Dick Morris: Obama Will Never Get Another Major Piece of Legislation Passed

January 21,2010

Prison Planet

By Paul Joseph Watson

Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris told Fox News yesterday that the election of Scott Brown was such a momentous event that it has killed all prospects of President Obama ever getting another major piece of legislation passed during his time in office.

Although Morris said that a watered down version of the health care bill would probably sneak through, he characterized the result as “absolutely incredible,” adding, “Nothing will ever be the same”.

“Let’s just stop for a second and understand the magnitude of the earthquake that hit Massachusetts….ultimately this is the end of the Obama ascendancy, he will never get another major piece of legislation passed,” said Morris.

However, as Alex Jones has warned, we heard similar noises when the Democrats seized control of the House and Senate back in 2006, and yet the wars, the big government and the attack on freedom only gathered more pace.

Indeed, despite the fact that Brown’s victory is being hailed as a crushing blow for the government, and there’s no doubt that it does represent a massive rejection of the Obama agenda, the fact remains that the Democrats hold a sizable majority in both the House and Senate, with the Senate majority being considerably larger than that enjoyed by Republicans during George W. Bush’s second term.

It’s therefore somewhat baffling as to why Democrats have manufactured talking points focused around the notion that, “It is mathematically impossible for Democrats to pass legislation on our own.”

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Ron Paul: The CIA Runs Everything

January 21,2010

Info Wars

The CIA was created at the behest of the bankers on Wall Street. OSS spook and Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner was recruited by Dean Acheson to work under Charles Saltzman, at the State Department’s Office of Occupied Territories in 1947. The CIA’s first director, Allen Dulles, was a Wall Street lawyer.

The CIA is Wall Street’s finely honed tool for the neoliberal agenda of the banksters. “A considerable proportion of the developed world’s prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries’ primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries – it means keeping poor people poor,” former CIA agent Philip Agee wrote. “Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty.”

“Throughout its entire history, the CIA has set up an elaborate shell game of ‘proprietaries’ (front companies), money-laundering operations and off-the-books projects so complex that no outsider — and few insiders — could ever keep track of them. BCCI was neither the first nor the last of these,” writes Mark Zepezauer.

Excerpt from the Campaign for Liberty Regional Conference in Atlanta, GA.

As the crowd begins to cheer, Ron Paul states, “We need to take out the CIA”.

“They are a government unto themselves. Their in buisnesses, their in drug buisnesses… and… they take out dictators. We need to take out the CIA.”

Also, the CIA have infiltrated the Ron Paul Presidential Campaign:

From Raw Story:

US House Rep. Ron Paul says the CIA has has in effect carried out a “coup” against the US government, and the intelligence agency needs to be “taken out.”

Speaking to an audience of like-minded libertarians at a Campaign for Liberty regional conference in Atlanta this past weekend, the Texas Republican said:

There’s been a coup, have you heard? It’s the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military. They’re the ones who are over there lobbing missiles and bombs on countries. … And of course the CIA is every bit as secretive as the Federal Reserve. … And yet think of the harm they have done since they were established [after] World War II. They are a government unto themselves. They’re in businesses, in drug businesses, they take out dictators … We need to take out the CIA.

Paul’s comments, made last weekend, were met with a loud round of applause, but they didn’t gather attention until bloggers noticed a clip of the event at YouTube.

Paul appeared to be referring to news reports that the CIA is deeply involved in air strikes against Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A suicide bombing late last year against Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan took the lives of seven of CIA operatives, including two contracted from Blackwater. The event highlighted the CIA’s deep involvement in the war effort.

Paul’s reference to the CIA being “in the drug business” refers to long-running allegations that the CIA has funded some of its covert operations with proceeds from drug-running. That claim was most famously made in a 1996 investigative report from the San Jose Mercury-News, which alleged that cocaine from the Contra-Sandinista civil war in Nicaragua was making its way to the streets of L.A. via the CIA.

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Copenhagen Summit Has Biggest Carbon Footprint

December 15, 2009

Reuters

Delegates, journalists, activists and observers from almost 200 countries have gathered at the Dec 7-18 summit and their travel and work will create 46,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide, most of it from their flights.

