STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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February 11, 2010
The European Union, like Frankenstein's monster, is not about to die again – or not if its leaders can help it. Every crisis, every mis-step, every unworkable solution only provides those running the EU with additional reasons why the EU should obtain more po ...
February 11, 2010
We disagree with those who believe that George Bush's presidency was a failed one. We believe George Bush was a profoundly transformational and important president. We also believe he was one of the cleverest men to occupy the White House – though we do not m ...
February 10, 2010
Is the Western world struggling through a bad patch? Our argument, voiced with various levels of clarity at various times, is that the West is currently living through a failure of fiat money - specifically a failure of the global anchor currency: the greenback ...
February 10, 2010
We disagree with the above frothing analysis, of course. We have placed ourselves firmly on record as believing the Western war in Afghanistan is aimed at the stiff-necked Pashtun tribe of some 40 million strong - and are inclined to support the notion that if ...
February 09, 2010
Who matters in the world's second-largest financial system is barely understood Feb 4th 2010. From being a rounding error a decade ago, the financial clout of China now trails only that of America. By market capitalisation, it has three of the four largest bank ...
February 09, 2010
The trouble with sanctions is that they often provoke the very wars they supposedly are intended to avoid. When the US slapped sanctions on Japan before the Second World War, Japan responded with a good deal more aggressiveness perhaps than US planners had expe ...
February 08, 2010
Sarah Palin is really a last chance gasp, in our opinion, for the power elite to maintain the integrity of the two-party system in America. We predicted that Palin would run long ago - and that she would set up an alternative political structure in the process. ...
February 08, 2010
It's hard to wrap one's head around the prevalence of what we call dominant social themes. The idea that a tiny and incredibly wealthy power elite can orchestrate fear-based promotions in order to offer authoritarian solutions that deprive citizens of yet more ...
February 07, 2010
The editors of The Daily Bell are pleased to present an exclusive interview with legendary London Times editor, Lord William Rees-Mogg. Lord Rees-Mogg attended Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford and was President of the Oxford Union in 1951. He became a w ...
February 06, 2010
Last week politicians in Washington made a few things clear about how they really feel about the state of the union. First, they are beginning to hear the growing discontent with the size and scope of government and the broken promises that keep piling up. Cert ...
February 06, 2010
Actually, no one thinks corporations are persons but some do believe they are groups of persons. No one thinks orchestras, or football teams or universities are persons but many do think they are variously configured people. If this is so, then they, as groups ...
February 05, 2010
The fight to maintain the European Union has been joined, and it is not clear what the outcome will be. It is possible that result will be a shrunken EU, even a shattered EU – or perhaps a EU that fights through the difficulties now arising and maintains its ...
February 05, 2010
Maybe Slate has not realized that Republicans and Democrats are basically equal opportunity offenders when it comes to the alarming erosion of civil rights and privacy in the United States. While damage to the protections provided by the Constitution to US citi ...
February 04, 2010
On the face of it, the Swiss business of banking secrecy seems to be under severe attack. But let's peer beneath the surface, shall we? The EU, right now is under tremendous pressure having to do with governmental over-spending in numerous states. Is it possibl ...
February 04, 2010
Wakefield's co-authors had already retracted the paper, so the Lancet retraction is probably predictable. However, the retraction by his co-authors, Wakefield has pointed out, is somewhat puzzling since the paper never made a direct connection between vaccines ...
February 03, 2010
This is a historical moment folks. You are in on the ground floor. You are looking at liftoff. Right now, just this minute, Gates has declared a NEW GLOBAL COLD WAR. That's right – he's saying that the DANGER posed by the stateless terrorist "transcends" the ...
February 03, 2010
What exactly did Paulson save? From our point of view, he purports to have saved a financial system that is driven by fiat money and distorted by central banking surges. Not a real financial system in other words, but a false-mimic of one that has gradually bee ...
February 02, 2010
The real title of this article is "Why do people often vote against their own interests?" It caught our eye because it seemed, well, a little bit patronizing. Even before reading it, just from the headline, we decided the BBC was asking the question based on th ...
February 02, 2010
Even as we are writing this article, analysis comes word from RTTNews, among other sources, that "at least 41 people were killed and over 100 injured when a woman suicide-bomber detonated her explosives during a religious rally in north-east Baghdad Monday." Wi ...
February 01, 2010
We've been writing about the decline and fall of the European Union (hopefully) for years. And for some reason, (even despite our criticisms!) the EU has slithered onward, swallowing up countries like a boa constrictor and pressing them close to its bosom in a ...
February 01, 2010
The West may prove so flexible about the Afghan war that it may eventually simply declare victory and leave. Of course, this flies in the face of the additional 30,000 troops that the Pentagon is committing to the fight. But it may be that the additional troops ...
January 31, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to publish an exclusive interview with Internet Media Entrepreneur Roger Simon. Los Angeles-based Roger L. Simon is co-founder of the well-known conservative news site Pajamas Media. Simon is the author of ten novels, including the pri ...
January 30, 2010
Much has been made recently about the supposed economic recovery. A few blips in a few statistics and many believe our troubles are all over. Of course, they have to redefine recovery as "jobless" to account for the lack of improvement on Main Street. But the b ...
January 30, 2010
It has puzzled me for some time why campaign contribution is considered a First Amendment constitutional issue. If I write out a check to some candidate, I am not talking, writing an essay, carrying some poster in a parade or anything that could be construed as ...
January 29, 2010
George Soros, in our opinion, has been "damaged goods" every since he made billions betting against the pound. The Queen called him in for a private talk after he took his profits, and ever since then he's been a virtual whirlwind of socialist energy – a ghos ...
