“Climate” issues are the Trojan horse, the false ruse, the talking point, the scheme to get economic systems in place -yes, political systems- to control the distributive flow of larger economic wealth within all nations."

The Paris Climate Accord? No, the Paris Economic Accord. That is the view of Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse.

Every word we read, every corporate broadcast, every espoused punditry opinion, every angle that’s visible, everything surrounding the Paris Climate “Treaty”, All.Of.It., is driven by multinational banks and corporations who have a vested financial interest.

The Paris Climate Treaty has nothing to do with “climate” and everything possible to do with economics, globalism and the controlled redistribution of economic wealth as constructed through decades of advanced policies of multinational financial interests.

There are factually TRILLIONS of dollars at stake.

When you consider the pontificating pearl-clutching from the financial and industrial elites, ask yourself this very basic question:

If Elon Musk (Tesla), Tim Cook (Apple), Larry Page (google), Mark Zuckerberg (facebook), or any of the myriad of multinational executives really cared about “climate change”, then why are they doing business in China?

The primary concern for every affiliated entity surrounds economics, not climate. “Climate” issues are the Trojan horse, the false ruse, the talking point, the scheme to get economic systems in place -yes, political systems- to control the distributive flow of larger economic wealth within all nations. Period.

What ObamaCare was to your loss of healthcare individualism, so too is the Paris Treaty a political tool to deconstruct national economic individualism. FULL-STOP.

...President Trump is very smart about the long-term ramifications to this ‘treaty’. If the heavily influenced industrialized nations commit themselves to this agreement they will be anchoring their economic manufacturing base within a tiered system of ridiculously burdensome regulations and agreements.

The strategic benefit to the United States will stem from not participating in the regulatory stranglehold that accompanies the agreement. Obviously all nations that compete with the U.S on international trade agreements would, for once, be at a disadvantage; and our American manufacturing and industrial base would be able to take strategic advantage.

In larger terms Trump’s refocused policy objectives remove the political benefit from Wall Street and places it back with Main Street, reversing a three decade long shift. This approach is adverse to the interests of the globalists.

President Trump’s economic team are well aware of the strategic advantage in walking away from the Paris Climate Treaty. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and their entire economic team know what is needed to reverse the decades long construct and defeat the interests of the global elites.

Read more here.

Or, both?

h/t Maggie's Farm

Debt

Seth Godin writes today about debt.

Greece. Puerto Rico. Student loans. Mortgages.

The forces of debt are reshaping the world, creating dislocations and crises on a regular basis. And yet, few of us really understand how debt works.

Not the debt of, "can I borrow five dollars?" but the debt of corporations, nations and bureaucratic bodies. What's debt, really? What is money, and which came first?

The most fascinating book I've read all year is Debt, by David Graeber. (The audio is highly recommended).

Debt is older than money, and money was probably invented not to help the imaginary harried merchant who is struggling with barter (what? you want to trade your sheep for my muffins? but I don't need sheep!) but instead to enable nation states to feed their armies, and for individuals to trade debts with one another.

[His army insight: The easiest way to feed an army is to invent a coin, then require all your citizens to pay taxes in that coin, a coin they can only get by trading. Then give a bunch of coins to your soldiers. Bingo.]

From this surprising beginning, Graeber takes us on a tour that covers 10,000 years. He talks about the origins of slavery as well as the inequities caused by the World Bank and the IMF. One simple example: If a dictator runs up a huge debt and then absconds with the money, are the citizens of that nation responsible? For how much? For how long? Should they be put into peonage, they and their children and all of their descendants?

If a mortgage is overdue, is it better to kick people out of the house and watch the neighborhood descend into rubble?

If 10 million Americans are overwhelmed with student debt they can't repay, what should we do then?

If the purpose of inter-country loans is to foster growth as well as international relations and trade, how does bankrupting and isolating an entire country when they can't pay accomplish this?

Or consider a much smaller example of how the world's most profitable profession can change even simple elements of user experience and customer satisfaction: Every time I pay for something with Paypal, I'm interrupted by a window insisting that I should pay for this item on credit, instead of using my balance. And every time, I close this window. Paypal knows this. And yet, they continue to interrupt millions of people a day, intentionally breaking their already weak user experience, because the idea of putting more people into more credit card debt is so financially seductive.