This would fill nearly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools, and is the same amount produced each year by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians — the vast difference is due to the huge gap in consumption patterns in the two countries — according to U.S. government statistics about per person emissions in 2006.

Despite efforts by the Danish government to reduce the conference’s carbon footprint, around 5,700 tonnes of carbon dioxide will be created by the summit and a further 40,500 tonnes created by attendees’ flights to Copenhagen.

The figure for the flights was calculated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), while the domestic carbon footprint from the summit was calculated by accountants Deloitte, said Deloitte consultant Stine Balslev.

“This is much bigger than the last talks because there are many more people here,” she said, adding that 18,000 people were expected to pass through the conference center every day.

“These are preliminary figures but we expect that when we do the final calculations after the conference is over, the carbon footprint will be about the same.”

Deloitte included in their calculations emissions caused by accommodation, local transport, electricity and heating of the conference center, paper, security, transport of goods and services as well as energy used by computers, kitchens, photocopiers and printers inside the conference center.

Accommodation accounted for 23 percent of the summit’s greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen, while transport caused 7 percent. Seventy percent came from activities inside the conference center, she said.

“We have been forced to put up some temporary buildings in order to provide the delegation rooms because the number of participants is so much larger than expected,” said Balslev.

“For instance the U.S. delegation has ordered an area that’s five times as big as last year.”

The temporary buildings housing delegation offices are not well insulated and are warmed by oil heaters, so this area is the most energy-wasteful, she said.

The researchers assumed that 60 percent of conference participants would catch public transport to and from the conference but Balslev said that was probably optimistic.

Balslev said most of the energy used by the conference was from coal fired power stations that power the electricity grid, but some was from wind power.

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Google and Yahoo Asking FDA to Update Guidelines for Web Ads

November 16, 2009

U.S. News

Internet giants Google and Yahoo have lined up with the pharmaceutical industry in asking the U.S. government to draft new rules that would give drug companies more latitude to advertise online.

Current U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations require that any mention of a drug’s benefits must also reveal its risks, including detailed lists of side effects. But drug makers and Web companies attending a two-day hearing this week on online marketing of medical products said the rule hampers them, given online space constraints.

Click here for the full report.

 

 

FDA Approves Yet Another Experimental Drug to Fight H1N1

October 26, 2009

The Wall Street Journal

By Jennifer Corbett Dooren

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is allowing the use of an experimental antiviral drug to treat severe cases of H1N1 or swine flu.

The drug, peramivir, is currently being developed by BioCryst Pharmaceuticals Inc. and is undergoing testing required for regular FDA approval.

The FDA issued a so-called emergency use authorization late Friday that allows doctors to use peramivir, which is delivered intravenously, in certain hospitalized adult and pediatric patients with confirmed or suspected H1N1 influenza.

A handful of doctors have already treated patients with severe cases of H1N1 using peramivir obtained through the agency’s expanded access rules that allow individual patients to obtain experimental drugs if certain conditions are met. The emergency-use authorization allows use of the drug without prior FDA approval.

The FDA said there’s only limited clinical data about whether peramivir is safe and effective, but “based upon the totality of scientific evidence available, it is reasonable to believe that peramivir IV may be effective in certain patients.”

The company said it is completing production of approximately 130,000 courses of peramivir and is prepared to make more, if required.

The FDA said peramivir should only be used in patients who have not responded to or can’t take the oral antiviral drug Tamiflu, made by Roche or Relenza, which is an inhaled drug made by GlaxoSmithKline PLC. Like Tamiflu and Relenza, Peramivir works by inhibiting neuraminidase, an enzyme that’s involved with the spread of the influenza virus within the body.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked the FDA to grant peramivir emergency use to help cope with the influenza pandemic which has killed more than 1,000 people in the U.S. since April and hospitalized thousands more. The CDC will control and track distribution of peramivir to hospitals.

As of Oct. 17, 46 states were reporting “widespread” influenza activity and many doctors offices have been swamped with swine-flu patients. The CDC said more than 7% of outpatients visits in the week that ended Oct. 17 were attributed to influenza-like illnesses — a rate higher than during the peak of the last few seasonal influenza seasons. The CDC said “many millions” of Americans have been sickened with H1N1 influenza since the virus was first discovered in April.

