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Peninsula readers' letters: Dec. 5





From Daily News Group readers
Posted: 12/04/2009 10:44:59 PM PST

War without consent

Dear Editor: The trouble with the American system now is that the president can get the U.S. into war without consent of Congress or the people. The law says that only Congress has the power to declare war, but the past few wars have not been started by Congress. In fact, sometimes it never even declared war at all. The war was simply started by the president because he's the commander-in-chief of the military and can throw forces into battles on his own in an emergency.

That's what Lyndon B. Johnson did in Vietnam: the Vietnamese sank one of the U.S. patrol boats in the Bay of Tonkin, so he turned around and began sinking theirs, and soon it was a full-scale war. I think it was a long time before Congress ever declared war, if it ever did. In World War II, the U.S. didn't declare war until Pearl Harbor. That made Congress mad enough to declare war almost immediately. In World War I, it took the sinking of the Lusitania, a British ship loaded with Americans, by a German sub. This gave the president a good excuse to get into the war, which is what presidents are usually waiting for.

They need something that's sufficient to provoke the public and Congress and make everybody agree that they need to go to war. What are Americans doing way over in Pakistan, of all places? Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and all those countries are Russia's next-door neighbors, not ours. It's stupid. The U.S. couldn't possibly win even if it goes to Pakistan's defense.

Ted Rudow III,MA

Palo Alto

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Sunday, December 6, 2009

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Sunday, December 6, 2009





Debt burden



Ted Rudow III,MA, Menlo Park, CA 94026
The global economy is heading toward a sustained recovery but given the risks of another downturn it is too soon to withdraw stimulus, International Monetary Fund Deputy (IMF) managing director John Lipsky said on Friday. "We think that we are on a trajectory toward sustained growth but that the recovery is going to be relatively moderate and relatively sluggish,"

All the Western industrialised nations, as well as most of the poor developing nations, are so deeply in debt to the IMF, & their economies so unbalanced & fragile with inflation, that it wouldn't take much to cause them to all come tumbling down into a full Depression! In fact, it's amazing that it hasn't happened already!

The dollar will crash and burn one of these days, as I've said, and it will come as quite a shock both to America and the world. It's sinking against the euro and the yen right now. But when the crash itself comes, it will be sudden, causing "a mighty widening of the eyes among those who have not discerned the signs of the times!"