America at the Crossroads:

Perhaps not since 1860 has America been in so much peril. The reason I pick 1860 and not 1940 is because the forces that most threaten America are not external. They are home grown perils. Let us consider them one by one.

We are told there is a banking crisis. How did this happen. Was it because banks external to America were being poorly managed? It was not. Simply put American banks got into trouble when they permitted Wall Street brokers to roll good loans with bad loans and market the resulting product. Now when you mix horse-shit and corn meal the result is not that you make the horse shit more editable. The result is that you make the corn meal uneatable.

What these fine folks have forgotten is that America has run for the past 20 or 30 years on the sweat of the rest of the world. America is a debtor nation running on borrowed money or to use the fancy term borrowed capital. When horse-shit got mixed in with the corn meal the backing for the massive borrowing America must do on a daily basis went to hell in a hand basket. No one wanted American IOUs.

How does one make good on a promise to repay? Generally speaking one does that by having a job. But a funny thing happened over the last 2 decades. All the well paying jobs left America. Not only did the jobs leave in many cases the machines of production were sold lock, stock and barrel. The former American factory is an empty shell both jobs and machines are most likely now in China or Mexico. Who did this you might well ask. Was it nasty ayatollahs from Iran? No folks this was done by American business men in their eternal quest for ever larger profits.

Today a greater percentage of Americans are incarcerated than any other nation on earth. Yes folks America has finally drawn ever with and surpassed such nations as Russia and China with regard to this important statistical measurement. How can this have happened? There are many answers to this but none of those answers can be laid at the doorstep of other nations. I myself feel that drugs have so thoroughly and persuasively penetrated the American system of justice that it has become incapable of delivering justice.

There is a moral to all of this and it is best summarized in the words of Pogo from back in the 1970s. “We have met the enemy … and he is us.” America is at a crossroads. Which road will we choose? Corn meal for starving African and American children or gas-a-hol for American Hummers. Vote carefully this fall. The republic is in jeopardy. Never so much since the year before the American Civil War.