The U.S. government has ordered enough vaccine to make up to 251 million doses if needed, but production has been slower than originally anticipated.

A total of 11.3 million doses of vaccine had been shipped to U.S. doctors, hospitals, and clinics as of Wednesday, according to the CDC, out of a total of 14.1 million doses that manufacturers had shipped to warehouses by that time. By Friday, 16.1 million doses of vaccine had been shipped to warehouses, the CDC said.

The total is far below the government’s most recent estimate that by the end of this month, about 28 million to 30 million doses would be shipped to warehouses for further distribution. That estimate itself is a revision, made last week, from a prior expectation of about 40 million doses by the end of the month. In July, the government had predicted that about 100 million doses would be ready in October.

Click here for the full report.

Swine Flu Vaccine is a Big Business

October 22,2009

Natural News

By Evelyn Pringle

Back on May 9, 2009, Robin Robinson, a director at the Department of Health and Human Services who oversees pandemic responses, told the Washington Post that even as officials take steps to develop a swine flu vaccine with sufficient doses for every “man, woman and child,” those plans would be dialed back if the pandemic “fizzles out.”

The pandemic has fizzled out but the gravy train toward vaccine profits is still rolling. On September 16, 2009, Reuters reported that the death rate from the pandemic H1N1 swine flu was likely lower than earlier estimates.

“Barring any changes in the virus, I think we can say we are in a category 1 pandemic. This has not become clear until fairly recently,” said Dr Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, an expert in infectious diseases, told a meeting of flu experts convened by the US Institute of Medicine.

“The news is certainly better than it was in May and even better than it was at the beginning of August,” he noted.

The US government’s Pandemic Severity Index has five categories, with a category 1 comparable to a seasonal flu epidemic. Seasonal flu has a death rate of less than 0.1 percent, Reuters reports. A category 5 would compare to the 1918 flu pandemic, which had an estimated death rate of 2% or more.

Lipsitch gathered information on how many people had reported influenza-like illness around the world, which may or may not actually be influenza; government reports of actual hospitalizations and confirmed deaths, and “came up with a range of mortality from swine flu from 0.007 percent to 0.045 percent,” Reuters advises.

Having new information about how many people were infected and did not become severely ill or die makes the pandemic look very mild, Lipsitch said.

Minimal Swine Flu Deaths
The CIA World Factbook estimates the world population to be close to 6. 8 billion and the US population a little over 307 million. At the beginning of the swine flu propaganda campaign, it was predicted that the strength of the pandemic could be measured by watching statistics from the Southern Hemisphere, where flu season runs from May to September, the southern autumn and winter months.

The Southern Hemisphere holds between 10 and 12% of the world’s population, meaning the Southern Hemisphere population would be roughly 760 million people, at 11% of the world’s total.

According to population numbers for 2008 from Nation Master.com, and statistics from the FluCount.org website, the total number of swine flu deaths, as of September 30, 2009, was only 2,386, for thirteen countries in the Southern Hemisphere, and three countries that are mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a total population of 628.3 million people who would have received no vaccine against the swine flu.

India’s population of approximately 1.17 billion people amounts to about one-sixth of the world’s population, according to the World Factbook. As of October 11, 2009, India’s swine flu death toll was a mere 385, according to the Times of India.

On October 6, 2009, the Associated Press reported that the “CDC doesn’t have an exact count of swine flu deaths and hospitalizations, but existing reports suggest the infection has caused more than 600 deaths and more than 9,000 hospitalizations since the virus was first identified in April.”

But yet the article further notes that “U.S. health authorities hope to give swine flu vaccinations to more than half the 300 million-plus population in just a few months.”

The first swine death in the army, the largest military branch with 552,425 soldiers, did not occur until September 10, 2009, according to the Associated Press on October 1, 2009. It was reported to be the only death among the 1.4 million men and women in uniform at that time.

Click here for full report

Farrakhan Says H1N1 Vaccine Is a Soft Kill Weapon

October 21, 2009

Prison Planet

By Paul Joseph Watson

Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan told an audience in Memphis on Sunday that they should refuse to take the H1N1 vaccine because it is a soft kill weapon designed to reduce global population.

