I'm astonished so many DUers are cool with ending Habeas Corpus

[JDPriestly]

326. The collapse of the US is due to the fact that during the 1970s,

as oil prices began to rise, legislation was passed that eventually encouraged many Americans to invest their life savings, their retirement savings month by month in pension funds and 401(K)s that were placed in the stock market.

During the 1980s, our Congress contemplated "free trade" and opening our markets to foreign manufactured products.

In that "free trade" environment (which increased in scope over the past 30 years), instead of investing the pension funds of Americans in American-based businesses and industries, Wall Street, seeking higher short-term profits by using cheap labor, rushed to fund the building of industry and prosperity in countries like India, Singapore, China, etc.

So, now, Americans import most of their consumer goods. The excess of imports and the comparative lack of exports has lead to a chronic balance of payments problem.

We hardly make any consumer goods at all. Not only does that mean that we are left with an economy of jobs that are either extremely poorly paid or extremely well paid with few jobs in between, but we have to borrow money in order to sustain the infrastructure and lifestyle to which we have been accustomed for decades.

It is politically nearly impossible to tell the American people the truth about our perilous economic situation. None of our politicians have dared to deal with this honestly. And if they did, they probably could not be elected.

On top of our trade and deficit problems, on top of the fact that our standard of living is declining, our currency is the currency in which oil and a lot of other commodities are traded. So what happens to commodity prices affects us even more than it does people in other countries. Right now, commodities are expensive (although not more expensive than they have been at times in the recent past) so we still feel that we are not doing too badly. But this will not last.

Wall Street has made a lot of bad choices. They blame the problems they almost single-handedly caused on ordinary, middle-class Americans. They lie. Ordinary, middle-class Americans did not make the important choices. Wall Street did. Wall Street and wealthy investors. And they have increased their profits in recent years as the rest of the country's belts have been pulled ever tighter.

How the world will respond? It may be that each country will try to look out for itself. We will have trade war, hopefully not worse, and everyone will suffer. Countries will compete to impose austerity in order to prevent their citizens from having the money to purchase foreign-made products.

We need just one politician who can speak the harsh truth to Americans: Wall Street squandered our future.

As for Wall Street: if a bunch of Wall Street traders want to go into a back room and gamble, say play poker, with their own personal fortunes that they earned from honest work, then that's nobody's business.

But they took the pension funds and savings of Americans, and they use money from the Fed, money that is printed in the name of the American people, so they should conduct their business in the open, with transparency. Above all, they should follow the rules that are established by Congress and those rules should protect ordinary people, our American infrastructure and our American industry.

Don't worry, every other country will do the same thing. Free trade has not worked. I am for capitalism, but I do not support the kind of socially irresponsible capitalism that is now destroying our economy and the future of our children. Anything too big to fail should be made small enough to fail or succeed on its own merits.