Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends

The analysis published under this topic are as follows.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.