Brexit, CETA and the beginning of the...

Update: Prime Minister Trudeau went to Brussels this past Sunday (October 3) for the public signing of the CETA. He did so after EU officials reached a compromise (Joint Interpretive Declaration) with the refusenik Walloons that sought to calm anxieties about how CETA would be interpreted and implemented. An important concession made outside the JID means Belgium will be able to seek an "opinion" from the European Court of Justice on the legality of parts of the CETA. Although such an "opinion" has been said by EU officials to be non-binding, the political impact on the ratification of CETA by all 28 member governments could be significant. Stay tuned.....

For much of the past two weeks, I have been taking in the sights, sounds, and tastes of the area around Frankfurt, Germany. It's been awesome. This is my second trip to Germany in the last few years, the previous trip being to Berlin. In fact, the photo of the Brandenburg Gate that forms the masthead of my Twitter page is from that trip. Germany regularly captures my attention because of its role in the postwar European Project, but has done so in recent years because of the prominent position it now awkwardly occupies in that Project.

On a light standard in Mainz, Germany

It is a Project that has been fraying around the edges and is, in my mind, a grim warning shot across the bow about where the politics of the global economy are headed.

The television in my hotel room has a surprising number of 24-hour news channels, including the English-language BBC and SkyNews. Yet, the language in which one watches doesn't matter, the news is all about the European Summit and the CETA-- the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU.

Regardless of the language in which I watch, it's easy to tell the news is bad.

A week ago, the tiny Belgian enclave of Wallonia (2.5 million people) spiked seven years worth of negotiations between the European Union (500 million people) and Canada by rejecting the terms of the CETA.

There's been a lot of this sort of rejection lately; the Greek debt crisis (which I've written about here a fair bit), to the near-miss of the 2014 Scottish Referendum, the economic nationalism of the U.S. presidential campaign, and, of course Brexit. There are days on which the drum-beat of bad news seems like the beginning of the end....

I'm for Hillary,.... but it wasn't easy.

I'm voting for Hillary Clinton on November 8....

A lot of readers of this humble blog may be he horrified it's taken me this long to make the obvious choice. Just to reiterate; both the major party candidates suck (to use non-scholarly assessment terminology). One sucks more than the other, but they both suck. Each sucks in different ways, but they both still suck.

And, because they do, I'm also worried about what comes after November 8. Let me explain....