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America needs an alternative. For that reason, I have reintroduced my plan to tackle our nation's most pressing domestic challenges-updated to reflect the dramatic decline in our economic and fiscal condition. The plan, called A Road Map for America's Future and first introduced in 2008, is a comprehensive proposal to ensure health and retirement security for all Americans, to lift the debt burdens that are mounting every day because of Washington's reckless spending, and to promote jobs and competitiveness in the 21st century global economy. The difference between the Road Map and the Democrats' approach could not be more clear. From the enactment of a $1 trillion "stimulus" last February to the current pass-at-all costs government takeover of health care, the Democratic leadership has followed a "progressive" strategy that will take us closer to a tipping point past which most Americans receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes-a European-style welfare state where double-digit unemployment becomes a way of life. Americans don't have to settle for this path of decline. There's still time to choose a different future. That is what the Road Map offers. It is based on a fundamentally different vision from the one now prevailing in Washington. It focuses the government on its proper role. It restrains government spending, and hence limits the size of government itself. It rejuvenates the vibrant market economy that made America the envy of the world. And it restores an American character rooted in individual initiative, entrepreneurship and opportunity. Here are the principal elements:

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 the underlying issue is that the U.S. has borrowed too much, and now has a higher debt to GDP ratio than it has ever -- and because the U.S. will inevitably borrow even MORE because 1. everyone believes that lower taxes and stimulus are needed to stimulate growth and 2. if we don't, growth in the U.S. will depress -- the reality is that our lifestyle (individuals and the government spending what they don't have) is unsustainable. He says: "In addition to balancing the budget and growing the economy, I think we have to accept that the coming decades are likely to see U.S. standards of living decline relative to the rest of the world. Unless our goods offer a better cost/benefit bargain, there's no reason why American workers should continue to enjoy the same lifestyle advantage over workers in other countries. I just don't expect to hear many politicians own up to this reality on the stump." His other big points: ..... "The dollar can no longer be the reserve currency" without unflinching adherence to the associated responsibilities. ..... The debt ceiling "solution" is unlikely to represent much fundamental progress; for the most part it'll just kick the can down the road because politicians are too concerned about getting re-elected to compromise....... "We have no choice but to raise the debt ceiling and keep borrowing in the short-term."....... "Washington's spending has recently been higher as a percentage of the nation's economic output than at any time since World War II. But by the same measure, Washington's revenues are the lowest in more than 60 years." ..... When asked about conservatives' insistence on a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, President Obama replied, "We don't need a constitutional amendment to do that [balance the budget]; what we need to do is to do our jobs." But clearly we do need some enforced discipline, because the years in which we haven't run a deficit have been by far the exception of late, n

Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.

UKIP sets the wheels to rocking on apple carts in the UK and EU, winning 24 of UK's 73 seats in the European Parliament and hundreds of seats in UK community governments, all at the expense of the front-running three parties in the UK's 2009 election.   Wikipedia: The UK Independence Party (UKIP) is a [hard] Eurosceptic, right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom, founded in 1993. The party describes itself in its constitution as a "democratic, libertarian party." Now if we could just begin to see a NATO-sceptic party emerging across Europe ...  

So Russia and China aim to take down Boeing and Airbus. And it seems as though the BRICS nations may get their own global positioning system by integrating Russian and Chinese satnavs. While Russia and China progress rapidly for earned economic leadership of the world, the U.S. sinks billions intoa new super-aircraft carrier and lets its civilian infrastructure -- vital to economic recovery if were was any serious plan to recover -- disintegrate into obsolete rust. But Obama tells us that the U.S. economy is not in decline.That's why China becomes the world's largest economy this year, no doubt. 

I wound up joining this campaign at the urging of the ACLU after checking the Privacy Policy. The Reset the Net campaign seems to be endorsed by a lot of change-oriented groups, from the ACLU to Greenpeac to the Pirate Party. A fair number of groups with a Progressive agenda, but certainly not limited to them. The right answer to that situation is to urge other groups to endorse, not to avoid the campaign. Single-issue coalition-building is all about focusing on an area of agreement rather than worrying about who you are rubbing elbows with.  I have been looking for a a bipartisan group that's tackling government surveillance issues via mass actions but has no corporate sponsors. This might be the one. The reason: Corporate types like Google have no incentive to really butt heads with the government voyeurs. They are themselves engaged in massive surveillance of their users and certainly will not carry the battle for digital privacy over to the private sector. But this *is* a battle over digital privacy and legally defining user privacy rights in the private sector is just as important as cutting back on government surveillance. As we have learned through the Snowden disclosures, what the private internet companies have, the NSA can and does get.  The big internet services successfully pushed in the U.S. for authorization to publish more numbers about how many times they pass private data to the government, but went no farther. They wanted to be able to say they did something, but there's a revolving door of staffers between NSA and the big internet companies and the internet service companies' data is an open book to the NSA.   The big internet services are not champions of their users' privacy. If they were, they would be featuring end-to-end encryption with encryption keys unique to each user and unknown to the companies.  Like some startups in Europe are doing. E.g., the Wuala.com filesync service in Switzerland (first 5 GB of storage free). Compare tha

So it takes three technical staff and two CIA lawyers to check a firewall? Lawyers? So if I want to check my firewall, I need to hire three technical staff and two lawyers? 

