Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Monday, 25 April 2016

The European Union Times


Posted: 25 Apr 2016 06:45 AM PDT

Sections of the American establishment believe the Kremlin supports Donald Trump. It doesn’t. However, many Russians are concerned a future President Hillary will further worsen, already appalling, relations between Moscow and Washington.
Bachman Turner Overdrive was a bunch of Canadian rockers who hit it big in the mid 1970’s. The band’s success was curious. In an era of glam rock and punk, their brand of three-chord guitar was a few years out of date. Nevertheless, despite their old-fashioned sound, they sold millions of records.
Hillary Clinton is the Bachman Turner Overdrive of US politics. Today, American youth, in common with their global counterparts, are searching for new ideas. Witness the appeal of anti-establishment figures like Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Beppe Grillo among young voters. Even Donald Trump has galvanized the disaffected American working class behind his campaign.
Hillary offers a position from the 90’s and 00’s when her husband, Bill, and his successor, George W. Bush, ran the Washington show. In fact, she’s something of an amalgam of both. Liberal, at least in public, on social matters and slightly-left leaning on economics like Bill, but a Bush-like hardcore neocon on matters of national security and foreign affairs. Because of this, she’s attracted support across the establishment, even if she remains unloved by the general public. Alarmingly, her popularity ratings are stuck in the mid 30’s.
Looking out for Number One
A product of the post-war generation, Hillary believes in American exceptionalism and the country’s self-assigned role as leader the “free world.” In this, she’s no more dangerous than Barack Obama. However, unlike the incumbent she’s a committed supporter of the military and gung-ho about violent interventionism. Witness her near-psychopathic glee over the death of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.” Gaddafi may have been a murderous thug, but nobody could claim that Libya is better off today than before the 2011 NATO attack that Hillary championed.
Obama gets a lot of stick in Russia. In my view, most of it is unfair. Back in 2012, when neocons were braying for war in Syria, he resisted their pressure. Likewise, regarding Ukraine, Obama has ignored hardliners who have proposed arming the Kiev regime with modern weapons. He’s also dialed down talk of expanding NATO to other former Soviet states.
His Secretary of State, John Kerry, is a proper diplomat. He’s careful with his words and favors quiet negotiation. Kerry has also scored notable successes in Iran and with his assured handling of the Ebola scare. In fact, the more we see of Kerry, the more we can lament his defeat to Bush in the 2004 US Election. A campaign that failed, largely, because his foreign policy platform was too moderate for a country in the grip of tremendous martial zeal.
Indeed, pro-military messaging here in Russia these days is relatively tame compared to the bombardment Americans endured in the mid 00’s. A time when even popular rock bands were booed at their own concerts for criticizing Bush’s aggression.
Quick Change Artist
Obama’s mistake with Russian policy was his naivety and lack of interest in a topic he probably considered irrelevant. At least at first. Like most his peers, Obama would have viewed tensions with Moscow as a relic of the Cold War. When he appointed the hapless Michael McFaul as ambassador, he quite likely did so in good faith. “This guy speaks Russian and he’s been interested in the region for a long time,” was probably the thinking.
While McFaul is probably not an ideological neocon, he had a history of supporting “regime change” movements in the former Soviet space. He’d also been strong proponent of NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia. As the Nation’s Bob Dreyfuss warned back in 2008: “McFaul doesn’t care about stability, since his main goal vis-a-vis Russia is to call attention to the autocratic nature of Putin’s rule.”
Obama’s other mistake was to allow Hillary, as Secretary of State, to retain neocon holdovers from the Bush administration on her Eastern Europe team. Even more incredibly, Kerry then inherited them for the second term. “Obama allowed US officials on the ground (in Ukraine and elsewhere) to pursue a grossly irresponsible and provocative anti-Russian policy,” Anatol Lieven recently told the Valdai Club. “What on earth, one may ask, was Victoria Nuland, a neo-conservative State Department official married to the arch neocon Robert Kagan, doing in the Obama administration at all, given that her attitudes run clearly counter to his?”
