Free Republic

The election [May 23] of 170 part-time dilettantes from the eurosceptic Left and Right might shake up French or Italian politics. It will change absolutely nothing in the governing structure of the EU. Trumpian ideologue Steve Bannon deems the European Parliament vote this week to be “one of the most important elections ever” but he has never tangled in earnest with Germano-European deep state. The EU’s permanent machinery will reassert iron control once the noise has subsided.

The third leg of the world's intractable depression is yet to come. If trade economists at the United Nations are right, the next traumatic episode may entail the greatest debt jubilee in history. It may also prove to be the definitive crisis of globalized capitalism, the demise of the liberal free-market orthodoxies promoted for almost forty years by the Bretton Woods institutions, the OECD, and the Davos fraternity. "Alarm bells have been ringing over the explosion of corporate debt levels in emerging economies, which now exceed $25 trillion. Damaging deflationary spirals cannot be ruled out," said the annual report of...

The International Monetary Fund has called on the US and Europe to abandon fiscal austerity and switch to stimulus measures, warning that the global economy faces a "threatening downward spiral".

Bears beware. The New Deal of 2008 is in the works. The US Treasury is about to shower households with rebate cheques to head off a full-blown slump, and save the Bush presidency. On Friday, Mr Bush convened the so-called Plunge Protection Team for its first known meeting in the Oval Office. The black arts unit - officially the President's Working Group on Financial Markets - was created after the 1987 crash. It appears to have powers to support the markets in a crisis with a host of instruments, mostly by through buying futures contracts on the stock indexes (DOW,...

HILLARY'S SECRET WAR The real story behindthe Clinton body count Posted: July 13, 20051:00 a.m. Eastern Editor's note: The following is an eye-opening look into New York Times best-selling author Richard Poe's revealing book, "Hillary's Secret War." Whereas Edward Klein's book on the New York senator reveals previously unknown aspects of her personal life, Poe's expose focuses on how Hillary Clinton and the left's "shadow government" have labored to put her and her far-left agenda in the White House by controlling the still-uncensored flow of real news to Americans – via the Internet.If that sounds too fantastic to be...

When experts from the US and the IAEA came upon blueprints for a 10-kiloton atomic bomb in the files of the Libyan weapons program earlier this year, they found themselves caught between gravity and pettiness. The discovery gave the experts a new appreciation of the audacity of the rogue nuclear network led by A. Q. Khan, a chief architect of Pakistan's bomb. Intelligence officials had watched Dr. Khan for years and suspected that he was trafficking in machinery for enriching uranium to make fuel for warheads. But the detailed design represented a new level of danger, particularly since the Libyans...

"Is Bill Clinton to blame? Of course he is. Degradation spreads from the top down. Four years were damaging enough. Another four, if Clinton lasts, will do real harm to the institutions of the US federal government." ===================================== Goodbye, good riddance Ambrose Evans-Pritchard April 20, 1997 TO the delight of the White House, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is leaving Washington. Time and again his stories on the Clintons and their abuses of power have been proved correct. He leaves with a warning for Americans It was something of a compliment, I suppose, when the White House singled me out for attack in...

Article: Good Intentions, Bad Idea HONOLULU: Some unsolicited advice to professors, congressmen, former diplomats and anyone seeking a Nobel Peace Prize nomination: If you really want to help resolve the nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula, stay home. Such delegations are always well intentioned but generally not very helpful in actually resolving the crisis. True, former President Jimmy Carter's mission to Pyongyang in 1994 did help save the day, moving the Clinton administration and Kim Il Sung, father of North Korea's current leader, back from the brink of sanctions and possibly war. But 2004 is not 1994 and heads...

So long, Jack Charles L. "Jack" Pritchard dropped one on the Bush administration this week by quitting his job as special envoy on North Korea to join the liberal Brookings Institution, days before the next round of talks on the North Korean nuclear dispute. The implicit message in the abrupt departure was that Mr. Pritchard disagreed with the current policy. The special envoy was viewed within the administration as a "Clintonista" who favored the former president's appeasement approach to North Korea. He even went on the now-infamous October 2000 visit to North Korea by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright,...

Dr. Ray Pritchard, Senior Pastor of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, Illinois told the story on Sunday. In between his 3rd and 4th worship services for the morning he stepped out front of the church and had a second to make some small talk with the village's traffic cop helping to keep traffic moving through the congested area near the church. "Mornin' pastor!" came the greeting from the policeman. They engaged in a discussion for a few minutes about the day and then came the question. "So who do you think the sniper is," asked the officer. Dr. Pritchard...