Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Friday, October 26, 2018
The USMCA Quest for ‘America First' World Trade / Politics / Protectionism
By: Dan_Steinbock
The era of post-1945 multilateralism is fading. After the revised NAFTA, Trump's dream is U.S.-dominated world trade and the ‘America First’ Asian Century, says Dan Steinbock.President Trump seeks to redefine all major free trade agreements on the basis of U.S. economic and geopolitical leverage.
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Friday, October 19, 2018
Israel’s 50-Year Time Bomb, Pushing Palestinians to the Edge / Politics / Israel
By: Dan_Steinbock
Why Is the Trump Administration Compounding Palestinian Distress?
In the quest to change Israel's very nature, the Netanyahu government is pushing Palestinians to an edge - with the support of the Trump White House.
Recently, a report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that “deepening rifts between key stakeholders and surging violence in Gaza further imperil prospects for peace.” That should not come as a surprise anymore.
Friday, October 19, 2018
Savings – Not Tariffs Will Make America Great Again / Politics / US Politics
By: Antonius_Aquinas
While the farcical Kavanaugh confirmation hearings dominated the news cycle for the past couple of weeks, little mention was made of a disturbing economic headline – the August US trade deficit. Despite all the bluster from the Trump Administration about “winning trade wars” and “trade wars are easy,” America’s trade imbalances for August were the highest ever and its deficit with its most contentious partner – China – reached an all-time high.
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Saturday, October 13, 2018
Ban Saudi Oil! / Politics / Saudi Arabia
By: Raul_I_Meijer
According to Middle East Eye, Richard Branson, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Economist editor-In-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, New York Times, Financial Times, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshah, Viacom CEO Bob Bakish and AOL founder Steve Case have all withdrawn from Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative conference, to be held this month in Riyadh. Branson also put a $1 billion investment plan on hold.
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Thursday, October 11, 2018
The First Casualty of Trade War Is Truth / Politics / Protectionism
By: Dan_Steinbock
As Trump tariffs continue to spread, an ideological war of words is redressing harsh protectionist realities. What is the state of Chinese growth amid the US tariffs? And what is the impact of the trade wars on global economic prospects?Recently, US academic Yasheng Huang argued on Wall Street Journal that “Jack Ma is retiring. Is China’s economy losing steam?” By the same logic, Elon Musk’s forced resignation from Tesla would mean US slowdown.
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Wednesday, October 10, 2018
IPCC Reports a Climate Fit For a Groundhog / Politics / Climate Change
By: Raul_I_Meijer
And there we go again. Another IPCC report, and they all keep getting more alarming than the previous one. And then nothing substantial happens. Until the next report is issued and makes everybody’s headlines for a day, or two. Rinse, spin and repeat. “Now we really have to do something!”. “World leaders have a moral obligation to act!”.
Oh boy. To start with that last bit, world leaders don’t act because of moral obligations. They act to stay in, or get in, power. And they all know that to achieve that goal they must keep their people happy, even if dictators do this differently from ‘democratically elected’ leaders.
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Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Society Trends To Keep in Mind in the USA / Politics / Demographics
By: Dylan_Moran
It’s an age-old debate: nature versus nurture. Who moulds us, we ourselves as dictated by our genetic destiny, or the environment or milieu we grew up in?
It’s a subject that holds so many conflicting views that behavioural scientists concede that the two are interwoven as Dr. David Rettew wrote in Psychology Today.
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Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Google's Dragonfly Serves their Chinese Master / Politics / Google
By: BATR
If there was ever any doubt that Google is committed to the destruction of freedom of speech, just examine their enthusiastic efforts to censor, track and restrict the Chinese use of the internet. Ryan Gallagher reports in The Intercept on a project – code-named Dragonfly.
"Following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, according to internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans.
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Wednesday, October 03, 2018
U.S.- Mexico - Canada Trade Agreement / Politics / US Politics
By: BATR
Now that the most disastrous aspects of NAFTA have been removed from the new U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement; traders, business managers and the public will get to see the true sentiments of the globalists, who will feel the pain of losing their special commercial protections. Restricting genuine free trade has always been the main objective of the corporatists and internationalists. The basic question: has President Trump bucked the financial monopolists and transformed commerce with a dose of business reciprocity or is USMCA just a back door to establish a North American Union?
Wednesday, October 03, 2018
How America Can Free Itself From Wall Street / Politics / Banksters
By: Ellen_Brown
Wall Street owns the country. That was the opening line of a fiery speech that populist leader Mary Ellen Lease delivered around 1890. Franklin Roosevelt said it again in a letter to Colonel House in 1933, and Sen. Dick Durbin was still saying it in 2009. “The banks—hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created—are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill,” Durbin said in an interview. “And they frankly own the place.”
Monday, September 24, 2018
Destroy America with Information Warfare / Politics / US Politics
By: BATR
The populace has been misled for decades by the information that comes from the establishment. Most people believe that foreign powers are the primary providers of disinformation. Few are willing to confront the reality that the most destructive culprits are the international monopolists who dominate the global economy. These plutocrats may be part of boards of public companies that are listed in the U.S. but their allegiance is with the globalist model of transnational economic hegemony. This commercial pattern supersedes any nationalistic obligation to accept President Trump's goal of making America great again.
