Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Obama Questions Extrajudicial Killings / Politics / US Politics
By: Andrew_McKillop
DOUBLE STANDARDS
President Obama told the nation it faces "hard questions" in the aftermath of the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school massacre. He pledged to "seek answers" in the memory of the 20 children and six adults killed. He added the comment that any society is judged by how well it can keep its children safe and able to lead a normal life.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Western Nations Saying Goodbye to Liberaty / Politics / Social Issues
By: Alasdair_Macleod
The human race, in its advanced economic form, is committing euthanasia. The US, UK, Europe and Japan are all implementing economic policies that must ultimately result in the complete destruction of their currencies; and if you destroy the means of exchange of goods and services, your people will starve. The political class and government establishments have drifted in incremental steps into this tragedy. Far from being the guiding hand for society, they are its destroyers.
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Monday, December 17, 2012
Obama, Sympathy from the Devil / Politics / US Politics
By: LewRockwell
William Norman Grigg writes: "They had their entire lives ahead of them – birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own," intoned the murderer of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as he began the liturgy of official mourning for the victims of the Newtown massacre.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Welcome to Canada Inc., A Subsidiary of the American Corporate Empire / Politics / Canada
By: Andrew_G_Marshall
As one of the most resource-rich countries on earth, and the largest single trading partner with the United States, Canada is strategically positioned to influence the changing nature of global power structures. Do we support – and siphon our resources for the benefit of – the American Empire, co-operating in the wholesale plundering of the world, the oppression and impoverishment of peoples, destruction of global ecology, all for the benefit of an increasingly small class of global corporations and banks… Or, do we become independent and free? Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper once said, “You won’t recognize Canada when I get through with it.” With multiple “free trade” agreements under way, expanded corporate rights, expropriation of vast amounts of natural resources, Canada is becoming one of the world’s foremost corporate colonies, unrecognizable from what Canadians once imagined our nation to be.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Shadow Forces Behind the Government / Politics / Social Issues
By: BATR
Let no man or woman dare speak of a shadow government. The crony corruptocrats that make up the ruling elites of the world must maintain the illusion, that elected governments are based upon willful consent and have the legitimate authority to establish rules of conduct that their citizen are obligated to obey. For those regimes that maintain their grip of power by undemocratic means, the apologists for the international community give a wide berth of acceptance in order to maintain the appearance of individual national sovereignty.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Apocalypse Now And The Asperger Syndrome / Politics / Religion
By: Andrew_McKillop
CHRISTMAS TALE 2012: CREATE A GOD, DESTROY A GOD
Paul Colin wrote in response to Nadeem Walayat's article "Mayan End of the World 2012 Prediction, Economy and Elite Use of Religion to Control":
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Murder at Newtown, America's Moral Bankruptcy / Politics / Social Issues
By: Michael_T_Bucci
Kate Randall of WSWS.com asked the important question in her coverage of the Newtown, Connecticut massacre of December 14. She lamented: "What intellectual bankruptcy! No US government official or media personality has the mental capacity or courage to ask why these horrible tragedies occur in America with such heartbreaking predictability."
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Sunday, December 16, 2012
Who Was Adam Lanza? A Disturbed Mentally Ill Mass Murderer / Politics / Social Issues
By: DK_Matai
Post America's worst mass school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Adam Lanza -- the twenty year old -- who is suspected of killing 26, including 20 children, appears to have killed his mother Nancy Lanza at their family home where they lived, before driving to the school to commit the massacre and then taking his own life.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
U.S.S. Titanic To Face More Icebergs than the Fiscal Cliff / Politics / US Politics
By: Danny_Schechter
2012 has been the l00th anniversary of the famous Titanic disaster. The Captain of that “unsinkable” ship was warned that there were icebergs ahead but he was too busy, out to set a speed record on the way to New York.
The warnings were ignored and we know what happened. What we don’t know is why other urgent warnings go unheeded.
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Sunday, December 16, 2012
The Federal Reserve's Magic Act is Destroying America / Politics / Central Banks
By: Money_Morning
Shah Gilani writes:
When it comes to the Federal Reserve, it's not a matter of what you see is what you get. It's more a matter of what you don't see is what you'll end up getting.
Getting, as in up the you-know-what!
I'm talking about getting socialism shoved up our capitalist backsides, for one thing.
