Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.Wednesday, November 17, 2010
How Many Grad Students Do We Need? / Politics / Social Issues
The recent fad of text-to-speech videos has placed its crosshairs on the unfortunate case of many young Americans who — facing a much higher unemployment rate than the nation as a whole — have turned to graduate school in record numbers. They typically do so to improve their job prospects, fulfill their intellectual fantasies, or simply escape the harsh reality of a depressed economy for another few years. It is clear that this trend cannot end happily for a large number of these students.
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Wednesday, November 17, 2010
U.S. $60 Billion Saudi Arms Sale Into the Arms of King Abdullah / Politics / Middle East
Congress was recently notified by the US administration that it would be selling weapons to Saudi Arabia in one of the largest arms sales in history. The $60 billion deal includes advanced military aircraft, new helicopters, and other weapons such as missiles and bombs.
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Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Hunger in America / Politics / Social Issues
Patrick Martin writes: Some 15 percent of US households, 17.4 million families or about 50 million people, were too poor to buy adequate food last year, according to a new report from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). More than a third of these households, with as many as one million children, were missing meals on a regular basis, the study found.
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Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Global Geopolitical Dislocation and the Worldwide Financial Crisis / Politics / Global Debt Crisis
As the LEAP/E2020 team anticipated in its open letter to the G20 leaders published in the international edition of the Financial Times of 24 March 2009, on the eve of the London Summit, the question of a fundamental reform of the international monetary system is central to any attempt to solve the current crisis.
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Wednesday, November 17, 2010
The World Shorts the U.S. Dollar / Politics / US Politics
A remarkable confluence of recent events has brought unprecedented but very welcome attention to both U.S. monetary policy and the global political economy in general.
First, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke recently announced that the Fed would embark upon another round of monetary easing by purchasing $600 billion worth of U.S. Treasury debt. This amounts to an admission that markets have run out of patience with our profligacy, and therefore our own central bank literally must serve as the buyer of last resort for Treasury debt.
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Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Fed`s Quantitative Easing Violates the Rule of Law / Politics / US Politics
The Federal Reserve represents global banking interests who have overstepped their legal authority. Their Quantitative Easing program is an explicit violation of the Constitution. By deliberately devaluing the dollar and causing the price of basic necessities to rise, the Federal Reserve is, as a matter of strategic policy, sacrificing a significant percentage of the US population for the benefit of a few global bankers. In the process, they are also igniting a global currency war that threatens the security of the American people. In clear terms, the Federal Reserve’s actions represent a declaration of war against the people of the United States.
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Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Academic Economists Complain About QE II, Republicans Call for Abandoning $600 Billion Bond Purchase / Politics / Quantitative Easing
Please consider this Open Letter to Ben Bernanke from 23 economists posted in the Wall Street Journal.
Read full article... Read full article...We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.
Monday, November 15, 2010
G20 Summit Fails to Resolve Global Trade and Currency Conflicts / Politics / Global Financial System
The G20 summit of leading economies held in Seoul, South Korea concluded Friday without any agreement on policies to bridge differences over global currency and trade issues that have grown increasingly bitter in recent weeks.
President Barack Obama failed to obtain a consensus to demand that China allow its currency, the renminbi (also known as the yuan), to appreciate more rapidly. But the US continued to defend its policy of printing hundreds of billions of dollars, dismissing complaints from countries ranging from Germany, Japan and China to Brazil, Thailand and South Africa that Washington is deliberately devaluing the dollar in order to obtain a trade advantage over its competitors.
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Monday, November 15, 2010
Bernanke Clips the People's Coin - From Bakersfield to Burma / Politics / Central Banks
"Ben Bernanke: The Chauncey Gardiner of Central Banking" examined the Federal Reserve's November 3, 2010, decision to save the economy by inflating the asset markets. Chairman Bernanke shared his unpardonable rationale for QE2 in the Washington Post, on November 4, 2010. His deadly cruise missiles, QE1 and QE2, were described in "Chauncey Gardiner."
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Monday, November 15, 2010
Deflation, Inflation and Goldman Sachs Role in Quantitative Easing Explained / Politics / Quantitative Easing
What the Federal Reserve is up to, and how we got here and why.Read full article... Read full article...
