Coming Soon: Trumped! (Part 5. The Aspen Strategy Group – -Hillary’s War Cabinet In Waiting)

NOTE TO READERS
I am in the throes of finishing a book on the upheaval represented by the Trump candidacy and movement. It is an exploration of how 30 years of Bubble Finance policies at the Fed, feckless interventions abroad and mushrooming Big government and debt at home have brought America to its current ruinous condition.
It also delves into the good and bad of the Trump campaign and platform and outlines a more consistent way forward based on free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, constitutional liberty, non-intervention abroad, minimalist government at home and decentralized political rule.
In order to complete the manuscript on a timely basis, I will not be doing daily posts for the next week or two. Instead, I will post excerpts from the book that crystalize its key themes and which also relate to the on-going gong show in the presidential campaigns and in the financial and economic arenas. The fifth of these is included below.
I am also working with my partners at Agora Financial on a new version of Contra Corner. More information on that will be coming early next month.
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…….. This fair summer camp for the (very) fortunate got double-whammy’d by the War Party during a weekend of ‘big think’ last August.
First there was a ‘debate’ about whether ISIS should be ‘contained’ or ‘defeated’. That was followed by a glowing progress report from General John Allen. He was President Obama’s Special Envoy for the Global Coalition of the Unwilling and Unable (to fight ISIS), and the gist of his speech was that 6,000 airstrikes since the previous August had been winning droves of hearts and minds in the Upper Euphrates valley.
Well, that number is up to 11,000 now, and there is scant sign of hearts and minds being won.
Still, General Allen’s speech was all for the edification of the pooh bahs of the foreign policy establishment who had been in town for the annual Aspen Strategy Group conclave. The latter bills itself as ‘a bipartisan foreign policy group that includes legislators, experts, journalists, policy practitioners, members of academia, and business leaders’.

This post was published at David Stockmans Contra Corner on July 27, 2016.