You cannot satisfy either energy, or electronics, or monetary silver demand with pieces of paper with the word "Silver" printed on them.
The absurdity of silver's pricing has been achieved by its removal from the monetary world from 1874 to 1964, supplemented by tidal waves of paper printed with the title "Silver" to satisfy monetary speculators.
If you need element #47 rather than an unfulfillable promise to trade, then you are out of luck. Geology is against you at any multiple of today's price less than 6.
Essentially, Brown is arguing that the Appointments Clause of Article 2 is superceded by the investiture of unelected bureaucrats with power rooted in no agreement between any State, or between people at all.
She's arguing for a self selected priesthood of dictators, as though that could last a week against a population who was never consulted on such a basis of rule without hiding behind the elected constitutional framework.
THIS IS WHY AFRICA DOES NOT HAVE, AND NEVER WILL HAVE, ANY SUCCESSFUL NATIONS.
Stripped of the veneer of legitimacy confered by Constitutional Compact, within months there will be armed physical rebellion. And within five years any of those bureaucrats found in this hemisphere will be summarily executed.
The understanding of human nature, free will, and consent, has to be entirely absent for Brown to even propose such an insane idea.
No State HAS power.
Every State BORROWS power from those they rule over.
If the do it in a way their people do not consider legitimate...then they will discover they are not especially intelligent, especially strong, or especially mighty in any way, and that they, too, are subject to the exact same human frailties they sought to leverage to impose their will on others.
If you want to rule an Asian, you outsmart him, usually in some convoluted intrigue or other.
If you want to rule an African you beat him physically, and then you beat him socially by recruiting sychophants.
If you want to rule a European you tell him of your divine right, meanwhile you distribute loot to key members of society to get them to echo the claim, while patronizing artists and story-tellers to glorify it in the common mind.
If you want to rule an American you get him to sign an agreement. And you had better live up to that agreement...
Failure to follow these formulae will result in the target populations physically tearing the offender into bloody chunks.
Notice that two of those cultural groupings' definitions of acceptable right to rule are exclusively personal...meaning they cannot easily transfer to others beyond the lifetime of the founder?
Now. Look at the history of government within those cultures and attempt to refute it.
Which line of Article 3 made the presidential appointments clause of Article 2 subject to Article 3 approval?
An "Independent" Agency with some executive and some legislative functions can be described in one word: ILLEGAL.
There is no authorization for any such agency to exist or for Congress to create one inasmuch as doing so invalidates the source of Congress' power to do anything whatsoever.
While the French Aristocrats cling to power through banking and bureaucracy, their continued rule will be numbered in years, not decades.
There will be no reconquista for France, because within 50 years their genome will have entirely disappeared through attenuation with Africans... meaning Africans will produce African children from unwilling ethnically French mothers until no French women of child bearing age exist. Thereafter France will not even be a memory.
Britain, Italy, and Germany are, at most, 20 years from an identical fate.
The US need not retain NATO alliances with allies who do not exist.
Last month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offered insight into when the light at the end of the tunnel may finally emerge for working-class households.
That would be when Irredeemable interest bearing debt ceases to be Legal Tender, and could be discounted vs money which does not require exponential increases in its quantity to remain solvent.
The financiers of this and last century are the worst, most selfish and evil humans in all of history.
They have murdered hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion souls over a century, in wars and various scams merely to preserve their rentier privilege of earning passive income that exists purely and exclusively pursuant to the retention of a ponzi scheme as a monetary system.
By comparison Hitler, Mao, and Stalin are choir boys.
If you believe that the US Judiciary, from Article 3 to every single law and regulation that allowed the judiciary to become so openly odious and corrupt, then up vote this post.
Discussion of what reforms should be can wait. First let us decide if the structure is bad enough to deserve a fundamental re-write.
Up vote if you think it is bad enough that a wholesale replacement is needed.
Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
So, since the context is the deportation of immigrants, what soldiers must decide is whether there is a Law or Constitutional specification prohibiting states and cities from importing people.
There is, after 1808 It is Article 1 Section 9:
The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight,
And the Congress has done that via the Immigration Naturalization Act (INA). No one has alleged that any particular action by the administration is anything other than authorized compliance with the INA.
It is the INA itself that some cities and states wish to nullify against popular objection.
So, based on this information, soldiers can decide for themselves whether orders to enforce it are enforcing rightful law, or are illegal.
Soldiers have never been required to follow illegal orders.
