The (American) Idiot's Guide to Brexit

well the title says it all. Enjoy. Americans wrote it. Just saying...

The (American) Idiot’s Guide to Brexit

Well, idiots seem to grow like weed. It can make you high and take over the vegetable beds. I don't know if I like the article, but then I read all sorts of things and get happily ever more idiotically dumb. Sigh.

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riverlover's picture

I have discovered (not novel) that compost piles grow flies and potatoes. I have yet to reinvent the wheel, although I understand the concept and its utility.

So they are assholes. Sigh.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

Not Henry Kissinger's picture

EU membership is good for the British economy. Or so says David Cameron, President Obama, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and most independent economists and large businesses.

If these people were for it, only idiots need wonder why the majority was against it.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

the only thing better for Business than interlocking trade deals is War, which crushes the little people to fine powder even faster than austerity.

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Only connect. - E.M. Forster

darkmatter's picture

In the long run.

So it's the other way around, in my view.

Putting what's good for business first always points us towards chaos and makes peace impossible. Eventually.

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The globalists and supporters of the status quo definitely are upset that 52 percent of Britains chose not to surrender.

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Those framing things and trying to create the narrative of 'how awful those in Britain who voted to leave the EU are' are just as bad as the people over at KOS who despise and insult Sanders supporters.

The hypocrisy exhibited by these people shouldn't be surprising, but it is definitely amusing.

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darkmatter's picture

I will say this. Back in the late 1990s, I was in favor of the euro. I didn't look into the details, and I didn't really process what a monetary union without a fiscal union would mean. I accepted the rhetoric of international cooperation bandied about, and I thought it would be neat, if on vacation in Europe, to not have to change currencies all the time.

I regarded the UK refusal of the euro as a retrograde, ethnocentric, irrational clinging to crown and country, etc. And if one did a poll at the time, it could well be that the British refusal of the euro was, in large measure, due to those nationalistic factors and not due to sober economic analysis.

I understand that the EU and the euro are not exactly the same debate, but like many here, I have come to have a great deal of skepticism towards (neoliberal) economic centralization. If centralization led to greater democracy, greater justice, more shared prosperity, then we would all be for it.

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

I got into a chat with a local attorney and asked him how the Euro was working out.

He shrugged and said, "Everything just got more expensive."

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

darkmatter's picture

A Guinness cost me something like the equivalent of 8 dollars.

I was trying to be faithful to my Irish ancestors and drink to excess, but you can't do that in such circumstances....

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

in the abstract,

but the consequences of poor policy become suddenly very real when they hit you square in the ancestry.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

WindDancer13's picture

the EU or Brexit and all the ramifications for Britain or for anywhere. What this article boiled down from me is that at some point 28 countries decided that they should create a benevolent despot because they were too stupid not to go to war with their neighbors.

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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--Aristotle
If there is no struggle there is no progress.--Frederick Douglass

Lookout's picture

I thought this fellows analysis was insightful. It is about 12 min.
Published on Jun 24, 2016

Michael Hudson argues that military interventions in the Middle East created refugee streams to Europe that were in turn used by the anti-immigrant right to stir up xenophobia

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-MraD1Ys3Q]

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

mimi's picture

in yesterday's article: 2008 All Over Again

The war against international finance, and the array of intergovernmental systems and institutions used to enforce the predatory beast of global speculation, has begun. The question is, who will win? Will it be the banks, which intend to continue to pillage economies? Or will it be popular movements that will rise up to cancel debt and reinstate economic and political sovereignty?

Hudson sees the crisis in Europe as, in part, spawned by the U.S. intervention in the Middle East and the Ukraine.

“If there is anyone who is responsible for the Brexit, it is Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,” he said. “They destroyed Libya. They turned over Libyan weapons to [Islamic State], al-Qaida and [Nusra Front]. It was their war in Syria, where many of these weapons ended up, which created the massive exodus of refugees into Europe. This exodus exacerbated nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Clinton and Obama are also responsible for a huge exodus of Ukrainians. This is all a response to American war policy in the Middle East and the Ukraine. In central Europe, with the expansion of NATO, Washington is meanwhile demanding that governments spend billions on weapons rather than on recovering the economy.”
...
The eurozone prohibits central banks from financing government budget deficits. Countries in the eurozone have, in effect, surrendered economic and political sovereignty. They cannot create money to cope with their budget deficits or pump money into the economy. This, Hudson said, has “turned the eurozone into a dead zone since 2008.”

“The eurozone now shrinks economies through debt deflation,” said Hudson, author of “Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.” “That is one of the factors that led the British and the euroskeptic parties to say, ‘We don’t want to be a part of a Europe run by banks that impose debt deflation. We want governments that can create their own money to re-inflate the economy and build economic recovery.’ As long as a country remains part of the eurozone, bankers will continue to lower wages and wipe out pension funds to pay bondholders. The Brexit vote reverses this rotten program. There are now calls from the Netherlands, France and Austria for a similar referendum.”
...
Britain’s withdrawal from the eurozone will damage not only the international banking system, but hamper Washington’s aggressive policies toward Russia and the Ukraine. Britain has served within the EU as an American proxy. German Social Democratic Party leaders, who have accused NATO of warmongering, have already called for the lifting of the sanctions against Russia. And there is a growing reluctance to continue supporting endless war in the Middle East.

By breaking with the European bankers, you also ultimately break with the American domination of Europe through NATO,” Hudson said.
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If the liberal class, embodied by the Democratic Party and bankrupt socialist parties in countries such as France, continue to serve the bankers, the right wing will have an easy route to power. This will be true in Europe and the United States.

There you go. Helps a lot to listen and read Hudson.
Thanks.

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Lookout's picture

was interesting, and the fact that many see the US as pushing the EU into a neoliberal procorporate entity.

Thanks for Hedges article!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

edg's picture

Is part of the problem that the US pushed the EU very hard to absorb Eastern European nations before they were politically and economically ready to join so that we could poke our thumb in Russia's eye and keep Cold War 2.0 rolling along?

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terriertribe's picture

I think you could say that, yes.

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Now interviewing signature candidates. Apply within.

hester's picture

at Naked Capitalism

with this great interview w Mark Blyth
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwK0jeJ8wxg width:560 height:315]

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Don't believe everything you think.

To my hedge fund friends, the Hamptons are an indefensible position. Eventually the people will come after you."

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terriertribe's picture

Is chock full of things to think about.

The Los Angeles Times‘ Vincent Bevins, in an outstanding and concise analysis, wrote that “both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for thirty years”; in particular, “since the 1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.” The British journalist Tom Ewing, in a comprehensive Brexit explanation, said the same dynamic driving the UK vote prevails in Europe and North America as well: “the arrogance of neoliberal elites in constructing a politics designed to sideline and work around democracy while leaving democracy formally intact.”

Got to love that "while leaving democracy formally intact." Awfully kind of them, yes?

It's a long article, please go read it. Plenty in it that applies over here, too.

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Now interviewing signature candidates. Apply within.

"There's been no world war since the eu". No, there's been no world war since NATO (& the UN, but somehow I see it as less effective).

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