A key tenet of our culture is, "you must pay your debts." Debt makes us think about what this simple sentence means. Even if your instinct is to answer with, "of course everyone should pay their debts," the next question is obvious: How should we deal with nations and peoples who can't? How far do we go?

I can't do Graeber's book justice in a blog post, but I want to point it out to anyone who wants to understand the acceptance and future of bitcoin, the changing wealth of nations or why countries still own tons and tons of gold. Mostly, knowing how we got here makes it a lot easier to figure out where we might head next.

The sky's the limit

Did we just get an alpha male into the 2016 GOP presidential race? No, I'm definitely not referring to Jeb Bush. I am referring to "The Donald."


Did you know that Trump got his life plan from a hobo?

Comedy Central Presents
Get More: Watch More Stand-Up.

PJ O'Rourke writes at The Daily Beast,

...During this endless grim, foggy, electoral season with its constant drizzle of wannabes, I intend to make little prose pictures of each candidatural dwarf until we are down to two.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that the two may be “Clinton” and “Bush.” Members of the electorate in their right minds will go into the ballot booth, see the names, think to themselves, “I did this already.” And leave with the ballot unmarked. Voter turn-out will be 6 percent. The shuttle from the local extended care facility will send a few memory-impaired Republicans to the polls. A DNC bus will collect some derelicts from skid row. And we will have the first President of the United States elected by a franchise limited to sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease and drunken bums.

Let us therefore begin at the bottom of the campaign barrel with the lees, the dross, and the dregs, by which I mean Donald Trump.

Or is Trump just using the garbage of his personality to chum for publicity again? If he isn’t really a candidate, I see no reason to take him at his word, any more than I’d take him at his word about anything else.

...Besides, I, personally, support his candidacy. “Democracy,” said H. L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The American government is of the people, by the people, for the people. And, these days, America is peopled by 320 million Donald Trumps. Donald Trump is representative of all that we hold dear: money. Or, rather, he is representative of greed for money. We common people may not be able to match Trump’s piggy bank, but we can match his piggishness.

...Many a candidate for president has fibbed on the subject of his or her economic circumstances—William Henry “born in a log cabin” Harrison and Hillary “dead broke” Clinton. But Trump will be the first candidate to — like the American legend that he is — tell tall tales about all the money he’s got. Trump is a financial Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and Davey Crockett rolled into one, according to Trump.

If Trump’s critics don’t think this is typical of modern Americans, they haven’t looked at our online dating profiles.

Also typical of modern Americans is Trump’s bad taste. True, he doesn’t dress the way the rest of us do—like a nine-year-old in twee T-shirt, bulbous shorts, boob shoes, and league-skunked sports team cap. And Trump doesn’t weigh 300 pounds or have multiple piercings or visible ink. He puts his own individual stamp on gaucherie. And we like it. We’re a country that cherishes being individuals as much as we cherish being gauche.

We have to consider what kind of president he would make. What would his foreign policy be? What domestic priorities would he favor? How would he handle the economy?

On all three counts he’ll be—just like he says he is already—a big success.

...Imagine the strides Trump will make in American foreign policy. He’s crazier than all the other candidates put together. He’s under the illusion that he’s 20 times richer than he is. He thinks childhood vaccination caused the movie Rain Man. He believes Obama was born to the Queen of Sheba in an H. Rider Haggard novel. Putin, Xi Jinping, Ayatollah Khamenei, ISIS, the Taliban, and Hamas will be paralyzed with fear. Who knows what this lunatic will do?

What he’ll do is build thousands of Trump casinos, Trump hotels, and Trump resorts in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Raqqa, Kandahar, and Gaza. Then all of them will go bankrupt the way Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza Hotel, and Trump Entertainment Resorts did. He’ll destroy the power of our foes leaving Russia trying to palm off Eastern Ukraine on angry bond-holders and China auctioning distressed property in the Spratly Islands.

Trump’s chief domestic policy will be to be on TV. That’s one more reason he’ll get elected. We can relate to Trump. The first and foremost goal of all Americans is to be on TV.

As President Trump will be able to be on TV all the time, 24/7. Just doing his hair in the makeup room during commercial breaks should keep him too busy to push other birdbrain domestic policies the way some presidents have. And he can yell “You’re fired!” as much as he wants. It will make for a healthy turnover in cabinet appointees such as Ivanka, Dennis Rodman, Larry King, and Vince McMahon.

