.
So, this "mantra" rings true in my opinion. In a world that is always increasing its intellectual capabilities through technology, increasing its ability to disseminate academic information, increasing its ability to research, study, examine, and postulate different solutions to different problems, there is a moral and ethical decline in part of the governments, and it is in fact a regression, a back tracking, a one-step-forward-to-steps-back, because it seems regardless of any ideological developments being made, their implementation is residually ignored over time in leu of the motivation of profit.