Today the United States is facing environmental, social and economic problems that are absolutely unprecedented.  There is a crying need for the American people to pull together to work on these huge challenges, but instead of focusing on solutions to our problems, an increasing number of Americans are getting angrier and angrier and are looking for someone to blame.  Today we are increasingly becoming a divided nation.  Kindness and civility have been replaced with strife, discord, anger and hate.  Finding solutions to our problems has taken a back seat to making sure that "our team" wins and that the "other team" gets blamed for what is wrong.  But arguing with one another and hating one another is not going to solve the problems that America is facing. 

The following are 12 huge problems that Americans need to come together on and start facing before it is too late....

#1) The Great Pacific Garbage Patch - We are literally filling the Pacific Ocean up with our garbage.  In fact, there is one area of the Pacific that is so full of plastic and other garbage that it has become known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  This area of the Pacific Ocean is literally a "toxic soup" of plastic, trash and human waste that is about twice the size of the continental United States and that stretches from Hawaii to Japan.  The devastation that all of this garbage is causing to wildlife is unimaginable and we will likely never be able to completely clean up the mess that we have made so far, and yet our polluting of the oceans just keeps getting worse.  How will we ever be able to look future generations in the eye and tell them what we have done?

#2) Americans use more water than anyone else in the world and now the United States finds itself on the verge of a massive water crisis.  The number of states facing a water crisis is now far greater than the number of states without one.  In fact, a total of 36 states are projected to face severe water shortages in the next three years.

#3) Even the water that we do have is rapidly becoming highly polluted.  One stunning new study has found significant levels of both pharmaceutical drugs and illegal drugs in our water supplies despite "rigorous" efforts to remove them at water treatment facilities.

#4) By using nuclear waste (depleted uranium) to fight our wars, the United States military is causing one of the greatest environmental horrors in the history of the world.  In fact, not only have the air, water and soil in many areas of Iraq and Afghanistan been highly contaminated by depleted uranium, but also it has come out that depleted uranium munitions are slowly nuking our own troops.  Something must be done to address this environmental nightmare. 

#5) Unemployment in some areas of the United States has spiked to alarming levels.  In fact, the mayor of Detroit says that the real unemployment rate in his city is somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 to 50 percent.  If people are not put back to work soon, many cities in the U.S. could find themselves overwhelmed with homelessness and crime.

#6) The economic crisis is also causing a sharp rise in the number of Americans that are going hungry.  In fact, more than one out of every 10 Americans is now on food stamps and each month that number is increasing.

#7) Already, crime is at near epidemic levels in many areas of the United States.  Every year there are nearly 12 million crimes committed in the U.S. - that is by far the worst in the world.  But how many more people can the U.S. possibly put in prison?  There are already over 2.2 million people in prison in the United States, which is the most by far in the world.  In fact, the United States has just 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's incarcerated population.  Something needs to be done to find a sustainable solution to this massive problem.

#8) Law enforcement officials now estimate that approximately 600,000 Americans are trading dirty child pictures online.  In addition, there are now over 400,000 registered sex offenders in the United States.  How can a nation that is as great as ours produce so many people that are so dysfunctional?  Something must be done to fight this epidemic.

#9) Mortgage defaults have continued to hit record highs and housing prices have continued to fall.  Now, a gigantic "second wave" of adjustable rate mortgages is scheduled to reset beginning this year.  If the first wave of mortgage resets brought the U.S. housing market to a standstill, what will this second round do?

#10) A huge wave of Baby Boomers is on the verge of retirement and they are counting on collecting their pensions and drawing Social Security payments.  However, most pensions throughout the United States are now massively underfunded, and the Social Security system is a ticking timebomb.  In fact, many analysts are now forecasting that the Baby Boomers are going to bankrupt the entire Social Security system.

#11) This all comes at a time when the U.S. national debt is spiralling out of control.  The official debt of the U.S. government is now over 12 trillion dollars and it is rising at a rate of about 3.8 billion dollars per day.  So how much is a trillion dollars?  Well, if you spent one dollar every single second of every single day, it would take you over 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#12) Lastly, one of the biggest problems is that an increasing number of Americans no longer treat their fellow citizens with civility and respect.  We are being taught that if we belong to one particular group or political party that we are to automatically view those from other groups or political parties as enemies.  Anger and hate is growing not only at the government but also at each other.  If we choose to hate each other instead of loving one another, then we will never be able to come together and solve all of the problems listed above. 

