STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Showing 3701 - 0 of 0
February 26, 2013
Suddenly, the US has enough available energy to be self-sufficient for a thousand years. And now we are told – by the BBC no less – that one of the world's more impoverished nations – Kenya – may be able to tap the equivalent of millions of barrels of o ...
February 26, 2013
Well, here we have an example of two "big brains" – respected free-market commentators – that have decidedly different opinions when it comes to intellectual property. In fact, a feedbacker pointed out that we should have asked the free-market economist Rob ...
February 26, 2013
A particularly irksome rhetorical ploy against the free society's champions is that they refuse to acknowledge that there is such a thing as the public interest (or public good or general welfare or some such goal). Critics of these champions routinely wag thei ...
February 26, 2013
We've written about the history of newspapering – pamphleteering really – but were nonetheless surprised to find a brief synopsis by Reuters columnist Jack Shafer. This is unusual. Twenty-first century journalism suffers from the same technocratic piousness ...
February 25, 2013
Simon Black's Sovereign Man tells us that the top gold storage firm worldwide – ViaMat – is refusing to take US clients. He reproduces a memo explaining the decision and then comments, "This is huge. I can't possibly overstate the potential ramifications." ...
February 25, 2013
The United States has recently engaged in so many wars that it has spawned a mercenary industry that is growing into a US$100 billion-a-year commercial enterprise. Is this a "real" business? There is considerable doubt that many of the wars now embarked upon ar ...
February 25, 2013
In what has to be one of the more cynical moves in recent US political history, the White House has announced (see above) that more information freely distributes is better than less information available on via subscription. This turn of events come about six ...
February 25, 2013
While this speech was made a while ago at Davos, we think it is worth noting as Ms. Christine Lagarde is enunciating a significant dominant social theme – that the West is surely destined to perish if savvy officials don't make the proper decisions. The West ...
February 25, 2013
While I oppose most gun control proposals, there is one group of Americans I do believe should be disarmed: federal agents. The use of force by federal agents to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws is one of the major, albeit overlooked, threats to liberty ...
February 24, 2013
The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Robert Wenzel. Here's a brief snippet. Daily Bell: Has libertarianism and Austrian free-market thinking advanced in the past ten years as a result of the Internet? Robert Wenzel: Very much so. T ...
February 23, 2013
"Fiscal trouble ahead for most future retirees." Or so the Washington Post tells us in a recent column explaining why future retirees (Baby Boomers) are headed for considerable trouble. Grim reading, actually. For the first time since the New Deal, a majority o ...
February 22, 2013
The European dialectic is alive and well in the Eurozone and beyond. Across the EU, recession (depression) spreads and we are told that the only response is a central banking one. The EU economic morass can only be alleviated by additional easing as the spigot ...
February 22, 2013
The world's top elite families have stored their gold in Switzerland for a long time, hundreds of years. And during that time, Swiss private bankers have served this vast Money Power with discretion and courtesy. Swiss private banking is not going away, no matt ...
February 22, 2013
France is a second-rate world power and now its President François Hollande has been given a second-rate peace prize. Barack Obama walked off with the big one as soon as he was elected. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What exactly US President Obama did ...
February 22, 2013
When you're in a situation and you feel like reacting with anger, or fear, or hurt feelings – anything that feels like it's an automatic, purely emotional response – you have a choice as to what to do about it. You can react, or you can choose to do somethi ...
February 21, 2013
The Financialist is published by the vast securities firm of Credit Suisse, and thus we are not surprised to find this sentiment being enunciated by officials in charge of this publication. It is, of course, a kind of elite dominant social theme. The idea is th ...
February 21, 2013
The New York Times recently opened up its editorial section to a discussion of why ratings agencies had failed so miserably during the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and what could be done to improve them. We've written about this in the past, concluding that ra ...
February 21, 2013
The United States penitentiary-industrial complex imprisons one-third to one-half of all incarcerated individuals in the world. Additionally, it has been reported that one of every three US individuals have some sort of interaction with the criminal justice sys ...
February 21, 2013
Over the last several years, statists have changed their tune a bit. Instead of advocating Draconian governmental intrusions on people's lives, in the tradition of the Soviets and other unabashed tyrants, they have at least seemingly reformed and changed their ...
February 20, 2013
China's central bankers have decided that the US economy is in fine shape, according to the UK Telegraph. This doesn't make much sense, given the US's generalized economic and socio-political difficulties but we wouldn't expect China's central planners to figur ...
February 20, 2013
Price fixing is back with a new title, "human" – as in "minimum human wage." We are indebted to the The Economist magazine for bringing us this latest jargon. We disagree with the concept, of course ... profoundly. As we pointed out just yesterday, The Econom ...
February 20, 2013
We've regularly tracked the progress of what we call the neo-Pecora meme – elite dominant social theme, really – and now we note Senator Elizabeth Warren's contribution. Reuters, an aggregate backer of regulatory democracy, is giving her latest outburst sig ...
February 20, 2013
This is the fourth of the "12 Axioms of Freedom Restoration" set forth in my introductory article on this topic, "How to Restore the West." The restoration of America's first and legitimate government will not be a quick or easy task but it is necessary if we a ...
February 19, 2013
James Buchanan is dead and we will not speak ill of the dead – nor should we in the case of the free-market oriented Buchanan. But we can certainly point out that his death gives The Economist (that most insufferable of all "newspapers"), yet one more opportu ...
