America

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Leon Hadar does a good job making some sense out of Trump’s recent rambling interviews on foreign policy with The New York Times and Washington Post:

We should reassess the American role in NATO and the rationale for continuing to maintain it. But Trump needs to explain to us why we need to do that, not like a technocrat going through the books but as a political leader with coherent vision of the role the U.S. should play in the world. We do foreign policy not to make a profit but in order to protect the country and advance its interests.

We have come to associate the term “technocrats” with the kind of unelected and non-political experts that serve in European governments, particularly those responding to the recent financial crisis that has devastated several economies there. For example, economists like Mario Monti who served as Italy’s prime minister from 2011 to 2013, leading a government of technocrats in the wake of the Italian debt crisis. Their task wasn’t to transform the economic status quo in Italy, but to use their knowledge and expertise to fix that country’s economy.

As part of Trump's blistering, unconventional and very unexpected rise to the top of the Republican presidential nominee ranks, he has seen his share of threats - some serious, most in jest - to both his person, and in some cases his life. Apocryphally, some commentators have predicted that a Trump presidency would be such a shock to the status quo that if successful in winning the presidency, he would never make to inauguration day alive.

Submitted by Chris Perrin via TheAntiMedia.org,

There’s a reason most parliamentary and presidential democracies have more than two political parties, and both Trump and Sanders are examples of why. Both nominee-hopefuls have increasingly come to represent polar opposites of the singular problem that the American two-party political system is suffering from: Stagnation.