Partial results from the poll, released Wednesday, found voters feeling more positively about the economy and of Mr. Obama's handling of it. Some 30% believed the country was headed in the right direction, up eight percentage points from a month ago. Some 60% said the country was on the wrong track, down from 69% in December and from 74% in October. The question is considered an important measure of voters' mood. − Wall Street Journal
Dominant Social Theme: President Barack Obama is doing better and better based on the strength of the economy.
Free-Market Analysis: It is really incredible to watch this meme flourish. We believe that the economic "good news" about the US economy, as mentioned in this Wall Street Journal article excerpted above is aimed primarily at furthering the hopes of President Barack Obama for a second term.
We have written about this several times before as well. President Barack Obama, like other presidents before him, is evidently and obviously committed to a globalist and authoritarian agenda. It is fairly clear that his lack of transparency about his background has to do with the agenda he is serving; that would be our suspicion (and the suspicion of many others) anyway.
Live from the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Mark Spelman, Managing Director, Strategy - Accenture, shares insights from a new Accenture study - Fast Forward to Growth: Seizing opportunities in high-growth markets. − YouTube
Dominant Social Theme: Globalism is the natural evolution of the current sociopolitical and economic environment.
Free-Market Analysis: Live from Davos – as if that's supposed to make us impressed – someone called Mark Spelman provides an unsettling vision of what the world's elites have in mind for the next ten years.
A quick summary of the video presentation provides us with numerous power elite dominant social themes – those fear-based promotions that frighten middle classes into giving up power and wealth to designated globalist facilities like the UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.
In this case, Spelman is using the language of power elite promotions to structure a world that flows logically from current globalist developments. These developments – such as the growth of the economies of the BRICs – seem logical but are actually manipulated occurrences.
World experts urge UN to take up mental health ... Mental illness and drug abuse can wreak havoc in global societies and economies, and the UN General Assembly should devote a special session to the matter, global health experts said on Tuesday. Every country in the world is affected by the burden of mental, neurological and substance use (MNS) disorders, but often sufferers face discrimination and human rights abuse, said the article in PLoS Medicine. ... Lead authors were Vikram Patel from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Judith Bass from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in the United States. Investment is needed in three key areas, they argued: expanding knowledge about mental health disorders, better access to evidence-based programs of care and treatment, and protection of human rights. A list of key needs to be addressed and steps to take could be enshrined in a "People's Charter for Mental Health" accounting for input from policy makers, families, researchers and other advocates. – AFP
Dominant Social Theme: The UN is the logical place to address the issue of mental health worldwide. When you need a problem solved, this is the place to turn!
Free-Market Analysis: So now the United Nations is to take up the issue of mental health on the way to creating a "People's Charter for Mental Health." But to us, this isn't a necessary antidote to another case of universal human suffering. It's merely the latest example of a fear-based, power-elite dominant social theme.
We try to explain on a regular basis how these fear-based promotions work and why they are so important to the control that a tiny group of humans exercises over others. The creation of a narrative is perhaps the most important part of an elite's toolkit when it comes to controlling others.
MegaUpload Is Now Launching a Music Service Called MegaBox ...There's another gigantic wrinkle in the MegaUpload drama. Not only is MegaUpload fighting tooth-and-nail against Universal Music Group, but they're now planning the launch of a cloud-based music locker, download store, and do-it-yourself artist service. It's called MegaBox, and it's already up in beta with listed partners 7digital, Gracenote, Rovi, and Amazon MP3. Actually, this is technically a relaunch of an earlier concept, and a perfect re-stab at major label opponents. "UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings," MegaUpload founder Kim 'Dotcom' Schmitz told Torrentfreak this week. – Digital Musical Upload
Dominant Social Theme: Megaupload was just a bunch of crooks on the make. We're glad we got 'em, and you should be too.
Free-Market Analysis: Whoops. Turns out that Megaupload was planning to launch its own music service to compete with Hollywood's music monopoly – and that may have been the reason for the recent raid that shut down one of the largest websites in the world.
This news has percolated on the Internet – of course – via a slew of extraordinary articles and even found a perch on Alex Jones popular anti-elite website. It is an extraordinary item because it shows that the Megaupload "takedown" by the US Justice Dept and the FBI may be even more complicated than it already seems.
