According to numerous TV appearances and news articles, the Obama administration has adopted the mantra, "Never let a good catastrophe go to waste." If so, we may be in much deeper trouble than we thought.

In the late 1800s in France, the catastrophe created by excesses of the nobility and the poverty of the peasants and subsequent revolution resulted in a despotic republic symbolized by the guillotine, a dictatorship, the Napoleonic wars and alternating monarchies and dysfunctional governments well into the mid-19th century.

Russia's catastrophe was spawned by the insensitivity of the czar to the legitimate claims of the bourgeois, the lack of success, tremendous loss of life and near starvation of the peasants during World War I. Germany helped by secretly shipping the migr activist lawyer, writer, orator and dedicated Marxist, Vladimir Ilvich Ulyanov, aka N. Lenin, back to Russia.

In 1917, the Communist Party took control, signed a devastating treaty with Germany, renamed Russia the USSR, and under Lenin, Stalin and their successors created a brutal dictatorship, seized all land and most private property, established gulags and executed an estimated 20-30 million dissidents. They ruled for 70 years.

The catastrophic reparations imposed by the Allies on Germany at the close of World War I, a debt impossible to pay (sound familiar), coupled with a stupefying inflation as a result of the nonstop printing of currency by the Weimar Republic (sound familiar), led in 1933 to the elevation of the Nazis and the dictatorship of Adolph Hitler, the extermination of millions throughout Europe, including six million Jews, the horrors of World War II and ultimately, the Cold War.

Obama, catastrophes do not always end well. Please, don't turn our current economic problems into a catastrophe.

Adopt a new mantra.

Jack Olsen

Foxfire Village