America

Submitted by Valentin Schmid vai The Epoch Times,

President-elect Donald Trump talks tough on China and has appointed trade hawks Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro to key positions in his administration. He has threatened to slap a blanket tariff on Chinese goods, and he has spoken directly to Taiwan’s president, something previously regarded as a major diplomatic offense.

According to “Road to Ruin” author James Rickards, this is Trump’s way of opening the negotiations with China to reach a mutually beneficial trade relationship.

Submitted by Darius Shahtahmasebi via TheAntiMedia.org,

Notable American foreign policy critic and linguist, Professor Noam Chomsky, has stated numerous times that the United States’ power has steadily been declining since the end of World War II. As Chomsky notes, in 1945, the United States had “literally half the world’s wealth, incredible security, controlled the entire Western Hemisphere, both oceans, [and[ the opposite sides of both oceans.”

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

“As we begin 2017, the most urgent threat to liberal democracy is not autocracy,” writes William Galston of The Wall Street Journal, “it is illiberal democracy.”

Galston’s diagnosis is not wrong, and his alarm is not misplaced.

Yet why does America’s great export, liberal democracy, which appeared to be the future of the West if not of mankind at the Cold War’s end, now appear to be a church with a shrinking congregation?

Just hours before president-elect Trump receives the full intelligence briefing over the Russian hacking allegations, Nancy Pelosi is convinced - stating that the report is "stunning" and "of course" Russia disrupted the election, there is "no question."

“It’s stunning in its conclusions and you’ll see some of it” though “I wish you could see the entire report”

 

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Here's the problem with central banks seeking higher inflation: costs go up but wages don't.

It's easy to quantify the annual cost of Social Security/Medicare, and not so easy to calculate the cost of Cartel Cronyism and Central Bank-created inflation. Cartel cronyism is a hidden tax on the entire economy, as is Central Bank-created inflation.