Isn't it just as likely that Britain will hit the rocks and break up? ... In the period immediately after the Costa Concordia hit a rock off the coast of Tuscany, the behaviour of the passengers and crew has given us all sorts of insights into the eternal glories and failings of human nature. Perhaps the most symbolically pregnant gesture took place in the dining room. When the crockery started to slide from the tables, as the ship began to list, the waiters just picked it up and put it back. "It is nothing!" they said soothingly. "It is an electrical fault. Tutto va bene and what would madame like for the antipasto?"... I am like the Concordia waiters, in that I can't really believe, somehow, that we can be set on a course for destruction. But look at the facts, my friends. Look at that submerged reef marked "devo max", or fiscal independence for Scotland. If you can unpick the fiscal union, what is there to maintain the monetary union? And if you unpick monetary union — as George Osborne rightly points out — then political union is dead ... That is the nature of slo-mo disasters: they can change very quickly, from being an outlandish theoretical possibility to a predestined inevitability. – Boris Johnson, UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.
Free-Market Analysis: The Telegraph's Boris Johnson has written an interesting article on the potential break-up of Britain, comparing it to the unexpected Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster.
In a sense this article by Johnson is part of a larger power elite dominant social theme, in our view. The rhetoric of fear-based promotions by various Anglosphere mouth-pieces has grown a good deal more shrill of late.
"The EU has delivered on its threat to ban the import of crude oil from Iran, in response to its nuclear programme. The latest round of sanctions prohibits any new oil contracts, while allowing for existing deals to run until July. But Tehran is apparently finding ways to keep business pumping. Reports say Iran will keep supplying one of its biggest customers − India − but will get payment in gold instead of dollars." – RT
Dominant Social Theme: The world is in a downward spiral. So many things going wrong at once. Bad luck!
Free-Market Analysis: We've waited a bit to comment once more on what may be an upcoming Iranian war, but that's only because we wanted to see if a pattern was emerging that we could make sense of.
The power elite, as we see it, is increasingly threatened by what we call the Internet Reformation. To counteract it, the elites have turned to the same playbook they used to try to counteract the first big information revolution that occurred after the discovery of mechanical printing (the Gutenberg Press).
Hockey is a game I know – rather well, actually. As a young person I excelled at the sport and even left home when I was 14 to live and play in a city that offered better coaching and a brighter road to the NHL. Yes, like many other young people growing up in Canada, I was highly infected with a burning desire to don my skates whenever possible and hit the ice ... preferably outdoors.
As I grew older and suffered through many knee injuries the prospect of playing professionally began to dim. Today I can truthfully say that I am thankful for that, although I certainly didn't always feel that way.
See, I have had many friends and teammates go on to join the upper ranks of hockeydom. I've watched as their candles lit and then burnt out, and then, sadly, saw how unprepared they were for life beyond the rink.
Perhaps this is a fate that is looming for one Tim Thomas, the goaltender who more than anyone else is responsible for the Boston Bruins winning the NHL's coveted prize and every young player's dream, the Stanley Cup.
Why does the TSA annoy so many of us? Not having the resources to do a survey, I resort here to what might be called educated speculation. I suspect it is because free men and women consider it invasive for government agents to order them around − pat them down, make them endure electronic surveillance, being ordered around by TSA agents, etc. − unless they give their permission.
Just because someone embarks upon air travel it doesn't follow that such permission can be inferred, especially if the search is conducted by government agents. If a private carrier states up front that utilizing it will require submitting to various intrusions, there is a difference. People may require of visitors to their homes or business establishments to submit to certain reasonable precautionary measures, say, for hygienic or security purposes. That's because their home belongs to them and they may impose conditions for accessing it to others even if these others do not quite understand the rationale behind the measures to which they are subjected. They can go elsewhere. But when government imposes such requirements, given the overwhelming force it wields and its monopolistic powers, certain due process provisions must be met. One cannot escape the government since it runs air traffic. Thus, not unless there is solid reason to suspect someone of misconduct or ill will may they be interfered with by the government. Otherwise the policy is arbitrary.