Lieven also pointed out that “figures like Nuland are still favored by Hillary Clinton (Kagan is now moving into her political camp) and much of the US foreign and security establishment; and that with regard to Russia, that establishment is still conditioned to pursue what are in effect Cold War attitudes.”
Down The Road
Right now, Hillary is the overwhelming favorite to become America’s next President. Bookmakers currently price her at 1/3, which implies a 75 percent chance that she’ll be sitting in the Oval Office this time next year. This is despite the fact that 55 percent of Americans hold a negative opinion of her, according to polls.
A Hillary Clinton presidency has the potential to bring East-West dissonance to its lowest ebb since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And that is not an exaggeration. In 2014, she compared Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. Anyone with a smidgen of intelligence knows that, given that over 20 million Soviets died fighting Hitler’s Germany, it was an incredibly stupid comment. Yet, Putin’s reply wasn’t very conciliatory either, telling France 24 that “it’s better not to argue with women. But Ms Clinton has never been too graceful in her statements.”
Putin has spoken about Clinton’s desire for the presidency. “First Bush Senior was in power there, later on Bush Junior – all from the same family. Clinton was in power for two terms and now his wife is laying claim to this position, and the family may remain in office. What does this have to do with turnover? As the saying goes, “Husband and wife are a single devil,” and they will be at the helm. I am not saying this is all bad. There are pros and cons to it,” he mused earlier this month.
Most recently, Hillary has called for a “tougher response to Russia on Syria and Ukraine.” Never mind that, under international law, Russia’s Syria campaign has been legal, while America’s is not, Hillary believes Putin must be “punished” for intervening there. “I have been, I remain convinced that we need a concerted effort to really up the costs on Russia and in particular on Putin. I think we have not done enough,” she remarked at the Brookings Institution.
Notwithstanding Russia’s position as the planet’s second strongest military power, American neocons simply cannot fathom any kind of partnership or equality with the Kremlin. But it’s not only about Russia; they can’t countenance other European countries acting independently either. The vitriol directed at France and Germany for opposing the illegal 2004 invasion of Iraq is proof of that. The blatant interference in Britain’s EU referendum is further evidence.
Next year, we are likely to have a Hillary Clinton government in America, squaring off against a Putin administration in Moscow. Unlike now, when Obama overrules extremist voices, Clinton will enthusiastically promote their ideas, no matter how imprudent. To quote Bachman Turner Overdrive, if you think relations between Washington and Moscow are bad now, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
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Posted: 25 Apr 2016 06:37 AM PDT

Donald Trump is winning big in the latest California poll from Capitol Weekly/Sextant Strategies.
A Caltrans sign on the northbound 15 Freeway in California displaying a pro Donald Trump sign Christmas night, Dec. 25, 2015. (Nikki Worden)
Politico reported:
Ted Cruz called California “the big enchilada” on Wednesday and said it would be the state that ultimately decides the Republican nomination. But a new poll from Capitol Weekly/Sextant Strategies shows Donald Trump in a dominant position across the state.
The results, provided to POLITICO, show Trump leading statewide with 41 percent of the vote and Cruz trailing far behind with 23 percent. John Kasich is in third with 21 percent, and 15 percent of Republicans said they remain undecided.
California is worth 172 delegates when it votes on June 7 — with the winner of each of the state’s 53 congressional districts receiving three delegates. The statewide winner receives 13 delegates.
The Capitol Weekly/Sextant Strategies poll shows Trump winning in almost every corner of the state, from San Diego and Orange County to northern California and the Bay Area, though some regions have small sample sizes.
Cruz performs strongest in the Central Valley, as he has in previous surveys, though he still trails Trump there by 7 percentage points, 35 percent to 28 percent. Trump leads in the liberal Bay Area, but it is Kasich who nudges above Cruz into second place, trailing Trump 39 percent to 25 percent.