The speach of the "Seditious Six" was carefully crafted to mirror the annual "Law of Land Warfare" to which the United States subscribes, and on which all soldiers have been required to be trained annually for the past 80 years.
However, context matters.
The Six were clearly not conducting oversight.
They clearly had ideas about what activities might be illegal, and clearly wished to imply that soldiers were currently being asked to follow illegal orders.
Those determinations are ultimately not theirs to make.
Those are Article 3 or individual soldier decisions.
We repose trust in soldiers because they are common men who come from the whole body of the population and not from a single region or tradition.
We trust common soldiers, ultimately more even than judges, because their societal interests are aligned with the whole population, and do not stand to gain great power, influence, notoriety, or money from their decisions in the way that all other government institutions do.
We trust common soldiers because they are direct representatives of the People, whom legislators are selected representatives, and they are less subject to bribery or corrupt influence.
But we strive to educate soldiers to arm them to make such decisions.
Like it or not, there cannot be a better repository for judgement of the legitimacy of government activities than the People, and common soldiers are at least that.
What is critical for both soldiers and the layperson to understand is that a soldiers decision to follow, or to disobey, an order places the soldier in a position where they WILL (potentially) BE PROSECUTED NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO.
You read that right. If the public thinks their actions illegal, they will prosecute. Soldiers ARE NOT EXEMPT FROM LOCAL PROSECUTION. If their leaders think their actions are illegal, then the soldier will be court-martialed.
None of this is as great a risk to the soldier than the risks of death and dismemberment they have already volunteered to provide.
The act of making a decision is no less, or more, an act of moral courage, than those soldiers are inherently asked to perform.
And there are no people within the population or government who are better suited to make such decisions than the people who have bravely volunteered to do it, for very modest pay and generally no personal benefit whatsoever.
Ultimately, the country will do as such as these decide because it is in these young, brave, idealistic people in whom we have entrusted the Force of Arms that can settle any such issue, beyond the ability of billionaires', politicians', or potentates' foreign or domestic, ability to resist.
What the "Seditious Six" meant to imply, presumably, is that they believe the use of National Guard to quell domestic unrest is illegal due to the Posse Comatatus of 1878.
Yet they failed to inform soldiers, or provide them resources with which to make such decisions.
Instead they treated soldiers with intellectual contempt, presuming soldiers needed to substitute the implied thinking of the Six for their own.
Here is what the Posse Comatatus says:
18 U.S. Code § 1385 - Use of Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force as posse comitatus
Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
Please note two facts:
The Posse Comatatus (PC) does not say under which circumstances it is legal to use Military but refers the question to either Congressional Law OR
The Constitution.
So let's look at the Constitution's Article 2 Section 2:
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;
AND
he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.
So...the President can direct them. But for what?
Article 1 Section 8 says Congress can authorize the President to exercise force in two ways:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
And Article IV Section 4 says the US government guarantees protection against invasion, and against domestic unrest if the legislature or governor requests help.
The fundamental political argument is with reality, not conservatives.
No amount of Politics, technology, or physics can make "free stuff" possible long term.
The political divide is amongst those who believe in "free stuff" and those who do not.
The "free stuff" crowd is divided between those who believe free stuff can be achieved by government decree, and those who believe free stuff can be achieved by impoverishing the masses of humanity.
But their argument is ultimately with God:
Free stuff is not possible in this universe because The Law of Conservation of Energy works...and inducing no number of academics to declare it disproved will cause it to cease operation.
Let me know your opinion when you have learned that the United States is not now a Democracy, and has never been a Democracy, but only ever a Republic.
Until then you are too poorly informed to have an opinion worth hearing.
How can we transition from the present fiat money system to a sound-money standard like we once had in the United States and the world?
By allowing the credit ponzi to collapse. There is no alternative. There never was an alternative. There never will be an alternative.
The simple act of attempting to buy the monetary commodity necessary to return to a Hard Money standard necessitates borrowing-into-existence sums of money which immediately invalidate any price the market chooses.
Imagine the monetary anchor is Gold. It could be bitcoin or anything else. But imagine it is Gold.
Today, for all the gold in the world to have enough value to satisfy today's debts IN JUST THE DOLLAR at a 1:1 ratio, the Gold price would have to be bid up to the vicinity of $120,000 per Troy ounce.
But HOW would anyone get enough currency to bid the price upward?
They would have to BORROW it into existence...which then invalidates their 1:1 ratio of all debts vs all Gold because the process of doing it doubled the debt. See?
