"Germans therefore keep exporting easily and running up a surplus while the Italians struggle and go deeper in to debt." Italian opposition parties want to ditch the euro and hope Mr Renzi's defeat will pave the way for a return to the lira but Mr Hague warned there is no easy way out of the eurozone.

He wrote: "Mr Renzi's defeat has not made the eventual break-up of the euro more certain, because that is coming anyway. It has simply made it more obvious. Leaving the euro, however, is a far more difficult problem than leaving the EU." 

"As everyone now knows, Article 50 provides for leaving the latter. It may be a vague and inadequate rule, on which our Supreme Court is now deliberating at length, but it is nevertheless a rule that provides for getting out. The eurozone has no such rule. This is a burning building you are never meant to leave. What is more, you are barricaded in."

On that Monday, the 538 members of the Electoral College will gather in their state capitals in all 50 states to formally elect the next president. Throughout US history electors have voted according to the will of the people more than 99 percent of the time, but in 2016 there is a concerted effort to persuade Republican electors not to vote for Trump.

If 37 Republican electors can be convinced to vote for someone other than Trump, that would keep Trump under the 270 vote threshold needed to win and it would throw the election into the House of Representatives.

Most people had considered this to be a longshot, but on Monday a Republican elector named Christopher Suprun publicly announced in the New York Times that he will not cast his vote for Donald Trump. On the other side, there are at least 8 Democratic electors that have already publicly pledged to switch their votes from Hillary Clinton to a compromise Republican alternative to Trump.

So we already know that there will be quite a few “faithless electors” on December 19th. The question will be whether or not they are able to rally enough electors to their cause to deny Donald Trump the presidency.

By injecting additional funds into the economy during a time of crisis, he believed that the severity of recessions and depressions could be reduced.  This approach ultimately become known as “Keynesian economics”, and in the post-World War II era virtually the entire world embraced it at least to some degree. 

Keynesian economists correctly point out that there is a “multiplier effect” to government spending.  In other words, when the government spends money it ends up in the hands of ordinary people.  In turn, those people spend that money on various goods and services that they need, thus boosting overall economic activity.  And the more the money circulates, the more the economy is stimulated. 

So one dollar of additional government spending does not just add one dollar to GDP.  Rather, the impact on GDP is often significantly greater than that. Of course the bad news is that whenever the government borrows money it is stealing consumption from the future.  So we are literally destroying the future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have in order to make the present look a little bit brighter.

At this moment, the US national debt is a whopping $19,901,545,151,126.51, and it will cross the 20 trillion dollar mark by the time Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20th. But when Barack Obama was inaugurated, the national debt was only 10.6 trillion dollars.  That means that we have added about 9.3 trillion dollars to the debt since that time.

So we have borrowed and spent 9.3 trillion dollars under Obama that we did not have.  But because of the “multiplier effect”, that 9.3 trillion dollars actually had a far greater impact on the US economy …without all of this debt that Barack Obama and Congress have been getting us into, we would be in the worst economic depression in US history right now.

Donald Trump is talking about cutting taxes and reducing regulations, and all of those things are good, but ultimately those measures are not going to matter that much. What is going to matter is what Donald Trump decides to do about our exploding debt. If Donald Trump continues to steal money from future generations of Americans at the same pace that Barack Obama has been doing, he will literally be destroying the future of America.  It will be a crime on a scale that is almost beyond words, and if they get a chance to do it, future generations of Americans will look back and curse him for what he has done to us.

So Donald Trump is really in a no-win situation when it comes to the economy. As a nation we have been consuming far more wealth than we produce for a very, very long time, and the only way that we have been able to do this is because we have been able to go into so much debt. But now a day of reckoning is fast approaching, and I am not sure if Donald Trump even realizes that he will soon be faced with some incredibly heartbreaking choices.

In fact, Allison takes that rhetoric one step further. While acting as the head of the Cato Institute, Allison published several theses indicating that the Federal Reserve was obsolete and needed to be abolished as it restricts power from the people and allows billionaire cronies to run banks globally. “I would get rid of the Federal Reserve because the volatility in the economy is primarily caused by the Fed,” Allison wrote in 2014 for the Cato Journal.

As an alternative, Allison argues that if we allow the market to regulate itself, it would be preferable to the Federal Reserve harming the stability of the financial system. “When the Fed is radically changing the money supply, distorting interest rates, and over-regulating the financial sector, it makes rational economic calculation difficult,” Allison wrote. “Markets do form bubbles, but the Fed makes them worse.”

Trump’s meeting is more than notable, it is almost groundbreaking. No president has dared to take power away from the Rothschilds’ and other billionaire elites that control all of the world’s banks. We could possibly be taking steps to eliminate one of the most corrupt banking schemes to ever take hold in this country.