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Posted: 25 Apr 2016 06:11 AM PDT

Hungary will increasingly become the destination choice of north western Europeans fleeing their nations’ “suicidal migration policies,” a former senior US diplomat has said.
Writing in the Hungary Today journal, Hungarian-American Adam Topolansky, who previously worked at the US International Trade Commission in Budapest, said that Hungary will “welcome autochthonous western European migrants with open arms.”
His article, titled “Hungary!—The country of choice for western Europeans by 2030?” asserted that “western and northern European citizens may choose Hungary in large numbers as a destination of choice within the next 15–20 years.”
Topolansky, who is currently living in Hungary but was educated at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs before being employed at the US Embassy in Budapest, predicted that “tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of German, Dutch, French, Belgian, and other western European citizens may opt to move to Hungary in the next 20–30 years and settle there in the wake of the migration crisis.”
Some, he said, might “prefer other destinations like Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, or other countries,” but Hungary “will be on top of their list as a destination country in which they will want to settle.”
He said that this “reversed migration” is a “predictable trend,” because citizens of Western Europe “will want to escape their leaders’ suicidal migration policies and will seek a safer place to retire.”
It is however not only older people, but also “younger folks” who will select Hungary as a destination.
The reason for this exodus, Topolansky said, is that “western Europeans do not want to live in fear surrounded by radical Muslims in their own countries.”
Hungary, on the other hand, he said, will “offer them a secure environment in which their accumulated assets and incomes will assure them the good life that they are accustomed to on the western half of the continent.”
Topolansky then launched into a detailed explanation of the insanity which has gripped Western Europe and sent it into a death spiral.
Let’s face it. In the wake of the Brussels terrorist attacks, we have had enough of the whining and commiserating: “Je suis Charlie, Je suis Paris, Je suis Brussels, Je suis the next large city in Europe”… STOP WILLKOMMENSKULTUR! Period.
Mass migration from northern Africa and the Middle East has destabilized Europe over the past decades and altered the way of life, the religious and cultural fabric of European societies. This needs to come to an end.
Topolansky pointed out that “Western Europe’s willkommenskultur and multiculturalism have been eroding European societies and disintegrating European value systems that were built over thousands of years.”
However, he said, “East-Central Europe has chosen a different path.”
Partly because of their steadfast nationalist pride and partly because of their newly acquired freedoms, the people of East-Central Europe will go the extra mile to preserve the freedoms and security they fought for.
They don’t want to be Brusselized or live in the shadow of another superimposed guardian society.
As a result of these factors, there will be a major migration wave from West to East, while concurrently, migrants will continue to pile up on the western half of the continent in order to collect higher social benefits and seek higher paying jobs.
This “manipulated breakdown of western European civilization” is, Topolansky continued, “presumably some kind of ill-conceived revenge by the liberal western elite for the two world wars and Nazism.”
However, he said, it was obvious that they were employing a double standard, because they took no such position on communist excesses:
Interesting that they are much more forgiving when it comes to communism as they have demonstrated on so many occasions. This double standard renders them unaccountable and makes them come across as malevolent.
He then went on to sketch how he sees Europe by the year 2050:
What kind of Europe are we going to have by year 2050 then?
There is one scenario with a predicament that it will be a divided continent—between a Muslim western Europe and a Christian eastern Europe.
Of course, the globalist elite would love to disrupt and weaken eastern European nation states through their multicultural agenda as well.
But they seemed to have underestimated the resilience of the Poles, the Hungarians, the Slovaks, the Czechs, the Croatians, the Slovenes, and the people of the Baltic nations.
These countries will probably form a new regional alliance and will no longer need the European Union, which will be ultimately dismantled.
The European dream may live on, but in a different form and in a different part of Europe.
A Transdanubian society may be created as some visionaries prophesized. Whatever the future will bring, one thing is predictable: the preferred place for all Europeans by the middle of the century may wind up to be East-Central Europe.
