European Union

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Earlier this week I was talking in Athens to a guy from Holland, who incidentally with a group of friends runs a great project on Lesbos taking care of some 1000 refugees in one of the camps there. But that’s another topic for another day. I was wondering in our conversation how it is possible that, as we both painfully acknowledged, people in Holland and Germany don’t know what has really happened in the Greek debt crisis. Or, rather, don’t know how it started.

Submitted by George Friedman via MauldinEconomics.com,

Donald Trump deeply upset the Europeans when he raised the possibility that NATO is obsolete and that the European Union is failing.

But this isn’t the first time these issues have been discussed. I wrote about it last year, and the conversation has only continued.

What Trump has done is simply bring into the open the question of Europe’s relationship with the US.

The missions and motives of NATO and the EU

In a setback for government efforts to abolish low tax rates for thousands of multinational firms while encouraging them to stay, the Swiss voted overwhelmingly against an overhaul the country's corporate tax system. Swiss broadcaster SRF said voters rejected the tax plans by about 60% to 40%. As Reuters notes, Switzerland has been in the European Union's firing line for years because Swiss cantons have a special tax status for foreign companies that means some pay virtually no tax other than an effective federal tax of 7.8%, an incentive to incorporate and stay on Swiss soil.

Submitted by Wayne Madsen via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Via Disobedient Media