Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The Federal Reserve's Silver Lining / Politics / Central Banks
The central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, is under intense scrutiny for its unprecedented actions following the 2008 financial crisis. Amidst the carnage of the financial crisis and real estate crash, Congress has taken a fresh look at the actions of the Federal Reserve on the economy.
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Banking Sector Bailouts the Biggest Tax Payer Rip-off of All Time / Politics / Credit Crisis Bailouts
In the scenario I’m about to paint for you, the dialog is fictional, but all the facts and figures are real.
The time: 1 AM, November 23, 2011, exactly two years from now.
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Former Soviet States Battleground For Global Domination / Politics / New World Order
A Europe united under the EU and especially NATO is to be strong enough to contain, isolate and increasingly confront Russia as the central component of U.S. plans for control of Eurasia and the world, but cannot be allowed to conduct an independent foreign policy, particularly in regard to Russia and the Middle East. European NATO allies are to assist Washington in preventing the emergence of "the most dangerous scenario...a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran" such as has been adumbrated since in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Iran Sanctions and Strategy / Politics / US Politics
The Iranian government has rejected, at least for the moment, a proposal from the P-5+1 to ship the majority of its low-enriched uranium abroad for further enrichment. The group is now considering the next step in the roadmap that it laid out last April. The next step was a new round of sanctions, this time meant to be crippling. The only crippling sanction available is to cut off the supply of gasoline, since Iran imports 35 percent of its refined gasoline products. That would theoretically cripple the Iranian economy and compel the Iranians to comply with U.S. demands over the nuclear issue.
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Monday, November 23, 2009
Audit the Fed Attached as an Amendment / Politics / Central Banks
I was pleased last week when we won a vote in the Financial Services Committee to include language from the Audit the Fed bill HR1207 in the upcoming financial regulatory reform bill. As it stands now, if HR 3996 passes, because of this action, the Federal Reserve's entire balance sheet will be opened up to a GAO audit. We will at last have a chance to find out what happened to the trillions of dollars the Fed has been giving out.
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Monday, November 23, 2009
From Zombie Banks to Corporations to All of America / Politics / US Debt
The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them." But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. Genesis 6
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Monday, November 23, 2009
The Global Warming Religious Crusade / Politics / Climate Change
I received a lot of emails in response to Beware The Ice Age Cometh: Hackers Prove Global Warming Is A Scam
Many were from religious zealots of global warming theory, and as you might surmise they were not printable.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Healthcare Under Capitalism / Politics / Healthcare Sector
Leo Panitch and Colin Leys have just brought out the 2010 annual volume of the Socialist Register, Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism, published by Merlin Press in London, Monthly Review Press in the U.S. and Fernwood Books in Canada. The book provides a path-breaking assessment of health under capitalism, providing a systematic account of the antagonistic relationship between capitalism and human bodies, of how modern healthcare has been deeply penetrated by neoliberal capitalism, and the ways in which healthcare workers, activists and socialists are struggling and pursuing alternative paths of solidarity in human health.
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Saturday, November 21, 2009
Global Warming Scam Exposed, Climagate / Politics / Climate Change
James Delingpole writes: If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
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Saturday, November 21, 2009
Evidence that Global Warming Is a Scam / Politics / Climate Change
It's now official. Much of the hype about global warming is nothing but a complete scam.
Thanks to hackers (or an insider) who broke into The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and downloaded 156 megaybytes of data including extremely damaging emails, we now know that data supporting the global warming thesis was completely fabricated.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The Pending Financial, Economic, Political and Social Collapse Of The United States / Politics / US Politics
Timothy V. Gatto writes: The truth that most people realize but can’t openly talk about is that America has seen better days and that the system of capitalism has long outlived its usefulness. The last part of that sentence, that capitalism has outlived its usefulness, is thoroughly the fault of the capitalists themselves.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Obama Warns of Double Dip Economic Recession / Politics / Recession 2008 - 2010
When I was a kid, a “double dip” was an ice cream cone with two scoops. Yummy,
Today, the same expression is being used to warn us that the recession we are still struggling with could, and is supposedly posed for recovery could fall even deeper into another dip. That d word seems to be a substitute for another—a depression.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
The Great U.S. China Romance / Politics / Global Economy
The newspapers are a-buzz with stories of Obama’s trip to China. The Financial Times tells us what “he should have said.” According to the FT, the American president should have told the Chinese that he wasn’t going to put the US into depression just to protect the value of China’s dollar holdings.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Obama’s Flawed Prescription for Health Care / Politics / US Politics
The House of Representatives has already passed its health-care bill and now the Senate is preparing to vote on its own. Should it pass, the largest new entitlement program since the New Deal will be a reconciliation process and a President’s signature away from being enacted. This is Congress and President Obama’s proposed cure for the ills of our health-care system. But are we sure they have properly diagnosed the disease?
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Thursday, November 19, 2009
Cap-And-Trade "Three-Card Monte" Dead For 2009 / Politics / US Politics
Typically, one of the best thing Congress ever does is nothing. And so it is again with the Cap-And-Trade energy bill. Thankfully, Senate Climate Bill Delay Raises Doubt on Chance for U.S. Law.
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Thursday, November 19, 2009
Show Me the Money / Politics / Social Issues
We have been conditioned from birth to believe that everything wrong in our society is about Greed: The inordinate desire to acquire or possess more than one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.
However, my research concludes the earth’s environmental damage and pollution was not the result of greed and the unintended consequences of our capitalistic consumer society, but was the goal.
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Global Warfare, U.S. Military Operations in All Major Regions of the World / Politics / US Politics
"Not only does one country account for the overwhelming plurality of world military expenditures, but that nation also has troops and bases on all six habitable continents (as well as a 54-year military mission in Antarctica, Operation Deep Freeze) and eleven aircraft carrier strike groups and six navy fleets that roam the world's oceans and seas at will. It is also expanding a global interceptor missile system on land, on sea, in the air and into space that will leave it invulnerable to retaliation."
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The Problem with Our Health-Care Debate / Politics / US Politics
Everyone seems to have a different take on how to solve America’s health-care problem. But notice that every solution offered involves some elaborate new system of government controls. Different proposals include a “public option,” mandatory insurance for individuals, government-supported health-care exchanges, government-sponsored “efficacy research,” government-supported co-ops, and as many other ways of dictating consumer and producer behavior as can fit in a 1,000-page bill.
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
China Criticises Obama For Wild Central Planning, Inflation, and Low Investment / Politics / US Politics
It's incredible how the U.S. has wound up over the decades adopting not only Oligarchic Party Communism, but even the Planning language and practices of the Communist Regimes.
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Monday, November 16, 2009
Free Market Competition Against the Government / Politics / US Politics
Last Saturday many concerned Americans watched in horror as the House passed the healthcare reform bill. If this bill makes it through the Senate, it would massively overhaul the way healthcare is delivered in this country. Today, obviously, we don't have a perfect system, but this legislation takes all the mistakes we are making with healthcare and makes them worse. Most of what is wrong with healthcare stems from decades of government intervention and the resulting unintended consequences.
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