"What's really remarkable is that we've seen the biggest drop in the burden of government spending since the end of World War II. Heck, the fiscal restraint over the past five years has resulted in a bigger drop in the relative size of government in America than what Switzerland achieved over the past ten years thanks to the "debt brake." At this point, some readers may be wondering who or what deserves credit for this positive development. I'll offer a couple of explanations. The first two points are about why we shouldn't overstate what's actually happened. 1. The good news is somewhat exaggerated because we had a huge spike in federal spending in 2009. To use an analogy, it's easy to lose some weight if you first go on a big eating binge for a couple of years. 2. Some of the fiscal discipline is illusory because certain revenues that flow to the Treasury, such as TARP repayments from banks, actually count as negative spending. I explained this phenomenon when measuring which Presidents have been the biggest spenders. But there also are some real reasons why we've seen genuine spending restraint. 3. The "Tea Party" election of 2010 resulted in a GOP-controlled House that was somewhat sincere about controlling federal outlays. 4. The spending caps adopted as part of the debt limit fight in 2011 have curtailed spending increases as part of the appropriations process. 5. In the biggest fiscal loss President Obama has suffered, we got a sequester that reduced the growth of federal spending. 6. Many states have refused to expand Medicaid, notwithstanding the lure of temporary free money from Uncle Sam. 7. Government shutdown fights may be messy, but they tend to produce a greater amount of fiscal restraint. And there are surely other reasons to list, including the long-overdue end of seemingly permanent unemployment benefits and falling defense outlays as forces are withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. The bottom line is that the past

Economic havoc looks to be about to break Greece's two-party political system as a third party, Syriza rises to take control of government. Might a similar event happen in the U.S. if the economy gets much worse, as seems about to happen because of the collapse of the petro-dollar? If so, what might the new coalition look like in the U.S.? This article points out that in Greece, Syriza is uniting demographic elements viewed as leftist. But the what is regarded as the left in the U.S., progressives, liberals, socialists, and communists, historically has been incapable of organizing in a way to assert political power for decades because they invariably fall for the choice of two evils argument and vote Democratic in general elections. It seems to be much the same story on the right in the U.S. For example, the Tea Party was co-opted by the Republican Party in general elections from the Tea Party's inception. What has been particularly troubling to me is that the American left and right actually agree on very many issues, but the divide-and-conquer strategy of the corporate/globalist/war machine of the oligarchy has so instilled hatred between the right and the left that it's been impossible to form a third-party that pushes an agenda driven by majority public opinion. To me, a new party that focuses on areas of broad agreement and avoids areas of disagreement seems to be the most likely candidate to break the the rule of our present usurpers of democracy. But if we are to create a new Majority Party (I like that name) based on majority opinion, how do we get past the hatred, particularly given that the usurpers will do their level best to fan the fire of hatred even more as the Majority Party gains numbers? And what to do about majority opinions that are formed by false usurper propaganda, e.g., the current propaganda campaigns that drive the pro-war agenda? They've been able to create majorities, e.g., for renentry of the U.S. military into Iraq to fight ISIL,

""The economy inhabited by the vast majority of Americans grows smaller and more cutthroat, with nearly all the new wealth accruing to the rich." Tuesday night, in his next-to-last State of the Union address, President Obama flashed the suckers a bag of tricks that has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress, but will allow his apologists to claim that the genuine, more progressive Obama is revealing himself in his final two years in office. Of course, the final-years Obama could have accomplished his modest 2015 agenda, and much more, back in 2009 and 2010, when Democrats dominated both the House and the Senate and the Republicans were in despair and disarray. Which is precisely why Obama chose, instead, to put his party's perishable congressional majorities at the service of bankers, Wall Street, private insurers and Big Pharma. Now that Democrats are the endangered species on Capitol Hill, Obama hangs a piñata of subsidized community college education, additional tax deductions for child care, seven days paid sick leave, higher capital gains taxes on the wealthy, and billions in fees on casino bankers. On closer examination, his grab bag of bills and requests for legislation contains even less than advertized - a vapor-thin rhetorical veneer for a center-right presidency whose real accomplishment has been to re-inflate the Wall Street casino, flush the last vestiges of secure employment out of the economy, and put the imperial war machine back on the offensive. Corporate pundits describe Obama's antics as an appeal to his party's "base." In a world in which words actually mean something, a politician's base would be composed of the people whose interests he actually serves, rather than those he victimizes. But, such logic does not apply in late capitalist America, where both parties cater to the needs of the moneyed classes; one, shamelessly, without inhibition, the other through deployment of talented liars like Obama. "Blac

Meanwhile, leaaders of both parties in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives reacted by announcing that the U.S. will devote all avialable funding to evelop and acquire weapons to fight off an anticipated invasion of the U.S. by the Islamic State. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, "We need weapons. We don't need no freaking infrastructure development."