It's days like this, when taking a step back to look at the big picture - one ponders - are we reaching a point in which the restrainer must be removed in order for the globalist agenda to progress?
Here and in Britain voters are torn as to whether or not to jump off the globalization, open borders bandwagon and government by unelected bureaucrats or voting to retake sovereignty and re-establish free markets. The polls show the sentiments for retaining the status quo or starting over (Brexit) seem too close to call, I predict Britain will leave. I hope we, too, will choose to return to less intrusive more accountable government, sovereignty and freedom by rejecting Hillary Clinton ourselves.
Why is this the last chance for Britain to retain its national identity?
This crowdsourced British video sets forth the significance of the Brexit vote. (It’s long, but if you’re pressed for time -- the first 15 minutes provides a good summary).
The EU is a richly compensated, enormous, anonymous unelected bureaucracy completely lacking in transparency.
Its power rests in people the voters are unaware of and unable to remove. They are utterly unaccountable to the voters. It is a wasteful crony capitalist racket, working largely to keep its own gravy train (and that of its favored friends) going and growing.
Europeans seem to be overly attracted to the notion of government by wiseman elites. British love of independence and freedom is deeper and stronger, although government regulation and control took root during the World War I and that increased even more during World War II -- power the government didn’t relinquish when the war was over. This softened their resolve when the notion of the EU was hatched.
With less than two weeks before the vote, polls indicate the British have had enough of this.
Pollster Frank Luntz, like me, sees a connection between Trump’s popularity and the movement to leave Brexit in Britain.
While the commentators focus on the horse race, there’s something deeper and longer-lasting happening across the U.K. Brits have become canaries in the coal mine, offering Europe, America and the developed world a glimpse of what is coming in our elections.
The Brexit question represents the political conflict rapidly spreading across the globe: Do hardworking, taxpaying citizens fundamentally trust or reject half a century of globalization, integration and innovation? Have the promises of the political and economic elite helped improve their daily lives? Or is it time for a rethinking and redrawing of our political and economic systems from the ground up?
The underlying currents are moving in Leave’s favor -- and they are doing so worldwide. Having conducted extensive polling and focus groups in the U.S., U.K. and across Europe, it is clear that more and more people have come to reject traditional theory and party orthodoxy, wreaking havoc on the politicians and political structures standing in its way.
Brexit is the beginning of a debate the developed world is about to have with itself, not the end.
The cost of regulation in the U.S. is not minor -- almost $1.88 trillion a year for manufacturers and consumers. The Competitive Enterprise Institute weighs in:
The scope of federal government spending, deficits and the national debt is staggering, but so is the impact of federal regulations, which now exceeds half the amount the federal government spends annually. Unfortunately, regulations get too little attention in policy debates because, unlike taxes, they are unbudgeted. They are also difficult to quantify because their effects are often indirect. In Ten Thousand Commandments, Crews compiles available data on regulatory costs and trends. By making the size, extent and cost of Washington’s rules and mandates more comprehensible, Crews underscores the need for more review, transparency and accountability -- for both new and existing federal regulations.
Federal regulation and intervention cost American consumers and businesses an estimated $1.88 trillion in 2014 in lost economic productivity and higher prices.
If U.S. federal regulation was a country, it would be the world’s 10th largest economy, ranking behind Russia and ahead of India.
Our bureaucratic elite, just as enamored of its own right to rule as the EU bureaucracy, is no more transparent or accountable to us than the EU is to Britons.
Take the Fast & Furious scandal, where we handed over weapons to Mexican cartels and then hid from scrutiny the evidence of the wrongdoing.
Or Benghazi. Or Hillary’s misuse of classified information.
As they choke the U.S. economy and beset us with preposterous diktats with regulations on everything, including school lunch menus, public bathroom policies, health coverage and insurance, college rape adjudication policies, proper light bulbs, water use, appliance efficiency, fuel mixes, the bureaucrats feather their nests.
