STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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December 26, 2013
Why does the US government cling to a government facility that is not needed and loses a lot of money on a regular basis? The funding given to the US Post Office and mentioned above – amounting to six percent – is startling because it begins to reveal a rat ...
December 26, 2013
A friend is celebrating the season by visiting her children in the States. Like many millennials, her 20-something son is working brutal hours for minimum wage at an unfulfilling job. After visiting with him and his girlfriend, my friend emailed, "These kids ar ...
December 25, 2013
The following essay was published by The Daily Bell on December 25, 2009 and remains a favorite of ours. It's called, "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus." The Federal Reserve and Congress are acting as our collective Santa Claus as we celebrate this Christm ...
December 25, 2013
USC economist Arthur Laffer identified, back in 1974, an interesting feature of oppressive public policies, applicable in numerous areas of concern to us. The principle acquired the name "the Laffer Curve" and its gist is that people will normally tolerate impo ...
December 24, 2013
More to the point ... what a mess this is. The Swiss Banks are making a desperate effort to fulfill US mandates when it comes to cooperating with US taxing authorities. But the vast effort being made shows clearly how difficult those demands actually are. Proba ...
December 24, 2013
The printed metal gun referred to in the above article excerpt is an illustration of what we might call the Law of Internet Reformation. Or we might call it karma: For every action there is a reaction. The information/technology revolution that so dispirits man ...
December 24, 2013
Barack Obama is finishing his fifth year as president, and continues to try to move America further in the direction of increased government paternalism with the implementation of ObamaCare, a push for a higher minimum wage, more intrusive business regulation, ...
December 23, 2013
The funniest thing about this article – and there are many portions that are at least incongruous – is the short excerpt that was selected as the article's title, above, "Age Shall Not Weary Her." It comes from the "Ode of Remembrance," by English poet Laur ...
December 23, 2013
We have long predicted that the outcome of the Edward Snowden "revelations" would be a rationalizing of the current global surveillance infrastructure. The problem of those who built the current infrastructure is that not enough people knew about it. These are ...
December 23, 2013
It is the time of year we feel a sense of joy and optimism. We are preparing for the holidays and looking to spend time with our families and friends. This year as we look back we see several developments that leave us feeling optimistic. A US attack on Syria w ...
December 22, 2013
There are generally three basic farming methods: green, organic and no-till. The green farming revolution lasted from the 1940s until today, but gradually it has become less effective, producing diminishing returns as the various chemicals and pesticides have m ...
December 21, 2013
The World Bank has a new mission. The Economic Times tells us that the World Bank has a new enemy to confront. It is not poverty but "corruption." Here's more: Corruption top foe in developing countries: World Bank ... World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim said Thursda ...
December 20, 2013
Once again we are exposed to a triumphant article about the eventual infallibility of the Fed. Yes, Ben Bernanke did initially have trouble initiating a "taper" but now he's found the right recipe. The Fed has found the "elixir." It can disentangle itself from ...
December 20, 2013
Frau Merkel is at it again, proving what we have long observed – that the top men of the eurozone have in mind using every scrap of each EU disaster to promote a further, deeper union. This has actually been stated in so many words in the past, and here we ca ...
December 20, 2013
Washington has had the US at war for 12 years: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen and almost Syria, which could still happen, with Iran waiting in the wings. These wars have been expensive in terms of money, prestige and deaths and injuries of b ...
December 19, 2013
The promotional propaganda is well underway. We are told that central banks are starting to print less money, especially the Federal Reserve. But to run a central bank is to run a printing press. And no one – no one at all – can ever say with certainty how ...
December 19, 2013
You can't make this stuff up. The top men in the globalist community have been hard at work building wars and potential wars, and now it's time to let 'er rip. This is one dominant social theme we saw coming miles away. We've been writing about its imminence fo ...
December 19, 2013
The US is attempting to give multinational corporations a status that has hitherto been reserved to sovereign nations. According to documents recently leaked from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, the Obama administration wants corporations to b ...
December 18, 2013
Step by step, government organizes savings for private citizens. Each step may seem logical at the time but the cumulative effect is to strip individuals of any ability to survive outside of the womb of the nanny state. This Reuters article is proposing that "f ...
December 18, 2013
We've often wondered what constitutes civilization. Ayn Rand believed civilization's highest art was privacy. But perhaps, to a degree, it is the rigorous adoption and promulgation of the scientific method. We arrive at the idea by returning to the Renaissance, ...
December 18, 2013
Given the considerable power and success of the Declaration of Independence, its detractors – e.g., Professor Garry Wills, in his massive effort to belittle it in his book Inventing America (Houghton Mifflin, 1978, 2002) – are hard put to refute the philoso ...
December 17, 2013
It's always a treat – if one is in the debunking business – to read an article like this in the Financial Times. Pompous, pious, filled with reverence for modern, monetary price fixing, almost every word is a lie and every paragraph offers us identifiable ...
December 17, 2013
This is one of those stories with no easy answers – except perhaps one. And we'll get to that shortly. The poor, beleaguered Ukrainian culture is torn between East and West and those wishing for a better life apparently have to choose between Russia and the E ...
December 17, 2013
The public eulogies marking the passing of Nelson Mandela at the age of 95 on December 5, 2013 have refocused attention on the long struggle in South Africa to bring about an end to racial discrimination and the Apartheid system. Mandela and His Marxist View of ...
December 16, 2013
We return to this meme because it is a popular one. We've commented several times before on the mainstream media's determination to declare the US Tea Party dormant. This Reuters article is a good example of the genre. What must be galling to those proposing th ...