And Trump understands the economy. He’ll push America’s economic growth forward the same way he pushed his own—with debt and more debt. Average American household debt is more than $225,000. The average American family’s credit card debt is almost $16,000. Trump restructured $3.5 billion in business debt and $900 million in personal debt between 1991 and 1994. We Americans know a leader when we see one. And we love debt. Otherwise America’s national debt wouldn’t have gone from $15 billion in 1930 to $18 trillion today. Tomorrow, with Trump in the Oval Office, the sky’s the limit.

Read more here.

Counting down

What's the deal with Casey Kasem? Somebody seeing dollar signs? From Wikipedia:

On June 6, 2014, Kasem was reported to be in critical but stable condition at a hospital in Washington state, receiving antibiotics for bedsores and treatment for high blood pressure. It was revealed that he had been bedridden for some time.[51] A judge ordered separate visitation times due to antagonism between Jean Kasem and his children from his first wife.[52] Judge Daniel S. Murphy ruled that Kasem had to be hydrated, fed, and medicated as a court-appointed lawyer reported on his health status. Jean Kasem claimed that he had been given no food, water, or medication the previous weekend. Kerri Kasem's lawyer stated that she had him removed from artificial food and water on the orders of a doctor and in accordance with a directive her father signed in 2007 saying he would not want to be kept alive if it "would result in a mere biological existence, devoid of cognitive function, with no reasonable hope for normal functioning."[42] Murphy reversed his order the following Monday, after it became known that Kasem's body was no longer responding to the artificial nutrition, allowing the family to place Kasem on "end-of-life" measures over the objections of Jean Kasem.[53]

On June 15, 2014, Kasem died at St. Anthony's Hospital in Gig Harbor, Washington at the age of 82.[10][54][55] He was survived by his wife, four children, and four grandchildren.[56] Casey's body was handed over to widow Jean, who would be making funeral arrangements.[57] Casey wanted to be buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles.[58]

Kerri stated that Jean sent a letter to the lawyer responsible for Casey's will that Jean intended to be "coming after" the irrevocable trust Casey established for his children in the 1980s.[58]

On July 19, it was reported that a judge had granted Kasem's daughter Kerri a temporary restraining order to prevent his wife from cremating Kasem's body to allow an autopsy to be performed, but when she went to give a copy of the restraining order to the funeral home, she was informed that they no longer had his remains. It was later revealed that Kasem's wife Jean had filed a death certificate dated July 15 listing an address in Jerusalem, Israel.[59]

Read more here.

"A politician for whom adoration and money are ultimate objectives rather than welcome byproducts of success probably doesn't belong in the White House."

Hillary Clinton's friend Tina Brown doesn't think Hillary should run for the presidency in 2016. She contrasts the presidency with the post-presidency Hillary and Bill are already enjoying.

Being president you may have more power than anyone else in the country, but you quickly discover that you have much, much less than you thought you'd have going in. You're hamstrung in ways you never dreamed of. That's truer now than it's ever been. It's not that you can't get anything done. It's that what you can get done is so paltry compared to what you wanted and expected to get done. You are doomed to disappoint the people who elected you. You'll disappoint yourself. And that's only the tip of the iceberg of stress that awaits you.

By contrast, writes James Taranto,

"the post-presidency . . . is a win-win. Money, Nobels, the ability to leverage your global celebrity for any cause or hobbyhorse you wish, plus freedom to grab the mike whenever the urge takes you without any terminal repercussions." Brown thinks Messrs. Carter and Clinton have made the most of the opportunity, and while she's disdainful of the Bushes' "parachute jumping" and "painting," she allows that they "have seemed happier out from under" the burdens of the presidency.

Here is Brown, making the case against President Hillary Clinton: "She is as adored as any ex-president already, she is making a ton of money, and she can expand the real passion of her life," the aforementioned global mission to advance women.

All of which amounts to a very strong case against Mrs. Clinton's running--a stronger case, perhaps, than Brown realizes. A politician for whom adoration and money are ultimate objectives rather than welcome byproducts of success probably doesn't belong in the White House.

Read more here.