Editor, Gazette-Journal:

In the mid-1930s, I remember my uncle reading a work in two volumes, titled "The Decline of the West" by Oswald Spengler, a German philosopher now long dead. His thesis being that great civilizations, for example China or Greece, had a lifespan of many hundreds, even thousands of years. They arise, produce materially and intellectually, mature and decline. It appears that our Western culture may be validating Spengler. Certainly the European nations who explored and populated the new-found continent we know as America have been in constant war as they compete for power and the earth’s resources.

Our Western society is entrapped by the desire for "easy money" offered by the crooked financial wizards of Wall Street, in collusion with powerful banks and an assortment of less-than-honest financial institutions whose tentacles reach throughout much of Europe.

For example, a principal cause of the California housing debacle was the r...