STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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June 02, 2014
This Reuters editorial shows us clearly how pro-EU forces are reacting to recent elections (Reuters being one such). These elections made it clear that large parts of the European electorate are fed-up with the euro and the EU as well after some six years of er ...
June 02, 2014
Last week Americans were shocked and saddened by another mass killing, this one near a college campus in California. We all feel deep sympathy for the families of the victims. As usual, many people responded to this shooting by calling for new federal gun contr ...
May 31, 2014
The US House of Representatives has voted to block federal law enforcement from pursuing users of medical marijuana in states that permit that use. This is just the latest move in the unraveling of marijuana prohibition. It may look as if a spontaneous movement ...
May 30, 2014
Do an Internet search about the Bilderberg conference now underway in Denmark and you'll find remarkably little news from the mainstream press. There are articles and videos – but as before, it's the alternative media on the scene: Infowars, AFP, etc. This ar ...
May 30, 2014
What, really, do the Swiss have to offer now? Is it possible that the UBS scandal was in some sense planned to bring down the system. The damage is certainly clear; the Swiss government and banking community sacrificed centuries of banking history and culture t ...
May 29, 2014
There is apparently consternation among those who define the West's dominant social themes. Keynesian economics is clearly not working and needs a reset (or so we are told), as we analyzed in yesterday's article. And now we can see clearly in the above excerpt ...
May 29, 2014
In keeping with the modern propensity for "bread and circuses," the Olympics have grown vastly over the past century. But now that growth seems to be halting, as we can see from this article excerpt. Is that so bad? In fact, the Olympics are a kind of moral fai ...
May 29, 2014
In the early 19th century, the American anti-slavery movement called abolitionism made an intriguing argument. Without denying or diminishing the horror of being a slave, abolitionists claimed that the slave owner was also a victim because owning another person ...
May 28, 2014
The reason we follow the Reuters opinion page is because we often find substantial rebuttals to what we call the Internet Reformation posted there. This editorial seems to be groping toward a new elite dominant social theme designed to negate points made by fre ...
May 28, 2014
We've often pointed out that there seems to be a globalist plan to swap in Africa for Japan and China when it comes to creating nation-states and regions that can buy US Treasuries. We have named this meme "Africa Rising," and you can see some of our articles h ...
May 28, 2014
Last week I watched President Obama give a talk about his VA problems. Those of us who have learned the lessons of history and some brilliant political economists, such as the late F. A. Hayek, were not shocked to witness that the VA has been unable to meet its ...
May 27, 2014
Puerto Rico is hot – not weather-wise but as a business destination. And perhaps there's a reason. Uncle Sam is well aware that many are doing their best to move their money and themselves out of the US; But if the funds have to go anywhere, US bureaucrats pr ...
May 27, 2014
For millions of Americans the Second Amendment and its guarantee of the right of the individual to bear arms appears irrelevant and practically anachronistic. It seems a throwback to those earlier days of the Wild West, when many men, far from the law and order ...
May 26, 2014
The headlines exploded last night with EU election results showing clearly that voters in France, England, Germany, Denmark, Hungary and Greece (among others) had had enough of the EU. Of course, our readers are not surprised. We've been predicting this for yea ...
May 26, 2014
In numerous articles, we've pointed out that the globalist power elite was backing what we call the marijuana meme – the decriminalization and eventual legalization of cannabis. We believed that this was an important perspective. The elite's support of legal ...
May 26, 2014
President Obama held a press conference last week to express his outrage over reports that the Veterans Administration was routinely delaying treatment to veterans, with some veterans even dying while on alleged secret waiting lists. The president said that, "i ...
May 26, 2014
Memorial Day is when we commemorate our war dead. Like the Fourth of July, Memorial Day is being turned into a celebration of war. Those who lose family members and dear friends to war don't want the deaths to have been in vain. Consequently, wars become glorio ...
May 25, 2014
I'm on the beach in the Caribbean today as I respond to the interview questions so for me, personally, like the Zac Brown Band sings in their hit song, "Toes", "I got my toes in the water, *ss in the sand not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand. Life i ...
May 24, 2014
Three news items caught my attention recently. They speak to mercantilist immorality, and I'll explain more clearly what that means toward the end of this article. First, let's look at the news items. An article entitled, "Car Exec Loses Money On Electric Cars, ...
May 24, 2014
Until Ron Paul raised the issue at the national level in 2007, the Federal Reserve System had been treated with the kind of lazy indifference or acquiescence with which the public gradually comes to accept any institution of long standing. To be sure, most of t ...
May 23, 2014
Once more, uneasy institutional voices are raised about the Fed's money printing. The idea is that the unholy trillions created by the Fed have been offered to commercial banks and may be used as loans at some point. Too many loans and too much currency can cre ...
May 23, 2014
Now Bloomberg is promoting the marijuana meme or at least beginning to support its affiliated product – hemp. This is right in line with what we have been predicting. The marijuana meme did not emerge simply from popular action. It is surely part of a larger ...
May 22, 2014
This article in the UK Telegraph points out succinctly the problems faced by the EU but spends a good deal of time wondering why European leaders like Francois Hollande are pursuing policies that are giving rise to extreme opposition and further damaging econom ...
May 22, 2014
Despite regular efforts to downplay the political change taking place around the US, events like this one – in the excerpt above – show that the sociopolitical fabric itself is being attacked by citizens who for one reason or another have had enough. They w ...
May 22, 2014
John Galt is the protagonist of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged and expresses her vision of the ideal man. The title of this article flashed at me during a discussion with a fellow who argued adamantly against idealism. He wanted it stamped out of libertarianis ...