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Poverty in America, The Big Picture / Politics / US Politics
In America’s Financial Apocalypse, a book that has been banned by the media, I discussed the many flaws in the calculation of poverty levels within the U.S. First, let’s have a look at some excerpts from the book.
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Sunday, November 14, 2010
Plagiarism? George Bush Book 'Decision Points' Lifted From Advisers' Books / Politics / US Politics
Ryan Grim writes: When Crown Publishing inked a deal with George W. Bush for his memoirs, the publisher knew it wasn't getting Faulkner. But the book, at least, promises "gripping, never-before-heard detail" about the former president's key decisions, offering to bring readers "aboard Air Force One on 9/11, in the hours after America's most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor; at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq," and other undisclosed and weighty locations.
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Saturday, November 13, 2010
Dr Bernanke Gets a Phone Call From Capitalist China / Politics / Central Banks
Zhou Xiaochuan is the Governor of the People’s Bank of China. Imagine that the following phone call were to take place.
Zhou: Hello. Dr. Bernanke?
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Saturday, November 13, 2010
Turning the United States into a Police State, Face Crime / Politics / US Politics
Doug Hornig, Editor, Casey’s Extraordinary Technology writes: In late September, there was a modest gathering of law enforcement officers, military personnel, and mental health professionals in the small western New York town of Hamburg. It was totally ignored by the mainstream media, with just a reporter from the Buffalo News on hand to record the proceedings. Lucky for us.
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Saturday, November 13, 2010
Stealth Bombers Seen Before Mystery Missile / Politics / Conspiracy Theory
Missile launched of the coast of LA and the pentagon says they know nothing? People are reporting seeing bombers right before the launch.
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Saturday, November 13, 2010
Jamie Dimon and Robert Rubin: Evasive on "Fraud as a Business Model" / Politics / Credit Crisis 2010
Foreclosure fraud isn't about losing paperwork or having incorrect paperwork. It is about committing fraud and trying to manipulate the U.S. legal system. No one -- not even a bank -- can show up in court with phony evidence.
State Attorneys General decry foreclosure fraud, because among other things, people signed affidavits making representations that were untrue. This is fraud on the court. All of these foreclosures may be vacated.
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Friday, November 12, 2010
Deficit Reduction Plan Promises Painful Prescription For U.S. / Politics / Economic Austerity
Don Miller writes: A bipartisan White House commission this week announced a sweeping proposal to slash the federal deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars a year by taking aim at virtually every sacrosanct area of U.S tax and spending policy, including Social Security and Medicare, middle-class tax breaks and defense spending.
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Friday, November 12, 2010
Demise of United States is Over Hyped / Politics / US Politics
Right now, the most crowded trade on the planet is the bet against the dollar and the US.In my view, those that believe the dollar will become trash have gotten carried away. When Warren Buffet was a young man, his father was terrified of just this. Granted, you would have been better to invest in stocks for the past 60/70 years but the dollar has not collapsed in the way he feared. On the contrary, it is now more pivotal to the world's economy rather than less and here are a few reasons I believe it will be around for another 70 years at least:
Friday, November 12, 2010
China India Growing Space Rivalry / Politics / GeoPolitics
SITUATION: China has directed a $13 million loan to Pakistan toward a joint communications satellite project, while space cooperation between America and India reaches new levels of sophistication.
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Friday, November 12, 2010
Today's United States of America is a Seventeenth Century Nation Adorned with 21st Century Trinkets / Politics / US Politics
The mythical United States of America so highly lauded exists nowhere. It is a Shangri-la. The Preamble of the Constitution makes perfectly clear what kind of nation the United States was meant to be. What exists today fulfills none of those goals. Some have argued that the nation was a fraud from day one. Whether accurate or not, what is clear is that it most certainly was quickly murdered by John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who wrote the decision known as Marbury v. Madison. Since that day, the Court has replicated England's seventeenth century political economy absent only the monarchy. Today's United States of America is a seventeenth century nation adorned with twenty first century trinkets, many deadly. Instead of being as it claims "the leader of the free world," it is a backward authoritarian pre-enlightenment reactionary regime.
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