Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
UK Election 2015 Results Repercussions for America / Politics / UK General Election
By: John_Browne
The British General Election, on May 7th, was an epic in two respects. First, in spite of polls forecasting a hung parliament, David Cameron's Conservative Party was given unexpectedly large support, winning 331 seats, or 51 % for an overall majority of four,and showing once again the failure of left wing parties to make traction in Europe. Second, Nicola Sturgeon's Scottish Nationalists Party (SNP) swept the Labour Party aside in Scotland to achieve an unexpected landslide and rekindle Scottish pressure for independence and, with it, a threat to the continued cohesion of the United Kingdom. Likely there will be important long-term repercussions for the United States.
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Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Is It Illegal To Not Pay Taxes? / Politics / Taxes
By: Jeff_Berwick
Human beings have a major cognitive dissonance problem when it comes to taxes. For some reason they don't see it as an armed extortion racket. Some even think it is "voluntary"... but as we'll show, it is far from voluntary.
Some people may fail to file taxes for numerous reasons, like personal or business problems, feelings of hopelessness or fear due to the burdensome tax process, anti-theft sentiments, or beliefs that the penalty won’t be worse than the expense and trouble of filing.
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Wednesday, May 13, 2015
China-Japan Before China-Taiwan / Politics / China
By: EconMatters
Some long time readers probably know I occasionally write about Asian geopolitics related to China and Taiwan. Since Taiwan typically goes under the radar of major news media, I usually google browse both Chinese and English news about Taiwan. Over the weekend, I came across one disturbing piece of article by Hugh White who's a professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. Excerpt below:
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
World War II and the Origins of American Unease / Politics / GeoPolitics
By: STRATFOR
We are at the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. That victory did not usher in an era of universal peace. Rather, it introduced a new constellation of powers and a complex balance among them. Europe's great powers and empires declined, and the United States and the Soviet Union replaced them, performing an old dance to new musical instruments. Technology, geopolitics' companion, evolved dramatically as nuclear weapons, satellites and the microchip — among myriad wonders and horrors — changed not only the rules of war but also the circumstances under which war was possible. But one thing remained constant: Geopolitics, technology and war remained inseparable comrades.
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
The Secretive Bank of England / Politics / Central Banks
By: BATR
With the enactment of the privately owned central bank, the Bank of England provided the model for the financial enslavement of governments, and their citizens. Well before the conflict for establishing a National Bank in America or the eventual surrender to the money changers with the betrayal in instituting the Federal Reserve, the history of the Bank of England needs to be studied. Relying on British historians may seem to invoke a cultural bias; however, the range and wealth of information on this topic comes from an earlier age. Further research will expand this understanding and many of the sources cited can fulfill this objective.
Monday, May 11, 2015
The Grand Old Strategies for the Islamic Conquest of The West and The Counter Strategies... / Politics / Religion
By: Dr_R_M_Mathew
... for The Total Disintegration of Islam and The Islamic World
Till the Suez Canal Crisis in 1956, the rise of the petro-dollar in 1970s, the proposal for the Islamic Bomb put forward by the Pakistani scientist, Prof. Abdul Salam and the Grand Strategy of Islamic Conquest of the West and the Rest of the World formulated in early 80s, neither the West nor the rest of the world, including Israel had taken Islam seriously other than some peripheral academic or religious interests.
Monday, May 11, 2015
The US Leads All Other Countries In Citizen Defection / Politics / US Politics
By: Jeff_Berwick
When it comes to extortion, or as they call it, income tax, the places where you want to be a citizen are colored green on the following map. Those countries have no income tax on individuals. The next best countries to be a citizen of, but not live in (as per the Permanent Traveller/Prior Taxpayer - PT Theory) are the ones shaded in blue. Those countries will charge you income tax if you are a citizen of that country AND also residing there... but if you are not residing there they will not charge you income tax.
Monday, May 11, 2015
The Cycles of the Human Capital / Politics / Social Issues
By: Dr_Jeff_Lewis
One must go beyond the ‘Housing Crisis’, ‘Lehman’, ’Dot Com’, or LTCM. Beyond the Peso Crisis, before the Gold window closed; go back to the lead up to the Great Depression.
We must go backward to frame this reality. Backward in time.
But at each point we must let the ‘accepted’ interpretation dissolve as we move on to the next.
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Sunday, May 10, 2015
Splitting Up Iraq / Politics / Iraq War
By: Mike_Whitney
“Iraq’s fate was sealed from the moment we invaded: it has no future as a unitary state … Iraq is fated to split apart into at least three separate states…This was the War Party’s real if unexpressed goal from the very beginning: the atomization of Iraq, and indeed the entire Middle East. Their goal, in short, was chaos – and that is precisely what we are seeing today.” — Justin Raimondo, editor Antiwar.com
Sunday, May 10, 2015
The Rich Get Richer / Politics / Social Issues
By: Mike_Whitney
Why are stocks still flying-high when the smart money has fled overseas and the US economy has ground to a halt?According to Marketwatch:
Read full article... Read full article...“For the eighth week in a row, long-term mutual funds saw more money flowing out of U.S. stocks and into international stocks, according to the Investment Company Institute……For the week ended April 22, U.S. stocks saw $3.4 billion in net outflows from long-term mutual funds…For the year to date, net outflows for U.S. stocks are $13.79 billion, while inflows for international stocks are $41.12 billion.
