Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
U.S. Empire of Death and Lies / Politics / US Politics
By: LewRockwell
Eric Margolis writes: Armed humanitarianism 2.0. That’s our new western version of old-fashioned 19th century imperialism, now feminized by President Barack Obama’s lady advisors, painted pink and accompanied by the kind of soft piano music you hear in ads for women’s products.
Last week, the Obama administration latched onto the plight of Iraq’s Yazidis who were being persecuted by those awful ISIS folks - just in jolly good time to divert attention from the massacre in Gaza.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Ukraine - Whose Spin Are We Caught Up In Here? / Politics / Ukraine Civil War
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Let’s assume for the moment that the two Guardian and Telegraph journalists who reported seeing 23 Russian army vehicles cross the border into Ukraine on Thursday were duped. Because if we don’t assume that, we must conclude they are accomplices, in a strange plot.
On Friday the Ukraine government, first through military spokesman Andriy Lysenko, and then through President Poroshenko, sent out a claim into the world that its army had destroyed a number of Russian vehicles on Ukraine territory.
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Sunday, August 17, 2014
The Key Role Of Conspiracy Theory In Dumbing Down Society / Politics / Social Issues
By: Andrew_McKillop
One Size Fits All
In a downsized western world, the abandonment of leadership and the dereliction of government are two major strands of the general dumbing down process. Examples abound.
In recent days president Obama of the USA was able to tear himself away from the golf course “to save Iraq”. The west is fighting the Islamic horde called ISIS. Previously, the west aided and supported ISIS, in Syria, but not in Iraq. Fighting the Islamic horde means that Obama and his lookalike-talkalike European partners and allies have to support Kurdistan. Previously, Kurdistan did not exist and all references to a semi-independent Kurdistan were studiously avoided by Obama and his partners.
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Saturday, August 16, 2014
Good Works Are Never Lost / Politics / Social Issues
By: Michael_T_Bucci
Last week the muses elbowed me to write about something, anything, but I couldn't focus. Where do I begin, muses? Do I write about the Ukraine imbroglio and its prospects leading to World War? Write more about press censorship in the West and America's global surveillance of the planet? Write about Israel and Gaza? Maybe write about America's reentry into Iraq and the absence of dissent in the U.S.? Do people need more written about Ferguson, Missouri and America's militarized police?
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Saturday, August 16, 2014
Decline And Fall Of The CO2 Crisis / Politics / Climate Change
By: Andrew_McKillop
Time Was
The 2009 Copenhagen conference was with no possible doubt the high point. Over 130 Heads of State flew into the Danish capital in their low-carbon presidential planes although some came by motorcade or presidential train to worry in public about “climate catastrophe” and bicker about who pays what.. Outside the venue hundreds of Climate Crazies, paid by somebody, danced round with paint on their faces in gay printed T-shirts to dramatise the urgency of the situation. They said that “Al Gore's 350ppm” must be fixed and set as the global limit for CO2 levels, and become the maximum-ever limit for CO2 in the atmosphere – that is 0.035%. In the geological past, without a single coal-fired power plant (or any humans including Al Gore) on the planet CO2 levels sometimes exceeded 1000ppm.
Friday, August 15, 2014
Welcome to the New Crusades / Politics / US Politics
By: Andrew_McKillop
A Fine Vacation
President Obama had a plan. Take two weeks and have a fine vacation (not taking his problem to the United Nations) in Martha’s Vineyard, rapidly becoming the Graveyard of US foreign policy. Boots would soon be on the ground in Iraq, about 600 of them to start with, and the Kurdistan he studiously never mentioned as a thing or “near nation” that exists would soon receive US arms shipments. The ISIS or Islamic State which received funding, in Syria, from the USA's NED or National Endowment for Democracy, was now The Enemy. It seems to be threatening oil supplies...