January 29, 2010
What is the Washington Post on about in this article entitled, "The Audacity of Nope?" This is certainly an obtuse article from our point of view. With all that is taking place in the US, how can the Post find American dissatisfaction incomprehensible? The nati ...
January 29, 2010
In the face of the President Obama's determination to push for more "change" down the path of expanding political paternalism, one imagines what he might have said in the State of the Union address if he had chosen to pro pose the type of change that really wou ...
January 28, 2010
We follow up yesterday's somewhat controversial column "Lieutenant Colonel Says US Coup Feasible" with this item from Newsmax (and perhaps elsewhere as well) which is actually entitled, "Former WMD Chief: Al-Qaida Awaiting Nukes." We focus on analyzing this sto ...
January 28, 2010
Yesterday we carried a CNN article (originally appearing in Fortune a feed-backer informs us) that predicted gold would plunge to US$500. While the author of this article apparently has an affinity for finding and then metaphorically lancing bubbles, we were no ...
January 28, 2010
It's about who is to choose! Our rights identify the realm of our choices, where we and not others get to decide about how things go. When rights are violated, the violator deprives the rights holder of his or her proper, morally justified authority to chose. S ...
January 27, 2010
We try to balance realism about society with a perception that the Internet, like a modern-day Gutenberg press, is badly damaging power elite dominant social themes. One of these themes in our opinion is "potential martial law" – a theme that has found specia ...
January 27, 2010
Every time we read one of these articles lumping gold in with other "investment" entities we feel an article coming on. Gold is not a stock, not a commodity, it is a money metal - and there are factors that influence it that go far beyond supply and demand. By ...
January 26, 2010
As of this writing, the tenor of reporting in Washington seems to have shifted. This past week, the story was that Ben Bernanke was not going to get reconfirmed as Federal Reserve Chairman. But after what appears to be a phone blitz by the Obama Administration, ...
January 26, 2010
We tend to analyze articles that appear in the mainstream press but regular readers know that the Bell will make an exception from time to time. And in this case, we have. The paper we have alluded to, (above, excerpted) seems to reveal details about the
January 25, 2010
This article, written by a young author with the Huffington Post, really got us thinking about political labeling. The article is certainly, in our opinion, written from a leveling perspective, as Samuel Johnson would say, and seems to bemoan the lack of sincer ...
January 25, 2010
Another day waging a war on terror, another Bin Laden tape. We've been writing about the war on terror and 9/11 fairly regularly because we believe some of the power elite's most fundamental dominant social themes are evident in them – and also because these ...
January 24, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to publish an exclusive interview with the distinguished free-market scholar and economist Dr. Mark Skousen. Dr. Skousen was an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business in 2004. In 2001- 02, he was preside ...
January 23, 2010
Did the results of the recent Massachusetts election in a sense presage a growing formal schism between conservatives and libertarians who supported the "real" Tea Party candidate Joe Kennedy? We've written about the schism in the past without being sure of its ...
January 23, 2010
It has been my experience that people who take politics seriously tend to want to have their idea of a good or just system of laws fully implemented. Yet these people aren't ignorant about the poor prospects of achieving their goal. Unless a society is being ru ...
January 22, 2010
Bernanke is vainly striving, presumably with the help of the Obama administration, to point the finger of blame for the economic crisis directly at Wall Street. This is all he can do, really. For if Congress does come up with a severe realignment of Wall Street ...
January 22, 2010
We've learned some interesting things in the past 24-hours. According to Newsweek and the New York Times, "FreedomWorks, headed by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey, helped direct the Tea Party movement in Massachusetts to score the upset win f ...
January 21, 2010
John Bogle is back at it again. The pioneer in the area of low-cost funds, Bogle always beats the drum for the small investor and positions himself as Wall Street maverick tilting at the windmills of greed and avarice. Bogle in this Journal opinion piece makes ...
January 21, 2010
We said we would return to the Tea Party movement and with the victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, now is as good a time as any. We see the First National Tea Party Convention (taking place in early February) is already sold out! Not only that, but it's ke ...
January 20, 2010
This is really unheard of, in our opinion. Even a year ago, the idea of the Fed actually "welcoming" a full review by Congress into ANY of activities would have seemed faintly ludicrous. Even now, we wonder what the Fed really has in mind – what slippery rhet ...
January 20, 2010
Well, this is interesting. We've written articles expressing the idea that the EU itself is something of a German reconquest of Europe without the messy effects of a war. But even within this context we wondered how much German citizens would be willing to pay ...
January 20, 2010
The Pecora Commission was stacked with big government sympathizers who blamed the free market and the gold standard without question, and without any consideration of government interference in the economy. This panel is no different. Never will they contemplat ...
January 20, 2010
The idea that just because there are other persons who are disabled or lacking in what they would want, no one may take pleasure in what he or she does have, may have a noble ring to it but it is complete folly. It is contrary to the very point of feeling sorry ...
January 19, 2010
We must admit we don't "get" the Tea Party movement either. Yes, it may be growing, but we think the mainstream media – and even portions of the alternative media – are purposefully massaging the movement's profile to fit certain political conceptions. But ...
January 19, 2010
There are always those, well educated and passionate, who make a case for a pax Americana similar to a pax Romana and that within this context a world-spanning and judiciously militaristic (American) empire may be seen as a good thing. We think, in fact, this p ...
January 18, 2010
The Internet, in our opinion, has been a big impediment to the plans of the power elite to drive global hegemony forward based on the latest financial crisis. It has taken a long time to organize an international response and there is no certainty that the over ...