Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Monday, December 29, 2014
What Went Wrong In 2015 / Politics / Social Issues
By: Andrew_McKillop
What Went Wrong in '14?
In some ways this could as easily be 1914 as 2014 War-fascination and phobia was so high in 2014 that in several countries, in Europe and also the USA, Canada, Australia and others the production of books, films, TV documentaries and panel discussions, leading press articles and political speeches relating to the 1914-1918 war were everywhere. But just as the Clash of Empires theme was found diificult or wanting to explain the war, even if the vidgame version of empires clashing is a moneyspinner. the economic causes of WWar I were also found wanting, despite all the effort trying to cobble them together and prove them. By the 1920s and above all the 1930s, J. M. Keynes had made the economic causes and consequences of the war one of his major writing projects. And in 2014 it was possible to find at least a few major similarities between the causes of the 1929 crash and its follow-on Great Depression, and the flyblown world since 2008.
Monday, December 29, 2014
Climate Change - What If The World Can’t Cut Its Carbon Emissions? / Politics / Climate Change
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Roger Andrews: Many people, including more than a few prominent politicians, accept that global warming must be limited to no more than two degrees C above the pre-industrial mean, or a little more than one degree C above where we are now, to avoid dangerous interference with the Earth’s climate. Let’s assume these people are right, that the 2C threshold really does represent the climatic equivalent of a cliff and that bad things will happen if we drive off it.
Monday, December 29, 2014
Things To Do In 2015 When You’re Not Yet Dead / Politics / Social Issues
By: Raul_I_Meijer
America has managed to construct an entirely one-dimensional political system. There’s no discernible difference left between left and right, other than in spin language pre-cooked for the sole purpose of faking the concept of elections. There’s very right and ultra right. America is living proof that once money is allowed into politics, the accumulation of it, and of the power it can buy, will and eventually must fully control a democratic system, which in the process, of necessity, suffocates and dies a painful death.
Monday, December 29, 2014
The Real Meaning of the 1914 Christmas Truce / Politics / GeoPolitics
By: Dr_Ron_Paul
One hundred years ago last week, on Christmas Eve, 1914, German and British soldiers emerged from the horrors of World War One trench warfare to greet each other, exchange food and gifts, and to wish each other a Merry Christmas. What we remember now as the "Christmas Truce" began with soldiers singing Christmas carols together from in the trenches. Eventually the two sides climbed out of the trenches and met in person. In the course of this two day truce, which lasted until December 26, 1914, the two sides also exchanged prisoners, buried their dead, and even played soccer with each other.
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, December 29, 2014
Are Islam And Christnity Being Wise And Brave Enough To Eradicate Hunger, Ignorance And Humiliation Of Their Own People? / Politics / Religion
By: Dr_R_M_Mathew
Islam and Christianity have emerged as the two well-organized and most resourceful world religions capable of bringing over sixty percent of the mankind under their fold. Out of 60,000 years of the known history of the humanity, Christianity has just 2000 years and Islam just 1400 years of existence. Both Islam and Christianity have been promising the heaven or the paradise for their own members, leaving the rest to some other place, including those who lived before their origin.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
America's War on Palestine / Politics / US Politics
By: Stephen_Lendman
America one-sidedly supports Israel. Both countries partner in each other's crimes. United against Palestinian statehood.
Determined to keep 4.5 million Palestinians subjugated. Hostages on their own land in their own country.
Under militarized occupation rule. Afforded no rights whatever. Congressional members demand Obama veto Palestine's Security Council statehood resolution.
Read full article... Read full article...
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Peace On Earth And Goodwill To All Men / Politics / Social Issues
By: Andrew_McKillop
What Was His Crime?
I'm not talking about Jesus but the 6-year-old Palestinian child who got off a bus – and got shot in the face at close range with a 15.5gram high velocity rubber bullet. So his crime was 1)Being Palestinian and 2)Not being sufficiently armed to reply to a punk psychopath soldier of the Israeli defense force-IDF or its paid militias. Treat them how you should treat them if they aggress your child with no reason at all.
Saturday, December 27, 2014
The Interview - 2014, The Year Propaganda Came Of Age / Politics / Propaganda
By: Raul_I_Meijer
From just about as early in my life as I can remember, growing up as a child in Holland, there were stories about World War II, and not just about Anne Frank and the huge amounts of people who, like her, had been dragged off to camps in eastern Europe never to come back, but also about the thousands who had risked their lives to hide Jewish and other refugees, and the scores who had been executed for doing so, often betrayed by their own neighbors.
Friday, December 26, 2014
Putin: It Is Time to Play Your Ace in the Hole / Politics / Russia
By: Ron_Holland
You've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run
You never count your money
When you're sittin' at the table
There'll be time enough for countin'
When the dealin's done.
"The Gambler" by Kenny Rogers
The entire world is watching Putin play poker with the Western politicians lead by Obama and followed by Washington quislings in London, Brussels and Berlin. America's goal since the end of the Cold War has been to weaken by financial, economic and, if necessary, military means any real competition to its global financial and resource domination through the petrodollar and dollar world reserve currency status.
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, December 26, 2014
Russian Roulette: Taxpayers Could Be on the Hook for Trillions in Oil Derivatives / Politics / Credit Crisis Bailouts
By: Ellen_Brown
The sudden dramatic collapse in the price of oil appears to be an act of geopolitical warfare against Russia. The result could be trillions of dollars in oil derivative losses; and depositors and taxpayers could be liable, following repeal of key portions of the Dodd-Frank Act signed into law on December 16th.