Saturday, September 22, 2018
The News Just Ain’t The News No More / Politics / Social Media
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Two thirds of Americans get at least some of their news on social media. Google and Facebook receive well over 70% of US digital advertising revenues. The average daily time spent on social media is 2 hours. Just a few factoids that have at least one thing in common: nothing like them was around 10 years ago, let alone 20. And they depict a change, or set of changes, in our world that will take a long time yet to understand and absorb. Some things just move too fast for us to keep track of, let alone process.
Those of us who were alive before the meteoric rise of the hardware and software of ‘social’ media may be able to relate a little more and better than those who were not, but even that is not a given. There are plenty people over 20, over 30, that make one think: what did you do before you had that magic machine? When you walk down the street talking to some friend, or looking at what your friends wrote on Facebook, do you ever think about what you did in such situations before the machine came into your life?
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Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Trump’s Backdoor Power Play to Rein In the Fed / Politics / US Federal Reserve Bank
By: MoneyMetals
“Just run the presses – print money.”
That’s what President Donald Trump supposedly instructed his former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn to do in response to the budget deficit. The quote appears in Bob Woodward’s controversial book Fear: Trump in the White House.
Trump disputes many of the anecdotes Woodward assembled. But regardless of whether the President used those exact words, they do reflect an “easy money” philosophy that he has expressed many times before.
Saturday, September 15, 2018
Central Banks Have Gone Rogue, Putting Us All at Risk / Politics / Central Banks
By: Ellen_Brown
Excluding institutions such as Blackrock and Vanguard, which are composed of multiple investors, the largest single players in global equity markets are now thought to be central banks themselves. An estimated 30 to 40 central banks are invested in the stock market, either directly or through their investment vehicles (sovereign wealth funds). According to David Haggith at Zero Hedge:
Read full article... Read full article...Central banks buying stocks are effectively nationalizing U.S. corporations just to maintain the illusion that their “recovery” plan is working. … At first, their novel entry into the stock market was only intended to rescue imperiled corporations, such as General Motors during the first plunge into the Great Recession, but recently their efforts have shifted to propping up the entire stock market via major purchases of the most healthy companies on the market.
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
The Ritual Burial of the US Constitution / Politics / US Politics
By: Raul_I_Meijer
In the wake of a number of the Lehman and 9/11 commemorations in America, and as a monster storm is once again threatening to cause outsize damage, we find ourselves at a pivotal point in time, which will decide how the country interacts with its own laws, its legal system, its Constitution, its freedom of speech, and indeed if it has sufficient willpower left to adhere to the Constitution as its no. 1 guiding principle.
The main problem is that it all seems to slip slide straight by the people, who are -kept- busy with completely different issues. That is convenient for those who would like less focus on the Constitution, but it’s also very dangerous for everyone else. Americans should today stand up for freedom of speech, or it will be gone, likely forever.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2018
Obama's Zombie Followers / Politics / US Politics
By: BATR
Barack Hussein Obama has emerged from his crypt. One of the time-honored practices when a President leaves office has been that they fade into the obscurity of retirement. As witnessed with George W. Bush, the public has not been burdened with his political involvement or wisdom of his years as commander and chief. The same cannot be said about Obama, the perpetual narcissist former head of state. This globalist CIA President caused severe damage to the Republic that any rational citizen would readily admit. Yet, this failed X-President has never shed his vision of grandeur. If anyone doubts about this assessment just reflect on his latest 64-minute speech. President Barack Obama Rips President Donald Trump: Full Speech 9/7/2018.
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Monday, September 10, 2018
How Trump Could Fire Powell and Rebuild the Fed / Politics / US Federal Reserve Bank
By: John_Mauldin
BY PATRICK WATSON : In recent weeks, Trump criticized Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell several times. He doesn’t like that Powell is leading the Fed to raise interest rates.Past presidents avoided such comments so they wouldn’t appear to be interfering. But Trump doesn’t care about appearances.
The Fed is somewhat insulated from electoral politics. The chair and board members have fixed terms. Its composition changes slowly... but it doesn’t have to.
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Monday, September 03, 2018
Toward ‘America First’ NAFTA / Politics / Protectionism
By: Dan_Steinbock
Despite the Trump administration’s frantic last-minute efforts to hammer the NAFTA agreement, the attempt failed within the US timeline, so the talks continue. Why is the revised deal so important to the White House? Last Friday, the trade talks between the United States and Canada broke off without an agreement.
The negotiations on the revised North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are not over, however. The talks continue and US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer will meet again Canada’s foreign minister Chrystia Freeland.
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Thursday, August 30, 2018
Social Media vs the Constitution / Politics / US Politics
By: Raul_I_Meijer
An ancient Latin saying goes: “Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi” (what is permissible for Jupiter, is not for an ox). It feels very much on topic when social media are concerned. And as the heat over their censorship is turned up, it may well be the decisive factor.
Reuters reiterates today that on May 23, Manhattan US District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that Donald Trump’ Twitter account is a public forum and blocking Twitter users for their views violates their right to free speech under the First Amendment. The same, says the ruling, applies to other government officials’ accounts.
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Thursday, August 30, 2018
4 Societal Trends in the UK / Politics / Social Issues
By: Dylan_Moran
Every year we sit down and take a look at the trends in society; how the world is changing and what is causing that change. Technology remains a major factor of course, thanks to automation and digitisation, but there are several trends that have little to do with tech. Here’s a closer look at 4 societal trends in the UK.
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