Saturday, May 09, 2015
Seven Changes Needed in Baltimore and Ferguson Right Now / Politics / Social Issues
By: MISES
I am regularly asked what can be done to solve the problem of “urban blight” in places like Detroit. The question is usually asked with exhausted desperation and a shrug, as if there are no possible answers. The cause of this “blight” is the root of the problem, and when ignited by police brutality, sets off riots in cities like Ferguson and Baltimore. There are a whole range of answers that we know will work to at least improve the situation.
Saturday, May 09, 2015
Britain: A Functioning Democracy It’s Not / Politics / UK Politics
By: Raul_I_Meijer
We at the Automatic Earth always try to steer clear of elections as much as possible, because there are no functioning democracies left in the west -no more than there are functioning markets-, and no journalists reporting on them either. Interesting question, by the way: how can a journalist report on a democracy that isn’t there? And where in that setting does news turn to mere opinion, and where does opinion then become news ?
Friday, May 08, 2015
Resilience is The New Black / Politics / Social Issues
By: Raul_I_Meijer
This is another essay from our friend Dr. Nelson Lebo III in New Zealand. Nelson is a certified expert in everything to do with resilience, especially how to build a home and a community designed to withstand disasters, be they natural or man-made, an earthquake or Baltimore. Aware that he may rub quite a few people the wrong way, he explains here why he has shifted from seeing what he does in the context of sustainability, to that of resilience. There’s something profoundly dark in that shift, but it’s not all bad.
Friday, May 08, 2015
Shaking The Shackles Of Collectivism: The Birth of Modernity / Politics / Social Issues
By: Jeff_Berwick
The following post is by TDV Senior Analyst, Ed Bugos- Individualism is the ethic that, in the west, laid the foundation for massive industrialized societies to emerge from the economic principle of the division of labor… for the abandonment of slavery… and, ultimately, which raised so many people out of poverty.
Under the ancient regime - before the doctrine of individualism and of individual rights in the natural sense came about - the individual never had rights. One may have been part of a family or tribe, where maybe the head had rights in some sense as the citizen of a state.
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Thursday, May 07, 2015
A Powerful Weapon of Financial Warfare--The US Treasury's Kiss of Death / Politics / US Dollar
By: Casey_Research
By Nick Giambruno
It’s an amazingly powerful weapon that only the US government can wield—kicking anyone it doesn’t like out of the world’s US-dollar-based financial system.
It’s a weapon foreign banks fear. A sound institution can be rendered insolvent at the flip of a switch that the US government controls. It would be akin to an economic kiss of death. When applied to entire countries—such as the case with Iran—it’s like a nuclear attack on the country’s financial system.
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Thursday, May 07, 2015
European War Games: Responses to Russian Military Drills / Politics / GeoPolitics
By: STRATFOR
Several events have coincided to demonstrate the dynamic, if not guarded, relationship between Russia and the Nordic and Baltic states. Ten NATO countries and Sweden launched a two-week planned exercise in the North Sea on May 4 to improve their anti-submarine warfare capabilities. On the same day, Finland — not a NATO member — began mailing letters to about 900,000 reservists informing them of their roles in a potential crisis situation. Meanwhile, Sweden's Foreign Ministry formally complained to Russian authorities that Russian navy ships were disrupting cable-laying work in waters between Sweden and Lithuania, the latest in a series of formal complaints over Russia's activity in the area. Concurrently, the Swedish and Lithuanian foreign ministers met with Moldova's pro-West leaders in Chisinau.
Thursday, May 07, 2015
Financial Warfare and the Declining U.S. Dollar / Politics / Currency War
By: MISES
Ryan W. McMaken writes: With the creation of the BRICS bank and now the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the major economies of the world are hoping to lay the foundation for a multi-polar financial world beyond the unilateral control of the United States. Due to the enormous size of the US economy, coupled with the reserve status of the US dollar, the United States government has long been able to achieve strategic and military goals through flexing its financial power. This power has long allowed the US government to buy allies and friends among foreign regimes, to finance proxy wars, and to threaten the growth potential of foreign economies whenever the US government deemed it necessary.
Thursday, May 07, 2015
The War On Cash: Governments Grabbing or Taxing Cash At Will Now / Politics / Fiat Currency
By: Jeff_Berwick
We have been warning for years that as bankrupt Western countries came closer to being completely insolvent that they would begin instituting capital controls, doing bank bail-ins, taxing cash and outright just stealing cash.
All of these things have come to pass now in one form or another. Here are four examples of the countless that we could choose from.
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Wednesday, May 06, 2015
Those Gruelling U.S. Tax Rates: A Global Perspective / Politics / Taxes
By: Steve_H_Hanke
The Tax Foundation released its inaugural “International Tax Competitiveness Index” (ITCI) on September 15th, 2014. The United States was ranked an abysmal 32nd out of the 34 OECD member countries for the year 2014. (See accompanying Table 1.) The European welfare states such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark, with their large social welfare systems, still managed to have less burdensome tax systems on local businesses than the U.S. The U.S. is even ranked below Italy, the country that has had such a pervasive problem with tax evasion that the head of its Agency of Revenue (roughly equivalent to the Internal Revenue Service in the United States) recently joked that Italians don’t pay taxes because they were Catholic and hence were used to “gaining absolution.” In fact, according to the ranking, only France and Portugal have the dubious honor of operating less competitive tax systems than the United States.
Wednesday, May 06, 2015
Do They Really Want to Outlaw Cash? / Politics / Credit Crisis 2015
By: EWI
Some bankers want to charge you for your deposits
Editor's note: You'll find the text version of the story below the video.
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