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Sunday, December 16, 2012
Obama's Crocodile Tears on Newtown Slayings as Dirty Drone Wars Rage On / Politics / US Politics
By: Andrew_McKillop
From December 14, world media was saturated with images and comment on the latest mass slaying by a young American male armed with cheap, easily and legally available firearms. These arms increasingly include high powered infantry war-theatre weapons such as US-made M16 and Russian AK47 Kalashnikovs, Heckler & Koch HK416 and 417 assault rifles, the Iraq-made Tabuk sniper rifle, Israeli Uzi submachine guns, and a large range of similar 5.56mm and 7.62mm calibre weapons with a killer firing range of 1 kilometre or more. In the US, sales of these arms always leap after each designer killing but Barack Obama shed a couple of tears on primetime TV concerning the Newtown outrage.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
UK's Green Energy And Nuclear Rout / Politics / Energy Resources
By: Andrew_McKillop
GOUGE THE SHEEPLE
in Europe, among very strong national competition in clean energy price gouging, the U.K. government’s effort to expand renewable energy and nuclear power are now forecast as raising household electricity bills by 54% by 2020, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In the UK case, as in France (but in few other countries) "renewable-based and low carbon electricity" also includes nuclear power. This is now an openly admitted high cost option, and the UK is so de-industrialized or uninterested in building nuclear plant that it cannot build reactors itself. As a direct result the UK government is locked into a process of promising France's government handout-dependent nuclear industry tariffs as high as 140 GBP (about $215) per 1000 kWh of power produced by French-built "new build" reactors in Britain. If these reactors are ever built in Britain.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Impotence, Leverage and Central Banking / Politics / Central Banks
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Some of our readers have been wondering why we spend so much time covering the situation in Europe. The relevance of the European situation is not perhaps immediately obvious to those geographically far removed, with a temptation to ascribe the problems of the European periphery to locally-specific conditions.
However, the global economy is exceptionally integrated, and what happens in one location all too readily leads to financial contagion - the spread of fear, from one asset class to another, or from one country to another in the case of sovereign debt risk.
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Friday, December 14, 2012
Climate Change Policy - Heating Up, Melting Down / Politics / Climate Change
By: Andrew_McKillop
HOTTING UP THE STAKES
In January 2011, the USA's space agency NASA, which has become one of the world's most outspoken advocates of global warming crisis, and the US oceanic and atmopheric agency NOAA, which says that its mission is "to enrich life through science", jointly announced that current temperature readings show that 2010 tied with 2005 as the hottest year in recorded human history. Their conclusion in 2011, and today is that greater global warming and "related climate change" is unarguable and certain from a scientific perspective.
Friday, December 14, 2012
The Fiscal Spliff / Politics / US Politics
By: Jeff_Berwick
Redmond Weissenberger writes: “My stock answer was that medical marijuana would start to be legalized in 10 years and that marijuana would start to be legalized in 20 years, probably during an economic crisis.” — Mark Thornton
Drug laws are probably the most inane (well maybe a close second to environmentalism in today’s world: San Diego Residents Face 6 Years In Prison For Washing Their Car) expression of the power of the state. Typically, the average person rationalizes laws in this way: “I am law abiding, and I respect the law as it is just, therefore I am not worried about the law applying to me.” Also, they generally buy into the state’s justifications of why a particular law has been put in place.
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Friday, December 14, 2012
HSBC, the “favourite” Bank of Mexican Drug Cartel, Above-the-Law Global Banking Cartel / Politics / Banksters
By: Andrew_G_Marshall
In what the New York Times declared as a “dark day for the rule of law” on December 11, 2012, HSBC, the world’s second largest bank, failed to be indicted for extensive criminal activities in laundering money to and from regimes under sanctions, Mexican drug cartels, and terrorist organizations (including al-Qaeda). While admitting culpability, and with guilt assured, state and federal authorities in the United States decided not to indict the bank “over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system.” Instead, HSBC agreed to pay a $1.92 billion settlement.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Freedom of Conscience: To What Extent? / Politics / Religion
By: David_Gordon
In this very thoughtful book, Brian Leiter calls our attention to a paradox. In most liberal democracies, including the United States, religious believers often are exempt from laws that violate the tenets of their religion. By contrast, parallel claims of exemption on non-religious grounds tend to receive less consideration.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Scandalous Market Regulators Emerge After Every Economic Crisis / Politics / Market Regulation
By: Mark_Thornton
The Democratic Party had its message on the economy well-prepared for the recent election. From President Obama to his campaign directors to campaign advisor-hacks, all the way down to the local party patsies, the message was uniform and well rehearsed. “We do not want to return to the failed economic policies of four years ago. Those policies caused the economic crisis that almost put the country back in a great depression. We cannot return to the naïve policy that deregulation is good for the economy.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Mayan End of the World 2012 Prediction, Economy and Elite Use of Religion to Control / Politics / Religion
By: Nadeem_Walayat
The world will end on 21st December! Or so the Mayan calendar supposedly predicts, though is vague on what the actual mechanism for our extinction will be, with the hot money betting on being hit by a rogue planet called Nibiru, whilst many academics argue that the Mayan calendar actually does not predict that the end of world but the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. However these theories have not filtered through to the masses many thousands of miles away in places such as China where some are going so far as building arks to ride out the end of the world, in Russia selling doomsday kits, in France closing access to mountain passes to avoid panic amongst people fleeing to the mountains.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Pay Differential Between Private Sector and Government Workers / Politics / Government Spending
By: BATR
A dreadful warning arises, when public sector employment pay and benefits outstrips the remuneration earned by the private employment workers. Even the most hardened government proponent, must succumb to the reality that private business generates real wealth that finances government through taxes. The expenditures of government on all levels are linked to the profitability of enterprises and sufficient margin that affords the ability to pay revenue levies. Thus, the proportion of wages between private enterprises and public employees has significant consequences.