STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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July 16, 2014
This is one of the better articles we've read in the mainstream media recently because it efficiently covers two sides of the Western economic argument. Only at the end does it fail to come to logical conclusions. But what it does provide is both entertaining a ...
July 16, 2014
Japan is going to create a standing army; supposedly truculent Premiere Shinzo Abe is leading the way. But there seems to be another side to Abe. Apparently, he can be politically astute and considerate when he wishes to be. At least that's what we read in The ...
July 16, 2014
That freedom is the matrix required for the growth of moral values – indeed not merely one value among many but the source of all values – is almost self-evident. It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occas ...
July 15, 2014
This article from Slate makes several arguments regarding higher taxes: Taxes are necessary and higher taxes are even more important for social comity. Why the "left" (if we can characterize Slate a leftist rather than corporatist) always seems to want to justi ...
July 15, 2014
We cover dominant social themes and often you find these in the mainstream media. But sometimes a meme is revealed by its absence. One such case is this article posted at the World Socialist Website, which provides us with an elite theme that has not really bee ...
July 15, 2014
In the minds of many people around the world, including in the United States, the term "capitalism" carries the idea of unfairness, exploitation, undeserved privilege and power and immoral profit making. What is often difficult to get people to understand is th ...
July 14, 2014
Another article, among thousands every year, explaining how the Fed can be more effective if it would just do ... this. Or that … The rhetorical element always involves explaining what the Fed has done wrong, and continues to do wrong, and why the Fed can bec ...
July 14, 2014
Here comes The Atlantic magazine – that bastion of international socialism – with a scathing article about the US's rising lawlessness. Of course, we have no idea why this article appeared in The Atlantic, a publication dedicated to advancing an ever-closer ...
July 14, 2014
Over the past several weeks we have seen a significant increase in illegal immigration, as thousands of unaccompanied minors pour across what seems an invisible southern border into the United States. The mass immigration has, as to be expected, put an enormous ...
July 13, 2014
Escobar: I think the world will change its policies, first with marijuana and then with cocaine. The important thing then will be to invest in education for the children so they know that it's harmful, same as alcohol. The problem is that right now there is ver ...
July 12, 2014
BusinessInsider tells us that "America's Drug Companies Are Bankrolling the Crusade Against Legal Weed." This article is actually a summary of a larger article in The Nation, and BusinessInsider presents it this way: "Last week, The Nation published an interest ...
July 11, 2014
Al Jazeera wants to make sure that people are aware that tax cuts are not beneficial. Presumably additional taxes would be helpful, using this logic. These sorts of articles remind us of why US citizens in particular are economically illiterate. Of course, the ...
July 11, 2014
Thank goodness for a do-nothing US Congress. We've written about this before but it is worth repeating. Every law and regulation produced at a federal, state or local level in the US – or in the EU, anywhere really – is a price fix, a redistributive act, ta ...
July 10, 2014
The temptation always is to believe that Russia and China operate systems that are much different than the West's. But perhaps not. Two recent articles remind us that what seems separate includes significant elements of compatibility. The world's leaders run in ...
July 10, 2014
Anthony Evans-Pritchard has made a bold statement in the pages of the UK Telegraph, the newspaper he writes for: He is predicting the eventual implosion of the oil and gas industry. Of course, green-energy types have been predicting the end of oil and gas for d ...
July 10, 2014
The third and final estimate (until the annual GDP revisions) of first quarter 2014 real GDP growth released June 25 by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis was a 2.9% contraction in GDP growth, a 5.5 percentage point difference from the January forecast of 2.6% ...
July 09, 2014
Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs doesn't have enough power, or so the British Parliament is told. HMRC wants to be both judge and jury when it comes to recalcitrant taxpayers. It wants to the ability to "raid bank accounts" and to do so without a court warrant. ...
July 09, 2014
Another meme is souring. We've tracked the gradual decline of movies, television, modern art and meaningful fiction. Now we see the same thing when it comes to popular music. And we should note that popular music has had a strong run in Western culture ever sin ...
July 09, 2014
Throughout history political thinkers have been doing a lot of fretting about the public good (or public interest, common good, general welfare, etc.). Usually they came up with massive plans or enchanting visions. Plato's teacher, Socrates, was the great grand ...
July 08, 2014
Oh, boy ... Renzi! Here is a modern technocrat and a darling of Reuters. Let's see what his esteemed qualities can tell us about the globalist agenda generally. This article, unlike most, seems to make it fairly clear. Renzi is held up as everything that is goo ...
July 08, 2014
From the perspective of the power elite, there's a lot riding on the success of the climate change meme. But it's not really working out. The idea apparently was that a carbon crisis would allow governments to centralize regulation in the UN and to spread it ar ...
July 08, 2014
This is an election year and as in all past election years we are inundated with promises and proposals from candidates, each hoping to attract our votes. For the most part what they are promising is "leadership" and political solutions to our personal, social ...
July 07, 2014
Amazing. Ms. Lagarde regards the stagnating economy worldwide and advises ... more government involvement. Reuters and other major media pick up her speech and report it without any further commentary. And thus we understand the following: The global economy is ...
July 07, 2014
Dominant social themes having to do with civil unrest are piling up quickly now. This article above is a kind of elaboration on a theme, but no less troubling for that. Previously, we covered the "neo-French Revolution" meme, in which the power elite seems to b ...
July 07, 2014
This week, supporters of religious freedom cheered the Supreme Court's ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. The Court was correct to protect business owners from being forced to violate their religious beliefs by paying for contraceptives. However, the decision was ...
