STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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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 ...
May 12, 2014
The greatness of a great land is long gone. Scotland is the home of dreary socialist cities glowering under a gray sky. And Scotland's fate will not really change whether it stays with Britain or goes with the EU and the euro. The choice is to be Europe or Brit ...
May 12, 2014
In several eastern Ukrainian towns over the past week, the military opened fire on its own citizens. Dozens may have been killed in the violence. Although the US government generally condemns a country's use of military force against its own population, especia ...
May 11, 2014
We have legislation advancing on all fronts. We are supporting a 2014 initiative to regulate marijuana like alcohol in Alaska, and we are just getting rolling with our 2016 initiative to regulate marijuana like alcohol in Nevada. "We also plan to support simila ...
May 09, 2014
Interesting question and answer. Bernie Sanders' query is predictable but Janet Yellen's response is not. Alan Greenspan no doubt would have answered in a way that allowed for multiple interpretations. But Yellen took the question with little equivocation. Here ...
May 09, 2014
Uruguay legalized cannabis, but perhaps infighting between anti-drug warriors and tolerant "new wavers" has resulted in a setback – as the legalization is fraught with government control. Is this what we call "directed history"? Right after Uruguay legalized ...
May 09, 2014
It is believed by many on the left today that our Constitution resulted from the Founding Fathers deceitfully conspiring to form a society ruled by aristocrats, and that the seeds for modernity's corruption lie in the Founders' elitist Constitution that now pla ...
May 08, 2014
This is a new dominant social theme. The old one would be: Drugs are evil. Why the change? Good question. We'll offer an answer toward the end of this analysis. But to set the stage: We've grappled with the issue of why cannabis is suddenly being legalized – ...
May 08, 2014
The NSA's comprehensive effort to create "dragnet" software aimed at investor data could give it the power to manipulate major stock markets comprehensively. That's the charge over at alternative media website Infowars, in an explosive article that was posted a ...
May 08, 2014
One man has answered the question, "How much does it cost to buy the U.S. Senate?" The price tag and his name came to light as the only plausible explanation for an otherwise inexplicable event. Two months ago, an even more bizarre spectacle than usual took pla ...
May 07, 2014
So economic analysis is flawed by assumptions? Congratulations to Bloomberg for allowing this observation to be published. It is, in our view, an extremely credible observation. Interestingly, the editorial was apparently ignited by a book called Capital in the ...
May 07, 2014
Probably every era has its scary ideology and ours, I'm afraid, is egalitarianism. The most prominent thinkers – those hailed and being featured in major journals, by prestigious publishers, in respected forums of opinion and so forth – such as Amartya S ...
May 07, 2014
Anyone who looks carefully behind the veil of words cannot find democracy in America. For years I have been writing that the US government is no longer accountable to law or to the people (see, for example, my book, How America Was Lost). The Constitution has b ...
May 06, 2014
The US government is reportedly about to release the grimmest study yet of climate change/gobal warming. Of course, these studies are not the same as "evidence." They are a compilation of data and opinion. The same sort of approach is used to create the famousl ...
May 06, 2014
This article makes an interesting point regarding Monsanto's evolution from a technological standpoint. It's "food for thought," so to speak. Instead of mixing different DNA together – which has brought the company much bad publicity and public distrust – M ...
May 06, 2014
A new book by French economist Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has recently caused a major stir on the opinion pages of newspapers and magazines. Piketty has resurrected from the ash heap of history Karl Marx's claim that capitalism inescap ...
May 05, 2014
The world is full of directed history and Ukraine is no exception. We've watched the propaganda mount and if the Ukraine promotion is any example of how conflicts get started and then enlarge, we can safely say that war is a racket – and a hoax besides. That ...
May 05, 2014
So Bloomberg suggests that schools only hire education-school graduates from the top third of their graduating class. These "super teachers" will improve the system. That's the idea anyway. Bloomberg claims this system works well in places like South Korea. Th ...
May 05, 2014
Last week World Bank economists predicted that China would soon displace the United States as the world's largest economy. The fact that this one-time economic basket case is now positioned to surpass the US is one more sign of the damage done to American prosp ...
May 04, 2014
Does prohibition ever work? Craig Jones: Sure! It works for organized crime and organized repression and the ancillary industries that support these: guns, banking, security services, prisons, lawyers, etc. It grows their budgets, power and political influence. ...
