Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
UK Government Report Gives Annual £6 billion Positive Spin To Migrant Workers / Politics / Immigration
By: Nadeem_Walayat
A new report from the governments Migration Impact Forum (Treasury and Home Office departments) concludes that migrant workers contribute to the British Economy to the tune of £6 billion pounds a year. Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, October 15, 2007
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Model is Flawed / Politics / Climate Change
By: Brian_Bloom
- Al Gore and the IPCC were awarded the Nobel Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change .”
- A High Court judge in the UK highlighted "nine scientific errors" in Al Gore's documentary.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Burma Regime Change - The Geopolitical Stakes of the Saffron Revolution / Politics / Asian Economies
By: F_William_Engdahl
There are facts and then there are facts. Take the case of the recent mass protests in Burma or Myanmar depending on which name you prefer to call the former British colony. First it's a fact which few will argue that the present military dictatorship of the reclusive General Than Shwe is right up there when it comes to world-class tyrannies. It's also a fact that Burma enjoys one of the world's lowest general living standards. Partly as a result of the ill-conceived 100% to 500% price hikes in gasoline and other fuels in August, inflation, the nominal trigger for the mass protests led by Saffron-robed Buddhist monks, is unofficially estimated to have risen by 35%. Ironically the demand to establish “market” energy prices came from the IMF and World Bank. Read full article... Read full article...
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Global Warming - The Impact of Rising Sea Levels / Politics / Climate Change
By: Ian_Brockwell
With sea levels reaching a critical point, governments around the world have decided to implement a plan that is designed to save as many people as possible.Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, October 11, 2007
The Geopolitical Foundations of Blackwater in Iraq / Politics / Iraq War
By: John_Mauldin
This week in the Special Outside the Box, good friend George Friedman addresses the lax governance and control of Blackwater, a private security firm recently embroiled in the accusation of firing upon Iraqi civilians without provocation. George shows us that private security contractors' working beside the military is not a recent mode of operation but rather one that has long been employed by the US military. Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Blackwater Accused of Murdering Innocent Iraqi Civilians / Politics / Iraq War
By: Anwaar_Hussain
So what are these Blackwater operatives? Peace keepers, law enforcers or dogs of war, armed goons? Or are they the new Stasi ?Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, October 11, 2007
UK NHS Hospitals Turning into Killing Fields Due to Super Bug and Patient Neglect / Politics / NHS
By: Nadeem_Walayat
Despite spin by Doctors and NHS Management, a shocking report by the Healthcare Commission reveals that hundreds of patients continue to die unnecessary deaths in further super bug outbreaks.Read full article... Read full article...
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Losing the Peace Incentive - Israel As Warning - Part 8 / Politics / Global Financial System
By: Stephen_Lendman
Conventional wisdom once thought economic growth and prosperity required peace and stability. No longer. Post-9/11, the terror scare was ignited, wars rage in Iraq and Afghanistan, more war is threatened on Iran, oil prices touched $80 a barrel, the WTO Doha Round trade talks collapsed, and "a golden period of broadly shared growth" prevails (at least until the recent credit crunch). How come?Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
The Movable Green Zone: Blanking the Beach - "The Second Tsunami" - Part 7 / Politics / Iraq War
By: Stephen_Lendman
For coastal Sri Lankans, like those in Arugam Bay, December 26, 2004 felt more like 1945 Hiroshima than life before that fateful day changing everything for them. A devastating tsunami took 250,000 lives and left 2.5 million homeless throughout the region. It affected Arugam Bay, "a fishing and faded resort village" on the island's east coast that government was showcasing in its plans to "build back better." Indeed, but not for the villagers hoteliers, developers and the government wanted removed but weren't sure how until nature did what they couldn't.Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
The Shock Doctrine: Iraq, Full Circle - Overshock - Erasing A Country - Part 6 / Politics / Iraq War
By: Stephen_Lendman
Perhaps no country provides a greater untapped opportunity for unfettered capitalism than Iraq. It represents the planet's last remaining low-hanging oil resources fruit with potentially more of it than Saudi Arabia according to some oil analysts. It's also strategically located in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East (with two-thirds of proved reserves) Klein calls the "crusade's....final frontier." Iraq's potential alone is so enormous it made war the way to crack open its market potential because peaceful methods hadn't worked. Its conquest would then serve as "a different model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world" that could become a catalyst to opening the whole region.Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, October 01, 2007
The Rise of the Disaster Capitalism Complex - Shock Therapy in the USA - Part 5 / Politics / Global Financial System
By: Stephen_Lendman
Richard Nixon knew before the rest of us that Donald Rumsfeld is "a ruthless little bastard." He also has a knack for making enemies even inside the Pentagon he ran as Defense Secretary. He planned to "reinvent warfare for the twenty-first century (making it) more psychological than physical, more spectacle than struggle, and far more profitable" than ever before.Read full article... Read full article...