On December 11th, Senator Elizabeth Warren charged Citigroup with “holding government funding hostage to ram through its government bailout provision.” At issue was a section in the omnibus budget bill repealing the Lincoln Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act, which protected depositor funds by requiring the largest banks to push out a portion of their derivatives business into non-FDIC-insured subsidiaries.
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, December 26, 2014
Israeli Good Tidings for Palestinians / Politics / Israel
By: Stephen_Lendman
Israel holds around 4.5 million Palestinians hostage on their own land in their own country. Under military rule. Affording them no rights whatever.
Especially 1.8 million besieged Gazans. Trapped in the world's largest open-air prison. Another 1.7 million Israeli Arab citizens treated like enemies of the state.
No signs of change whatever exist. Occupation harshness continues. Palestinian self-determination remains as distant as ever.
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, December 26, 2014
Christmas Reality - One Jew’s Christmas / Politics / Religion
By: Walter_Brasch
I am a Jew.
I don’t mind receiving Christmas cards or being wished a “Merry Christmas” from friends, clerks, or even in junk mail trying to sell me something no sane person should ever buy. My wife and I even send Christmas cards, with messages of peace and joy, to our friends who are Christians or who we don’t know their religion.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
My Parrot Told Me About Global Warming / Politics / Climate Change
By: Andrew_McKillop
Ivar Giaver the Parrot
Sometimes you don't have to buy a parrot even if you never had that particular thought. My parrot adopted me without me having to go out and buy one, in Papua New Guinea. At the time a young telecom engineer used to come visit me with problems due to the tectonic movement of relay towers on PNG mountains – and he thought it could be something to do with climate change! The parrot didn't agree at all. Nor me.
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
How to Prepare for the Super Convergence: the Bio-Info-Nano Singularity? / Politics / Technology
By: DK_Matai
More than a century ago, in 1900, Lord Kelvin famously stated, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." Five years later, Albert Einstein published his paper on special relativity, which challenged the very simple set of rules laid down by Newtonian mechanics, which had been used to describe force and motion for more than two hundred years.
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
How Goldman and D.C. Hosed AIG – and the Taxpayers / Politics / Banksters
By: Money_Morning
Shah Gilani writes: The truth about crony capitalism, at the highest level, is being laid bare right before our eyes.
I’m talking here about Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) as the husband of global investment banking prowess with the U.S. government as its mistress puppet.
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, December 22, 2014
About That Interview - North Korea / Politics / Social Issues
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Michael Moore once famously – though by no means famously enough yet, because he was so dead-on – said that ‘you can’t declare war on a noun’. If only Americans had paid better attention. That would have shone a whole different light on, if not outright prevented, insane, expensive and terribly deadly concepts such as the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on terrorism’. Now it looks as if John McCain is fishing for a fresh noun to declare war on.
Talking about Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and James Franco’s ‘The Interview’ movie, and the hackers known as ‘Guardians of the Peace’ who made Sony Pictures pull the movie’s Christmas release, McCain told CNN’s State of the Union that “It’s more than vandalism. It’s a new form of warfare that we’re involved in and we need to react, and react vigorously.” President Obama earlier said the opposite, that it’s not war, but vandalism.
Read full article... Read full article...
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Obama's Party Joke Spotlights North Korea / Politics / US Politics
By: Andrew_McKillop
Don't Obamify His Name
Kim Jon Bama, AKA president Barack Obama delivered his own party joke at what was billed as his end-year conference and Q&A, December 19. This was two day's after Vladimir Putin did his own often light-hearted and boisterous same thing. Commentators warned us to only take what Jon Bama was saying as a last pirouette of presidential power and privilege, before Republicans take full control of the floors of both houses in January. So Obama was witty, formal, stern and forthright about finally ending the 50-year blockade of Cuba, a small island country run as the Castro family firm, and starting a spanking "new" crusade - against equally small and unimportant North Korea. Which has been US-blockaded about 60 years
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Ukraine Headed for Disaster / Politics / Ukraine Civil War
By: Stephen_Lendman
Perfect storm conditions threaten Ukrainians. In Europe's heartland. Fascist dictatorship. Mass impoverishment. Growing deprivation.
Civl war. Potential economic collapse. Troubled nuclear reactors. Facing possible meltdown. More on this below.
Ukraine's economy is rife with problems. Potential bankruptcy looms. IMF aid caused more harm than good. Largely used to pay Western bankers. Wage war on Donbas.
Read full article... Read full article...
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Ruble Takedown Exposes Cracks in Putin’s Defense / Politics / Russia
By: Mike_Whitney
Russian President Vladimir Putin suffered a stunning defeat on Tuesday when a US-backed plan to push down oil prices sent the ruble into freefall. Russia’s currency plunged 10 percent on Monday followed by an 11 percent drop on Tuesday reducing the ruble’s value by more than half in less than a year. The jarring slide was assisted by western sympathizers at Russia’s Central Bank who, earlier in the day, boosted interest rates from 10.5 percent to 17 percent to slow the decline. But the higher rates only intensified the outflow of capital which put the ruble into a tailspin forcing international banks to remove pricing and liquidity from the currency leading to the suspension of trade. According to Russia Today:
Friday, December 19, 2014
Is Russia Being Driven Into the Arms of China? / Politics / Russia
By: GoldCore
The “isolation of Russia” idea is one which has been receiving a lot of traction of late. Russia’s recent economic woes have sometimes been covered with barely contained glee despite the hardships that average Russians may have to endure if the rouble continues to collapse … not to mention the inevitable geo-political backlash.
Russia has become isolated from its western neighbours on account of the putsch in Ukraine which led to the predominantly ethnically Russian Crimea seceding from Kiev through a democratic process.
Read full article... Read full article...