America’s 2.1 million career civil service workers make on average 78 percent more in total compensation than private sector workers, according to new data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Both Congress and federal employees receive generous pension benefits and Congressmen receive generous other perquisites of office.
One thing is clear -- both the EU officialdom and ours are wiser than voters only in their ability to feather their own nests, not in making us safer, richer, or happier. Many predict that if the UK exits Brexit, other European countries will follow, Maybe one of the attractions of Trump is that the distaste for the regulatory state run by elites is spreading across the Atlantic.
The exercise dubbed Anaconda2016 involves at least 31,000 personnel from 24 countries (there are 28 member nations in NATO). This includes soldiers from non-NATO but associated agreement countries such as Finland, Sweden, Georgia and Ukraine. It also includes a large number of fighter aircraft and B-52 bombers built during the Kennedy or Johnson Administrations (old enough to be their crews' grandfathers) dropping concrete practice bombs and mines into the Baltic Sea. There was no word on whether the BUFFs pilots also practiced dodging incoming Russian hypersonic SAMs or SU-30s like they'd see while flying close to or over Russia in a real war...
Over the past 15 years the United States has been in a perpetual state of war. What does it have to show for this? The record clearly demonstrates foreign interventions leave countries in chaos and desperation. When will Washington learn violence is not the answer? CrossTalking with Pepe Escobar and Peter Kuznick.
Our first task in this SITREP is to answer the most pressing question on the minds of RogueMoney readers around the world: does this mean a war between NATO and Russia is imminent? The answer we're confident is no, but that doesn't mean that the U.S. sabre rattling against Moscow isn't going to get worse before it gets better. Nor can we exclude the possibility, with the entire U.S./Atlanticist media and cultural Establishment throwing its weight behind Hillary Rodham Clinton or at least against her opponent Donald J. Trump for the Presidency of the United States, that another President Clinton will cross Russia's red line via a proxy or hybrid warfare attack.
Such scenarios would include a Clinton or Biden White House green-lighting a full blown Turkish invasion of northern Syria, a joint U.S.-Romanian occupation of nominally neutral Moldova to pressure or blockade the pro-Russian exclave of Transnistria, or NATO 'vacationers' and advisers joining in an all out Ukrainian attack on the Moscow-backed breakaway city-statelets of Donetsk and Lugansk.
The war psychosis of a President Hillary Clinton, manipulated by her military industrial and bankster complex handlers desperate to prop up the failing U.S. dollar by any means short of nuclear holocaust, are what we fear may come to pass in 2017-18. After that period of maximum danger, as we've told the Guerrilla, Bankster Slayer and W the Intelligence Insider, the window for U.S. military action and power projection financed by unlimited fiat dollar printing begins to close fast. Or at least that's assuming the baseline dollar collapse scenario upon which the Guerrilla has been operating for many months now..
Russia now has more strategic and tactical nuclear weapons as well as superior missiles to deliver them than the United States. And these numerical comparisons of 'NATO vs. Russian combat capabilities' all assume in an actual shooting war many U.S. NATO allies like Greece, Hungary, or even France and Germany wouldn't tell Washington to back off and use diplomacy rather than see their own soldiers bleeding and dying. Questions about whether NATO would fight to defend Turkey particularly in a scenario where the Turks provoked the Russians in Syria appear to have been answered firmly in the negative last November.
In the winter of 1941, a Jewish gravedigger from Chelmo, the western province of Poland, appeared in Warsaw and desperately sought a meeting with Jewish leaders.
He told them the Nazis were rounding up Jews, including the old, women and children, and forcing them into what looked like tightly sealed buses. The buses had the exhaust pipes redirected into the cabins. The Jews were killed with carbon monoxide. He had helped dig the mass graves for thousands of corpses until he escaped.