All currency is currently debt. Debt carries interest. Debt ceases to exist if repaid or defaulted on. Ergo...Debt inherently either grows exponentially or collapses. And the act of funding the transition to Gold (or anything else) to make the new asset have sufficient price to settle debts (as opposed to rolling them over at interest) inherently invalidates the effort by then increasing the debt, and hence the price needed for the asset to function as as debt-settlement instrument.
Do you see?
It is only possible to get there by admitting the fact thst the ponzi inherently is, and always was, bankrupt.
There is more energy in the oil shale sitting on the surface of the Green River Formation, waiting to be picked up, than humans have burned in the history of humanity multiplied by three. And theres another two-times all-the-oil-ever-burned just under it, geologically classified as "moderate" recover difficulty.
Whatever anyone told you about energy shortages in the US they were lies.
The US was the world's number 1 producer of hydrocarbons the day before the petrodollar.
And the US resumed being the largest producer the day after the petrodollar was abandoned.
Whoever told you the US lacks energy was either a fool or a liar.
The US has not constructed a new refinery in over half a century, but is still far ahead of the #2 refiner. The US "imports" oil because it must be imported to be refined, the refineries were built for the oil grades in use 70 years ago, and the Euro-Commie lobby influenced a 56 year (so-far) regulatory road block to retooling, prospecting, or new development.
The EU is militarily a collection of pushovers. 3rd World Countries can walk all over them with impunity...except they have a big ally who is militarily no joke to anyone...The US.
Their legacy power is industrial and financial.
But they financialized and regulated their industrial power out of existence.
Their banking and public sectors are the most levered in history. DB was levered 50X (ON THE BOOKS!) at the dawn of COVID. That was one of the better EU GSIBs. SG, CS were almost twice as bad. UBS was a little better.
Now EU regulators claim big Euro their leverage is single digit. They would have you believe that at least $15 trillion of bad debt disappeared without anyone going bankrupt: NO IT DIDNT.
(Note on Edit of this Comment: I am deliberately understating the amount of debt losses that must be realized to get to single-digit leverage by orders of magnitude. You know they did not deleverage because the scale of bad debts there are so large the deleveraging would have triggered world-wide debt contagion. END EDIT.)
Meanwhile, they've been engaging in attempts to trigger civil war and/or a Leftist Color Revolution in their ONE leg of power - Their militarily powerful ally.
Cut them loose of those alliances.
They are mendacious and untrustworthy as allies.
And they are the literally geopolitical 70-pound weaklings who have taken to kicking sand in the face of the US and Russia, who genuinely are heavyweights, while comically flexing muscles they entirely lack.
Ignore them. It will further discredit their unworthy authoritarian regime.
Besides, what are they going to do?
Send police? Sanctions? Their tottering banks can be bankrupted overnight (no exaggeration), their militarily will evaporate like fog on a hot day if they attempt the military commitments they have already made in Ukraine...much less if they attempt to enforce their decisions by armed force on a US Company.
What exactly will they do?
Their positions are politically those of a rich house-wife: Luxury beliefs supported by nothing but mountains of delusion, arrogance and a powerful benefactor whom they routinely abuse.
So, Mr Breton and Ms Von Der Leyen, enjoy the impotence, weakness, and general malaise you have purposely constructed from decades of self-indulgence, sloth, unintelligence, and expensive posturing. You have earned it.
In regards to your presumptions to Legal Force: They rely upon force you lack.
Now scurry back to your offices, and resume your scheming and play-acting.
"We are facing the risk of the disintegration of the international order that brought peace to the world for decades, and in this context, the dialogue between China and France is even more essential than ever,"
This is a gross overestimation of the importance of the 29.5 million ethnically French people subject to the French Government out of 8 billion people on Earth.
BTW...Did you know that only 45% of France's population of 66 million is ethnically French?
You think the Morrocans and other ethnicities give a crap about France's place or the Western international order? In case it was unclear, this last question is a litmus of your intelligence and rationality.
If birth is the litmus of citizenship then either we are an ethno-state and "Jus Sanguinis" (Law of the Blood) applies, or a purely territorial state and "Jus Solis" (Law of the Soil) applies.
For the Declaration of Independence to have any relationship to our existence as an independent nation, then our Jurisdiction to rule, as explicitly stated in the Declaration, must be the overruling factor else the Declaration is rendered irrelevant along with the Constitutional Republic created pursuant to its ideas.
Recent Comments
You cannot satisfy either energy, or electronics, or monetary silver demand with pieces of paper with the word "Silver" printed on them.