Sunday, September 30, 2007
The Shock Doctrine: Lost in Transition: Slamming the Door on History - Part 4 / Politics / Global Financial System
By: Stephen_Lendman
Before the Berlin Wall fell, Lech Walesa became a labor hero in Poland and the West by defying the Moscow-controlled government and getting away with it. Solidarnosc (Solidarity) spread from its Gdansk roots to the country's mines, shipyards and factories and within a year had 10 million members. They won the right to bargain but wanted more. They aspired to take over the state and institute their own alternative economic and political program. It's radical centerpiece was to transform huge state-run companies into worker-run cooperatives so Solidarity members could be empowered in their own "socialized enterprise."Read full article... Read full article...
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Why Did Israel Attack Syria? / Politics / Middle East
By: John_Mauldin
One of the things I found out in my recent survey of readers is that many of you really like the special Outside the Box I send every now and then from George Friedman and Stratfor. I share your enthusiasm for the really unique world view that George and his team bring to us. This week's special Outside the Box is no exception to the quality and uniqueness of analysis that George brings to us.
I have found it very strange that no government is talking about the air strike that Israel did a few weeks ago into Syria. Why isn't Syria screaming? Israel bragging? Turkey's air space was used. It now seems that there were more than a few planes. Something happened, and as George points out, it is serious. But at what level. This whole thing needs to examined carefully for its implications, but I will let George do that.
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Wednesday, September 26, 2007
The Shock Doctrine: Surviving Democracy - Part 3 / Politics / Global Financial System
By: Stephen_Lendman
Chicago School dogma became known as Thatcherism in Britain, but its prime minister wasn't an early adherent. Margaret Thatcher thought Chilean shock therapy wasn't possible in a democracy like the UK because voters wouldn't buy it. Three years into her first term, her approval rating was lower than George Bush's. She was in danger of not being reelected and didn't dare risk imposing bitter economic medicine that would sink her chances. That is, until destiny intervened on April 2, 1982 when Argentina invaded the British-held Falkland Islands off its coast that was unimportant to either country except for the political hay to gain from war.Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Iranian President's Visit Uncovers Western Hypocrisy, Prejudice and Hysteria! / Politics / Iran
By: Ian_Brockwell
The visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Columbia University on Monday, where he will give a lecture, has created protests from a wide variety of directions.Read full article... Read full article...
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Chile The First Test - The Bloody Birth of the Counterrevolution - Part 2 / Politics / Global Financial System
By: Stephen_Lendman
Reviewing Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" - Introduction ,
Part 1 - Two Doctor Shocks - Torture and Chicago School Fundamentalism
Counterrevolution began 34 years ago in Chile on another September 11 that should have been unimaginable and had to seem surreal. There were tanks in the streets and fighter jets attacking government buildings in a scene all too real and deadly. It played out in Santiago and around Chile and was just the beginning of a long nightmare.
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Saturday, September 22, 2007
Two Doctor Shocks - Torture and Chicago School Fundamentalism - Part 1 / Politics / Global Financial System
By: Stephen_Lendman
Reviewing Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" - IntroductionFollowing a crisis shock, another quickly follows. The corporate piranhas exploit disorientation with economic "shock therapy" along with "police, soldiers and prison interrogators" with torture their method of choice "to build a model country (by) erasing people and then trying to remake them from scratch."
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Friday, September 21, 2007
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism / Politics / Global Financial System
By: Stephen_Lendman
Reviewing Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" - Naomi Klein is an award-winning Canadian journalist, author, documentary filmmaker and activist. She writes a regular column for The Nation magazine and London Guardian that's syndicated internationally by the New York Times Syndicate that gives people worldwide access to her work but not its own readers at home.Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Greenspan Blames Bush for Subprime Credit Crunch / Politics / Credit Crunch
By: Mike_Whitney
Alan Greenspan's appearance on 60 Minutes was preceded with all the pomp and ceremony of a royal wedding. The public relations blitz dragged out for a whole week.
What profound truisms would the elusive former-fed master divulge to the News Magazine's withered-coquette, Leslie Stahl? Would he produce his crystal ball and forecast America's blurry economic future in mangled Fed-speak? Or would he focus on the startling gyrations in the stock market and the “frothy” conditions in the slumping housing market? The suspense was nearly unbearable.
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Monday, September 17, 2007
Who is Putin Rooting for to be the Next Russian President? / Politics / Russia
By: Ian_Brockwell
The recent sacking of the Russian Prime Minister, Mikhail Fradkov, was perhaps less of a surprise than President Putin's choice to replace him. Fradkov was also an unusual selection when he was appointed to the position, and his profile has been so low he was almost invisible.Read full article... Read full article...