On the way to Warsaw, he had gone from village to village, frantically warning the Jews. Scores of Jews, in the villages and ultimately in Warsaw, heard his testimony of horror and dismissed it.
A handful of listeners, however, including Zivia Lubetkin, who two years later would help lead the uprising by 500 armed Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, instantly understood the ultimate aims of the Nazi state.
“I don’t know how we intuitively shared the same horrible conviction that the total annihilation of all the Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe was at hand,” she wrote in her memoir, “In the Days of Destruction and Revolt.”
She and a handful of young activists started planning a revolt. From that moment forward, they existed in a parallel reality.
“We walked along the overcrowded streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, hundreds of thousands of people pushing and rushing about in fright, antagonistic and tense, living the illusion that they were fighting for their lives, their meager livelihood, but, in reality, when you closed your eyes you could see that they were all dead …”
The established Jewish leadership warned the resistance fighters to desist, telling them to work within the parameters set by the Nazi occupiers. The faces of the established Jewish leaders, when they were informed of the plans to fight back, she wrote, “grew pale, either from sudden fear or from anger at our audacity. They were furious. They reproached us for irresponsibly sowing the seeds of despair and confusion among the people, for our impertinence in even thinking of armed resistance.”
The greatest problem the underground movement faced, she wrote, was “the false hope, the great illusion.” The movement’s primary task was to destroy these illusions. Only when the truth was known would widespread resistance be possible.
The aims of the corporate state are, given the looming collapse of the ecosystem, as deadly, maybe more so, as the acts of mass genocide carried out by the Nazis and Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The reach and effectiveness of corporate propaganda dwarfs even the huge effort undertaken by Adolf Hitler and Stalin. The layers of deception are sophisticated and effective. News is state propaganda. Elaborate spectacles and forms of entertainment, all of which ignore reality or pretend the fiction of liberty and progress is real, distract the masses.
Education is indoctrination. Ersatz intellectuals, along with technocrats and specialists, who are obedient to neoliberal and imperial state doctrine, use their academic credentials and erudition to deceive the public.
The promises made by the corporate state and its political leaders—we will restore your jobs, we will protect your privacy and civil liberties, we will rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, we will save the environment, we will prevent you from being exploited by banks and predatory corporations, we will make you safe, we will provide a future for your children—are the opposite of reality.
The loss of privacy, the constant monitoring of the citizenry, the use of militarized police to carry out indiscriminate acts of lethal violence—a daily reality in marginal communities—and the relentless drive to plunge as much as two-thirds of the country into poverty to enrich a tiny corporate elite, along with the psychosis of permanent war, presage a dystopia that will be as severe as the totalitarian systems that sent tens of millions to their deaths during the reigns of fascism and communism.
There is no more will to reform, or to accommodate the needs and rights of the citizens by the corporate state, than there was to accommodate the needs and rights of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. But until the last moment, this reality will be hidden behind the empty rhetoric of democracy and reform. Repressive regimes gradually institute harsher and harsher forms of control while denying their intentions. By the time a captive population grasps what is happening, it is too late.
The elaborate ruses set up by the Nazis that kept Jews and others slated for extermination passive until they reached the doors of the gas chambers, usually decorated with a large Star of David, were legend. Those taken to death camps were told they were going to work. Unloading ramps at Treblinka were made to look like a train station, with fabricated train schedules posted on the walls and a fake train clock and ticket window. Camp musicians played. The elderly and infirm were escorted from the cattle cars to a building with the Red Cross symbol on it called the infirmary before being shot in the back of the head. Men, women and children, who would die in the gas chambers within an hour, were given tickets for their clothes and valuables.
“The Germans were quite courteous when they led people to be slaughtered,” Lubetkin noted acidly.
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I just watched the whole Brexit video and what a video it was. I so hope they vote for exiting the EU. Then I hope the US takes quite a few steps back from this globalization trend as well. I wish we had a presidential candidate running that was sane and ethical enough to do something to end the insanity.
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