Does Size Matter?
Even if they club together, for example, it is hard for other countries to match China’s clout in Asia. And there is no real substitute for America’s overall influence and power. The country spends more on defence than the next seven countries combined, produces 23% of global GDP (measured at market exchange rates) and has the world’s dominant currency. Still [some are hoping] that a joint effort can make a difference while Mr Trump is president. “A group of midsized and wealthy democracies could join forces and protect the rules-based world order.”
When the full weight of the state can be brought down on one man, and when that man is not a criminal in any meaningful sense—remember, taxation is legalized, state theft of private property—you know that man, Paul Manafort, in this case, was never free.
AND you know YOU are not free. Beware!
BUT, “Our democracy” is under threat. The Russians, the Russians.”
As usual, Tucker is the only sane member of Big Media.
More “free” people of the West. Having to defend yourself against the state for saying stuff:
After a long month of court dates, the verdict for the Austrian Generation Identity trial is finally in: NOT guilty of hate speech. NOT guilty of being a criminal organization. The boys are FREE!#ÖsterreichIstFrei#Vindicatedpic.twitter.com/19lgpG1ft3
— Brittany Pettibone (@BrittPettibone) July 26, 2018
UPDATE (8/2/018):
#DiGenova: "The use of terror legal tactics to destroy a human being, #Manafort. And why is DiGenova not AG? #POTUS did not appoint good people & is suffering for it. AG #Sessions is "asleep. Should be ashamed." https://t.co/MdfYkLoOn2
Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University, to Tucker Carlson:
“I want my president to do what every other president has done. Meet with the head of the Kremlin to avoid an existential crisis—war—between the two nuclear superpowers. Sit with the other side and walk back the conflict. The Trump hunters, however, prefer trying to impeach Trump to averting nuclear disaster.
AND:
“Why the hostility to Russia AFTER the collapse of the Soviet Union?”
Why do Deep Staters dislike Putin, “president of post-Communist Russia, more than they disliked the leaders of communist Russia?”
I can partially answer that, Prof. Cohen: These people are so stupid and ignorant that they prefer to think of Russia as a socialist state, when it is politically nationalist and economically mixed. (See the Russian Journal of Economics, Volume 3, Issue 2, June 2017, Pages 109-128: “Lessons in stabilization and prospects for growth: Russia’s economic policy in 2016.”)
The rest of the answer owed—why the establishment hates Russia today, while it loved Russia of yesteryear—that’s more complicated.
Wrong title. Corrected: Brilliant Russia scholar, Stephen Cohen, makes Mad Max Boot Cry. Boot is the warmonger con who said he’d sooner vote for Stalin than Trump.”
Venezuela’s inflation is 46,000 percent a year, “which in turn is largely caused by the printing of money to finance the government’s deficit of 30 percent of GDP.” (“Venezuelan cash is almost worthless, but also scarce,” Economist, July 12th, 2018.)
“In FY 2017, the federal deficit was 3.4 percent of GDP. This year, FY 2018, the federal government in its latest budget has estimated that the deficit will be 4.2 percent of GDP.” (https://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/federal_deficit_percent_gdp.)
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the United States was worth about 19 trillion US dollars.
Thanks to private enterprise ingenuity, not government frugality (see US Debt Clock), the US is not Venezuela.