Friday, August 15, 2014
America the Neighborhood Bully Recklessly Throws its Weight Around / Politics / US Politics
By: Peter_Schiff
On June 30, U.S. authorities announced a stunning $9 billion fine on French bank BNP Paribas for violations of financial sanctions laws that the United States had imposed on Iran, Sudan and Cuba. In essence, BNP had surreptitiously conducted business with countries that the United States had sought to isolate diplomatically (sometimes unilaterally in the case of Cuba). Although BNP is not technically under the jurisdiction of American regulators, and the bank had apparently not broken any laws of its home country, the fine was one of the largest ever issued by the United States and the largest ever levied on a non-U.S. firm. The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve made clear that unless BNP forks over the $9 billion (equivalent to one year's of the company's total earnings), the U.S. will prevent the bank from engaging in dollar-based international transactions. For an institution that makes its living through such transactions, that penalty is the financial equivalent of a death sentence. The fine will be paid.
Friday, August 15, 2014
The Something For Nothing Society - Inflation and Getting Paid NOT to Work / Politics / Social Issues
By: Ty_Andros
The greatest man made societal and economic collapse in history is unfolding before our eyes. This Journey to the collapse of the developed world's civilization and empire began over 100 years ago during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson with his subversion/betrayal of the constitution of the United States and creation of a privately owned banking and currency monopoly called the Federal Reserve and the creation of the income tax to fund the beginning of the Confiscationism of the progressive socialism we see today. In exchange for a monopoly on money to multi century banking cartels which allowed the country to be run for the benefit of the banking systems. In exchange for unlimited funding for government. Private property rights began its road to demise at that time.
Friday, August 15, 2014
Life and Times in Propagandistan / Politics / Propaganda
By: Raul_I_Meijer
The UN said earlier this week that in east Ukraine over 1000 people – a conservative estimate – were killed during the last fortnight in the battles over Donetsk and Luhansk. Today, there are again reports of more heavy shelling by the Ukraine “army”, and dozens more deaths, while the Russian aid convoy is still not – allowed – anywhere near the cities.
At this rate, who’s going to be left to receive any of the food and generators and sleeping bags? I have a dark suspicion that if we don’t resolve this issue, and fast, we’re going to regret that for a very long time.
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Thursday, August 14, 2014
Back In Iraq: We Only Want To Save You / Politics / Iraq War
By: Danny_Schechter
New York, New York: Welcome back to Iraq—complete with our ever present WMD’s --- Weapons of Mass deception.
Suddenly, the country we never wanted to have to think about again is back in the news and on our military agenda. So, after a few denials that troops would not, never, and no way be sent, sure’nuff, U.S, boots are back on the ground, but to play a very different “mission.”
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Thursday, August 14, 2014
Russia, Ukraine - Washington Chokes Truth With Lies / Politics / US Politics
By: Andrew_McKillop
Are Western propagandists fooling anyone but themselves?
The latest absurdity coming out of Ukraine, the EU and Washington is that the humanitarian aid that Russia and the Red Cross are trucking into the former Russian territories that comprise eastern Ukraine is a trick, a deception, a pretext for Russia’s invasion forces. Such a preposterous lie tells us that Western propagandists have no respect whatsoever for the intelligence of Western peoples.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Putin is Winning the New Cold War / Politics / New Cold War
By: Mike_Whitney
“History shows that the United States has benefited politically and economically from wars in Europe. The huge outflow of capital from Europe following the First and Second World Wars, transformed the U.S. into a superpower … Today, faced with economic decline, the US is trying to precipitate another European war to achieve the same objective.”… Sergey Glazyev, Russian politician and economist
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Wednesday, August 13, 2014
ISIS - The Latest Neocon Lies for War / Politics / US Politics
By: LewRockwell
Patrick J. Buchanan writes:
U.S. air strikes since Friday have opened a corridor through which tens of thousands of Yazidis, trapped and starving on a mountain in Iraq, have escaped to safety in Kurdistan.
The Kurds, whose peshmerga fighters were sent reeling by the Islamic State last week, bolstered now by the arrival of U.S. air power, recaptured two towns. But the peshmerga have apparently lost the strategically important town of Jalawla, 20 miles from Iran, the furthest east that ISIS forces have penetrated.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Israel Is Bad for The Jews / Politics / Israel
By: Danny_Schechter
I would have become a rich man in the Fiddler in The Roof sense if each of the insults, putdowns and venomous asides about my recent article, “Israel Is Bad For The Jews,” had a monetary value.
