Jason Scheurer is a Financial Advisor, former US Senate Candidate, Eagle Scout, radio talk show host and columnist.
Politics, as we’ve always known it, will be dead after this election cycle. It is not a question of whether the major parties break apart, but more a question of when. The margin of victory in 2016 will likely be less than the percentage of votes going to third parties, just as it has been in many state races around the country (like those in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida).
Congratulations on something that should have taken place a long time ago. Savor your victory, but let’s be honest here — you screwed up, also. You wasted over forty years supporting the Democratic Party which was, until recently, opposed to your ever attaining equality under the law. You opted for the lesser-of-two-evils position each election, and the result was that you were taken advantage of. I’m sorry you had to wait so long. It didn’t have to be this way.
Large corporate “rules” allow for those responsible for life-and-death decisions to get away with inflicting damages beyond anything the corner hustler in Baltimore could ever muster. Steal a loaf of bread . . . go to jail. Steal from hundreds of millions through manipulation, and fraud . . . pay a fine. Seems fair and just, right?
Israel has over 100 nuclear weapons. No one in the US government will publicly admit to this truth because to do so would break the very laws we passed decades ago against proliferation, while simultaneously exposing the hypocrisy of the current US Israeli foreign policy.
The U.S. electoral system is a farce. It is controlled with the same mastery with which Coke and Pepsi dominate the soda market. It is sold to the American public as if the free and open exchange of ideas is what’s inside, but the hidden ingredients are toxic to the body politic. The story of Election 2014 will be how Libertarians (and some Independents) were, and will continue to be, a deciding factor in statewide elections despite the constant roadblocks. No longer polling at 1–2 percent, the jump to the 6–8 percent range looks to rewrite the political playbook that campaign workers have used for generations.
President Obama’s January State of the Union speech was nothing more than a 45-minute window dressing to fool the public into thinking he is really going to scale back the growing police state. He is not. I never thought it would be possible to speak for so long about reform and, in the end, say so little. As an objective observer, it is clear that the abuses of the current administration go beyond the horrible expansion Bush put in place. This growing police state is an unrelenting war on the general public, one that the Church Commission warned us about back in the 1970s.
Turkey decided to clamp down on several web sites the last week of March for exposing a recently leaked discussion by high-ranking government officials. The controversial recording captured a planned false flag incident that would justify Turkey’s military intervention into bordering Syria. This leak, and the government’s response to try to silence its dissemination, has significant implications of global importance. It appears this NATO country is willing to attack itself if it would further its leaders’ political agenda, and in the process, inadvertently help expose another example of mainstream media censorship.
Developed nations face a perilous balance, teetering between the growth and death of their financial futures through their underlying demographic trends. These trends are almost impossible to reverse and can take decades to play out, since it is quite difficult to get the public as a whole to significantly alter their reproductive choices. While production efficiencies are certainly important when growing earnings, it is raw sales that drive the bottom line.
Surely you’ve seen all the charts and heard all the analogies, but let’s put this in simple terms: debt is helpful to a point, but once it becomes too large it transforms into an anchor on growth, and all because of the costs of rising interest rate payments. Despite all of our fantastic innovations and efficiencies, it has been our country’s increasing debt that has fueled much of the misleadingly false prosperity we have witnessed over the last three decades, as well as the increase in wealth inequality. Of course, I could refer back to the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 and the subsequent abandonment of the gold standard nearly four decades later on August 15, 1971, as the key turning points in U.S. monetary policy that set us on this path, but for now let’s just focus on the recent history — that which most of us can remember.
The unprecedented expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet over the last few years looks like it may be setting citizens up for a “bond bubble,” and future currency crisis of historic proportions. Looking over the $17 trillion in national debt and the Fed’s creation of over $3.5 trillion all on its own, should give even a high school dropout with basic math skills pause. Now I know I may be preaching to the choir, but there is a large percentage of the population that is comfortable with, or oblivious to, the spiraling debt. “The deficits don’t matter,” is often their flippant claim. BS, spouted off by elected officials like Dick Cheney, and akin to a two pack-a-day smoker justifying continuing to smoke because he hasn’t gotten cancer, yet. These deficits do, in fact, matter when they get too large. And guess what? OUR DEBTS ARE TOO LARGE!
