Free Republic

My second PinocchiObama piece for OMG! For America. See the first one here.

Nikos Gavalas and Alexandra Tricha, both 31 and trained as agriculturalists, were frustrated working on poorly paying, short-term contracts in Athens, where jobs are scarce and the cost of living is high. So last year, they decided to start a new project: growing edible snails for export. As Greece’s blighted economy plunges further into the abyss, the couple are joining with an exodus of Greeks who are fleeing to the countryside and looking to the nation’s rich rural past as a guide to the future. They acknowledge that it is a peculiar undertaking, with more manual labor than they, as...

Last week's European Summit shows how difficult it is for the European Union to confront its fundamental economic problems. Since 2007, many European Union countries have suffered loss of their rates of growth and high unemployment. Yet the European Summit offers no plan for growth. More trouble lies ahead for Europe. America's economic condition is not yet as dire as Europe's, but it soon will be if we do not correct the root cause of the problems that we face in our own country. Since 2006 America's growth rate has also declined. America now has 15.5% less GDP than it...

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA-05) and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) Dec 8 - With the European debt crisis dominating the news and threatening to pull the world into a double-dip recession, there are growing calls for Uncle Sam to come to the rescue. The U.S. is already committing untold billions to the $1.4 trillion European bailout fund, but that's not enough, according to some European leaders and even U.S. politicians. They say that while the EU bailout is costly, it's also necessary. They are only right about the cost. These endless bailouts are not only unnecessary, but are in fact...

The 17 eurozone states and six other EU countries agreed early Friday to create a new treaty that will allow them to introduce stricter fiscal rules in the hope of containing a worsening debt crisis, but Britain's prime minister immediately threatened to block the new accord. The failure to get agreement among all 27 members of the European Union at a summit meeting in Brussels reflected in large part a deep split between France and Germany on the one hand and Britain on the other. France and Germany are the two largest economies in the eurozone; Britain does not use...