May 21, 2014
Here is a mainstream media article about the necessity for governments to reduce their size and scope. It is surprising for the strong language it uses in tracking the West's current dilemma regarding expanding and divisive bureaucracies. Nevertheless, it does ...
May 21, 2014
High Alert has taken a position that some investments are more palatable than others. But unlike the mainstream media, we don't believe that adhering to elite dominant social themes defines "morality." Ethical investing often focuses on "saving the planet" by s ...
May 21, 2014
I teach ethics, mainly business ethics, and here is a brief outline of some of the more prominent schools I discuss in class: A. Ethical hedonism is the view that everyone ought to seek to obtain as much physical pleasure in life as possible. This has appeal be ...
May 21, 2014
In response to our account of the mysterious large rise in Belgium's Treasury purchases, it was suggested that the transaction would show up on the Fed's balance sheet. However, the Fed is under no obligation to show the transaction. The $141.2 billion in Treas ...
May 20, 2014
This interesting Reuters article provides us with a quasi-review of Glenn Greenwald's new book, No Place to Hide, and concludes that Greenwald is occasionally overwrought. The real issue seems to be that Greenwald doesn't think much of "national security" repor ...
May 20, 2014
In the past few days we've read numerous articles about how the Antarctic is melting and that it is too late to stop it now. Being long-time analysts of dominant social themes, we didn't take the meme seriously even though it was repeated over and over again. B ...
May 20, 2014
Governments have an insatiable appetite for the wealth of their subjects. When governments find it impossible to continue raising taxes or borrowing funds, they have invariably turned to printing paper money to finance their growing expenditures. The resulting ...
May 19, 2014
It is common knowledge we need modern regulatory justice because of an inherent tension between the rights of individuals to be left alone and the rights of others not to suffer from the acts of a few. This is most famously summarized by a statement in Oliver W ...
May 19, 2014
Let the dialectic begin. Inexperienced meme watchers might believe this report expresses the bureaucratic view of the UN regarding drugs: Criminalization should stand. But wait ... We think much of what is going on today is in a sense preordained. The marijuana ...
May 19, 2014
Recently, Republican leaders in Congress unveiled a "tax reform" plan that they claimed would provide the American people with a simpler, fairer and more efficient tax system. While this plan does lower some tax rates and contains some other changes that may ma ...
May 18, 2014
There is now a new normal and it is far worse than it used to be. Life itself has changed. Daily life is far more difficult and grim than it used to be, 20 years ago. There are so many ways in which life or the new daily norm has become more difficult. Consider ...
May 17, 2014
The UK Telegraph has published an article entitled, "EU officials plotted IMF attack to bring rebellious Italy to its knees." The crux of the article is that Tim Geithner, in his book Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, reveals that top EU officials a ...
May 16, 2014
A few years ago, we began writing about how the big credit rating agencies had blown up. The agencies didn't foresee the credit meltdown of banks and financial firms in 2008. They had no idea that Lehman Brothers was bankrupt, that Merrill Lynch would have to b ...
May 16, 2014
This "article" includes a slide show that presents 25 public figures in various stages of climb-down regarding marijuana. The names include everyone from John McCain to Pete Holmes, the attorney for the City of Seattle. It's quite startling to read what people ...
May 15, 2014
There is probably nothing more destructive to Western economies than interest rates that are held down for too long. That's what is going on currently and it will surely end horribly. In between, the Wall Street Party we've predicted will probably move forward ...
May 15, 2014
Once upon a time, it was thought that female writers and editors might bring special qualities to newsrooms that male-dominated enterprises lacked. Additionally, it was thought that liberal-oriented (leveling) publications with a stake in creating "equality" mi ...
May 15, 2014
The Department of Justice (DOJ) program is called Operation Choke Point. The choke point is America's payment infrastructure through which an estimated $5 trillion in consumer purchases flow each year; more than eight million merchants use it to process credit ...
May 14, 2014
It occurred to us long ago that the price one paid for modernity was an increasing lack of privacy. But then we began to notice the "take downs" on YouTube, Yahoo, Google and other large Internet facilities. If so much information could be removed from the 'Net ...
May 14, 2014
In this past presidential election, the Republican Party establishment brain trust was so worried about libertarian Ron Paul that the party furiously staved off the congressman's bid before settling on the more establishment friendly Mitt Romney. Of course, the ...
May 14, 2014
Although it is prudent to be skeptical about the entries found at Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia offers a sound account of utopias: "Utopia is a term for an ideal society. It has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempted to create an ...
May 13, 2014
Here is an article about dogmatism versus pragmatism. The idea is that conservatives may be victorious in upcoming elections but even if they win they may lose. This is along the lines of what we have been explaining in the recent past. The Tea Party is more th ...
May 13, 2014
Tina Brown, perhaps the most storied journalist of her generation, has posted an article about Monica Lewinsky that reveals a lot more about Brown than Lewinsky. The article is noteworthy, unfortunately, not only for what it is but for what it is not. It is nei ...
May 13, 2014
This year marks one hundred years since the beginning of the First World War in the summer of 1914. The Great War, as it used to be called, brought great devastation in its wake. Millions of human lives were lost on the battlefields of Europe, vast amounts of a ...
May 13, 2014
Is the Fed "tapering"? Did the Fed really cut its bond purchases during the three-month period November 2013 through January 2014? Apparently not if foreign holders of Treasuries are unloading them. From November 2013 through January 2014 Belgium with a GDP of ...
May 12, 2014
This article drums up the market. It makes the point that equity market gains in the first four months have been more limited than at any time since 2009 — "just 1.6 percent on the S&P 500." At the same time, bonds have done much better. It's time to sell, ri ...
