STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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September 30, 2010
The mainstream media continued to flog the usual sub dominant social theme of Rand Paul "free-market thinker, racist and capitalist," but we were beginning to think the libertarian threat was greatly exaggerated. Yes, we were coming to a different conclusion ab ...
September 30, 2010
President Obama's friend and former colleague Cass Sunstein, now apparently on leave from Harvard Law School, would have us believe that our rights are granted to us by government. Sunstein and his co-author Stephen Holmes have argued in their book, The Cost of ...
September 29, 2010
We've often pointed out that banking is the "biggest bubble" - at least until a feedbacker pointed out to us that government actually is. But banks probably run a close second. In the 20th century, especially, central bankers were the unacknowledged priests of ...
September 29, 2010
We were doing some research into the United Nations the other day (all 1,000 of us) when we came across a couple of articles dealing with an apparently abortive comic book enterprise that was to the feature the UN. The headline: "Marvel Comics to Produce United ...
September 29, 2010
This week marked six months since Congress passed the healthcare reform bill in what has become all-too-typical legislative chicanery. Those in power crafted a mammoth piece of legislation and rammed it through Congress under a dire sense of emergency. Insistin ...
September 29, 2010
When working out what should guide public institutions and policies in our lives and human communities, those who chime in from ancient to contemporary times have advanced various proposals and they have often been divided into two groups. Members of one of the ...
September 28, 2010
Ben Bernanke is on the rebound. Given the idea that the best defense is a good offense, Bernanke has apparently decided to make elaborate speeches justifying American economics and his actions - and the actions of the Fed. Dominant social theme: We're on top th ...
September 28, 2010
We really do think we see signs of an elite fear-based promotion having to do with space aliens. In fact, we've already broached this idea in the fairly recent past. But this article (excerpted above) brings the subject up again. Seem wacky? After the insanity ...
September 28, 2010
President Obama has just issued a blackmail to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China: "You immediately revalue the yuan or else..." According to an article of David E. Senger in The New York Times dated September 23, 2010, the two leaders met at the United Nations ...
September 28, 2010
This fracas about letting the Bush tax cut expire for those making more than the arbitrary amount of $250K per year is bizarre. Never mind for now that the entire system of taxation in a bona fide free country is criminal - not different, in principle, from a s ...
September 27, 2010
People who visit the Bell regularly know that we usually begin analysis of a power elite dominant social theme with a mainstream media article. But occasionally we depart from this formula when we find a non-mainstream or alternative press analysis that adds to ...
September 27, 2010
Reporting the arguments of EU leaders may provide a human face. But it likely does nothing to ameliorate the underlying stresses. Elite promotions can fail when they are discovered or debunked. In this case, the promotion seems simply to be outrunning reality. ...
September 26, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Dr. James L. Payne. Dr. Powell, senior fellow at CATO, is an expert in the history of liberty. He has lectured in England, Germany, Japan, Argentina and Brazil as well as at Harvard, Stanford and ...
September 25, 2010
This new Oliver Stone financial film, "Money Never Sleeps," (a follow to his big 1980's hit "Wall Street") is notable for what it leaves out. Even with immense pressure on the Federal Reserve from a variety of sources, Oliver Stone fails to put recent central b ...
September 25, 2010
An open letter to Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, 1979-1987; Chairman of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, presented to him, in person, last year. Dear Paul: In 35 years our paths have crossed for the s ...
September 25, 2010
True, the idea came to me after having read many of Paul Krugman's missives, both his columns in The New York Times and essays in such magazines as The New York Review of Books. In his often very polemical writings - for a Nobel Laureate he does seem to indulge ...
September 24, 2010
We have puzzled some readers with our insistence that EU austerity was another fear-based promotion of the power elite, but in this article we will seek once again to why the elite has attempted to enforce austerity and why it is failing. Anyone, in our estimat ...
September 24, 2010
While we have written numerous articles on the bureaucracy of big science and its varying incompetences, we have neglected to point out the impact that the unrolling financial crisis is having on what the Register (see above article excerpt) calls "boffins." We ...
September 24, 2010
In our time, not entirely unlike in others, the main appeal politicians hold out for millions is that they join them in their resentful bashing of the rich. This is a successful ploy because in the past, of course, most riches came from conquest, from governmen ...
September 23, 2010
The power elite used to move along the waters of the world like a majestic supertanker with plenty of time to take evasive action when an obstacle was sighted. These days it races along like nuclear-powered destroyer. An additional dominant social theme might b ...
September 23, 2010
Just yesterday, we wrote about NFL quarterback Michael Vick who ran a violent dog-fighting ring and who, years after the offenses, remained something of a sports pariah from a reporting standpoint. We pointed out that the sports-writing community in particular ...
September 23, 2010
This past week the administration announced its choice for the first credit czar at the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This bureau was created as part of the supposed Wall Street reform bill recently passed by Congress. This new bureau, which represe ...
September 23, 2010
At times I have the impression that maybe there are practicing political allies out there somewhere, ones who are involved with current affairs, and at times it looks like these would be Republicans and especially conservative ones. That's because strictly spea ...
September 22, 2010
Savvy investors – having realized that the stock market is not necessarily the way to generate terrific riches – are going back to the land. The dominant social theme might be, "Who can trust these paper products? Give us tangible, productive investments th ...
September 22, 2010
We've watched the Michael Vick story unfold with some fascination. It tends to confirm what we think about sports reporters in general, that they exaggerate every single wrongheaded characteristic of mainstream reporters. This stands to reason after all; it tak ...