Let's make the right choice.

Let's decide that we are going to love one another.

Sometimes there are things in life that happen so suddenly that they take us completely by surprise.  But there are other things that happen so slowly over a period of so many years that you can see them happening from a mile away.  The collapse of the U.S. dollar falls into the second category.  For years, many observers have been warning that if we did not fundamentally alter our economic policies that the U.S. dollar would eventually collapse.  In fact, U.S. Representative Ron Paul has been warning about the demise of the dollar for decades.  We can all see it happening in slow motion, and yet the U.S. government still does not seem to have the will to do anything about it.

In fact, the financial crisis of 2008/2009 greatly accelerated the ultimate collapse of the U.S. dollar.  Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson says that the U.S. economy came "very close" to collapsing into a second Great Depression during that time, and he is actually correct.  If the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve had not stepped in with massive bailouts at that point, we would have had a financial apocalypse.

But while the bailouts helped stabilize the U.S. economy for the moment, they actually made our long-term problems much, much worse.

It turns out that instead of $700 billion, it was actually $23.7 trillion that the Federal Reserve gave banks access to during the financial crisis.  During the financial crisis, the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve flooded the U.S. financial system with dollars.

This helped the U.S. banking system weather the storm, but it also hastened the ultimate destruction of the dollar.

Why?

Because each time more dollars are introduced into the economy, the value of each existing dollar goes down.  Just check out the following chart from DollarDaze.org....

When the number of dollars goes up, the purchasing power goes down.  It is simple mathematics.

Every time the amount of money in circulation goes up, it destroys each dollar that you own by just a little bit more.

So did all of those bailouts put our economy back on the right track?

No.

In fact, those in charge of monitoring the TARP program are warning that it may have created an even bigger financial crisis to come.

The Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program recently released the Quarterly Report to Congress for the period ending 12/31/2009.  The executive summary of that report contains a frightening assessment of the impact of TARP.  You have got to read this....

The substantial costs of TARP — in money, moral hazard effects on the market, and Government credibility — will have been for naught if we do nothing to correct the fundamental problems in our financial system and end up in a similar or even greater crisis in two, or five, or ten years’ time. It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date.

• To the extent that huge, interconnected, “too big to fail” institutions contributed to the crisis, those institutions are now even larger, in part because of the substantial subsidies provided by TARP and other bailout programs.

 

• To the extent that institutions were previously incentivized to take reckless risks through a “heads, I win; tails, the Government will bail me out” mentality, the market is more convinced than ever that the Government will step in as necessary to save systemically significant institutions. This perception was reinforced when TARP was extended until October 3, 2010, thus permitting Treasury to maintain a war chest of potential rescue funding at the same time that banks that have shown questionable ability to return to profitability (and in some cases are posting multi-billion-dollar losses) are exiting TARP programs.

• To the extent that large institutions’ risky behavior resulted from the desire to justify ever-greater bonuses — and indeed, the race appears to be on for TARP recipients to exit the program in order to avoid its pay restrictions — the current bonus season demonstrates that although there have been some improvements in the form that bonus compensation takes for some executives, there has been little fundamental change in the excessive compensation culture on Wall Street.

 

• To the extent that the crisis was fueled by a “bubble” in the housing market, the Federal Government’s concerted efforts to support home prices — as discussed more fully in Section 3 of this report — risk re-inflating that bubble in light of the Government’s effective takeover of the housing market through purchases and guarantees, either direct or implicit, of nearly all of the residential mortgage market.

Stated another way, even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.

Wow.

Remember, this is an official government report.

For an official government report to say that "we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car" is absolutely stunning.

The truth is that the U.S. economy and the U.S. dollar are headed for big trouble.

The U.S. financial system will fail again, and more bailouts and more government cash will be needed.

So what will happen next time?

For the moment, though, life is good for companies that have been bailed out.  For example, AIG was scheduled to distribute about $100 million in bonuses to its employees on Wednesday.

Ouch.

It is time for the American people to wake up and realize what is happening to their economic system.  It is slowly dying, and in the short video below, Ron Paul actually warns that when the U.S. economy and the U.S. dollar do die, we may see a complete breakdown of law and order in society.....