STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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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 ...
June 15, 2010
In the effort to move the world toward human liberty - to induce countries around the globe to implement the regime of individual rights to life, liberty, etc. - the image of turn around an aircraft carrier, redirecting which way it will move in the middle of t ...
June 14, 2010
It is so interesting to see the ways that people construct the various realities of modern day life – and their evolution. In our opinion, the London Times has gotten a lot more aggressive and honest in terms of covering the current economic crisis. This fits ...
June 14, 2010
This is an astonishing revelation from our point of view. We have tended to analyze the war from the point of view of the Afghan Pashtuns – which is a lot better than the mainstream media does, anyway – but we were always aware of the larger element of Paki ...
June 14, 2010
There is a provocative recent comment attributed to Harvard University and Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen in The Philosopher's Magazine (3rd Quarter 2010, p. 12 and taken from what he reported wrote in the New Statesman magazine). It is that "The nature o ...
June 13, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Doug Casey. Mr. Casey has appeared on hundreds of radio and TV shows, and has been the subject of articles in People, US, Time, Forbes, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications. For ne ...
June 13, 2010
Thanks to the Internet, one could argue, we are witnessing the beginning of the next great Renaissance/Reformation, free-market era. It is one that may prove even more powerful than the one unleashed by the Gutenberg press and agents such as Luther. Nonetheless ...
June 12, 2010
To say that the gold standard is not practicable is the same to say that honesty is not practicable, and Constitutions are made to be blithely ignored when convenient. The American Constitution, for example, mandates a metallic monetary standard for the United ...
June 12, 2010
Professor Benjamin Barber, author of the book Strong Democracy (1984), was recently a guest on John Stossel's FOX Business News Network program honoring the memory and ideas of Milton Friedman who wrote the world famous book Free to Choose (1980) and has been f ...
June 11, 2010
We've now explored the inflation versus price deflation argument in depth in two articles – and arrived at the conclusion that modern fiat-money economies are more likely to tip toward price inflation than price deflation, at least eventually. In fact, this a ...
June 11, 2010
We want to return to the topic of the Afghan war because the end-game is becoming more apparent – and we want to present both the scenario and its consequences. To be clear, we were always skeptical of the military surge planned for Afghanistan. We never beli ...
June 11, 2010
Ideas do have consequences. You come to believe that you are invincible, you will take risks more readily. You believe government will bail you out, cover your debts up to a certain amount, you will borrow more (indeed, your financial advisor will tell you you ...
June 10, 2010
We wrote an article about inflation and price inflation recently and came down on the side of inflation (both price and monetary) - in the long term anyway. This article on Rick Ackerman's blog seems to be getting a lot of attention and comes to the opposite co ...
June 10, 2010
Sanctions alone will probably not restrain Iran's nuclear program nor its inevitable march toward a nuclear weapon. Iran's leaders have made a deal with Turkey and Brazil that will considerably vitiate any sanctions that are placed against that country. Additio ...
June 09, 2010
We had to look at this article twice, because the first time we didn't quite believe it. From our perspective, the US economy is not in great shape. Also from our perspective (and we've been writing about this for nearly a decade now) gold and silver investment ...
June 09, 2010
Anthony Fry made headlines throughout the blog-o-sphere with his dramatic comments about buying barbed wire and guns as the West's economic environment continues to erode. The hysteria swirled about various electronic pages and the terror evinced by the more pa ...
June 09, 2010
In his heartfelt eulogy for his mother, Jean Biden, Vice President Joe Biden quoted some words from her, very approvingly. These included the idea that "Everyone is your equal, and everyone is equal to you." Furthermore, in his autobiography the vice president ...
June 08, 2010
The world is in a jam because its biggest economic brains don't know where money is headed. Is the paper money in your pocket, dear reader, going to be worth less or more ... tomorrow. This article in Telegraph tells us that more economists believe that money i ...
June 08, 2010
One of the miracles of the years of former President Ronald Reagan was the boost the American economy received from tax cuts. And one of the prominent advisors to Ronald Reagan and his "kitchen cabinet" was Arthur Laffer, the developer of the Laffer Curve. This ...
June 08, 2010
This past week several emerging and ongoing crises took attention away from the ongoing sovereign debt problems in Greece. The bailouts are merely kicking the can down the road and making things worse for taxpaying citizens, here and abroad. Greece is unfortuna ...
June 08, 2010
Some years ago, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Empire, I was an invited speaker at a conference of company CEOs and presidents in Acapulco, Mexico. Another of the speakers was Gennady Gerasimov, who you may remember was Gorbachev's spokesperson to th ...
June 07, 2010
We were surprised by this article in the UK Telegraph because we have come to believe that the power elite that is responsible for the Western world's dominant social themes tries to "keep a lid on" contrarian perspectives as long as possible. From our humble p ...
June 07, 2010
Once upon a time, this might have been a frightening prediction. But there are so many of them these days. Here at the Bell we call them dominant social themes. They are, in our opinion, (in many cases, anyway) actually fear-based promotions generated by a powe ...
June 07, 2010
For the last couple or so decades the universities and colleges where I have taught - and by all accounts, most of them in the USA - have had two mutually exclusive social objectives. (Yes, Virginia, higher education is now mostly embarked upon pursuing social ...
June 06, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Judge Andrew P. Napolitano. Judge Napolitano joined FOX News Channel (FNC) in January 1998 and currently serves as the senior judicial analyst. He provides legal analysis on both FNC and FOX Busin ...
June 05, 2010
This is an astonishing and forceful statement by Max Boot, "the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor to Opinion," according to the brief LA Times bio at the bottom of the ...
June 05, 2010
While Prof. Krugman and most other fiscalists believe this to be self-evident, it is not. Indeed, this fiscalist dogma fails to withstand the indignity of empirical verification. Prof. Paul Krugman's formulation fails to mention the state of confidence. This is ...
June 05, 2010
In a recent talk, responding to the Arizona law that's said to be aimed at containing illegal immigration, President Barrack Obama stated that this piece of legislation "threatens to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans...." I am not ...