September 21, 2010
The UK Telegraph remains a mainstream anomaly; articles by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard often do not buttress the dominant social themes that the power elite is trying to promote. On the other hand, Evans-Pritchard is no free-market monetarist. He seems to believe i ...
September 21, 2010
Is it jaw-jaw rather than war-war with Iran? Portions of the US military industrial complex obviously want war-war, but the pushback from other US military, intelligence and civilian sectors seem to mitigate against it. We remember when it seemed certain that t ...
September 21, 2010
Some have been demeaning the right to private property - which is very closely linked to America's political tradition and if sufficiently discredited would also help destroy the country - because such a right is supposedly created by a legal system. If so, the ...
September 20, 2010
The Gold Council research makes the point that "The gold price is consistent with its long-run average level compared with a range of different assets, including equity indices and hard assets like oil." Or to put it another way, there is a new dominant social ...
September 20, 2010
We can only repeat that what is happening is a process, not a series of inexplicable, serial events. Of course, we may yet be wrong. Perhaps the power elite can - via censorship and military force - reverse the trends that we see continuing to grow. But think f ...
September 20, 2010
As a loyal though reluctant reader of The New York Review of Books – too masochistic an experience at times but in my line of work unavoidable – I have read a lot of essays by the recently deceased public intellectual and NYU professor Tony Judt. A skilled ...
September 19, 2010
The editors of The Daily Bell are pleased to present an interview with well-known libertarian philosopher Tibor R. Machan. Dr. Machan is currently Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, Alabama, and holds the R. C. Hoiles Endowed Chair ...
September 18, 2010
There is so much that is strange about this consumer financial protection bureau that it is not easy to know where to start. First of all transactions between someone borrowing money and someone lending it do not strike us as "consumption." We think of consumpt ...
September 18, 2010
Have you ever wondered what would happen if most of the claimed US gold reserves do not really exist? Can Washington continue to operate under its own questionable and often non-existent accounting rules if it doesn't have the gold reserves as promised? Should ...
September 17, 2010
This era has proven remarkable. We can actually see how dominant social themes are being built. We have compared this to watching an island form in the ocean out of volcanic material. It is a rare occurrence, but one that has confirmed our perspectives. The pla ...
September 17, 2010
We really don't understand what is going on in Afghanistan anymore - or not from the perspective of the Anglo-American axis. Is it turning into another Vietnam, replete with body counts? Now there are "metrics" that the Pentagon and Obama administration are goi ...
September 17, 2010
Faced with continuing economic decline and an impending election, the administration, predictably, is entertaining the idea of another stimulus package. To explain why the last one didn't work, adherents to the Keynesian economic philosophy are claiming that th ...
September 16, 2010
It is true that as the Internet becomes more comprehensive, patterns emerge. We see patterns and often those who patronize our humble blog see the same patterns, and others, only more deeply and clearly. We are grateful when they present these visions to us via ...
September 16, 2010
This is a strange story for the mainstream media to carry. We don't see any promotion here, not even a dominant social theme necessarily – as we believe the above-excerpted article provides us with a fairly clear recitation of what is actually occurring, and ...
September 15, 2010
We return to the West's sputtering economy and horrific unemployment because it shows two things. One, elite-structured capitalism doesn't work and, two, the Anglo-American power elite is most nervous about social explosions as a result of the crashing monetary ...
September 15, 2010
Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times on September 5 under the title "1938 in 2010", chastizes president Obama's economists once more for doing what they have promised not to do: to repeat the mistakes of president Roosevelt's economists in 1937 in pullin ...
September 14, 2010
We recently wrote about how a takeover by Brussels of Britain's financial centers was actually in our view nothing more than a real-estate transaction. British finance may move to Belgium, but the Anglo-American axis will still maintain control of it, just as t ...
September 14, 2010
Satirist Joe Queenan is in great form in this article excerpted above and featured recently by the Wall Street Journal. Not only has it set the blogosphere abuzz, but we think it captures neatly an unspoken trend, which is that the movie fare that Hollywood pro ...
September 14, 2010
Anyone in search of a short yet useful introduction to the life of Sir Winston Churchill will find it in Paul Johnson's biography. Johnson, a long-established historian of the modern age, has penned a readable and informative account of the life, personality, t ...
September 13, 2010
We have no idea where Iraq is getting the money to buy its weapons. Presumably, Iraq will print the money and the money will essentially act as a claim on Iraq's productivity as the Iraq political and military elite arm themselves first for domestic reasons and ...
September 13, 2010
The power elite, in our view, has a special affection for vaccine programs. The more emphatically efficacious it can make vaccines seem, the more ability the elite has to promote a variety of vaccine programs without significant push-back. We are also aware tha ...
September 13, 2010
General Petraeus sadly got it wrong when he wants to shut down the Koran burning on the grounds that some will react to it irrationally. Sure, the burning should not happen because it is a needlessly provocative deed but no one should be forcibly stopped from u ...
September 12, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Dr. James L. Payne. Dr. Payne is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Director of Lytton Research and Analysis and author of numerous well-known, libertarian-oriented books. These incl ...
September 11, 2010
It is likely confusing for most people to understand what is going on regarding the British financial system and Europe. On the surface it looks like a takeover of the British system, with the important regulatory elements migrating to Brussels. This is in fact ...
September 11, 2010
Here at The Daily Bell we continue to cheerfully cover the degeneration of the elite's dominant social themes. (See other story in today's Bell.) The 21st century's truth telling via the Internet and the endless ravel of the financial crisis has proven increasi ...
