Category: US Politics
The analysis published under this category are as follows.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
The Great Anglo-American Gaddafi Deception, What's Really Going On / Politics / US Politics
By: Ron_Holland
One has needed a score card to keep up with the twists and turns of the situation in Libya and what will follow over the weekend is still unclear. My point is while we wish the people of Libya and their color revolution victory over crazy Gaddafi, they have likely been the unwitting pawns in a major deception by Washington to hide a dramatic Middle East foreign policy shift.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
US Makes War on Another Muslim Country With Oil / Politics / US Politics
By: LewRockwell
Following the US-lobbied UN authorization of military murder in Libya, the death-dealing regime of Colonel Gaddafi said immediately that it would stop all killing. That put Obama’s war on hold, for a little while. The crazy Colonel has learned a thing or two about American foreign policy. If you pretend to favor the stated goals of the empire and comply with its stated dictates, you can otherwise do what every government in the world is structured to do: stay in power at all costs.
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, March 18, 2011
Time to Quit Pining for a “Level Playing Field” in International Trade / Politics / US Politics
By: Ian_Fletcher
One of the most common plaints from those who are upset about America’s current trade mess is “just give us a level playing field.” In particular, this is what one tends to hear from American businesses (at least those which have resisted the siren song of offshoring) that are hard pressed by “unfair” foreign competition. It’s hard not to be sympathetic, and on an individual basis, my heart goes out to them.
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, March 18, 2011
Why “Fair” Trade Is Not The (Whole) Answer / Politics / US Politics
By: Ian_Fletcher
The idea of “fair” trade is very appealing, whether confronting the plight of autoworkers in Michigan or farmers in the Third World. Unfortunately, it will be only a small part of any trade solution for the U.S. and the world as a whole.
Fair trade in goods like coffee is a fine thing, because there exists a clear idea of unfair practices in how coffee importers treat coffee farmers and how to avoid them. That sort of fair trade basically consists in First World consumers voluntarily not using the full strength of their bargaining position with Third World producers. This is admirable enough.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Kennedy’s Blunder, or How Free Trade Turned Sour for America / Politics / US Politics
By: Ian_Fletcher
How did America end up in its present trade pickle? NAFTA? No way. The WTO? I wish. To understand our present predicament, you need to go back much further than that.
In retrospect, America’s decisive wrong turn on trade was probably John F. Kennedy’s Trade Expansion Act of 1962.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
WTO Judicial Activism vs. America / Politics / US Politics
By: Ian_Fletcher
The WTO’s latest outrage has brought this odious organization to public attention again, but this is hardly the first time it has sided against American interests.For example, it has for years engaged in judicial activism aimed at systematically rewriting American trade law to our disadvantage. As Robert Lighthizer, a former Deputy U.S. Trade Representative, told a hearing of the House Trade Subcommittee in 2007:
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, March 14, 2011
WTO Sides With Chinese State Capitalism Against the U.S. / Politics / US Politics
By: Ian_Fletcher
The World Trade Organization has a long history of anti-American actions. They’ve just handed us another one, and in the process handed a big freebie to Chinese state capitalism.
Unbeknownst to most Americans, huge sections of our nation’s trade policy aren’t set in this country anymore. They are set by panels of WTO judges in Switzerland, to whom we have signed over the right to rule on the legitimacy of our policies.
Monday, March 14, 2011
The Gathering Political and Economic Storm / Politics / US Politics
By: James_Quinn
"Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." - Winston Churchill - The Second World WarRead full article... Read full article...
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Free Trade and the Tea Party: Puppets or Rebels? / Politics / US Politics
By: Ian_Fletcher
My job deprives me of the luxury of partisanship, as I have to reach out to both sides on the issue of free trade--a disastrous policy one can give impeccably liberal or conservative reasons to be against. So I can't offer any opinion of the Tea Party movement per se. But I can tell you that the way they're handling the issue of free trade reveals a lot about them.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Five Principles That Made America Great / Politics / US Politics
By: Gary_North
Assume that you are traveling abroad. You get into a discussion with a foreign national who wants to know what makes America unique. He asks you to summarize the origins of America's success in a sentence or two. What would you say?
No matter what you say, if he asked ten other Americans the same question, he would not get the same answers. America is a complex society. Its citizens have widely varying views on what makes America tick.