Farrakhan has never shied from controversy and has previously spoken out on 9/11 being an inside job and how the international central bankers control the U.S. government.

“The Earth can’t take 6.5 billion people. We just can’t feed that many. So what are you going to do? Kill as many as you can. We have to develop a science that kills them and makes it look as though they died from some disease,” Farrakhan said, adding that many wise people won’t take the vaccine,” reports United Press International.

“The black community has become toxic and must cleanse and restore peace from within,” Farrakhan added.

As we have documented previously, the use of vaccines to sterilize minority populations and induce abortions is on the record.

In the following video clip, after an introduction by Alex Jones, women of the Akha tribe who live predominately in Thailand, describe how they miscarried shortly after taking vaccines when they were eight months pregnant. The videos below highlight the efforts of supporters of the Akha tribe to get answers from the University of Oregon and the United Nations, who provided funding for the vaccination and sterilization programs.

Further evidence of the link between vaccinations, birth control, cancer and other diseases can be researched here.

Continuing on the theme of population reduction, Farrakhan claimed that prostate cancer was a tool of such a conspiracy, because it is abnormally prevalent amongst black men. He attacked pharmaceutical companies for making vast profits from disease.

“After you take a pill to fix this, you have to take a pill to fix that,” he said. ‘Who’s getting rich off of us getting sick?’”

Click here for full report

Ethanol Linked to E.Coli in Cattle

October 7, 2009

NaturalNews

By David Gutierrez

Emerging research is suggesting that in addition to boosting food prices, ethanol production may have another unintended consequence: higher E. coli infection rates in cattle.

In light of growing concern over global warming, ethanol — produced from corn — has been touted as a potentially carbon neutral liquid fuel. Government incentives for ethanol production have provided so much encouragement to the industry that corn prices have skyrocketed.

In 2007, scientists began to notice a sudden increase in contamination of beef products with the E. coli strain O157:H7, which does not harm cows but can be lethal to humans. In that year, the U.S. government recalled beef 21 times due to O157:H7 contamination, with roughly a third of those recalls sparked by reports of human illness due to the bacteria. In contrast, only eight recalls took place in 2006, none of them associated with human illness. In 2008, O157:H7 contamination remained on the rise, with 50 percent more reported cases from January through mid-October than in the same time period of 2007.

Late in 2007, researchers from Kansas State University noticed that cattle fed a diet of distillers grain — the residue left over after the starch has been removed from corn for ethanol production — had significantly higher levels of O157:H7 in their feces than cows fed with regular grain.

The recent spike in ethanol production has resulted in an abundance of distillers grain, driving prices down until it is cheaper than corn. In addition to the cost savings, ranchers favor distillers grain because it is higher in fat and protein than regular corn, leading to fatter cattle for the same amount of feed.

In a follow-up study, researchers infected calves with O157:H7, then fed them either distillers grain or regular grain. The bacteria proliferated more rapidly in the guts of the cows fed distillers grain. This finding was later confirmed by researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Click here for the full report.

U.S. Issues $7 Trillion Debt, Supply to Stabilize

September 23, 2009

Yahoo! News

By Burton Frierson

The U.S. government will have issued $7 trillion in bonds by the time the current fiscal year ends next week, but it expects the debt deluge to stabilize by mid 2010, a Treasury official said on Wednesday.

Though markets and the economy are improving, efforts to provide a firm foundation for recovery will require increases to the U.S. Treasury’s conventional bonds going forward, as well as debt securities that are indexed to inflation.

However, this expansion may take place in an environment where investors consider leaving the safe-haven Treasury market for riskier assets, and debt issuance is likely to level off mid next year, said Treasury Acting Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets Karthik Ramanathan.

“In fiscal year 2009, which ends next week, Treasury will have issued $7 trillion in gross issuance — that’s in a 12-month period,” Ramanathan told a financial markets conference in New York.

“This issuance was necessary to meet nearly $1.7 trillion in net marketable borrowing needs, nearly $1 trillion more than what we raised last year,” he added.

DEMAND TO WANE

The heavily-indebted U.S. government has seen tremendous demand for Treasury debt securities this year due to a flight-to-quality into the safe haven assets.

