I live in the Pacific Northwest and recently had conversations with two real estate agents we know. Both were aware that not only are people from dry states moving into our area, so are the Chinese — just as they did in Vancouver when Hong Kong was turned over to China by the British. This is all part of the Migration Trend I have both predicted and described in SR over the last 15 years when I first saw data suggesting it.
There was a time when the American legal system was considered the benchmark for the world. Those days are long gone. The American gulag today and the courts and law enforcement agencies that service it constitute an octopus of the state that might described by Kafka on acid. In the United States if you are an ivy league graduate and work for the right financial institution you can weasel billions from fixed income grandmothers with no fear of being held accountable. If you are Black or Hispanic, and particularly if you are poor, however, any touch by one of the suckers of the octopus, and you are doomed. We manufacture criminals in the United States. Like cars they are created in the factories of the prison system. And they are needed, like terrorists, because they justify the expenditure of billions upon billions, producing profits made by a tiny faction of the population. There is a reason we have five per cent of the world's population, but twenty five per cent of the world's prisoners.
Part 1 of a two part series — This interview with Professor Stephen Cohen provides a very useful, and I believe largely accurate, portrayal of why our policy toward Russia has gone off the rails and could lead to a 2nd Cold War that is even more dangerous than the first — with one serious omission, IMO. Cohen's discussion of the reasons for NATO’s expansion, while accrurate, does not include the influence of the arms manufacturers in promoting that expansion. The MICC had a huge interest in NATO expansion, because adding new countries to NATO had the obvious potential for opening up huge arms markets in the name of NATO’s policy of standardization and interoperability. That the market has turned out less than predicted in the 1990s does not obviate the power of the motive. It is part of the mosaic of domestic political impulses to expand NATO that Cohen describes as being so dangerous. CS
You may be familiar with the proposed “REINS” Act proposed by some Members of Congress, which would, if enacted, require Congressional approval of major federal regulations. Of course, the chances of getting 60 Senate votes and a Presidential signature for such legislation are speculative at the current time. However, given the more skeptical attitude of many state legislators towards federal power, there is a potential strategy for empowering state legislators to force Congress to propose such a measure.
I have been witness to and participant in more than a decade of strenuous but essentially fruitless efforts to challenge the passivity with which America has collectively accepted an “upgrade” that gave us a concealed, computerized, privatized vote counting process–a Trojan Horse which the forensic evidence we have painstakingly gathered links inextricably to a bewildering political sea change tantamount to a rolling coup.
