America

Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

Could there be a crash coming in 2017? Will increasing interest rates at the Federal Reserve trigger the beginning of the end?

It is possible, but not certain.

It will fall, perhaps, after a new sense of normal sets in, and some become comfortable with the change in leadership, and accustomed to drowning out the opposition yelling noisily from the other side. Expectations have been set for a growing economy, fresh infrastructure and new hopes for the average worker.

President Trump wasted no time setting as official policy the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the renegotiation of NAFTA, placing his election promise to bring jobs and industry back to America front and center. Straight after Trump was sworn in, the administration got to work and pledged to negotiate “tough and fair” trade agreements in order to create more U.S. jobs and make the United States a manufacturing powerhouse once more. The strategy has been listed as one of the new administration’s top policy issues on Whitehouse.gov.

Submitted by Robert Parry via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Whenever The New York Times or some other mainstream news outlet holds itself out as a paragon of professional journalism – by wagging a finger at some pro-Trump “fake news” or some Internet “conspiracy theory” – I cringe at the self-delusion and hypocrisy.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker,

The Trump era starts now – with geopolitics and geoeconomics set for a series of imminent, unpredictable cliffhangers.

I have argued that Trump’s foreign policy guru Henry Kissinger’s strategy to deal with the formidable Eurasia integration trio – Russia, China and Iran – is a remixed Divide and Rule; seduce Russia away from its strategic partnership with China, while keep harassing the weakest link, Iran.

Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

Making The Chicken Run, Part 1

“Making the chicken run” is what Rhodesians used to say about neighbors who packed up and got out during the ’60s and ’70s, before the place became Zimbabwe. It was considered “unpatriotic” to leave Rhodesia. But it was genuinely idiotic not to.