40 Hard Questions That the American People Should Be Asking Right Now
If you spend much time watching the mainstream news, then you know how incredibly vapid it can be. It is amazing how they can spend so much time saying next to nothing. There seems to be a huge reluctance to tackle the tough issues and the hard questions. Perhaps I should be thankful for this, because if the mainstream media was doing their job properly, there would not be a need for the alternative media. Once upon a time, the mainstream media had a virtual monopoly on the dissemination of news in the United States, but that has changed. Thankfully, the Internet in the United States is free and open (at least for now) and people that are hungry for the truth can go searching for it. Today, an increasing number of Americans want to understand why our economy is dying and why our national debt is skyrocketing. An increasing number of Americans are deeply frustrated with what is going on in Washington D.C. and they are alarmed that we seem to get closer to becoming a totalitarian police state with each passing year. People want real answers about our foreign policy, about our corrupt politicians, about our corrupt financial system, about our shocking moral decline and about the increasing instability that we are seeing all over the world, and they are not getting those answers from the mainstream media. If the mainstream media will not do it, then those of us in the alternative media will be glad to tackle the tough issues. The following are 40 hard questions that the American people should be asking right now.... #1 If Iran tries to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, what will that do to the price of oil and what will that do to the global economy? #2 If Iran tries to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, will the United States respond by launching a military strike on Iran? #3 Why is the Federal Reserve bailing out Europe? And why are so few members of Congress objecting to this? #4 The U.S. dollar has lost well over 95 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was created and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a track record of incompetence that is absolutely mind blowing. So what possible justification is there for allowing the Federal Reserve to continue to issue our currency and run our economy? #5 Why does the euro keep dropping like a rock? Is this a sign that Europe is heading for a major recession? #6 Why are European banks parking record-setting amounts of cash at the European Central Bank? Is this evidence that banks don't want to lend to one another and that we are on the verge of a massive credit crunch? #7 If the European financial system is going to be just fine, then why is the UK government preparing feverishly for the collapse of the euro? #8 What did the head of the IMF mean when she recently said that we could soon see conditions "reminiscent of the 1930s depression"? #9 How in the world can Mitt Romney say with a straight face that the individual health insurance mandate that he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts was based on "conservative principles"? Wouldn't that make the individual mandate in Obamacare "conservative" as well? #10 If the one thing that almost everyone in the Republican Party seems to agree on is that Obamacare is bad, then why is the candidate that created the plan that much of Obamacare was based upon leading in so many of the polls? #11 What did Mitt Romney mean when he stated that he wants “to eliminate some of the differences, repeal the bad, and keep the good” in Obamacare? #12 If no Republican candidate is able to accumulate at least 50 percent of the delegates by the time the Republican convention rolls around, will that mean that the Republicans will have a brokered convention that will enable the Republican establishment to pick whoever they want as the nominee? #13 Why are middle class families being taxed into oblivion while the big oil companies receive about $4.4 billion in specialized tax breaks a year from the federal government? #14 Why have we allowed the "too big to fail" banks to become even larger? #15 Why has the United States had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976? #16 Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of all jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs. How in the world could we allow that to happen? #17 If the United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, then why don't our politicians do something about it? #18 If you can believe it, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have permanently closed down since 2001. So exactly what does that say about our economy? #19 Why was the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall made in China? Wasn't there anyone in America that could make it? #20 If low income jobs now account for 41 percent of all jobs in the United States, then how are we going to continue to have a vibrant middle class? #21 Why do the poor just keep getting poorer in the United States today? #22 How can the Obama administration be talking about an "economic recovery" when 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be "low income" or are living in poverty? #23 Why has the number of new cars sold in the U.S. declined by about 50 percent since 1985? #24 How can we say that we have a successful national energy policy when the average American household will spend a whopping $4,155 on gasoline by the end of this year? #25 Why does it take gigantic mountains of money to get a college education in America today? According to the Student Loan Debt Clock, total student loan debt in the United States will surpass the 1 trillion dollar mark in early 2012. Isn't there something very wrong about that? #26 Why do about a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who don’t pay their bills to be put in jail? #27 If it costs tens of billions of dollars to take care of all of the illegal immigrants that are already in this country, why did the Obama administration go around Congress and grant "backdoor amnesty" to the vast majority of them? Won't that just encourage millions more to come in illegally? #28 Why are gun sales setting new all-time records in America right now? #29 Why are very elderly women being strip-searched by TSA agents at U.S. airports? Does that really keep us any safer? #30 The last words of Steve Jobs were "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." What did he mean by that? #31 How in the world did scientists in Europe decide that it was a good idea for them to create a new "killer bird flu" that is very easy to pass from human to human? #32 If our founding fathers intended to set up a limited central government, then why does the federal government just continue to get bigger and bigger? #33 Are we on the verge of an absolutely devastating retirement crisis? On January 1st, 2011 the very first of the Baby Boomers started to reach the age of 65. Now more than 10,000 Baby Boomers will be turning 65 every single day for the next two decades. So where in the world are we going to get all the money we need to pay them the retirement benefits that we have promised them? #34 If the federal government stopped all borrowing today and began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the U.S. national debt. So does anyone out there actually still believe that the U.S. national debt will be paid off someday? #35 If the U.S. economy is getting better, then why are an all-time record 46 million Americans now on food stamps? #36 How can we say that we have the greatest economy on earth when we have a child poverty rate that is more than twice as high as France and one out of every four American children is on food stamps? #37 Since 1964, the reelection rate for members of the U.S. House of Representatives has never fallen below 85 percent. So are the American people really that stupid that they would keep sending the exact same Congress critters back to Washington D.C. over and over and over? #38 What does it say about our society that nearly one-third of all Americans are arrested by the time they reach the age of 23? #39 Why do so many of our politicians think that it is a good idea to allow the U.S. military to arrest American citizens on American soil and indefinitely detain them without a trial? #40 A new bill being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives would give the U.S. government power to shut down any website that is determined to "engage in, enable or facilitate" copyright infringement. Many believe that the language of the new law is so vague that it would allow the government to permanently shut down any website that even links very briefly to "infringing material". Prominent websites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would be constantly in danger of being given a "death penalty". The American people need to ask their members of Congress this question: Do you plan to vote for SOPA (The Stop Online Piracy Act)? If the answer is yes, that is a clear indication that you should never cast a single vote for that member of Congress ever again. Reprinted with permission from the Economic Collapse Blog. December 30, 2011 Copyright © 2011 Economic Collapse Blog
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