STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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August 21, 2010
All 1,000 of us gathered around the Bell conference table and there wasn't any room to breathe. So we scattered and a few of us decided to write this article. The rest went hiking. It is actually not our hypothesis but that of a very paranoid individual's. Call ...
August 20, 2010
While popular, left-wing website AlterNet cannot be considered mainstream media per se, this article partakes of the modern Western (mostly US) tradition of debunking suspicions that people may have about their government. It is especially a US dominant social ...
August 20, 2010
We were startled to find this article appearing in the leftist Salon.com because it deals evidently and obviously with the Daily Bell theme: that prominent writers can construct fear-based arguments that help support larger power-elite dominant social themes. I ...
August 20, 2010
In response to an essay in which I discuss the difference between Amartya Sen's and the late Peter Bauer's recommendation for how countries can achieve economic development, one in which I touch on the topic of natural rights, someone sent the magazine where my ...
August 19, 2010
Rupert Murdoch is a full-on genius - as we have pointed out before. Having purchased the Wall Street Journal and implemented a pay wall, he now has to come up with compelling news and opinions to make the Journal worthwhile buying. We know he is succeeding beca ...
August 19, 2010
GM is going back into the markets. GM is a new and improved car company and is back on its feet again. Is there a further elaboration of a dominant social theme we could muster? Perhaps there is: "Government knows what it is doing and President Barack Obama sav ...
August 19, 2010
Ironically, pragmatism, the quintessentially unprincipled philosophical movement, was born in America, the one country in human history and around the globe most explicitly tied to certain basic principles of community life – e.g., the existence of unalienabl ...
August 18, 2010
A number of month ago, we wrote a good many articles about the Tea Party movement. Along with everyone else we were trying to figure out what it was about and why there seemed to be several different movements and no real way of determining who was in charge or ...
August 18, 2010
It took Bill Clinton nearly eight years to kill the credibility of his presidency. It took George Bush about five years. It has taken Barack Obama about two. Anybody see a pattern? We do. The Internet itself, like a vast echo chamber, reminds people endlessly ( ...
August 18, 2010
As life rolls on for me, with many pluses and some minuses along the way, an issue that keeps propping up in my more academic studies is whether people have instincts like non-human animals supposedly do. Or are we born with what some refer to as a blank slate, ...
August 17, 2010
The argument made in this article is that Europe's debt crisis is not at an end and will continue to get worse. The article is written by Matthew Lynn – a Bloomberg News columnist and author of "Bust," a forthcoming book on the Greek debt crisis. Is there a d ...
August 17, 2010
Here at the Bell we regard the Afghan war as the most important conflict since World War II. We do not believe the Afghan war is merely one of convenience designed to initiate a long war that will destabilize Asia and thus China and Russia. If the Anglo-America ...
August 17, 2010
The truth comes out eventually, however. Much like the recently discovered exemption from Freedom of Information Act requirements for the SEC that was slipped into the equally massive and "urgent" financial reform bill, we are finally seeing what other insidiou ...
August 17, 2010
For once I agree with something that President Obama said, if I understood him right: Muslims do have the basic right, one that is legally protected in a free country, to build a mosque anywhere they choose if they own the land (or are leasing it with permissi ...
August 16, 2010
Mortimer Zuckerman, who never apparently unearthed a mainstream meme he didn't appreciate, has written an article (excerpted above) in the Wall Street Journal proclaiming the "end of American optimism." Zuckerman is the extraordinarily successful Canadian-born ...
August 16, 2010
We have written previously about feminism, stating that it was a kind of elite dominant social theme to induce women to compensate for the loss of family income due to central banking. It was not going to be enough by the mid 20th century for women to work hard ...
August 15, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Larry Pratt. Lawrence D. Pratt (born November 13, 1942) is the Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, a U.S.-based firearms lobbying group, and a former member of the Virginia House of Deleg ...
August 14, 2010
Paul Krugman is upset. He wants the Federal Reserve to take a number of concrete actions to make the deleveraging of America go away. He doesn't call it deleveraging of course. He calls it deflation, which means the money supply is contracting. Of course he doe ...
August 14, 2010
We have stated numerous times that one way someone can tell whether or not a specific sociopolitical belief system is a power-elite dominant social theme is by whether it continues to lurch ahead even after its credibility has badly diminished. There is no bett ...
August 13, 2010
We are relieved that Ms. Barbara Kiviat, who looks too young to be writing about economics for Time Magazine, has had her confusion lessened by Roger Backhouse in his new book. However, by giving voice to her puzzlement, Kiviat is enunciating a dominant social ...
August 13, 2010
This caught our collective eye (it's one heckuva strange looking eye, sort of like an insect's with many facets) because it is so quintessentially a New York Times article. The New York Times has always specialized in "insider" big-town articles, which provide ...
August 12, 2010
We've written about the difficulty of reigniting employment in the midst of a crack-up boom, and now even the New York Times is starting to come around to that point of view. For those conspiracy-minded folk that like to chant "out of chaos, order," we want to ...
August 12, 2010
When we read about Matt Ridley and his latest book, The Rational Optimist, we were actually shocked! The level of sophistication that Ridley brings to the subject is far beyond what we traditionally read in the mainstream media – which is more likely to focus ...
August 11, 2010
The power elite insists on its memes. Having put a dominant social theme into play, it continues to promote the theme no matter whether it is credible or not. This made sense in the 19th century when the elite controlled all the possible channels of communicati ...
August 11, 2010
We have commented on the eventual unraveling of the pact between the state and its public employees before. Now, apparently, it is starting to become a reality. For decades the West, both Europe and America, has maintained the fiction that government was a nurt ...