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, March 11, 2011
Why So Many Americans Hate Obama / Politics / US Politics
By: Joel_S_Hirschhorn
I can explain why so many Americans are angry about President Obama and dislike or hate him with passion, and why it has little to do with his actions and policies. But first I must examine the confluence of two historical inflection points that explains so much resentment and opposition to Obama.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Stealing from Social Security to Pay for Wars and Bailouts / Politics / US Politics
By: Paul_Craig_Roberts
The American Empire is failing. A number of its puppet rulers are being overthrown by popular protests, and the almighty dollar will not even buy one Swiss franc, one Canadian dollar, or one Australian dollar. Despite the sovereign debt problem that threatens EU members Greece, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, it requires $1.38 dollars to buy one euro, a new currency that was issued at parity with the US dollar.
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
U.S. Government Deliberate Lies That Shift Attention Away From The Economy / Politics / US Politics
By: Chris_Kitze
Rick Gedeon writes: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a blatant admission during a U.S. Foreign Policy Priorities committee meeting by arguing that the State Department needs more money because the US military-industrial complex is losing the information war to the likes of Russia Today and Al Jazeera. This loss of course is due to the US corporate media having completely abandoned real news.
Monday, March 07, 2011
U.S. Buying Friends Creates More Enemies / Politics / US Politics
By: Dr_Ron_Paul
Last week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and I had the opportunity to raise some of my concerns regarding US foreign policy and the costs of our interventionism around the world.
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, March 07, 2011
The Social Snobbery of Free Trade / Politics / US Politics
By: Ian_Fletcher
Skepticism about free trade is often stigmatized with ad hominem attacks. These mostly come down to variations on the following:“Protectionists are dummies, losers, incompetents, hippies, rednecks, dinosaurs, closet socialists, or crypto-fascists.”
Thomas Friedman’s version in The World is Flat (the Das Kapital of Globalism) runs thus:
Read full article... Read full article...
Sunday, March 06, 2011
The Class War, March Madness Time in the USA / Politics / US Politics
By: Danny_Schechter
“The worst things get, the harder it is for people to agree on what to do.”
The term class war has been extricated from the archives of another era, while divisions over the future of the economy have become a battleground in which the adversaries yell at each other, but rarely engage in any discourse with each other in a shared language.
Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Lies and the Truth in the Wisconsin Worker Rights Battles / Politics / US Politics
By: Walter_Brasch
Historian and satirist Thomas Carlyle said "a lie cannot live." However, Mark Twain casually remarked, "It shows that he did not know how to tell them."
More than a century later, newly-elected Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-dominated Wisconsin legislature have proven themselves to be "quick studies," having learned how to tell whoppers about the working class and unions. Here are just a few.
Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
The New Math and the New Geometry Bringing Down the State / Politics / US Politics
By: Butler_Shaffer
They [feminist groups in Iraq] are very strong. Their approach is unique because they have no leaders. They do not have a head or branch offices. . . . This movement is made even stronger by not having leaders. If one or two people lead it, the organization would weaken if these leaders were arrested. Because there is no leader, it is very strong and not stoppable. ~ Shirin Ebadi, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Recipient
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
How American's Lost Control of Economy, Constitution and Civil Liberties / Politics / US Politics
By: Paul_Craig_Roberts
This essay is about three recent books that explain how we lost our economy, the Constitution and our civil liberties, and how peace lost out to war.
Matt Taibbi is the best--certainly the most entertaining--financial/political reporter in the country. There is no better book than Griftopia (2010) to which to turn to understand how stupidity, greed, and criminality, spread evenly among policymakers and Wall Street, created the financial crisis that has left Americans overburdened with both private and public debt. Taibbi walks the reader through the fraudulent financial instruments that littered the American, British, and European financial communities with toxic waste. He has figured it all out, and what in other hands might be an arcane account for MBAs is in Taibbi’s hands a highly readable and entertaining story.
Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
We Can’t Just Compensate Free Trade’s Losers / Politics / US Politics
By: Ian_Fletcher
It is sometimes argued that although free trade has some victims, its benefits exceed its costs, so it is possible for its winners to compensate its losers out of their gains, everyone thereby coming out ahead in the end.This is, in fact, the usual fallback position of mainstream economists once they admit that free trade has drawbacks. (They don't usually admit to civilians there are drawbacks, but press them even moderately hard and they'll usually 'fess up.)
Read full article... Read full article...