Having come from similar cultures and religious backgrounds, Hungarians at that point will welcome autochthonous western European migrants with open arms and may even promise not to boast: “We told you so…”
* “Autochthonous” definition according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
1: indigenous, native, an autochthonous people; 2: formed or originating in the place where found.
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Posted: 25 Apr 2016 05:37 AM PDT

On Sunday Ted Cruz and John Kasich joined forces to deny Donald Trump enough delegates to win the Republican nomination.
Both of the contenders are coordinating efforts to stop Donald Trump. And the Republican party elites support this. Unreal.
Kasich and Cruz campaigns released concurrent statements Sunday agreeing Cruz will focus on Indiana, and Kasich on Oregon and New Mexico.
CNN reported:
Ted Cruz and John Kasich are joining forces in a last-ditch effort to deny Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination.
Within minutes of each other, the pair issued statements late Sunday saying they will divide their efforts in upcoming contests with Cruz focusing on Indiana and Kasich devoting his efforts to Oregon and New Mexico. The strategy — something the two campaigns have been working on for weeks — is aimed at blocking Trump from gaining the 1,237 delegates necessary to claim to GOP nomination this summer.
The extraordinary moves reflect the national strength Trump has shown and the inability of Republicans who oppose the New York billionaire to come together to stop him. Dividing up some of the remaining primary states by putting forward one strong alternative to Trump in each could be enough to take away delegates and curb Trump’s run to the nomination.
Trump is the only candidate who can realistically get a first-ballot victory — there’s no mathematical path for Cruz or Kasich to clinch the nomination heading into the convention. The billionaire is poised for a strong performance Tuesday, when Republicans in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island head to the polls.
This is reminiscent of when Cruz and Rubio joined together to gang up on Donald Trump at the GOP debate.
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Posted: 25 Apr 2016 05:16 AM PDT

Are we witnessing the beginning of the end for the United States of America? All great nations eventually fall, and the United States is not going to be any exception.
Many of those that write about the decline of our once great country tend to focus on external threats, and there are certainly many that could be talked about. But perhaps even more ominous is the internal societal meltdown that we see happening all around us. According to Real Clear Politics, recent surveys show that 67 percent of Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track, and only 26 percent of Americans believe that it is headed in the right direction. So even though we are tremendously divided as to what the solutions are, the vast majority of us can see that something is deeply, deeply wrong with America.
Personally, I spend a lot of time writing about our economic problems. We have piled up the largest mountain of debt in the history of the planet, last year the middle class became a minority for the first time in our history, and 47 percent of all Americans couldn’t even pay an unexpected $400 emergency room bill without borrowing the money or selling something. But I don’t want to focus on economics in this article.
Neither do I plan to focus on our political problems. The fact that somewhere around half the country plans to vote for Hillary Clinton in November shows just how far gone we are as a nation. And the Republican Party is essentially just a watered-down version of the Democrats at this point. On average, Congress has just a 14.5 percent approval rating, and yet we keep sending the same corrupt politicians back to Washington D.C. time after time.
What in the world is wrong with us?
Physically we are a giant mess too. According to USA Today, the obesity rate in the United States has more than doubled over the past 25 years, and the OECD has found that the U.S. has the most overweight population in the entire industrialized world by a wide margin.
But our physical problems are not going to be the focus of this article either.
Instead, I want to focus on what is going on inside our heads and inside our hearts. I want to focus on our mental, emotional and spiritual problems.
Alvin Conway of The Extinction Protocol has been chronicling global disasters for years, and he has just posted an insightful piece in which he comments on the growing social decay that we see all around us…
According to Covenant Eyes, an internet search group, 1 out of 5 mobile searches on the internet involves pornography. Illegal drugs continue to be both manufactured and transported into the U.S. with no apparent way of halting or stopping the flow. In the US alone, more than 15 million people abuse prescription drugs, more than the combined number of people who reportedly abuse cocaine, hallucinogens, inhalants and heroin. If the war against drugs can’t be won, what luck will we ever have winning the war on terror? Does anyone remember who won Lyndon B. Johnson’s famed war on poverty? Regardless, let’s throw some more taxpayers’ money at an issues that money along can’t fix.