However, Ramanathan said some of this demand would begin to taper off and investors were likely to favor other sectors as the financial markets recovery continues.

“Rather than being discouraged by this move to more risky assets we should actually be encouraged,” he said. “It is the natural progression from the state we were in last year.”

The collapse of Lehman Brothers investment bank in September 2008 sparked the massive migration toward safe-haven assets, though the stock market has been in a remarkable rally since the spring.

Investors have also returned in numbers to the corporate debt market, which suffered during last year’s turmoil.

There is still a long way to go toward market and economic stabilization but good progress is taking place, Ramanathan said, adding that officials were no longer focused “on LIBOR/OIS spreads on a daily or hourly basis.”

“We still have a long way to go and…there are going to be bumps along the way, but at least we’re seeing the signs of traction,” he added.

The LIBOR/OIS spread is a market measure that reflects the difference between the cost of so-called risk-free borrowing, such as that done by the U.S. Treasury, and lending to the private sector, which is normally considered less safe.

LONGER MATURITIES?

When asked whether the Treasury would consider offering a longer maturity bond in the future, Ramanathan said, “We are content with our current suite of securities.”

The Treasury’s longest maturity is the 30-year bond.

However, issuance will increase in the near term, as has been the case all year.

“Going forward we expect to increase both nominal and inflation indexed coupon issuance incrementally and gradually over the next nine months to extend the average maturity of the debt,” he said.

Due to structural changes in the budget deficit, Ramanathan said he expected the average maturity of the debt to stabilize at six to seven years, exceeding historic averages of five years.

However, he said he expected coupon debt securities, or the bonds Treasury issues, to stabilize next summer and potentially go down toward the end of next year.

Click here for the full report from Yahoo! News

Obama the Impotent

September 22, 2009

Guardian UK

By Steven Hill

Much hope has been invested in Barack Obama’s ability to strike a new course for the US following eight years of Bush administration unpopularity. Yet many in the US and abroad are impatient with the pace of progress under the Obama administration. The president made the rounds on five news talkshows on Sunday as he pressed his policies and vision, preparing for what is likely to be a difficult week.

Besides the ongoing battle over healthcare, this week sees two showdowns between Europe and the US that will reveal further slippage in American global leadership. The first showdown comes today at a UN special session on climate change in New York City; the second will come at the end of the week at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, where America and Europe will butt heads over financial system reforms designed to ensure that the AIGs of the world can never again cause an economic collapse.

Europe has been increasingly critical of America’s failures to live up to its global responsibilities. The US is not only the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases but is by far the largest per capita emitter of carbon and other pollutants. China comes close to the US in terms of total carbon emissions, but it has four times more people, who each belch far less individually. Europe, while having much the same high living standard, has an “ecological footprint” that is only half of America’s, since Europe has taken leadership in implementing renewable technologies and conservation practices.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama promised to reverse the Bush administration’s terrible ecological record. Yet so far the world has seen more symbolic gestures from the Obama administration than accomplishments. Its biggest achievement so far has been an example of disappointment. President Obama signed an executive order to increase US motor vehicle mileage standards – but only to a level that will push fuel efficiency by 2020 to a level that European and Japanese cars reached several years ago, and even China has already achieved.

Europe has announced donations of $2bn to $15bn a year for the next decade to help developing nations cope with climate warming, yet the Obama administration has not offered anything close to that amount. Europe also wants binding, near-term targets for developed nations, proposing a 20% reduction from 1990 levels by 2020, or 30% if everyone agrees. The Bush administration of course rejected such targets – but now it looks like the Obama administration is not willing to go any further. It has said such targets should be voluntary but verifiable.

With the US Senate is bogged down in the fight over reforming healthcare, American leaders have said that the senators might not move on climate legislation until 2010, well after the global climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. That drew a sharp response from John Bruton, head of the European Union delegation: “TheUnited States is just one of the 190 countries coming to this conference,” Bruton said, “but the United States emits 25% of all the greenhouse gases that the conference is trying to reduce. I submit that asking an international conference to sit around looking out the window for months, while one chamber of the legislature of one country deals with its other business, is simply not a realistic political position.”