Stocks Are Cheaper Than They've Been in Two Decades ... U.S. stocks are trading at their cheapest levels since at least 1990, according to such commonly used valuations as price-to-earnings and price-to-book ratios as well as dividend yield, Bespoke Investment Group says. This realization will lift the S&P 500 Index by 11 percent to 1,400 this year or maybe more, according to the research firm's 2012 outlook report. "The S&P 500 is currently trading below its historical average P/E and P/B ratios, and these ratios are also at their lowest levels in the careers of a large percentage of money managers," wrote strategists Paul Hickey and Justin Waters. – Fast Money/CNBC
Dominant Social Theme: Now is a golden buying opportunity!
Free-Market Analysis: OK, stocks are cheaper than they've been in 20 years. But cheaper than what?
This is actually a kind of power elite dominant social theme, in our view. We used to believe in the myth of the ever-abundant stock market but not anymore. Nonetheless, equity drummers keep pounding away. Stocks are just like any other widget. Sometimes they're expensive according to historical indicators and sometimes they're cheap. When they're cheap you buy. When they're expensive you ... hold.
In the wonderful world of brokerage, the wisest customers never sell. In about five years from now – if the current system survives, and we doubt it will – there'll be a virtual flood of articles about the few brave souls who managed to hold onto their equity positions for the past 15 years without flinching.
George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War ... Has the great short seller gone soft? Well, yes. Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. "At times like these, survival is the most important thing," he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn't just mean it's time to protect your assets. He means it's time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of "evil." Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether. – Daily Beast
Dominant Social Theme: Soros is very worried about the state of the world, and we should be, too. Maybe Davos will save us! Or the Bilderbergs?
Free-Market Analysis: The Daily Beast is out with an article that ticks many of the boxes of dominant social themes of the elite. As we have often explained, the power elite works via fear-based promotions that frighten the middle classes into giving up power and wealth to globalist institutions.
George Soros has the fear-based stuff down to a science. The article (see excerpt above) is one fear-based meme after another. "Survival is the most important thing" ... "a period of evil" ... "a descent into chaos and conflict."
Although Congress was back in session for scarcely more than a day last week, private citizens across the country managed to cause an uproar felt across Capitol Hill. The uproar took the form of hundreds of thousands of phone calls to both Senators and Representatives, urging them to oppose two draconian new bills that threaten the free and unbridled flow of information on the internet.
On Wednesday last week, dozens of prominent websites like Wikipedia, Reddit and Craigslist were blacked out in protest of two bills known in DC jargon as SOPA and PIPA. SOPA is the House bill; PIPA is its Senate companion. These bills ostensibly will combat internet piracy, and of course we also are told they will help us wage the never ending "war on terror."
America overcomes the debt crisis as Britain sinks deeper into the swamp ... Britain has sunk deeper into debt. Three years after bubble burst, the UK has barely begun to tackle the crushing burden left by Gordon Brown. The contrast with the United States is frankly shocking ... The latest report on "Debt and Deleveraging" by the McKinsey Global Institute shows that total public and private debt in the UK is still hovering at an all-time high. It has risen from 487pc to 507pc of GDP since the crisis began ... The ordeal of belt-tightening will be grim, dragging out for a generation if Japan is any guide. The Japanese at least began their post-bubble debacle as the world's top creditor nation with a trade super-surplus and a savings rate of 17pc. Britain has no such buffers. It is a very different picture in the US where light is emerging at the end of the tunnel. American banks, firms, and households have been chipping away at their debts, more than offsetting Washington's double-digit deficits. The total burden has dropped to 279pc, down from 295pc at the peak of the boom. Households have purged roughly a third of the excess, roughly tracking the historic pattern of post-bubble deleveraging. – UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: The US is really doing well. It only appeared to be doing badly. And President Barack Obama is doing better and better ...
Free-Market Analysis: Every now and then our favorite mainstream journo, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, runs off the tracks. Evans-Pritchard makes the case (see excerpt above) that Britain is not recovering from the 2008 financial crisis but that the US is on the way up.
Say what? As a publication that covers dominant social themes of the power elite – the fear-based promotions that frighten middle classes into giving up power and wealth to globalist constructions – we would point to this sort of article as a good example of power elite rhetoric.
We are not accusing Evans-Pritchard of purposefully writing an article that buttresses Anglosphere power-elite themes. In fact, he's an acute observer of the economic scene and has written a steady stream of great articles about the increasingly hopeless position of the euro and even the European Union itself. But in this case, whether or not he is aware of the larger promotional picture, he certainly has written an article that fits into a trend we are observing.
