Supporting the Home Team,
Marine Le Pen is suddenly the front runner in France's (May) presidential election. Her clarified policy is to get France out of the currency union. The French Franc and other national currencies would be shadow currencies in a transition-period, similar to the transition into the common currency.
“The euro has not been used as a currency, but as a weapon — a knife stuck in the ribs of a country to force it to go where the people don’t want to go,” she said this month. “Do you think we accept living under this threat, this tutelage? It’s out of the question.”
France returning to an independent, non-NATO foreign policy is also an active topic in the French election now. It's not just Le Pen. Thanks Eleni.
Donald Trump is becoming a nidus for global regime change to condense, seeding-the-hypersaturated-storm-cloud of nascent transformation. (ooh, I'm proud of that phrase :-) Ilargi looks at how Trump is playing hard to get with EU leaders, dissing them overtly and more subtly, by openly mistaking identities.
These are the players that banked on neoliberal-neocon Clinton, openly, to an election-influencing degree. Two essays explore this interminable EU-in-Purgatory moment.
Meanwhile in Davos: IMF Director, Christine LaGarde is "afraid of populism" and advocates increasing-the-dole, just enough, here and there, to contain that threat.
Larry Summers lectured (not in attendance) Donald Trump that "populism is always counter-productive". That should settle it.
Keep making "America greater than ever before" by investing in infrastructure, tech and education,according to Summers. (Not "great again", how crude!)
UK Trade Rep, Liam Fox says that bilateral trade talks ("unofficial" for now) are underway with 12 countries, ahead of formal announcement triggering the 2-year time clock of Article-2, expected in March.
What can Americans learn from Chinese Government Propaganda? (Look, there's a naked-lesbian-TV-star!)
Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited 1958
Alibaba's Jack Ma says the US "wasted: $14 trillion over the past 30 years. (That's his opinion. The neocons, military-industrial-complex and global banking think it was well-spent. Dead families don't get to express any opinion.)
Greece and Cyprus both insist that any agreement must involve the withdrawal of 30,000 Turkish military-occupation troops, and elimination of Turkish "security-guarantor" status.
Julian Assange's lawyer says that Assange meant for Obama to do something different, sooner, in the Chelsie Manning release. It doesn't count. Not agreeing to extradition.
Chelsea Manning thanks President Obama for "giving me a chance" in commutation of sentence to "time-served".
Lease on Life
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