August 11, 2010
Last week the National Bureau of Economic Research published a report on the effect of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq that confirmed what critics of our foreign policy have been saying for years: the killing of civilians, although unintentional, an ...
August 11, 2010
My current reason for deciding to celebrate Mose is a bit odd. He is one of the oldest jazz musicians still making the circuit regularly, having just recently returned from recording live two CDs in London, just as a sample. He is in his early 80s and sings and ...
August 10, 2010
Like everybody else, we have been transfixed by the war-crimes tribunal that is weighing the fate of former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor. OK ... that was a nice opening line, but actually, we don't know anyone who is "transfixed," and few who are following ...
August 10, 2010
We don't much like large governmental organization and we are not fans of the even larger organizations erected by, for lack of a better phrase, "regional" governments such as the European Union. This announcement by the African Union is a twofer in this regard ...
August 10, 2010
Recently I have been recalling when University of Michigan Professor of Law, Catherine McKinnon used to advocate censoring pornography because she believed it is an assault upon women. She lays out her case in her very prestigiously published slim and readable ...
August 09, 2010
It is getting toward desperation time for the Obama Administration. While there is nothing much the public sector can ever do to "create" jobs or to make an economy more prosperous, the public sector in this day and age can surely make things worse. The dominan ...
August 09, 2010
We keep stumbling on these weird articles in the mainstream press, and from our perspective they're getting weirder all the time - the ones that seek to justify various power-elite memes such as globalization, global warming and financial regulation. But this a ...
August 08, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Bill Bonner. We caught up with Agora Financial's founder, Bill Bonner, at Agora's annual conference in Vancouver, BC. We have interviewed him previously. Since founding Agora Inc. in 1979, Bill Bo ...
August 07, 2010
We've watched this story unfold and are quite taken by its admirable qualities. There is something amazing about watching so many important people come together to give so much money to worthy causes. That this cavalcade of generosity would be led by such lumin ...
August 07, 2010
The BP story just keeps on getting weirder. First it was the most monumental crisis in the history of environmental pollution, and now, if reports are accurate, it is nearly nothing at all. In the meantime, the Obama Administration has attempted to shut-down de ...
August 06, 2010
We have made this point before, but it is an important one, so we'll do so once again: The conversation about freedom in America is alive and well and becoming more important every day. This article in the Baltimore Sun - an editorial actually - provides eviden ...
August 06, 2010
Please don't write to us about VoltaireNet. We understand what it is and its controversial history. We are citing an article from it only because F. William Engdahl, whom we both admire and dislike (idea-wise, not personally) has written an extraordinary series ...
August 05, 2010
There are no less than two eye-opening recent stories in Germany's mainstream Spiegel Online dealing with the Chinese real-estate bubble. You can see an excerpt of one above. The other is called "Chinese Fight Property Seizures by the State," and gives us a fai ...
August 05, 2010
One cannot help but be struck at the timing of such a war, when put into the context of other wars being waged now – either acknowledged or not. The Afghanistan war is an acknowledged one. But there is also an undercover war being waged in Pakistan by US merc ...
August 05, 2010
On a recent visit to Portugal, near Lisbon and right off the Atlantic Coast, I rediscovered that country after having been away from it for 40 years. And it comes across very different now from what it was back then. Most surprisingly it comes across to me like ...
August 04, 2010
Timothy Geithner has written a long, self-congratulatory New York Times article entitled "Welcome to the Recovery." In it, he points out that the US is gradually beginning to do better economically and that the country is "on the path back to growth." The reces ...
August 04, 2010
Those who bother to read the Daily Bell semi-regularly will know that there has been feedback discussion about the Bell's perspective that austerity for Southern Europe is not a good thing. Much pushback to this perspective has come in the form of comments that ...
August 04, 2010
Our foreign policy was in the spotlight last week, which is exactly where it should be. Almost two years ago many voters elected someone they thought would lead us to a more peaceful, rational co-existence with other countries. However, while attention has been ...
August 04, 2010
Tradition says when Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown back in 1781 the British played this tune as they marched out of the fortifications in surrender to the American army. Whether this actually happened is open to debate but the loss suffered by the grea ...
August 03, 2010
This opinion piece appearing in the American Pocono Record is a great representation of a certain kind of elite dominant social theme: "The marketplace is flawed and government regulatory authority is a necessary corrective, in ever-larger doses if necessary." ...
August 03, 2010
There is a plethora of information on the web concerning Jews and "Money Power" these days - some of it scholarly and some of it running the gamut from bemused to hysterical. Separately, books are continually appearing on the subject and focusing directly on th ...
August 02, 2010
We have written about this dominant social theme before but are constantly amazed by its reoccurrence. Actually, it is not a dominant theme but a sub-dominant social theme, a spinoff of a larger theme, which is, of course, "the world's central banking economy i ...
August 02, 2010
Increasingly, we believe the high-water mark of the Anglo-American axis came in 2007. History will record, as with Rome, that this first decade of the 2000s marked a gradually shifting away from one of the bloodiest annals of human history. The Anglo-American a ...
August 01, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Walter E. Williams. Dr. Williams is the author of over 150 publications which have appeared in scholarly journals such as Economic Inquiry, American Economic Review, Georgia Law Review, Journal of ...
August 01, 2010
An Open Opportunity IRA, however, can be used to control the potential tax bill on your estate, since it easily accommodates what has become a conventional estate planning strategy. With the Open Opportunity structure, your IRA holds just one asset – a limite ...
