Obviously the goal is to get the most viable presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to buy into your electoral reform bill as the leaders who could then sell it to the voting public. What if they either remain unreceptive or tell you, “yeah it looks good on paper, but that kind of radical change doesn’t come overnight, so we need to move in smaller incremental steps.” How would you respond to these two scenarios?
Last September 11, I posted an essay that argued the refugee flows triggered by the aftermath of our interventions in the Middle East were mutating, whether by design or by accident, into grand strategic weapon of mass destruction. My argument was limited to the flows within the Middle East, but as I implied, they were also putting pressure on our allies in the European Union. Attached herewith is essay by Jonathan Marshall that expands on this latter issue. Indeed, this is the best analysis of the E.U.’s grand strategic problem that I have yet read. I am using the term “grand strategy” quite precisely. New readers can go to Criteria for a Sensible Grand Strategy to see what I mean when I use this term.
Exclusive: The E.U.’s crisis – with the post-World War II project to unify Europe spinning apart amid economic stress, refugees and terrorism – can be traced back to E.U./U.S. neo-imperial wars in the Arab world, says Jonathan Marshall.
By Jonathan Marshall, Consortium News, March 25, 2016
So we’ve turned the post-war economy that made America prosperous and rich inside out. Somehow most people believed they could get rich by going into debt to borrow assets that were going to rise in price. But you can’t get rich, ultimately, by going into debt. In the end the creditors always win. That’s why every society since Sumer and Babylonia have had to either cancel the debts, or you come to a society like Rome that didn’t cancel the debts, and then you have a dark age. Everything collapses.
Pentagon spending has not really been an issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign. With the exception of Ted Cruz, the positions of the remaining candidates have been vague about even the size of the defense budget. As near as I can tell: (1) Clinton’s position on the size of the Pentagon’s budget is that she will establish a blue ribbon commission to review defense policy and spending levels; (2) Trump claims without detail he can make the military great again but cut the budget at the same time; (3) Cruz says he will copy President Reagan's spending spree by using tax cuts to stimulate the economy and ramping up defense spending to 4% of GDP (more on this plan in a subsequent blaster); and (4) Sanders seems to want to cut the Pentagon’s budget, but has not detailed how. No candidate appears to have noticed that President Obama has allowed the Pentagon to plant a defense budget time bomb in the form of modernization bow wave, although Obama's bow wave has been reported repeatedly in the defense circles, e.g., read full article.
Peer-to-peer lending is a relatively new concept in Ireland but in just a few years it’s expanding to provide finance to thousands of Irish SMEs worth millions in the process.
This raises an obvious question: what killed the middle class? While many commentators try to identify one killer cause (for example, the U.S. going off the gold standard in 1971), the die-off of the middle class is more akin to the die-off in honey bees, which is the result of the interaction of multiple causes (factors that increase the toxic load dumped on bees and other pollinators by modern agriculture).
…thanks to Trump, and depending on what happens with Sanders and his supporters, there is now a decent chance that the old order will be shaken to its foundations, and that great changes are afoot.
