Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
More U.S. Municipal Bankruptcies on the Way / Politics / US Debt
By: BATR
Even to the casual observer, the financial condition of government budgets are under severe stress. Taxes have gone up consistently and have outpaced any meager adjustments in income for most taxpayers. No one can reasonably expect that municipal financing is assured by simply raising assessments and rates to keep their bloated bureaucracies solvent. Since the middle class has never recovered from the money centered meltdown, the average community struggles with diminished resources.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Speaker Boehner Readies Final Sellout As Debt Ceiling Debacle Looms / Politics / US Debt
By: MoneyMetals
It's campaign season, and that means non-stop media coverage of candidate polls, quips, gaffes, tweets, emails, controversies, lies, and scandals. It all makes for a good soap opera. Unfortunately, it's almost all irrelevant in the big picture.
The media prefer to focus on the sideshow rather than the 800-pound gorilla in the room: the looming debt crisis. Nothing that comes out of a pundit's mouth or a Hillary Clinton email will close the $210 trillion long-term fiscal gap the U.S. now faces.
Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Question to Millennials: Why Are You Not Mad as Hell Yet? / Politics / Student Finances
By: Mike_Shedlock
Millennials, why are you not angry about ...
- Having to pay Social Security when it won't be there for you.
- Paying exorbitant taxes for public pension handouts and boomer retirements at age 50 for which you receive negative benefits.
- Obamacare for which you overpay to support the obese and the nicotine addicts.
- Enormous student debt burdens for which you received little benefit.
I ask this in response to an email I received from Rich Renza who writes ...
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, September 28, 2015
Congress and the Fed Refuse to Learn From Their Mistakes / Politics / US Federal Reserve Bank
By: Dr_Ron_Paul
This month marks the seventh anniversary of the bursting of the housing bubble and the subsequent economic meltdown. The mood in Congress following the meltdown resembled the panicked atmosphere that followed the September 11th attacks. As was the case after September 11th, Congress rushed to pass hastily written legislation that, instead of dealing with the real causes of the crisis, simply gave the government more power.
Read full article... Read full article...
Sunday, September 27, 2015
France Bombs Syria / Politics / Syria
By: Stephen_Lendman
France is part of the problem, not the solution, in Syria. It supported Obama’s war from inception. It partners in all US imperial wars, a key member of NATO’s killing machine, smashing one nation after another.
On Saturday, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius lied, blaming Assad for four-and-a-half years of war, ignoring Obama’s full responsibility and French complicity, backing his aggression on another independent country, using ISIS and other takfiri terrorists to do his dirty work.
Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Why I'm Never Going to 'Two-Bit' China / Politics / China
By: Mike_Shedlock
I would never go to China, even if someone paid for the trip and all expenses.
My reason can be explained in one headline: China Arrests US Citizen for 'Endangering National Security'
Read full article... Read full article...An American businesswoman has been formally arrested in China on suspicion of "endangering national security" just days before Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in the US for his first official state visit.
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Germany’s Immigration Challenge / Politics / Refugee Crisis
By: John_Mauldin
This immigration crisis in Europe is a big deal, and it’s a bigger deal for Germany than for any other European country. Germany is directly in the firing line, both geographically and in terms of how many of the migrants want to settle there. Nearly 40% of migrants choose Germany as their preferred final destination, while the only other nation that is chosen by more than 10% of migrants is Hungary, at 18%.
Thursday, September 24, 2015
City Governments Blowing Billions - How to Stop a Pickpocket / Politics / Government Spending
By: Casey_Research
By Justin Spittler
Los Angeles wants to blow billions of tax dollars…
The Olympics are a spectacle. The athletes are incredible to watch. But hosting the games is a usually a big money-loser for the venue city.
Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Europe’s Refugees Are A Global Crisis / Politics / Refugee Crisis
By: Raul_I_Meijer
At the moment I start writing this, leaders of European nations are in a meeting in which they talk about refugees that, though it was announced over a week ago, was nevertheless labeled an ’emergency’ meeting. The only thing that truly tells you is that Europe still refuses to see the refugee situation as an emergency. And that’s not just semantics.
Of course there’ll be all sorts of bickering about the difference between migrants and refugees, and tons of words about how “we” should separate the two, and send people back, and strengthen European borders, and fight the human smugglers. None of which addresses reality, or at least at best a tiny sliver of it.
Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Poland, Czech, Slovakia and Hungary Refugee Hypocrisy After Flooding UK with 4 Million Economic Migrants / Politics / Refugee Crisis
By: Nadeem_Walayat
The euro-crats obsession with the eastwood expansion of the European Union, one of incorporating former dictatorships stuck in centuries old mind sets is once more being revealed to have been another catastrophic error, one that potentially sows the seeds for the destruction of the European Union. Today, in an attempt at dealing with the refugee crisis facing Europe by means of a drop in the ocean quota of 120,000 refugees to be distributed among EU member states, a quota that is barely 10% of the 1.1 million migrants expected to enter the EU this year. However once more the hypocrisy of the Eastern European states has been exposed as they virulently rebel against any attempts to settle any refugees in their lands, despite the fact that these very same nations have sent several millions of refugees westwards ever since the cold war began and more recently over the past decade flooded western europe with well over 10 million economic migrants, 4 million of whom have settled into the embrace of Britain's welfare state, resulting a huge crisis in social services, schooling and not least Britain's housing catastrophe.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Defending National Sovereignty from the NWO / Politics / New World Order
By: BATR
In a world that is virtually unrecognizable from the universal principles that underpinned Western Civilization, the fundamental concept of national sovereignty is being attacked as a relic of a former age. The New World Order is designed to eliminate the self-government of sovereign nations. While individuals live under the domain of established states, the fact that specific regimes operate within and often under the auspices of international hegemony that routinely violates the independence of specific countries is undeniable. The “world community” is not a voluntary association of collaborating governments; it is a euphemism of a top down despotic authoritarian system for global control and punishment for uncooperative governments.
Monday, September 21, 2015
Refugee Crisis - Merkel Opens the Flood Gates / Politics / Refugee Crisis
By: John_Mauldin
“The European Project has very little economic and political capital left to defend it if anything goes wrong now. As Mr Juncker says, the bell tolls.”
– Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Perhaps I should issue a storm warning for this letter. Maybe it’s because I had major gum surgery on my entire lower jaw this week and am in a bit of discomfort, but as I read the news coming through my inbox, it’s not helping my mood. This week’s letter will focus on the immigration crisis in Europe – after I muse on what I think is the very disturbing aftermath of this week’s Federal Reserve meeting.
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, September 21, 2015
Blame America? No, Blame Neocons! / Politics / US Politics
By: Dr_Ron_Paul
Is the current refugee crisis gripping the European Union "all America's fault"? That is how my critique of US foreign policy was characterized in a recent interview on the Fox Business Channel. I do not blame the host for making this claim, but I think it is important to clarify the point.
Read full article... Read full article...
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Pentagon Updating War Plans Against Russia / Politics / US Military
By: Stephen_Lendman
Longstanding US policy calls for regime change in all sovereign independent countries - by color revolutions or wars, notably targeting Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela, to eliminate major rivals and control world resources, especially oil.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Europe Refugee Crisis, UK to Repatriate 120,000 Hungarian Economic Migrants Back to Hungary / Politics / European Union
By: Nadeem_Walayat
Now if true such a policy would send political earthquakes throughout Europe if David Cameron had started to pull the plug on Eastern European mass economic migration that still continues. But of course its just not going to happen because the UK is a far more civilised nation than the likes of Hungary and its other eastern european brethren that have been showing their anti-european fascist credentials that would be home in Czar Putin's Russian empire than that which the European Union purports to be and what the people of Britain have been led to believe it be.
Friday, September 18, 2015
Financial Sanctions Against Hungary, Poland, Czech, Slovakia Syrian Refugee Migrants Hypocrisy / Politics / Refugee Crisis
By: Nadeem_Walayat
It speaks volumes that those eastern european nations of Poland, Hungary, Czech and Slovakia amongst others that have over the past decade alone sent over 10 million ECONOMIC MIGRANTS westwards, demanding full equality in every respect, and receiving it despite putting nations such as the UK under immense pressure in terms of social services and housing as a consequence of an influx of 4 million Polish, Hungarian etc. economic migrants are now themselves not even wishing to entertain more than a handful of syrian refugees to seek refuge in their sparsely populated heavily depopulated regions.
Friday, September 18, 2015
In Thrall to the Federal Reserve / Politics / US Federal Reserve Bank
By: MISES
Jeff Deist writes: BREAKING NEWS:
Perhaps no economic pronouncement in history has been anticipated, discussed, predicted, dissected, and reported like the Federal Reserve’s momentous decision today not to raise interest rates.
The outpouring of relief witnessed today by the financial press is nothing short of cathartic. Fear and anxiety, built up over months, is replaced by relief, even euphoria.
Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Economic Consequences of the Syrian Refugee Invasion / Politics / Immigration
By: BATR
The dual peril of unfettered migration into Europe and the United States has a different complexion of invaders, but both suffer an appalling economic aftermath. However, the flood gates from the Middle East and Africa “so called” refugees are destined to overcome and hasten the breakup of the European Union. Just note the impact from not defending the borders of Europe, both placing terminal pressure on the economies and finances of EU countries, but also from the social dissolution of Western societies.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Governments Give Migrants a Disastrous Mix of Social Welfare and Bureaucracy / Politics / Immigration
By: MISES
Justin Murray writes: On August 27, 2015, seventy-one refugees were discovered suffocated in an abandoned, locked transport truck in Austria just across the border with Hungary. These individuals, reported as refugees fleeing from the civil war in Syria, made a trek of over 1,000 miles. This is just a long string in the growing refugee and migration crisis hitting Europe over the past few years, with 2,500 estimated deaths from capsizing ships in the Mediterranean alone, of the nearly half million people crossing into Europe over the course of 2014–2015.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Pope Francis the False Prophet / Politics / Religion
By: BATR
"Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It's up to YOU, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops, and your religious act like religious." - Archbishop Fulton Sheen