The absurdity of silver's pricing has been achieved by its removal from the monetary world from 1874 to 1964, supplemented by tidal waves of paper printed with the title "Silver" to satisfy monetary speculators.
If you need element #47 rather than an unfulfillable promise to trade, then you are out of luck. Geology is against you at any multiple of today's price less than 6.
Essentially, Brown is arguing that the Appointments Clause of Article 2 is superceded by the investiture of unelected bureaucrats with power rooted in no agreement between any State, or between people at all.
She's arguing for a self selected priesthood of dictators, as though that could last a week against a population who was never consulted on such a basis of rule without hiding behind the elected constitutional framework.
THIS IS WHY AFRICA DOES NOT HAVE, AND NEVER WILL HAVE, ANY SUCCESSFUL NATIONS.
Stripped of the veneer of legitimacy confered by Constitutional Compact, within months there will be armed physical rebellion. And within five years any of those bureaucrats found in this hemisphere will be summarily executed.
The understanding of human nature, free will, and consent, has to be entirely absent for Brown to even propose such an insane idea.
No State HAS power.
Every State BORROWS power from those they rule over.
If the do it in a way their people do not consider legitimate...then they will discover they are not especially intelligent, especially strong, or especially mighty in any way, and that they, too, are subject to the exact same human frailties they sought to leverage to impose their will on others.
If you want to rule an Asian, you outsmart him, usually in some convoluted intrigue or other.
If you want to rule an African you beat him physically, and then you beat him socially by recruiting sychophants.
If you want to rule a European you tell him of your divine right, meanwhile you distribute loot to key members of society to get them to echo the claim, while patronizing artists and story-tellers to glorify it in the common mind.
If you want to rule an American you get him to sign an agreement. And you had better live up to that agreement...
Failure to follow these formulae will result in the target populations physically tearing the offender into bloody chunks.
Notice that two of those cultural groupings' definitions of acceptable right to rule are exclusively personal...meaning they cannot easily transfer to others beyond the lifetime of the founder?
Now. Look at the history of government within those cultures and attempt to refute it.
Sovereign debt and currency crisis will soften Europe's opposition to peace considerably.
They still think they can print wealth.
They do not breed.
They do not build.
But they borrow hugely in a monetary system requiring eternal exponential debt expansion to remain solvent.
- - -
IS THE SOLUTION TO THE BLUES NOT OBVIOUS?????????
Which line of Article 3 made the presidential appointments clause of Article 2 subject to Article 3 approval?
An "Independent" Agency with some executive and some legislative functions can be described in one word: ILLEGAL.
There is no authorization for any such agency to exist or for Congress to create one inasmuch as doing so invalidates the source of Congress' power to do anything whatsoever.
Cut sling load.
They chose their fate.
France is, at most, 45% French.
While the French Aristocrats cling to power through banking and bureaucracy, their continued rule will be numbered in years, not decades.
There will be no reconquista for France, because within 50 years their genome will have entirely disappeared through attenuation with Africans... meaning Africans will produce African children from unwilling ethnically French mothers until no French women of child bearing age exist. Thereafter France will not even be a memory.
Britain, Italy, and Germany are, at most, 20 years from an identical fate.
The US need not retain NATO alliances with allies who do not exist.
That would be when Irredeemable interest bearing debt ceases to be Legal Tender, and could be discounted vs money which does not require exponential increases in its quantity to remain solvent.
The financiers of this and last century are the worst, most selfish and evil humans in all of history.
They have murdered hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion souls over a century, in wars and various scams merely to preserve their rentier privilege of earning passive income that exists purely and exclusively pursuant to the retention of a ponzi scheme as a monetary system.
By comparison Hitler, Mao, and Stalin are choir boys.
SURVEY:
If you believe that the US Judiciary, from Article 3 to every single law and regulation that allowed the judiciary to become so openly odious and corrupt, then up vote this post.
Discussion of what reforms should be can wait. First let us decide if the structure is bad enough to deserve a fundamental re-write.
Up vote if you think it is bad enough that a wholesale replacement is needed.
They have learned the same lessons.
They work for the same mob bosses.
The difference is that one of the two PRETENDS they do not.
The ither side makes no pretenses.
So, since the context is the deportation of immigrants, what soldiers must decide is whether there is a Law or Constitutional specification prohibiting states and cities from importing people.
There is, after 1808 It is Article 1 Section 9:
And the Congress has done that via the Immigration Naturalization Act (INA). No one has alleged that any particular action by the administration is anything other than authorized compliance with the INA.
It is the INA itself that some cities and states wish to nullify against popular objection.
