History shows war is a good way out of depression, recession or virtually any other political mess. Woodrow Wilson ran as a strong anti-war candidate and jumped right into WWI (The war to end all wars). Franklin Delano Roosevelt solved the great depression with WWII. Harry Truman, avoiding a post-war economic down-turn, gave us the Korean War. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson opened with the Cuban missile crisis and orchestrated the Viet Nam War.
In some ways 2012 reminds me of 1936. The country had gone through four years of hard economic times and a liberal president was re-elected. As soon as the '36 elections were over we started getting ready for war even though the country was overwhelmingly isolationist. It took a third term for FDR to get us into World War II, the worst war in history.
Like '36, the 2012 election followed four tough years and a "very" liberal "anti-war" president has been re-elected. A Russian nuclear sub has been spotted off our coast, China has built a new war plane suspiciously like ours and North Korea is rattling sabers. The crazies in Iran are building a nuke and the whole Middle East is a tinderbox of Muslim fanaticism.
The guy in the White House is supposed to be anti-war like Wilson. Just like Roosevelt, he's been re-elected after four hard years and he has something else in common with our other war-time presidents. He's a Democrat with a big mess on his hands. This may be over-simplifying it a bit, but there are other similarities, too.
Bankers are sitting on cash they'd rather lend to warring nations than to small businesses. During the Vietnam War, the Rockefellers, who control Chase Bank, owned a metal processing plant in North Vietnam. They supplied the Russians with weapons and the North Vietnamese got most of their weapons from Russia. And they weren't the only bank making money off that war.
The 22nd amendment was passed to prevent a repetition of the Roosevelt travesty of being president for life. Jose Serrano, D NY, has introduced a bill in the house to repeal it. I have this eerie feeling that a real war may not be far away. The next one could really be the "war to end all wars" and, coincidentally, all of us. Pray for peace.
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