Later in his article, Conway goes on to link this social decay with the spiritual decline of our nation…
According to Pew Forum, the number of people who claim to be religious in America is declining as the country becomes more and more secular. “Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014. Over the same period, the percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated – describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – has jumped more than six points, from 16.1% to 22.8%.” The U.S. is beginning to look more and more like ancient Rome before it collapsed.
I agree with Conway. America is starting to look more and more like the Roman Empire just before it collapsed.
A nation is only as strong as its population, and right now we are quite a disaster. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the suicide rate in the United States has spiked to the highest level in almost 30 years. The following is an excerpt from a Washington Post article entitled “U.S. suicide rate has risen sharply in the 21st century“…
The U.S. suicide rate has increased sharply since the turn of the century, led by an even greater rise among middle-aged white people, particularly women, according to federal data released Friday.
Last decade’s severe recession, more drug addiction, “gray divorce,” increased social isolation, and even the rise of the Internet and social media may have contributed to the growth in suicide, according to a variety of people who study the issue.
That same article goes on to say that the suicide rate in this country increased by a whopping 24 percent from 1999 to 2014.
Is that a sign of a healthy nation?
At this point things have gotten so bad that even 70 percent of our pastors are battling depression. The following was authored by respected journalist Jennifer LeClaire…
There is no lack of statistics about pastors and depression, burnout, health, low pay, spirituality, relationships and longevity—and none of them are good. According to the Schaeffer Institute, 70 percent of pastors constantly fight depression, and 71 percent are burned out. Meanwhile, 72 percent of pastors say they only study the Bible when they are preparing for sermons; 80 percent believe pastoral ministry has negatively affected their families; and 70 percent say they don’t have a close friend.
The Schaeffer Institute also reports that 80 percent of seminary and Bible school graduates will leave the ministry within five years.
We are a deeply, deeply unhappy nation, and we have been trained to turn to pills as the solution.
According to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 59 percent of all U.S. adults are on at least one prescription drug at this point, and 15 percent of all U.S. adults are on at least five prescription drugs.
Those are absolutely astounding numbers to me. We are the most drugged up nation on the face of the planet, and yet we just keep on getting less happy.
Here are some more selected numbers from a previous article that back up that claim…
–Back in 1987, 61.1 percent of all Americans reported being happy at work. Today, 52.3 percent of all Americans say that they are unhappy at work.
–A different survey found that 70 percent of all Americans do not “feel engaged or inspired at their jobs”.
–One survey of 50-year-old men in the U.S. found that only 12 percent of them said that they were “very happy”.
–The number of Americans diagnosed with depression increases by about 20 percent each year.
–According to the New York Times, more than 30 million Americans take antidepressants.
–Doctors in the United States write more than 250 million prescriptions for antidepressants each year.
–The rate of antidepressant use among middle aged women is far higher than for the population as a whole. It is hard to believe, but right now one out of every four women in their 40s and 50s is taking an antidepressant medication.
–Compared to children in Europe, children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants.
–In America today, there are 60 million people that abuse alcohol and there are 22 million people that use illegal drugs.
–America has the highest rate of illegal drug use on the entire planet.
–America has the highest divorce rate in the world by a wide margin.
–America has the highest percentage of one person households on the entire planet.
–100 years ago, 4.52 people were living in the average U.S. household, but now the average U.S. household only consists of 2.59 people.
We are more isolated, more lonely and more miserable than we have ever been before.
But does that mean that we are on the verge of collapsing as a nation?
Just like during the days of the Roman Empire, most Americans cannot even conceive of a time when America will be no more. And yet we can all see that the foundations are being constantly chipped away at.
Will we be able to survive once our foundations are totally gone?
Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 18:32