STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Showing 6901 - 1 of 1
July 03, 2010
This is a rare event. It is like watching a dormant volcano come to life. Or an island being raised in the ocean from resultant lava flows. It is a one-of-a-kind opportunity. We are bearing witness to the creation of a brand new dominant social theme. It is a m ...
July 03, 2010
In my political circles quite a few people, both now and in the past, defend the right to private property, to individual ownership, based on the idea that whatever one earns – or creates, or makes, or produces – surely is one's own property and others have ...
July 02, 2010
This is a truly remarkable little story because it indicates the confusion that the mainstream media is facing when it comes to preparing and presenting dominant social themes. In the excerpt, above, we see a report that former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Gre ...
July 02, 2010
Just yesterday, inspired by the nomination of Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court, we focused on how the Western legal system had increasingly departed from the sensible roots of common law. Now comes this Telegraph story about blood feuds in Albania, which is ...
July 01, 2010
We have remarked many times before on the fiscal and regulatory emphases that comprise the "free-market thinking" of the mainstream Western media. This article is a good example, excoriating the high-ticket gymnastics of the Obama administration when it comes t ...
July 01, 2010
Will Elena Kagan be a good Supreme Court Justice? The spectacle of Supreme Court nominations goes on with most mainstream media queries being devoted to the dangling questions of whether Elena Kagan's personal views will have an impact on her judicial decisions ...
June 30, 2010
Yesterday we covered Cameron's calls for austerity in Britain, believing it was perhaps part of a larger dominant social theme sweeping Europe and eventually America. The fear-based promotion in this case is that governments are over-extended and that ruin awai ...
June 30, 2010
We don't mean to point fingers at Stratfor specifically in the upcoming analysis but only to point out that faulty analyses lead to faulty conclusions – and thus acceptance of the elite's dominant social themes or at least an inability to properly confront th ...
June 30, 2010
This past week various news events once again made it abundantly clear that our foreign policy is an abject failure. Unfortunately, in spite of this the administration is determined to stay on this destructive course, despite any past promises to change it. For ...
June 30, 2010
The New York Times editorialized in panic, predictably, in the wake of the U. S. Supreme Court ruling striking down Chicago's ban on handgun ownership. Lamenting the Court's highly abstract debate about the constitutional clause that needed to be considered, Th ...
June 29, 2010
We write a lot about the alternative press, but when it comes to analyzing the dominant social themes of the power elite, we try to take excerpts from mainstream publications to show how these fear-based memes are disseminated and the ways the are positioned by ...
June 29, 2010
As we have reported before, this austerity seems part of a larger dominant social theme. In the US, President Barack Obama is quoted as speaking about the need for "painful" choices. In Europe, a whole slew of Southern European countries are even now in the mis ...
June 29, 2010
Paul Krugman's article The Renminbi Runaround in the June 24th edition of The New York Times is not only diplomatically insensitive: it also lacks economic justification. The United States, with its unprecedented debt, is hardly in a position to lecture China a ...
June 29, 2010
General McChristal spoke out of line, though perhaps truth to power. Yet hasn't the American military been mislead into thinking that it is the answer to most of our problems? In which case his conduct may well be quite understandable, even a prelude to things ...
June 28, 2010
This potential move gives the deflation versus inflation debate a new perspective. We have written in the past that we had questions about the Great Depression based on conflicting opinions of Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman et. al. Living through the "Great R ...
June 28, 2010
This is startling news. We will explain. First of all, the reality of Al Qaeda is fairly tenuous. It may stem from a "list" of Arab militant activists that the CIA kept in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, without state funding there cannot really be an Al Qaeda. It ...
June 28, 2010
I no longer recall whether I chose philosophy as the discipline I wanted to explore because of some puzzles I encountered or whether I found the puzzles in the field once a got to do work in it. I think it is the former since I recall some odd questions I rais ...
June 27, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Dr. Paul Gottfried. Dr. Gottfried is Raffensperger professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College (PA) and a Guggenheim recipient. He is an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute and the author ...
June 26, 2010
One of the hoariest dominant social themes or sub themes promoted by the power elite is that government can create jobs. It is possibly a sub theme because the dominant theme is simply that "government can do it all." In fact, the only things government can do ...
June 26, 2010
We have written about Rand Paul in the past expressing some hesitation about the race he is running. We wondered if he would have done better to use his hard-fought platform as a bully pulpit to educate the public about free-market themes instead of apparently ...
June 25, 2010
The more arcane the language, the more opaque the actual stimulative occurrences, the less people understand. That's the point of course. The average person should know only that tremendous and substantive efforts are being made by extremely intelligent people ...
June 25, 2010
On the surface it seems shocking that a nation would sell off parts its physical environment because of public sector debts. But this has been going on for a long time in impoverished nations. First profligate nations are lent a lot of money by private sector b ...
June 24, 2010
This fits into one of our observations – that the EU has been using the threat of deflation as a way to promote "austerity," which is actually a way of further impoverishing and controlling what is left of the European middle classes. But we have also observe ...
June 24, 2010
Will it be OK now that McChrystal has been replaced by Petraeus? Will the war be won by the determined Anglo-Saxon axis? We're not sure. But we are aware of course, that the effort is not only determined, it is one of great sophistication as well. We know this ...
June 24, 2010
The present Great Financial Crisis is far from over. In fact, it is getting worse. It can be described as a debt crisis or, at its roots, a belated gold crisis. The landmark year was 1971, when the United States defaulted on its international gold obligations. ...