December 16, 2013
The only trouble with this kind of mea culpa is that nations really don't exist. And this is especially true at the top of the federal government where powerful factions compete for clout and funding. It's a blood sport and losing can be serious, indeed, potent ...
December 16, 2013
A week from now, the Federal Reserve System will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding. Resulting from secret negotiations between bankers and politicians at Jekyll Island, the Fed's creation established a banking cartel and a board of government over ...
December 15, 2013
There are so many issues, so many fires raging, that we're kind of like a fire brigade. We've only got a limited amount of water and we have to decide which fires we are going to throw the water on. We're running around and somebody says, "This fire over here i ...
December 14, 2013
The National Journal reports: "Adversarial journalism has been replaced by secretarial journalism. Obamacare's glitches have not slowed the trend." This is not exactly a profound statement but it captures the times. Like much in the National Journal, it is an o ...
December 13, 2013
Are considerations regarding Monsanto's business progress in South America behind the legalization of marijuana in Uruguay? George Soros was a significant supporter of marijuana legalization in Uruguay, and Soros is reportedly also a big Monsanto shareholder. H ...
December 13, 2013
This is one of those articles that attempts to humanize central banking by treating these facilities as people and casting (modest) doubt on their expertise and intelligence. Of course, those who stop by here regularly know that we believe monopoly central bank ...
December 13, 2013
The payroll jobs report for November from the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the US economy created 203,000 jobs in November. As it takes about 130,000 new jobs each month to keep up with population growth, if the payroll report is correct, then most of t ...
December 12, 2013
We've tried to keep track of this meme because it is perhaps the most insufferable single dominant social theme disseminated by the power elite. To recap: We begin with Henry George who created the idea of a land tax in the mid-1800s; he influenced his disciple ...
December 12, 2013
Yes, this indeed is what we've predicted. As aficionados of directed history, we observed the recent rollout of Obamacare and decided it was probably incompetent on purpose. We don't have any direct evidence for this except that it is so terribly produced and s ...
December 12, 2013
The US Constitution is clear. Legislation must be approved by the House of Representatives, the Senate and the president before it becomes law. With very limited exceptions, revenue bills must originate in the House of Representatives. The Obama administration ...
December 11, 2013
One thing is for certain: This amped-up regulatory regime is not about taxes. It's about control ... not just of Swiss banking facilities but ultimately of banks around the world, large and small. In fact, the top elites already run central banks around the wor ...
December 11, 2013
In fact, the tapering conversation is not complicated at all. Take a look at a picture of James Bullard sometime. The Bloomberg article carried a photo of him in front of a podium, serious and a bit truculent looking. But in the Modern Era, the wages of success ...
December 11, 2013
It may have been either Will Rogers or Mark Twain, I cannot now recall which of the two great American humorists it was, who said all politicians are criminals. But it makes no difference because when something is true, its source is not the main issue. Fact is ...
December 10, 2013
The Financial Times does us the favor of advancing what we call directed history in this article. It is certainly an amazing article, explaining how the West is collapsing and what it portends. You can see at the end of this excerpt that a specific threat is le ...
December 10, 2013
We are supposed to be grateful that the world's largest tech companies are standing up to US government and its intrusive intel operations. But we have a difficult time summoning the appropriate enthusiasm. From our point of view, it's a kind of "directed histo ...
December 10, 2013
One hundred years ago this month, on December 23, 1913, the Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, establishing a national central-banking system in the United States. The governing board of the Federal Reserve was organized on August 12, 1914, and the Federa ...
December 09, 2013
Let's start with bitcoin. Then comes a bigger announcement ... We've been skeptical of bitcoin for years. The smug techno-geekness of bitcoin's backers irritated us, especially when we realized what they were supporting – a system that keeps track digitally o ...
December 09, 2013
We're probably just in a worse mood than usual, but to us this Reuters article has an unusually gloating tone. And we reject totally both the gloating and the reason for it. Governments don't create trade. All governments can do is get in the way of businesspeo ...
December 09, 2013
One of the most important cases the US Supreme Court will consider this term is Hobby Lobby's lawsuit challenging the Obamacare mandate that employer-provided health care plans must cover abortion and contraceptives. Hobby Lobby, a corporation owned and managed ...
December 08, 2013
Thomas D. Conrad: The petrodollar was viable only because Saudi Arabia was the dominant oil producer and could insist that other countries pay for oil only in US dollars. Lately, the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and especially China – have made st ...
December 07, 2013
This fat so-and-so is shooting off his mouth again. Just stuff him full of crack cocaine and shut him up. After reading a recent Hill article about Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's comments blasting Obamacare's unaffordability, I looked for a little bit more informatio ...
December 06, 2013
Say what? This WSJ article warns us that most major governments around the world are contemplating significant tax hikes. There are three major conclusions that we would draw from this. First, those globalists who want homogenized, high-tax societies have no in ...
December 06, 2013
This RealClearPolitics transcript is taken from a recent House hearing that featured Professor Jonathan Turley, someone who is #38 among US "public intellectuals." In the excerpt of his address to Congress above, Turley registers concern that President Barack O ...
December 06, 2013
The several days of organized protests in Ukraine are notable for the relative lack of police violence. Unlike in the US, Canada, Thailand, Greece and Spain, peaceful protesters have not been beaten, tear-gassed, water cannoned and tasered by Ukrainian police. ...
December 05, 2013
Think of government as a stern father or an understanding confessor. Reveal your most intimate secrets. It won't hurt. And it will help to forget that governments slaughtered something like 200 million people in the 20th century. We're well on our way to compre ...
