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Your post is so reactionary and simple-minded that it certainly seems to have been written by an American, short on rationality as it is. In fact, in the last day or so /. has had several posts like yours modded up because they say absurd things such as the high cost of oil is due in part to the restrictions on domestic drilling.

If you think the US economy is in the shitter because of environmental protections you are an embarrassment to the genetic legacy your ancestors have bequeathed you.

The US economy is in the craphole because of the massive debt that has been leveraged against insolvent debtors. This came in the form of the mortgage crisis and its effects have reverberated and multiplied through the banking system. This has led to a crisis in commercial credit which has taken away the ability of consumers to fuel the economy which further erodes the ability of the banking system to maintain solvency. The causes of the credit crisis caused by the tanking of the mortgage system has not yet finished and we are likely to see much worse before it stops.

Regarding the offshoring of manufacturing and environmentalism, the real impact of environmental legislation in the United States is not to preserve non-human species, but to protect humans themselves. Look at the places where mining companies, steel refineries, chemical manufacturing plants, and pulp mills have operated and what you'll find are poisoned water tables and insanely elevated cancer rates. Additionally, the relative low-production of minerals from mining is due mainly to evisceration of the lands where valuable resources once existed, not due to the governmental restrictions on development.

For you to say something like "the tree huggers over her taking so much power" is laughable. Opening all the protected lands in the US would to natural resource exploitation do virtually nothing to fix the GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS let alone the paltry problem of the US economy stumbling against the stronger European economy. The kind of neanderthal thinking that bad economic times can generate amongst people is amazing and your post is an example of such stupidity.

Environmentalism has not caused the US economic crisis. Bad banking practice has.

Oh please, quit it with the Iraq bullshit.

Vietnam war was twice as violent, was twice as costly, and you were doing this when a REAL threat to the nation existed (good old CCCP that had nukes and wasn't afraid to use them, not to mention they had a really powerful army sitting right next door to western europe... You know, the same jerks who insult the US every other day).

You kids these days. And Vietnam was so much more pointless. In Iraq there was a dictator who was a threat to neighbouring regions (and invaded its neighbours constantly), who testing chemical and biological weapons on his own people, who violated so many UN human rights charters... And it help fight the slow death of small, often ignored countries like Lebanon. If it wasn't for the occupation of Iraq I doubt Syria would have backed out of there; then what would you do when an entire culture was extenguished before your eyes, Europe?

In vietnam communists wanted to control the country. That's why it was invaded, occupied for oh about 20 years, and firebombed/poisoned/raped/sulfurbombed back to the stone age...

Of course, typical Americans; cleaning up after europe shits all over the place. Abolishing slavery, abolishing monarchies, reinstating civil rights and real courts, cleaning up the mess left in the Middle-East by the English (I'd love to applaud the people who drew those maps up, geniuses amongst men they must have been to mix kurds, sunnis, and shias), and defending Europe as much as they could from facists, from communists.

Yeah, really getting derailed here...

Anyway, shouldn't a weaker USD bring more industries? If I was BMW I'd love to settle back in Detroit; little competition from GM/Ford, tons of skilled workers, all at a time when the USD is looking very attractive in comparaison to the Euro.

Also, while our European governments steal all our money for taxes, we use it for better things than throwing bombs at some desert...