Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends

The analysis published under this topic are as follows.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Doha Hoha - Global Warming Hits A Scientific Iceberg / Politics / Climate Change

By: Andrew_McKillop

World media has already forgotten the Doha COP18 climate jamboree earlier this month, during which the Qatari conference director, oil minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiya joked that soon Qatar, and the world will no longer need any fossil fuels at all, eliminating any problem of burning them and causing planetary warming. The debate soon lost itself on the strange, almost theological subject of climate treaties and loss or damage payments and awards to small island states and low income countries.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Obama's Last Chance To Become A Great President / Politics / US Politics

By: Raul_I_Meijer

Barack Obama has one last, fleeting chance of becoming known to posterity as a Great President.

His first four years were nothing to write home about, but with the burden of seeking re-election gone, you could argue that he can now throw off the shackles that held him back - and down - since January 20, 2009, and at last show his true face and intentions.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

NRA BE DAMNED! / Politics / US Politics

By: Michael_T_Bucci

Several days after the tragic shootings of December 14 in Newtown, Connecticut, I spoke to another writer and asked him to share his thoughts and feelings about this horrible event. He, an avowed enemy-of-the-people in the eyes of American Conservatives because he is committed to "Peace"; he, who never owned a gun and wrote occasional pleas advocating controlling the most dangerous of these firearms that George Bush and like-minded Republicans unleashed from restrictions; he, who has given every inch in justifying the Constitutional "rights" of everyone, including gun owners, replied: "The next time I hear someone yell '2nd Amen!' and recite specious propaganda or endlessly repeat conspiracy theories produced for gain by the NRA, I'm going to put down my pen, go out, buy a gun, and I'm going to shoot him! NRA? 2nd Amen? Be damned!"

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition, Slaughter of the Innocents / Politics / US Politics

By: Danny_Schechter

New York, New York: The late December holidays in America used to be known as “the season to be jolly,” with our streets festooned with bright lights, groups caroling, shopping galore, gift-giving and cheer.

This year, there’s a pall over all the light heartedness because of the horrific violence that claimed the lives of 20 young school children and their teachers in a still unexplained shooting incident in Connecticut, the latest of a string of similar events involving widely available deadly weapons often in the hands of mentally ill people.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The Geopolitics of Shale Oil and Gas / Politics / GeoPolitics

By: STRATFOR

Robert D. Kaplan writes: According to the elite newspapers and journals of opinion, the future of foreign affairs mainly rests on ideas: the moral impetus for humanitarian intervention, the various theories governing exchange rates and debt rebalancing necessary to fix Europe, the rise of cosmopolitanism alongside the stubborn vibrancy of nationalism in East Asia and so on. In other words, the world of the future can be engineered and defined based on doctoral theses. And to a certain extent this may be true. As the 20th century showed us, ideologies -- whether communism, fascism or humanism -- matter and matter greatly.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Al Capone And The Bible, Newtown-Type Terror And Economic Terror / Politics / US Politics

By: Andrew_McKillop

According to Dr. John R. Lott, described as one of the USA's leading gun experts,  banning gun-free schools, or gun-free zones inside schools, and allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons at all times "could help eliminate mass shootings at schools". For Lott, gun-free schools or zones inside them are like smaller and weaker nations. They become “a magnet” for deranged killers and World Tyrants who hope to burn their names into history books by running up the highest-possible body count.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Why the Federal Reserve Is So Dangerous / Politics / Central Banks

By: Money_Morning

Shah Gilani writes: The Federal Reserve System is a government-sanctioned private enterprise that functions as a socialist tool.

It was conceived in 1910 and constructed for the benefit of the private bankers who control it. Congress blessed the scheme in 1913 with passage of the Federal Reserve Act.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

American Gun Culture of 2012 / Politics / US Politics

By: Walter_Brasch

Jan. 8, 2011, Tuscon, Ariz.: A man had gone to a political town meeting at a supermarket, with the intent to murder Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. He killed six and wounded 14, including Giffords, who was shot in the head. On Jan. 25, 2012, Giffords, still in recovery from the shooting, walked onto the House floor to a standing ovation. Congress and the President have no plans to restore the assault weapons ban that expired under the Bush–Cheney Administration or to tighten gun laws.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Mass Murders in American State Schools / Politics / US Politics

By: Jack_D_Douglas

In my early life [born 1937] I lived all over the U.S. I saw lots of guns. I was present at various gun incidents in arguments and fights. Few ever ended in shootings. My mother's employer threatened my stepfather with a pistol to stop his beating my mother. He stopped. I did know people who were shot or shot other people. A younger brother shot the husband of one of my mother's sisters near the heart to stop him from beating our aunt. [It was a 22. He lived with the bullet in place. My brother was sent to a minimum security camp for months and eventually walked away and came to live with us.] The employer of that aunt caught a robber in the act where she worked and shot him to death with a shot gun.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Fiscal Cliff Is a Diversion From Dollar Bubble Trouble / Politics / US Debt

By: Paul_Craig_Roberts

The “fiscal cliff” is another hoax designed to shift the attention of policymakers, the media, and the attentive public, if any, from huge problems to small ones.

The fiscal cliff is automatic spending cuts and tax increases in order to reduce the deficit by an insignificant amount over ten years if Congress takes no action itself to cut spending and to raise taxes. In other words, the “fiscal cliff” is going to happen either way.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Video Games: The Government’s New Propaganda Tool / Politics / Propaganda

By: Jeff_Berwick

Monday, December 17, 2012

America's Conditioning, Children Randomly Slaughtered in Schoolrooms and by Predator Drones / Politics / Social Issues

By: James_Quinn

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

The world makes less sense every day. Little children are randomly slaughtered in their schoolrooms. Predator drones roam the skies over foreign countries exterminating bad guys, along with innocent women and children (collateral damage when it occurs in a foreign country). Drugged up mentally ill kids with no hope and no future live lives of secluded quiet desperation until they snap. Ignorant, government educated, welfare dependent drones with no self respect or respect for others, assault, kill and rob within their government created urban jungles.

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.

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."

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.