1. Any article listing the top 10 of anything will be widely read.
2. A poll of people in 65 countries, including the United States, finds that the United States is overwhelmingly considered the greatest threat to peace in the world. The consensus would have been even stronger had the United States itself not been polled, because the 5 percent of humanity living here is largely convinced that the other 95% of humanity — that group with experience being threatened or attacked by the United States — is wrong. After all, our government in the U.S. tells us it's in favor of peace. Even when it bombs cities, it does it for peace. It's hard for people under the bombs to see that. We in the U.S. have a better perspective.
This is a very important article, and the points it makes deserve your careful attention. The idea that for increasing the education budget by $63 billion we could give every student in a public university a four year education for free would do the country more good than almost any other similar expenditure! Just as the GI Bill recipients created the middle class of the 40s through 70s, such a program would heal the devastation of the last 30 years, particularly the last 10. We piss away $63 billion on the military industrial/security industries every year with studied abandon. Three examples come immediately to mind: The F-35 attack aircraft, or the piece I published a while back on the cargo planes in Afghanistan that were simply being abandoned never having been used. Or the opulent command center built by the Army for the Marines, reputedly the best command HQ ever built, that was never used, and never will be. This is a political idea whose achievement depends on citizen effort and, I ask you to write your Representative and Senators, telling them you support this and so should they. This is a game changer. Click through to see the chart. A mere $62.6 billion dollars!
This is just a piece of a larger whole. (See: http://www.wingia.com/en/services/about_the_end_of_year_survey/7/ for the full report.) But one that deserves our close attention. The source of this information and the quality of the survey are authoritative. I don't know about you but I am not comfortable having the world think the greatest threat to the peace is! the United States. Click through to see the chart listing the nations in order.
This is a clear example of the Schism Trend; Mississippi has become a bastion of Theocratic Rightist culture, and white supremacy. It is amongst the most violent, obese, least educated, poorest, most fundamentalist, and most unhealthy, and shortest lived states in the union. There are large parts of Mississippi that are essentially second world. This is not happening by chance. It results from consci! ous choices, and is deliberate. Here is an example of what I mean. (See At the Cost of Your Life: Social Value, Social Wellness. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2813%2900249-8/fulltext.) This schismatic process is a major trend, creating two very different essentially hostile cultures.
Expansion of Mississippi Medicaid Unlikely in 2014
EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS – Sun Herald (Mississippi Gulf Coast)
The US has been voted as the most significant threat to world peace in a survey across 68 different countries. Anti-American sentiment was not only recorded in antagonistic countries, but also in many allied NATO partners like Turkey and Greece.
A global survey conducted by the Worldwide Independent Network and Gallup at the end of 2013 revealed strong animosity towards the US’s role as the world’s policeman. Citizens across over 60 nations were asked: “Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?”
Editor's Note:The following Geopolitical Weekly originally ran in January 2013.
By George Friedman
When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe, I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.
At the same time, I would agree that the United States faces a potentially significant but longer-term geopolitical problem deriving from economic trends. The threat to the United States is the persistent decline in the middle class' standard of living, a problem that is reshaping the social order that has been in place since World War II and that, if it continues, poses a threat to American power.
