America

Submitted by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

According to a recent poll, 73 percent of all Americans oppose increases in federal spending. Since this anti-government spending sentiment is a major reason Republicans control the House and Senate, one would expect the Republican Congress to hold the line on, or even cut, government spending. Yet, despite the Republican leadership’s rhetoric about "fiscal responsibility," this year’s House Republican budget spends $104 billion more than the GOP’s 2013 budget.

Earlier this month in “GOP Leaders, Tech Execs Plot Against Trump At Secret NeoCon Island Meeting,” we discussed the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum, an event held on Sea Island, Georgia.

It’s a notoriously secretive affair and is off limits to the press. “We can’t even get a snow update,” Bloomberg joked last year.

If you've ever watched Senator Elizabeth Warren grill a Fed chief on Capitol Hill you know that she's not one to mince words and she's not one that's easily impressed or intimidated. 

The darling of the liberal Democrats, Warren looms large over the 2016 race which many suspected she would run in. She didn't, but the Massachusetts Senator casts a long shadow and on Monday, she had apparently seen all she cared to see of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. 

Reader Leslie Fain sent this Washington Post piece in. It came out last fall, but I missed it. It’s a haunting portrait of the race and class divide in America, which is, at its heart, a cultural chasm that seems irresolvable.

It tells the story of a poor black family from New Orleans, displaced by Katrina and settled in a small Nebraska town that welcomed them with open arms. But things went badly wrong for the family there. Excerpts:

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Once the Oligarchy is above the law, the Republic is already dead.

To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway: How did you lose your Republic? Two ways, gradually and then suddenly. The Romans experienced this when their Republic was extinguished by Empire.