Web Letters: Looking Backward

I remember the last part of the "Great Depression." I can still hear the melody and some of the words of "Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?" We've had one suicide so far on Wall Street, and probably many more on Main Street. This mess is going to make the Great Depression look like a day at summer camp. During the thirties we still had our manufacturing base and our capital was held here in the United States. Now, thanks to our globalist gluttons, we don't even grow our own food. One lady today asked the president how soon she could count on moving out of her car, and our media seized on that as a novelty. Where in hell have they been for the past ten years? MSNBC spends its weekends in jails or trapping poor sexual perverts, wow??? And Wall Street gluttons give themselves $18.4 billion in pay packages with our tax money and a couple of Republican senators cut the education money out of the recovery bill. In the words of my new great hero, "They don't get it."

JAMES PINETTE

Caribou, ME

History is repeating itself, and Congress is investigating Lehman Bros. today on C-span. Despite the $700 billion bailout, markets are collapsing all over the world. Indeed, the international "free market" system is collapsing, and it is every country for themselves. In the EU, there is no "EU" response, and national governments are following their own national interests. As an economic nationalist, I do not regard this as a bad thing. Bringing different countries, whose economic systems have developed over centuries, into one economic system is like herding cats. There is no real international way out of this global economic mess. However, I do believe, that through national efforts, each country can pull themselves out of this mess one nation at a time. I therefore do not criticize members of the EU for going their separate ways in solving their economic problems.

However, since everyone seems to copy American economic policies, no matter how idiotic, we might, for a change, provide a model on how to get out of this mess. It is a fairly simple process. We recreate the American market, the same way Alexander Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures" gave it to us. We pull out of the WTO, and all "free trade" agreements. We impose a tariff system, behind which we rebuild all the industries and jobs that have been outsourced overseas. The American economy was built on well-paying jobs that provide disposable income to buy products. No industries, no jobs, means no economy. Employment is supplied by small businesses and not Wall Street. Any stimulus needs to go to Main Street and not Wall Street. But, even a long-term stimulus will not work without tariffs, because the industries and the jobs that are created must be US industries and jobs to support an American market. This is not impossible! We have done it before and we can do it again!

Pervis James Casey

Riverside, CA