For so many years, we used to joke, “Five Jews, Ten Opinions,” as a comment about the perennial, ongoing and never ending arguments and debates that made our culture so rich with its many religious tendencies—Reform, Conservative and Orthodox, and their many spinoffs competing over the best way to serve God.
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Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Writing Off America's Losses In Iraq And Ukraine / Politics / US Politics
By: Andrew_McKillop
Spend and Defend
It is impossible to get exact figures and numbers on how many Iraqi civilians and American soldiers died in Iraq post-2003, nor on how much it all cost US taxpayers and the Federal government. We can probably say at least 4,500 American lives, over 100,000 Iraqi lives and $1700 billion spent doing what? Although star players in the rush to war in 2003 such as Paul Wolfowitz memorably said that “Iraq floats on a sea of oil – so we had to intervene” the lure of cheap oil was played down as the main war aim. Today, we can pretty much forget all about that. Obama's present fumbling in a so-called humanitarian war against ISIS will help oil prices upward at a time when basic supply-demand metrics are driving its price below the “magic three digit” level of $100 a barrel.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Only the Powerful Get Tax Cuts / Politics / Taxes
By: MISES
Crosby Kemper writes: Ninety-seven years ago, a small but ruthlessly determined band of revolutionaries set out to prove that it would be possible to achieve material happiness— and social justice — by replacing free markets with economic planning.
In his classic work Socialism, produced in 1922, just five years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Ludwig von Mises predicted the failure of Soviet communism. He pointed out that the planners would be flying blind — lacking the vital information that comes from free-market pricing. In his words, the marketplace acts as “a daily referendum of what is to be produced and who is to produce it.”
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Tuesday, August 12, 2014
New World Order Forbidden History the Ultimate Taboo / Politics / New World Order
By: BATR
People are dumb because they do not know and refuse to learn the real history behind world events. Educational institutions do not function as seekers of truth, but as gatekeepers for narratives that defy common sense and defame historical facts. Society fosters the ultimate taboo against chronicles that differ with the established story of distortions and misdirection. Anyone who dares waver from accepted limits and suppositions immediately is a quack or an extremist. The dreaded label of being a conspiracy theorist, used to smear and marginalize researchers and pundits, is the height of anti-intellectualism and character assassination.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Kurdistan Oil, Chaos, Power and Arrogance / Politics / Middle East
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Boy, what a day so far; hard to keep up. tell me, is it just me, or has the US really started another round of regime change in Iraq?
Washington wants a new government in the capital, Baghdad, a national unity one, ostensibly to respond to the Islamist State threat.
PM Maliki doesn’t want to go, but also can’t lead such a government (nobody likes him). Iraqi President Fuad Masum then tells him off, so does a court. Maliki sends loyal troops into Baghdad, threatens to take the President to court, and the latter names deputy parliament speaker Haider Al-Abadi as new PM.
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Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Ukraine Will Destroy Itself With New Gas Tax / Politics / Ukraine Civil War
By: OilPrice_Com
Ukraine doesn't need Russia to take it down-Kiev is doing fine destroying itself, most recently with a new tax code that doubles taxes for private gas producers and promises to irreparably cripple new investment in the energy sector at a time when reform and outside investment were the country's only hope.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on August 1 signed off on a new tax code that effectively doubles the tax private gas producers in Ukraine will have to pay, calling into question any new investment, as well as commitment from key producers already operating in the country.
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Monday, August 11, 2014
The Long Descent – Peak Oil And Decline / Politics / Social Issues
By: Andrew_McKillop
Western Decline Paradigm Redux
The current re-edited version of “The Long Descent” from New Society Publishers, by John Michael Greer was first published in 2008 when things looked mighty different for many things, including the economy. In 2008 oil briefly hit $147 per barrel in Nymex trading. Using the doctored US official CPI figures we would need over $160, or in real terms probably north of $170 to beat that today.