February 19, 2013
Unlike many in the alternative media, we spent a lot of time covering the civil war that overtook Ivory Coast after the botched election between Laurent Gbagbo and the country's current president, Alassane Ouattara. Ouattara is Muslim and Gbagbo is Christian. D ...
February 19, 2013
We've written about David Icke before, suggesting that what is seemingly inexplicable and strange – downright nutty – about his conspiracy theories is no different than the great artist William Blake's creation of poetic cosmogony in his era. You can see ou ...
February 19, 2013
Last week, senators threatened to put a "hold" on the nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director over his refusal to answer questions about the use of drones to kill Americans on US soil. That the president's nominee to head the agency that has used drones t ...
February 19, 2013
Paradigms are mega-systems of thought that explain certain realms of reality so as to shift mankind toward new visions. For example, mercantilism, Lockean limited government, species evolution, Pasteurian medicine, quantum physics, Keynesian economics and welfa ...
February 19, 2013
As the global currency war intensifies, the majority of attention has been paid to the 17% fall of the Japanese yen against the US dollar over the past few months. The implosion has given cover to the sad performance of another once mighty currency: the British ...
February 18, 2013
Two issues need to be clarified about the current junk boom. First, it doesn't exist and second, you ought not to want it to. The modern junk bond market, when it is really in evidence, is a multi-trillion dollar entity. A few deals do not a resurgent junk bond ...
February 18, 2013
The post-World War II period in the United States saw a number of exposes take place that have since been debunked. One can speculate on the reasons why but it seems fairly clear that the social order was being attacked to make people feel less certain about th ...
February 18, 2013
Counterpunch, one of the United States's top leftist media facilities, has launched a long screed analyzing the attack that Africa has now come under from the West. This attack has been going on for years, but the editors at Counterpunch – in this article, an ...
February 18, 2013
One of the biggest and most controversial memes of the modern era is environmentalism, specifically the idea that manmade carbon is clogging the skies and making disastrous global warming inevitable. The amount of carbon that man injects into the atmosphere is ...
February 18, 2013
In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, "Generational Theft Needs to be Arrested," three men advanced some suggestions to Republicans. Their main focus was the need for Republicans to address what they, following others who have chimed in on the topic, have crit ...
February 18, 2013
The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families ...
February 17, 2013
The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Edward Karr. Daily Bell: It's not always easy to find opportunities that support an entrepreneurial society and generate significant revenue as well ... Edward Karr: This is true, unfortunately. ...
February 16, 2013
... One and a half years ago, Suliman, 42, re-set his watch to German time, having become disenchanted with Al-Jazeera. And it wasn't just because the broadcaster seemed less interested in reports from Europe. Rather, Suliman had the feeling that he was no long ...
February 16, 2013
We are seeing a lot of pushback in the mainstream media to any mythologizing of Chris Dorner. This column by New York Times editorialist Charles Blow is along those lines. He points out that Dorner brutally took lives and intended to take more, and that his act ...
February 15, 2013
According to this Reuters opinion article, Federal Reserve officials have finally realized that markets need common sense regulation – including bubble moderation when things seem to be getting out of hand. This is hailed as a positive first step to returning ...
February 15, 2013
We put the letters in caps in our dominant social theme, above, because you can almost hear former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell making that statement in rolling tones. He wrote this editorial for Reuters in his capacity as co-chairman of Building America's ...
February 15, 2013
It is unfortunate that Julian Assange faces extradition to Sweden and then to the United States but even though John Pilger is defending him, we have a hard time letting go of our suspicions regarding the WikiLeaks founder. We've written about them before. Just ...
February 15, 2013
Poor Chuck Hagel. Every day, The Wall Street Journal wallops the fellow. He is whacked for not knowing what he is doing ... smacked for not appreciating the threat of a nuclear Iran ... and slapped hard for not bending over quickly enough to kiss neo-con butts. ...
February 14, 2013
Just when we think the meme of the all-knowing central banker can get no worse, we learn otherwise. Today's central banker, Bloomberg tells us, is supposed to be a reckless gunslinger, taking chances because there is little left to lose. Do you feel better now? ...
February 14, 2013
According to various prophecies, the next pope may be the last one and usher in the era of the anti-Christ. That pope is to be known as Peter the Roman. The main set of prophecies regarding papal succession is the Prophecy of Popes, 112 short predictions in Lat ...
February 14, 2013
There is some idea, apparently, that a government petition focused on firing the chief prosecutor of the Aaron Swartz case will begin to redress injustice. We doubt it, however. Aaron Swartz is dead of an apparent suicide apparently brought on by prosecutorial ...
February 14, 2013
Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and she is considerably less alarmist than some about this latest "crisis." But crisis it is nonetheless and Folbre doesn't shy away from calling it that. In today's world, of co ...
February 14, 2013
Once I learned to read there was no end to it. I used my flashlight to make it possible after I was sent to sleep and my first books were quite a disorderly collection. I read a bunch of historical novels in Hungarian, several about the 160-year-long Turkish oc ...
February 13, 2013
Among very few publications, we've been covering what we considered to be a dominant social theme regarding paper money and the state's ability to print directly for "the people." Along the way, we've received vicious attacks because, as has hard-money economis ...
February 13, 2013
This article is actually a compendium of dominant social themes and secret elite strategies. Once again, we see confirmation of much that we have mentioned in the recent past. This article is positioned as an attack on Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, even tho ...
February 13, 2013
"The Shooter" article in Esquire continues to reverberate. You can see our own article on the subject here: "Esquire Portrait of bin Laden's Death Fails to Convince." But in the meantime, a conservative website called Twitchy has been documenting the efforts of ...