July 06, 2014
When are Americans going to see through the charade? Right now they don't have the courage, dignity or self-respect to do so. They don't want to admit they've been conned by their con-manders in chief. They don't want to believe they bought the lies of hope and ...
July 05, 2014
In the past few months, we've examined articles and editorials that seem to align themselves with a neo-French Revolution meme, odd as that sounds. In fact, each article we've analyzed has presented an argument that income disparity is leading to increased viol ...
July 04, 2014
Central banks cannot do anything to avoid asset bubbles and subsequent crashes, according to the head of the world's most powerful central bank, Janet Yellen. We had to read this article twice to make sure we were "getting it." Yellen has decided that screwing ...
July 04, 2014
We are not surprised by the declining confidence of citizens in the US government. What is there, after all, to be confident about? Congress is posturing and ineffective. The president continues to centralize and further regulate large chunks of the US economy, ...
July 04, 2014
Did you know that 85 to 90 percent of war's casualties are non-combatant civilians? That is the conclusion reached by a nine-person research team in the June 2014 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The deaths of soldiers who are fighting the war ar ...
July 04, 2014
Let us celebrate the 291st birthday of the great Scottish economist together and let us rehabilitate his Real Bills Doctrine! Richard Ebeling in the June 3rd issue of the Daily Bell under the same title contributed a much needed reminder of the relevance of Ada ...
July 03, 2014
This is a negative article about a powerful man. President Obama has changed the way US citizens receive health care and now he is convulsing the nation's southern border by deliberately abrogating its security. Love him or hate him, if Obama succeeds in changi ...
July 03, 2014
In the sixth century BC, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu identified the world's biggest problem. Individuals viewed themselves as powerless. The burden of impotence made them resent others and fear life which, in turn, led them to seek power through controlling ...
July 02, 2014
So here is yet another wrinkle, Class V shares. Are they, finally, a panacea? Probably not. Corporations get bigger and bigger, and the people running them accumulate more and more power and wealth. That would be fine if corporations were an outgrowth of the fr ...
July 02, 2014
The Washington Post has leapt to the defense of Facebook. Both Facebook and the Washington Post are affiliated with US Intel, from what we can tell, so it's probably not surprising. Facebook recently ran an experiment on its users to see if what they read over ...
July 02, 2014
Natural scientists are pretty much committed to understanding the world without reference to morality since if what happens does so because of impersonal forces of nature, there would seem to be no room for consideration of right versus wrong, good versus ba ...
July 02, 2014
I want to look at two words that the State and its hangers-on have employed with much success on behalf of increases in government power. One is racism. The other is equality. What exactly is "racism"? We almost never hear a definition. I doubt anyone really kn ...
July 01, 2014
What an article! Only by treating most every statement as false can we begin to approach the truth. The excerpt notes that corporations are not "taking advantage of the booming stock market to step up investment." In a way, this is surely untrue. Corporations h ...
July 01, 2014
Al Jazeera uses euphemisms in this article because the reality is incendiary. President Barack Obama is not "going it alone" on immigration reform. He is breaking down the borders of the country he is supposed to defend – illegally so. He may scold Republican ...
July 01, 2014
The Declaration of Independence, proclaimed by members of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, is the founding document of the American experiment in free government. What is too often forgotten is that what the Founding Fathers argued against in the Decla ...
June 30, 2014
This is the second recent article we've noticed that predicts that rich people are going to be attacked over income inequality. Here was our analysis of the previous one: An Unfortunate Politico Promotion? Nick Hanauer, author of the Politico article, was obvio ...
June 30, 2014
The nightmare of law enforcement is having crime go down when criminal acts are legalized. That seems to be what's happening when it comes to marijuana. The above Drug Policy Analysis article was reposted around the Internet because it makes this point. And one ...
June 30, 2014
This week Americans will enjoy Independence Day with family cookouts and fireworks. Flags will be displayed in abundance. Sadly, however, what should be a celebration of the courage of those who risked so much to oppose tyranny will instead be turned into a cel ...
June 29, 2014
We do not need the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about. I trace the problem back to Toynbee's observation that "The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money. ...
June 28, 2014
An article in Politico magazine provides us with a relevant dominant social theme that reinforces the precarious position of the predatory one percent – as first presented by Occupy Wall Street. Is the OWS meme revving back up? Too bad. We enjoyed the relativ ...
June 27, 2014
What nonsense is this? A small group of good gray men announce they are fixing prices throughout Great Britain; the West's supine press has nothing to say? These same individuals describe their actions as "significant" and "breaking new ground." Indeed, it woul ...
June 27, 2014
Our attention was first drawn to this apparent dominant social theme when marijuana legalization exploded onto the scene. In reporting on the marijuana meme, we began to find evidence that marijuana was not the only drug that might soon be legalized. We have th ...
June 26, 2014
This article makes points that we have made in the past about the "Wall Street Party" and how equity markets have been positioned for higher-highs. Specifically, this article refers to "high-frequency trading," but in fact, market rigging is an ancient tale. Mo ...
June 26, 2014
Former spymaster Robert David Steele seems like a sincere and passionate fellow. We're sorry to report, then, that it is difficult for us to fully accept his analysis. We'd like to, as it in many ways matches our own. We, too, have maintained that the Era of th ...
June 26, 2014
Aggression will occur within every society because it occurs within human nature. Every society needs to have mechanisms of correction to address the inevitable violence – that is, theft, physical assault and the threat thereof. The State v. the Individual as ...