So, based on this information, soldiers can decide for themselves whether orders to enforce it are enforcing rightful law, or are illegal.
Soldiers have never been required to follow illegal orders.
The speach of the "Seditious Six" was carefully crafted to mirror the annual "Law of Land Warfare" to which the United States subscribes, and on which all soldiers have been required to be trained annually for the past 80 years.
However, context matters.
The Six were clearly not conducting oversight.
They clearly had ideas about what activities might be illegal, and clearly wished to imply that soldiers were currently being asked to follow illegal orders.
Those determinations are ultimately not theirs to make.
Those are Article 3 or individual soldier decisions.
We repose trust in soldiers because they are common men who come from the whole body of the population and not from a single region or tradition.
We trust common soldiers, ultimately more even than judges, because their societal interests are aligned with the whole population, and do not stand to gain great power, influence, notoriety, or money from their decisions in the way that all other government institutions do.
We trust common soldiers because they are direct representatives of the People, whom legislators are selected representatives, and they are less subject to bribery or corrupt influence.
But we strive to educate soldiers to arm them to make such decisions.
Like it or not, there cannot be a better repository for judgement of the legitimacy of government activities than the People, and common soldiers are at least that.
What is critical for both soldiers and the layperson to understand is that a soldiers decision to follow, or to disobey, an order places the soldier in a position where they WILL (potentially) BE PROSECUTED NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO.
You read that right. If the public thinks their actions illegal, they will prosecute. Soldiers ARE NOT EXEMPT FROM LOCAL PROSECUTION. If their leaders think their actions are illegal, then the soldier will be court-martialed.
None of this is as great a risk to the soldier than the risks of death and dismemberment they have already volunteered to provide.
The act of making a decision is no less, or more, an act of moral courage, than those soldiers are inherently asked to perform.
And there are no people within the population or government who are better suited to make such decisions than the people who have bravely volunteered to do it, for very modest pay and generally no personal benefit whatsoever.
Ultimately, the country will do as such as these decide because it is in these young, brave, idealistic people in whom we have entrusted the Force of Arms that can settle any such issue, beyond the ability of billionaires', politicians', or potentates' foreign or domestic, ability to resist.
What the "Seditious Six" meant to imply, presumably, is that they believe the use of National Guard to quell domestic unrest is illegal due to the Posse Comatatus of 1878.
Yet they failed to inform soldiers, or provide them resources with which to make such decisions.
Instead they treated soldiers with intellectual contempt, presuming soldiers needed to substitute the implied thinking of the Six for their own.
Here is what the Posse Comatatus says:
Please note two facts:
So let's look at the Constitution's Article 2 Section 2:
AND
So...the President can direct them. But for what?
Article 1 Section 8 says Congress can authorize the President to exercise force in two ways:
And Article IV Section 4 says the US government guarantees protection against invasion, and against domestic unrest if the legislature or governor requests help.
What about those Congressional Laws?
The fundamental political argument is with reality, not conservatives.
No amount of Politics, technology, or physics can make "free stuff" possible long term.
The political divide is amongst those who believe in "free stuff" and those who do not.
The "free stuff" crowd is divided between those who believe free stuff can be achieved by government decree, and those who believe free stuff can be achieved by impoverishing the masses of humanity.
But their argument is ultimately with God:
Free stuff is not possible in this universe because The Law of Conservation of Energy works...and inducing no number of academics to declare it disproved will cause it to cease operation.
Let me know your opinion when you have learned that the United States is not now a Democracy, and has never been a Democracy, but only ever a Republic.
Until then you are too poorly informed to have an opinion worth hearing.
Financialization transforms managers, entrepreneurs and engineers into gamblers.
And it transforms wage laborers first into beggars then into Barbarians.
Finance diverts the energy of human endeavor away from life-reinforcing productivity into life-destructive behaviors.
By allowing the credit ponzi to collapse. There is no alternative. There never was an alternative. There never will be an alternative.
The simple act of attempting to buy the monetary commodity necessary to return to a Hard Money standard necessitates borrowing-into-existence sums of money which immediately invalidate any price the market chooses.
Imagine the monetary anchor is Gold. It could be bitcoin or anything else. But imagine it is Gold.
Today, for all the gold in the world to have enough value to satisfy today's debts IN JUST THE DOLLAR at a 1:1 ratio, the Gold price would have to be bid up to the vicinity of $120,000 per Troy ounce.
But HOW would anyone get enough currency to bid the price upward?
