STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Showing 3451 - 2 of 2
February 24, 2015
California's officials are mulling this idea ... and Florida has already done it. "Florida has had a similar office in a 124-year-old Victorian home on Capitol Hill since 1973," the article informs us. The move is treated merely as another news item to report o ...
February 24, 2015
In the other article in this issue, we pointed out that in the US, feelings of alienation toward the country and its federal government were a good deal more prevalent than ordinarily discussed. A Reuters analysis of a poll on the issue discovered almost a quar ...
February 24, 2015
One of the great myths about the capitalist system is the presumption that businessmen make profits at the expense of the consumers and workers in society. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the free market, consumers are the sovereign rulers who deter ...
February 23, 2015
As expected, Greece's strong words have not been matched by action. The top men of Greece spoke boldly, but when we examined their pedigrees, they matched up with those on the other side of the table. The negotiations were thus never those of Greeks versus Germ ...
February 23, 2015
For the most part, the alternative media has led the way when it comes to defining the parameters of the cannabis industry and its potential profits. As decriminalization and legalization have evolved, however, we've seen more articles like this one posted at B ...
February 23, 2015
Last week President Obama sent Congress legislation to authorize him to use force against ISIS "and associated persons and forces" anywhere in the world for the next three years. This is a blank check for the president to start as many new wars as he wishes, an ...
February 22, 2015
Our mission's expanded because the central problems with the government – surveillance, swat team raids, innocent citizens getting shot – all those things have expanded. Most of those issues, when the Rutherford Institute was founded some 30 years ago, didn ...
February 21, 2015
In this article, the BBC does what it often does, which is provide a "balanced" narrative regarding semi-authoritarian rulers and their bad behavior. This article pays little attention to Kirchner's truly outrageous behavior and instead "profiles" her in a fair ...
February 21, 2015
This new Canadian bill is that the bill is exceptionally popular in Canada we learn from Canada's Globe and Mail. It calls for "tough new measures" that will further compromise Canadians' natural right to privacy, while giving the government invasive new powers ...
February 20, 2015
Predatory lending is a big meme these days. During the sub-prime postmortems it was brought up a lot. Apparently, if someone offers you money and you take it, you may have participated in a crime. You're not at fault, of course. It's the fellow who gave you the ...
February 20, 2015
In the other article in this issue, we've discussed Eric Holder's final attempt to bring accountability to Wall Street's bankers. What Holder claims he wants to accomplish on Wall Street – to clean it up – the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants to d ...
February 19, 2015
Just in time to join this larger debate comes the reasonable GAO alternative: Let's make the Fed more accountable but not TOO accountable. Call this the Goldilocks option. We did some research and found a version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears that took the ...
February 19, 2015
This Mises article about Russia potentially returning to a "gold standard" was written earlier this month. We've also speculated on this idea, and the article pulls together a number of current events from a Russian standpoint. The article talks about a remonet ...
February 19, 2015
A pivot point occurred within feminism on the issue of rape in 1975 when the book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape by Susan Brownmiller appeared. In its pages, Brownmiller attempted to chart the history of rape from the Neanderthal through to modern man, p ...
February 18, 2015
This is one of those articles that in our humble opinion starts with a false premise, one that is enunciated at the very bottom of the article: In any event, financial regulators shouldn't be afraid of cost-benefit analysis. If it's done well, it serves the cau ...
February 18, 2015
This anti-extremism summit is likely laying the groundwork for further repression of US freedoms. It is using the fear of "terrorism" to do so. The legal remedies created as a result will eventually be aimed at domestic critics of US fedgov's increasingly repre ...
February 18, 2015
"Are you ready for total war?" "Sind Sie bereit für totalen Krieg?" – Joseph Goebbels. On February 18, 1943, German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels delivered a rousing speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, asking the German people, "Sind Sie bereit für tota ...
February 18, 2015
"You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." – George Orwell, 1984. None of us are perfect. All of us bend the rules occasionall ...
February 17, 2015
The ingredients are being assembled for another Greater Recession. Methodically, they are placed in the pot. And eventually the pot will be stirred ... and the result will not be pretty. Central banks are printing money as never before. The BIS guides them and ...
February 17, 2015
There are no nation-states, only cultures. Yemen is a good example of this. Western forces are trying to put back together a "nation" that never worked in the first place. And the reason given is (basically) Western security. But we would argue along with Ron P ...
February 17, 2015
A little more than seventy years ago, on March 10, 1944, there appeared in Great Britain one of the most amazing and influential political books of the twentieth century, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek, which forewarned of socialist trends in Britain ...
February 16, 2015
Here is yet another article arguing that making money worth less increases prosperity. Black is white, up is down, etc. We truly live in an age where most of the world's received wisdom is at least questionable. And it is not hard to tell why. There are conside ...
February 16, 2015
Republicans are worried about getting blamed for a Department of Homeland Security shutdown. The idea, as always, is that government needs to function effectively. If it doesn't then somebody is at risk of losing his job. And that's usually – according to com ...
February 16, 2015
The president is requesting Congress to pass an authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) resolution against ISIS. Congress has not issued a similar resolution since 2002, when President Bush was given the authority to wage war against Iraq. The purpos ...
February 15, 2015
I see the main issue as the continued expansion of the welfare and warfare state. The national debt is now $16.8 trillion and it was about $8.5 trillion when I made FIAT EMPIRE in 2006. It looks like the bankers are winning. I thus think the only way this debt ...