May 03, 2014
Janet Yellen is at it again, poormouthing the economy. In a Bloomberg article entitled "Yellen Fed Resigns Itself to Diminished Growth Expectations," we get the sad news that there isn't going to be a white-hot economy any time soon, certainly not in the US. An ...
May 02, 2014
This article proposes that it is necessary to confront the growing rage of ever-poorer populations with solutions that will produce increased income equality. Those at the "top" of society are obviously growing more uncomfortable with the increasingly evident f ...
May 02, 2014
So silver is suffering from its relationship to gold? That's a bit strange. Gold has been circulated by humans for thousands of years. Supposedly they may have found 100,000 year-old gold mines in South Africa. But the power elite, ever jealous of its paper pri ...
May 02, 2014
Marxists were notorious for infighting over the most trivial differences. One group would secede from another, reverse the word order of the group it had seceded from, and declare itself the new and pure group. The first group, the new group would declare to th ...
May 02, 2014
My missive under the same title (Daily Bell, April 18, 2014) created quite a stir. As pointed out, the title is tongue-in-cheek and should be interpreted in the light of trying to find the best method to combat the fiat currency inflicted upon the population of ...
May 01, 2014
So the Dow has hit a record high. We told you so. There is NO reason for the Dow to go "up" so much. The US is mired in a quasi-depression, Europe is in chaos, China continually faces a hard landing and the BRICs generally are struggling. Where is the growth to ...
May 01, 2014
Talk about an exercise in futility ... The US Congress is holding hearings on whether or not fedgov policies encourage poverty. Of course, the real reasons for US poverty are obvious to anyone who studies the matter seriously. Western fiscal, monetary and judic ...
May 01, 2014
The state is not necessary for there to be law in society. In North America, the indispensable laws – the ones that protect person and property – evolved from customary laws or from common law. Customary laws are the rules of conduct that arise naturally as ...
May 01, 2014
The US economy is a house of cards. Every aspect of it is fraudulent, and the illusion of recovery is created with fraudulent statistics. American capitalism itself is an illusion. All financial markets are rigged. Massive liquidity poured into financial market ...
April 30, 2014
Surprised? The article also notes that on a per-household basis, federal regulatory costs average nearly US$15,000. That is reportedly a bigger sum than individual and corporate income taxes combined. Also, US regulations are not "capped" nor are they subject t ...
April 30, 2014
German green fanaticism turned into national policy some years ago and the largest economy in Europe created a political blueprint to reach truly utopian goals. And now it's all falling apart. That's what happens when politicians substitute their judgment for t ...
April 30, 2014
It is individualism that the American Founders elevated into political prominence and it is individualism that most politicians and governments, including America's, find most annoying because it is the bulwark against arbitrary power. If, as the Declaration of ...
April 29, 2014
So now what we consider to be the Snowden false flag comes into clearer focus. Directed history has taken us from the hard-to-fathom escapades of Snowden himself – very suddenly – to a conference of 1,200 wise wonks that want to "change" the Internet to sav ...
April 29, 2014
Here at High Alert we can tell the difference between science and exploitation. Much of what passes for applied science these days in the West is unfortunately fear- and greed-based exploitation. It is the power elite that organizes these faux-science applicati ...
April 29, 2014
A demonstration of just how far the United States has moved from its original founding principles is seen in the fact that in all the jousting over ObamaCare, the general rise in "entitlement" spending and the burden of government regulation over American enter ...
April 28, 2014
Directed history advances once again? Here's what the Washington Post concludes about moving ahead with immigration reform: The takeaway? ... that would be a bad thing for Republicans. What kind of politician directly advances programs inimical to his party's r ...
April 28, 2014
The mainstream media in the US has always seemingly been pro-Obamacare. The program never received a forceful vetting and now with the program supposedly gaining traction, defenders are out in force. This Reuters editorial is a good example. The talking points ...
April 28, 2014
Earlier this month, CIA-operated drones killed as many as 55 people in Yemen in several separate strikes. Although it was claimed that those killed were "militants," according to press reports at least three civilians were killed and at least five others wounde ...
April 27, 2014
The overriding recommendation is to own things rather than promises. Own tangible assets like farmland, timberland, oil wells, buildings used productively and, of course, precious metals instead of financial assets like bank accounts and bonds. Avoid those asse ...
April 26, 2014
AP is reporting that Ukraine fears Russian invasion. The fears were apparently expressed by Ukraine's deputy foreign minister. "We have the information we are in danger," Danylo Lubkivsky told reporters at the United Nations, according to AP. The escalation in ...
