Everyone refers to NAZIs and Hitler. I have heard some naive

[JDPriestly]

talk show hosts say you can't compare Bush, for example, to Hitler because Bush did not put people in concentration camps. There was much more to the crisis in Germany, the popularity among Germans of Hitler's propaganda and the response of Hitler to the horrible crisis in which Germany found itself following World War I.

I strongly recommend that DUers read this excellent article from Time magazine May 1939.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,761353-8,00.html

Schacht to Funk. Even before Hitler the Germans had been forced to experiment with foreign exchange control. With exports falling in 1933, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, head of the Nazified Reichsbank, first prohibited the transfer of interest on German foreign debts and then evolved a system of control boards to balance imports and exports. Out of these equilibrist schemes grew the blocked currency accounts and the barter devices, with the Germans paying foreign exporters in special marks good only for German goods at a price lower than the internal price level. Boycotts and currency difficulties kept lopping off chunks of normal German trade with England, the U. S., and Soviet Russia, but export subsidies to the extent of 30% of the value of all German exports enabled Nazi businessmen to quote speciously attractive prices to the Balkans and South America, regions with surpluses of grain, tobacco, oil, cotton, coffee and cocoa. Between debtor nations the system of subsidized barter might have worked satisfactorily enough, but the Nazis themselves were slow to deliver finished goods in return for foodstuffs and raw materials, and they frequently demoralized world markets for their suppliers by reselling coffee, tobacco, cotton, etc., at knock-down prices in order to get needed foreign exchange.

Compare our situation to that of Germany in the 1930s. There are definite similarities. Hitler's way was not the answer. But what direction should we take to correct the horrible mess that our "leaders" and our own greed (I'm referring to all of us American people) have gotten us into?