They would have to BORROW it into existence...which then invalidates their 1:1 ratio of all debts vs all Gold because the process of doing it doubled the debt. See?
All currency is currently debt. Debt carries interest. Debt ceases to exist if repaid or defaulted on. Ergo...Debt inherently either grows exponentially or collapses. And the act of funding the transition to Gold (or anything else) to make the new asset have sufficient price to settle debts (as opposed to rolling them over at interest) inherently invalidates the effort by then increasing the debt, and hence the price needed for the asset to function as as debt-settlement instrument.
Do you see?
It is only possible to get there by admitting the fact thst the ponzi inherently is, and always was, bankrupt.
And waiting simply increases the damage.
Any other bright questions?
Why?
There is more energy in the oil shale sitting on the surface of the Green River Formation, waiting to be picked up, than humans have burned in the history of humanity multiplied by three. And theres another two-times all-the-oil-ever-burned just under it, geologically classified as "moderate" recover difficulty.
Whatever anyone told you about energy shortages in the US they were lies.
The US was the world's number 1 producer of hydrocarbons the day before the petrodollar.
And the US resumed being the largest producer the day after the petrodollar was abandoned.
Whoever told you the US lacks energy was either a fool or a liar.
The US has not constructed a new refinery in over half a century, but is still far ahead of the #2 refiner. The US "imports" oil because it must be imported to be refined, the refineries were built for the oil grades in use 70 years ago, and the Euro-Commie lobby influenced a 56 year (so-far) regulatory road block to retooling, prospecting, or new development.
The EU is flexing its Soviet-CCP-Style muscle.
The Problem: They dont have any.
The EU is militarily a collection of pushovers. 3rd World Countries can walk all over them with impunity...except they have a big ally who is militarily no joke to anyone...The US.
Their legacy power is industrial and financial.
But they financialized and regulated their industrial power out of existence.
Their banking and public sectors are the most levered in history. DB was levered 50X (ON THE BOOKS!) at the dawn of COVID. That was one of the better EU GSIBs. SG, CS were almost twice as bad. UBS was a little better.
Now EU regulators claim big Euro their leverage is single digit. They would have you believe that at least $15 trillion of bad debt disappeared without anyone going bankrupt: NO IT DIDNT.
(Note on Edit of this Comment: I am deliberately understating the amount of debt losses that must be realized to get to single-digit leverage by orders of magnitude. You know they did not deleverage because the scale of bad debts there are so large the deleveraging would have triggered world-wide debt contagion. END EDIT.)
Meanwhile, they've been engaging in attempts to trigger civil war and/or a Leftist Color Revolution in their ONE leg of power - Their militarily powerful ally.
Cut them loose of those alliances.
They are mendacious and untrustworthy as allies.
And they are the literally geopolitical 70-pound weaklings who have taken to kicking sand in the face of the US and Russia, who genuinely are heavyweights, while comically flexing muscles they entirely lack.
Ignore them. It will further discredit their unworthy authoritarian regime.
Besides, what are they going to do?
Send police? Sanctions? Their tottering banks can be bankrupted overnight (no exaggeration), their militarily will evaporate like fog on a hot day if they attempt the military commitments they have already made in Ukraine...much less if they attempt to enforce their decisions by armed force on a US Company.
What exactly will they do?
Their positions are politically those of a rich house-wife: Luxury beliefs supported by nothing but mountains of delusion, arrogance and a powerful benefactor whom they routinely abuse.
So, Mr Breton and Ms Von Der Leyen, enjoy the impotence, weakness, and general malaise you have purposely constructed from decades of self-indulgence, sloth, unintelligence, and expensive posturing. You have earned it.
In regards to your presumptions to Legal Force: They rely upon force you lack.
Now scurry back to your offices, and resume your scheming and play-acting.
This is a gross overestimation of the importance of the 29.5 million ethnically French people subject to the French Government out of 8 billion people on Earth.
BTW...Did you know that only 45% of France's population of 66 million is ethnically French?
You think the Morrocans and other ethnicities give a crap about France's place or the Western international order? In case it was unclear, this last question is a litmus of your intelligence and rationality.
If birth is the litmus of citizenship then either we are an ethno-state and "Jus Sanguinis" (Law of the Blood) applies, or a purely territorial state and "Jus Solis" (Law of the Soil) applies.
For the Declaration of Independence to have any relationship to our existence as an independent nation, then our Jurisdiction to rule, as explicitly stated in the Declaration, must be the overruling factor else the Declaration is rendered irrelevant along with the Constitutional Republic created pursuant to its ideas.