Even Europe’s conservative politicians, such as Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, are expressing impatience: “It’s rather crucial that the US can show a credible pathway,” Hedegaard said, pointing out that the US emits twice as much carbon dioxide per capita as Denmark, without gaining anything in improving its quality of life.

That’s the start of President Obama’s week. At the end of it, President Obama will appear at a meeting in Pittsburgh of the G20, a bloc of both developed and developing nations, representing 85% of the world’s economic output and most of its population. On the table will be what reforms to help avoiding a repetition of the financial panic and global economic collapse that is perceived as having originated on Wall Street. Despite immense, taxpayer-financed rescue packages needed to overcome the crisis, the financial sector in the US is rapidly returning to business as usual. Indeed, three US banks – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan – which received some $45bn of bailout aid, each paid billions of dollars more in bonuses in 2009 than they earned in 2008.

Here again, Europe is leading, while the Obama administration is dragging its feet. Europe has proposed far-reaching reforms designed to impose new rules on executive pay and bonuses, requiring that banks link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance, and that they “claw back” any bonuses received in the face of losses. Europe wants a financial police force that has powers to slash payments where investments prove to have failed, and to force boardrooms to control levels of speculation. Europe also wants to block the exercising of stock options for set periods and expose top bank directors to penalties, following huge payouts to failed bank chiefs.

The Obama administration’s approach has been much more tepid, to say the least. The US financial industry, as expected, is fighting these reforms, but what do we make of arecent quote by President Obama questioning the need for supporting Europe’s proposals. “Why is it,” he asked during a recent interview, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or [American] football players?”

Besides the fact that President Obama was wrong – the National Football League does have salary restrictions for its players – Silicon Valley businesses and NFL quarterbacks don’t cause an economic collapse when they screw up. It’s very sobering that, if David Letterman read that quote on his TV show and asked his audience: “Who made this clueless statement, former President Bush or President Obama?” we know what the response would be. Or would have been.

In response to American foot-dragging, European leader Jean-Claude Juncker said Europe should act on the bonus issue “whether the Americans are with us or not.” He said that a Europe-only charge “will take on such force over time that the Americans will not be able to sit on the sidelines.”

Many leaders and supporters are beginning to wonder what is causing this growing gap between the Barack Obama that many people saw on the campaign trail, and the Obama they see in the White House? Beyond Obama’s oratorical skills, which excited not only American voters but people all over the world, he is mostly untested as a politician. His previous experience was only a few years in the US Senate and a few years more as a state senator. A sinking feeling is arising among many that President Obama may not be up to the task, that he may not possess the artful skills needed to accomplish even his own goals.

But it must be recognised that it’s not just Obama’s shortcomings that are causing the problem. The very structure of the American political system is at the heart of these failures. For example, thwarting Obama on a regular basis is an unrepresentative senate where “minority rule” prevails and undermines what a majority of the country may want. With two senators elected per state, regardless of population, California with more than 35 million people has the same number of senators as Wyoming with just half a million residents. This constitutional arrangement greatly favours low population states, many of which tend to be conservative, producing what one political analyst has called “a weighted vote for small-town whites in pickup trucks with gun racks.”

In addition, the senate’s use of that arcane rule known as the “filibuster” means you need 60 out of 100 votes to stop unlimited debate on a bill and move to a vote. A mere 41 senators, representing as little as 20% of the nation’s population, can stymie the other 80%. Given a vastly unrepresentative senate wielding its anti-majoritarian filibuster, it is hardly surprising that minority rule in the senate consistently undermines majority rule, whether on healthcare, financial industry reform, environmental legislation and many other policies.

Pile on to that an uncompetitive, winner-take-all electoral system, marinated in money and special interest influence, and the sclerotic US political scene is deeply troubling. None of these anti-democratic structural features are going away any time soon. Unless Barack Obama is able to demonstrate a better level of political skill than he has shown so far, everyone needs to fasten their seatbelts. The world is about to enter a challenging phase where the US – the undisputed leader of the free world for the past 60 years – is going to rapidly cede its place at the head of the line.

It appears that the wheels may be coming off the world’s post-war leader, and not even Barack Obama can stop it happening.

Click here for the full report.

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