Elaborating ways to fill the gaps in the ranks of the military (Bundeswehr), which is set to get an enlargement in the coming years, was one of the main points of the meeting. “The minister increasingly wants to attract more school leavers without a diploma for the Bundeswehr,” Handelsblatt writes. According to the plan, those students will get an ability to graduate while already fulfilling their military service.

“We find that it’s important to give everyone a chance,” von der Leyen stressed as quoted by the news outlet. After getting rid of the compulsory military service in 2011, the Bundeswehr was reduced to a number of almost 177,000. Yet in July the German army introduced its new roadmap to the national parliament, stating that the country has “a responsibility to help shape the world order.”

The Catholic presentation sought to assess whether and to what extent religions can play a role in the resolution of conflicts and the construction of a new international order based on justice, peace and the care of Creation. In affirming the divine sanctity of human life, our religions demand respect for each person’s life and identity. This must be guaranteed to refugees and migrants, also by receiving them in such a way that the rights and freedoms of all are promoted.

The Jewish presentation surveyed the various factors that lead to aggression, violence and war, and sought to define criteria and values available in particular to the Abrahamic traditions in combatting these – specifically, the sanctity of the human person, the principle of free will, and appreciation of diversity as a reflection of the Divine Presence and Will.

In discussion on current issues, the principle of universal respect for the holy sites of each religion was affirmed; and note was made of attempts to deny the historical attachment of the Jewish People to its holiest site. The bilateral commission vigorously cautioned against the political and polemical denial of biblical history and called on all nations and faiths to respect this historic religious bond.

But all that schmoozing was merely the warm-up for Trump’s escapades over the weekend. First, he issued a White House invitation to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, the man who called President Barack Obama a son of a bitch and who is leading a killing campaign against drug dealers in his country that borders on a war crime.

Following that, the president-elect “took a call” from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen – and shattered a diplomatic consensus between Washington, Taipei and Beijing that has been in place since 1979. That year the United States recognized the People’s Republic of China and cut ties with Taiwan, a diplomatic situation that remains in place.

In response to the spate of condemnation following the call, Trump defended himself on his favorite medium, Twitter. He pointed out the absurdity of the United States selling billions of dollars in arms to Taiwan while he’s forbidden to take a call from that country’s president.

Indeed, the President elect’s undiplomatic behavior put the spotlight on one of the international community’s many agreed-upon lies. It’s not just that Taiwan is one of the largest importers of US weapons, but that Washington is obliged by treaty to defend it against a Chinese invasion. (Though the issue is defined by sufficiently vague diplomatic jargon to leave America’s options open and deter Taiwan from issuing a unilateral declaration of Independence.)

As Eurozone finance ministers prepare to meet in Brussels on Monday to discuss short-term debt relief for Greece, Schaeuble delivered an ultimatum to Athens: the country, which already has a staggering €330 billion ($349 billion) debt burden, must reform or face an exit from the EU.

“Athens must finally implement the needed reforms,” Schaeuble told Bild am Sonntag on Sunday. “If Greece wants to stay in the euro, there is no way around it – in fact completely regardless of the debt level.” Athens has received three international bailouts since 2010, and its debt, at about 180 percent of GDP, is still the highest in the Eurozone, amounting to over €300 billion of emergency loans.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are a concern for a number of reasons. When consumed, GMOs have been shown to cause gastrointestinal problems, increase cancer risk, and even silence human genes, not to mention their harmful effects on the environment and endangered species such as bees. Within the US, there is also a dearth of safety testing as most tests that show that GMOs are “safe” are short-term studies, lasting only a matter of months. Longer-term studies, even those conducted for just a few months longer than industry-funded studies, have found that the consumption of GMOs causes serious problems, such as an increase in tumor risk.

For those US consumers who are rightly concerned about the presence of GMOs in their food, mandatory GMO labeling is one solution that gives consumers the right to know what is in their food while not affecting the GMO food purchases of those who support biotechnology.

A handful of US states have successfully passed GMO labeling laws such as Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont. Similar initiatives in other states, like California, only failed due to the massive amounts of money funneled to the opposition by Industrial Agriculture and Food companies as well as the corporations who create GMO seeds and associated agrochemicals, such as Monsanto.

The bill, under the title S.764 or “A bill to reauthorize and amend the National Sea Grant College Program Act, and for other purposes,” skipped a house vote and was voted on by the Senate on July 7th, a month after it had been introduced. Obama signed and enacted the legislation a few weeks later on July 29th with little fanfare. All of this took place while media attention was focused on Brexit as well as the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, marking the opening stages of the general election.

Regardless of how one feels about GMOs, the passage of this law in such an under-the-radar manner is a chilling blow to state’s rights. The nullification of state laws, especially one passed in several states, should, at the very least, be an issue debated upon by the entire Congress and the American public at large. However, some senators, and the president himself, chose to pass this law without so much as a peep while the populace was conveniently distracted by the US election circus.