February 13, 2015
The comments being made by Richard Fisher are probably a result of a recent Fed scandal involving the New York Fed and Goldman Sachs. Carmen Segarra worked at the Federal Reserve in New York and started secretly recording conversations in 2012 involving Goldman ...
February 13, 2015
Here is Bloomberg yet again postulating that business cycles are not predictable and that – by default – central bank money printing has nothing to do with it. Of course, one of the big breakthroughs of the 20th century was, in our view, the discovery by Lu ...
February 12, 2015
We begin to see a pattern here. As always, we are led to believe the crisis is unavoidable and the horror is about to descend. And then at the last minute, or even after the last minute, the bureaucrats somehow manage to resolve their differences. Some governme ...
February 12, 2015
This article proposes that the US ought to get involved in European affairs as it has "twice before" in the past century. When the article talks about "involvement," what is considered necessary is apparently a large sum of US cash that will allow Greece in par ...
February 12, 2015
The term "social construction" has entered the popular culture and vocabulary without being clearly defined in people's minds. It refers to far more than merely deconstructing an idea or an institution, such as the court system, and then reconstructing it diffe ...
February 11, 2015
This Bloomberg editorial begins with an elaborate apology regarding a mis-statement that Rand Paul referred to US$57 trillion in Fed assets in a recent speech when he actually said US$57 billion. But the article doesn't back down any further regarding Rand Paul ...
February 11, 2015
Even now, many look on entrepreneurs in the cannabis space with mild derision. The industry has boomed so soon and multiplied into such a variety of opportunities that most people cannot foresee just how far or fast a cannabis venture can travel. Forbes, on the ...
February 11, 2015
Almost every week I get an email from an American expatriate living outside the country who commiserates about the deplorable state of our freedoms in the United States, expounds on his great fortune in living outside the continental U.S., and urges me to leave ...
February 11, 2015
As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has observed, the payroll jobs reports no longer make any logical or statistical sense. Ask yourself, do you believe that retailers responded to the very disappointing Christmas season by rushing out in January to hire 46,000 ...
February 10, 2015
There are two free trade pacts being negotiated currently, one in the "Pacific" and the other in the "Atlantic." The Pacific one seems to get most of the attention and there is good news for those who want the treaty cancelled or radically reconfigured. The goo ...
February 10, 2015
This is partially one of those "backlash" editorials, designed to take a countervailing position in order to stimulate our sense of inquiry. That's what we read editorials for, editors like to believe. In a sense, it harkens back to 20th century memes having to ...
February 10, 2015
In American culture there is one persistent villain portrayed as the enemy of humanity, the perpetrator of deception, and the agent for social corruption and human harm: the businessman. Whether in news commentaries or on the movie screen, the businessman is pr ...
February 09, 2015
We've been writing about this race to the bottom for months now. From our point of view, it seems like a kind of directed history. First, central bankers announce the specter of deflation and then they gradually take steps to combat it. They also announce that ...
February 09, 2015
This article from Martin Armstrong is a timely reminder that cross-border protections are getting stronger not weaker. We've estimated in the past that within two years time it will be significantly more difficult to get funds in and out of the US. Armstrong ha ...
February 09, 2015
If I were still a practicing ob-gyn and one of my patients said she was not going to vaccinate her child, I might try to persuade her to change her mind. But, if I were unsuccessful, I would respect her decision. I certainly would not lobby the government to pa ...
February 08, 2015
I think we just need a little more time for things to gain momentum on the federal level. The National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA) and the Marijuana Industry Group (MIG) both bring an incredible amount of credibility and organization to this effort. Wi ...
February 07, 2015
A recent Reuters editorial asks, "Is Jeb Bush just another 'big government' liberal?" The article then goes on to discuss the differences between the "liberal" and GOP conservatives. This is an interesting analysis but I will try to show that it leaves out a th ...
February 06, 2015
Is this a dance between the EU and Greece, designed to yield tension, headlines and ultimately resolution? Or is it a legitimate unraveling of the EU's program? Once again, the world waits and watches while powerful government officials bargain over national an ...
February 06, 2015
In the other article in this issue, we've analyzed the dialectic now taking hold between Greece and the EU. We pointed out that the EU may be trying to control negotiations as best it can but that these negotiations are disruptive nonetheless and presumably the ...
February 05, 2015
The suit is settled and presumably it's back to business as normal for S&P. The ratings agency stood accused of providing too-rosy ratings in order to gain clients. Of course, S&P was not the only agency to provide ratings that looked overly optimistic after th ...
February 05, 2015
Not long ago, cannabis was generally illegal and you could go to jail for a long time by smoking it. But now with legalization and decriminalization taking place in the US and elsewhere, cannabis is being touted as a government money spinner. In the case of Col ...
February 05, 2015
The political sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) coined a new term, The Power Elite, through the title of his popular 1956 book. The term described the relationships of power between people who occupied leadership positions in three key segments of society ...
February 04, 2015
We recently pointed out in an article – "Grexit: The Footsteps Grow Louder ... Could the EU Blow Apart?" – that Germans might be very unhappy with a rescheduling of Greek debt. But that looks like what is happening. The proximate mechanism is a proposal by ...
February 04, 2015
The US economy is making a comeback but not for individuals. This article in Al Jazeera, a quasi-mainstream publication, provides us with these insights. The article is written by David Cay Johnston, an award-winning investigative reporter who recently produced ...
February 04, 2015
Americans love their reality TV shows – the drama, the insults, the bullying, the callousness, the damaged relationships delivered through the lens of a surveillance camera – and there's no shortage of such dehumanizing spectacles to be found on or off scre ...