June 24, 2010
Yes, most of my friends have similar political convictions to mine. Actually, not just political but also more general philosophical ones, bearing on the theory of being, knowledge, the human good and even the nature of art. But not all. I do have some genuin ...
June 23, 2010
Well, of course it is, and for your own good, too. Or maybe not. We have watched with interest as government attacks against the Internet have become more formalized in China, the UK and, of course, America. The Chinese attacks are obvious and known in aggregat ...
June 23, 2010
It is hard, in fact, to write a dominant social theme that includes this book because we don't think this book is part of a power-elite promotion. We don't think this guy went and put himself into an Afghan jail just to increase his credibility. No, we think it ...
June 23, 2010
Sadly, the disaster in the Gulf continues this week as BP's efforts at containment keep hitting snags and residents along the coast scramble to clean up and defend their shores and wildlife. Many have criticized the federal government in the past weeks for not ...
June 22, 2010
The Chinese miracle plays on. Around the world, the yuan pushed up against the dollar now that Chinese leaders are letting the yuan float. Chinese stock markets are soaring. Meanwhile, Senator Joseph Lieberman has launched legislation to specifically grant the ...
June 22, 2010
So gold is in a bubble, eh? How many times are we going to read this statement in the mainstream media? And as many times as we ask this question, we point out that the same media never state that stock or bond markets are in a bubble. It is taken for granted t ...
June 22, 2010
Skeptics have, throughout history, concluded that we can never be sure about what it is that exists, and even that reality itself does not exist except in the mind. With their gospel of "eternal doubt," advocates of skepticism have thus played the role of ideol ...
June 22, 2010
Yet another excuse for some people to gain power over others is this idea of the level playing field. It's a metaphor, of course, but used often to mean starting in a race with no advantages for any of the participants. Another term by which to indicate this i ...
June 21, 2010
For the last umpteen months, beginning with sightings of "green shoots," the powers-that-be have been trying to gin up a recovery. It is a kind of dominant social theme of course, the idea that after a painful "recession," economies begin to rebound and life gr ...
June 21, 2010
Several months ago we wrote about UK Prime Minister David Cameron's adoption of Phillip Bond's idea of neo-communitarianism. Since at the time Cameron was struggling to redefine himself and his Tory party, the idea of political devolution probably seemed quite ...
June 21, 2010
I am always baffled and now and then really angered when people defend using coercion against other people. (Some will say I must be biased since I come from several early years of tyranny and since one of my parents was an out and out brute. How could I be o ...
June 20, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche's employment history began as work under his father's direction during vacation periods 1938-1942, which was intended to prepare him for a future career as consultant in ...
June 19, 2010
More talk about global currencies. Medvedev has announced this ruble-reserve push with great fanfare in advance of the lastest G20 meeting, and the news is splashed all over the Internet. From our point of view, this statement is no accident and may have as muc ...
June 19, 2010
Many moons ago President Richard Nixon lashed out at Charles Manson after he learned of the carnage but before the law could get at the mass murderer. The president told reporters that Manson was "guilty, directly or indirectly of eight murders." Manson's defe ...
June 18, 2010
With such a weak (jobless) recovery in the States, and in Europe, too, central banks are apt to leave money in the system far too long. The end result: stagflation, a combination of a sluggish economy and increased price inflation. First price deflation, then i ...
June 18, 2010
We try not to directly analyze articles of the alternative 'Net media because we are more interested in the dominant social themes expressed by mainstream news. But in this case, we cannot help it. This article was brought to our attention by a Bell feedbacker ...
June 18, 2010
Here you have yet another instance of never allowing a good disaster to go unexploited for political purposes, a policy endorsed a while ago by White House Chief Eric Rahmer. But I will leave that aside for now and focus once again on the curious phenomenon of ...
June 17, 2010
The EU is the mother-of-all power-elite dominant social themes, and it is getting harder to salvage all the time. Of course, as we have pointed out before, these promotions never really die but only reincarnate and continue in some fashion or another. But the E ...
June 17, 2010
We wanted to focus on this debate in the House of Representatives because it typifies the posture of the National Rifle Association. The legislation in question, according to an article by Gun Owners of America (GOA) on its website, "would require special-inter ...
June 17, 2010
I mentioned this in a column, saying "Michael Sandel reportedly refused to let his own child play sports because that would teach them the idea that some people are better athletes than others and that this matters somewhat in one's life." Then I went on to cri ...
June 16, 2010
The Daily Bell analyzes the dominant social themes of the power elite, and one of the most important fear-based promotions has been the inevitability of monetary union - expansive, global and ongoing. Thus, we have watched bemusedly as the EU brain-trust has st ...
June 16, 2010
We have been discussing the EU fairly regularly and also the Afghan war. These are two critical elite promotions and they are both failing. We discuss the EU in the other article in today's Bell. Here we once again ponder the war in light of recent events – a ...
June 15, 2010
We are surprised. The Gulfo is no more. Wikipedia, in fact, has expunged the name Gulfo, which we thought was very a strange name to begin with. Wikipedia now redirects us from Gulfo to Khaleeji (currency). This we learn was the proposed name. Khaleeji is Arabi ...
June 15, 2010
Ordinarily we don't like to cover stories that are already receiving a great deal of coverage, and this one has been splashed all over the blogosphere. But we have to cover it, really, because it deals so directly with the Bell's brief, which is to report on th ...
June 15, 2010
The administration's terrible healthcare reform bill is now law, but the debate over how - and whether - the federal government should be involved in providing healthcare services is not over. It is not too late for America to correct its course and stop the ma ...
