Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Wednesday, September 02, 2015
Syrian Refugee Crisis - Is Germany More Islamic than Saudi Arabia? / Politics / Saudi Arabia
By: Nadeem_Walayat
Whilst many european nations are positioning their storm troopers on their borders and ports to repel the swarm (David Cameron) or hordes as other politicians have referred to the mass migration underway, instead Germany has now taken the opposite position by opening its doors to this year settle as many as 800,000 mostly Syrian refugees out of a potential total of 1 million Syrian refugees expected to enter Europe this year which itself is out of a total Syrian refugee population of more than 4 million who today are mostly sat in refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, most of whom seek to follow the now well trodden migration paths northwards.
Tuesday, September 01, 2015
Pondering Hitler's Legacy / Politics / WW2
By: STRATFOR
By George Friedman: Happenstance has brought me today to a house on the Austria-Germany border, just south of Salzburg. That puts me about 3 miles from the German town of Berchtesgaden, on the German side of the border. Adolf Hitler's home, the Berghof, was just outside the town, on a mountain in the Bavarian Alps. To the extent that Hitler had a home, this was it, and it was the place where Hitler met with many notables, particularly before the war began.
Tuesday, September 01, 2015
Mainstream Media Goes Berserk / Politics / Mainstream Media
By: BATR
The practice of objective journalism has been effectively banned from the body politik. The social culture is driven by the embodiment of an unceasing drumbeat of disinformation; spoon fed prevarications and carefully shaped distortions, projected by a mass media that is in the tank for protecting the ruling elite. The myth that the press is endowed with an inherent courage to confront the establishment has been laid bare for any honest observer to witness. However, the problem is that the bulk of the marginally functioning intellects that still accept the mind control of the corporate media, continue to linger on in their dream world of obeying the prevailing order.
Monday, August 31, 2015
US Presidential Aspirants Resemble an FBI Most Wanted List / Politics / US Presidential Election 2016
By: Stephen_Lendman
America is run by a criminal aristocracy - a one-party system with two wings, serving monied interests exclusively at the expense of beneficial social change.
Their agenda no matter who’s president or heading key congressional committees features:
•an obsession with national security at a time America’s only enemies are ones it invents;
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Monday, August 31, 2015
The Real Refugee Crisis Is In The Future / Politics / Immigration
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Perhaps Angela Merkel thought we didn’t yet know how full of it she is. Perhaps that’s why she said yesterday with regards to Europe’s refugee crisis that “Everything must move quickly,” only to call an EU meeting a full two weeks later. That announcement show one thing: Merkel doesn’t see this as a crisis. If she did, she would have called for such a meeting a long time ago, and not some point far into the future.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Independant Scotland 1 Year on, UK Civil War If the SNP Fanatics Had Succeeded / Politics / UK Politics
By: Nadeem_Walayat
What to know what would have happened if the SNP fanatics had succeeded in convincing the Scottish electorate into voting for independence?
Well the following video gives an idea of the path that not just Scotland would have been set upon but the whole of the UK as Scottish independence would have unleashed forces that would literally have torn the nation apart, something that the SNP fanatics continue to remain blind to today, this despite the fact of the oil price collapse of 2015 which alone would have collapsed the Scottish economy.
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Friday, August 28, 2015
UK Immigration Crisis Hits New Record, Trending Towards Becoming a Catastrophe / Politics / Immigration
By: Nadeem_Walayat
Britain's Immigration crisis is fast trending towards becoming a catastrophe as the latest immigration statistics once more bring home the stark reality that the UK has no control over its borders as 5 years of Conservative government rhetoric of controlling immigration have yet again been revealed to be a case of "the emperor has no clothes", where rather than annual net immigration of in the tens of thousands as David Cameron promised at the start of his Premiership in 2010, instead net immigration has once more soared above the previous record high of 318,000 announced in May, to now 330,000.
The Conservative / Coalition governments failures to control immigration for the past 5 years have just marked a continuation of the Labour immigration catastrophe that set in motion a 15 year long immigration mega-trend for importation of over 8 million people (total immigration) where approx 90% of the adults were expected to vote Labour (90% on benefits such as tax credits).
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Thursday, August 27, 2015
Refugees Expose Europe’s Lack Of Decency / Politics / Immigration
By: Raul_I_Meijer
This is a story I’ve been wanting to write for a while now, at least two full weeks, but haven’t gotten around to because I have my dying mother to attend to. Something I can to an extent approach from a rational point of view, because she has expressed her explicit will to die. But it will of course never be easy, if only because I’ve been close to her all my life even in the 20-odd years I lived thousands of miles away. It’s a thing of the heart.
And so must be, at some moment or another, my dealing with what she goes through, and what I will go through when she finally gets her wish. A wish I would have thought would be reasonably easy to fulfill in a country as supposedly advanced as Holland, but that’s not true. People have to suffer more, long after they’ve signaled they’ve had enough, just to satisfy someone or another’s idea of ethics who has little to no involvement in the situation. Unless they’ve been through endless series of conversations with total strangers who will then decide when it’s time.
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Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Citizenship as a Weapon: Travel Controls and What You Can Do About It / Politics / Social Issues
By: Casey_Research
By Nick Giambruno
It’s an extremely potent weapon, yet most are not even aware of its existence.
That is, unless they have been unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of it.
The weapon I’m referring to is travel controls, also known as people controls. It’s the power any government has to limit the ability of its citizens to travel. They do this by restricting the issuance of travel documents like passports.
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Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Economic Nationalism: Alternative to Globalism / Politics / Social Issues
By: BATR
Ivory tower economists, corporate business analysts and financial experts routinely trash any discussion that America needs to institute a national economic policy that actually benefits our own country. The mantra of unchallenged doctrine that globalism is the only path for world commerce has been intensively pushed for well over the last half century. How well did the United States fare? An honest evaluation must acknowledge the diminishing middle class has paid the greatest penalty from the corporatist sedition that has destroyed internal independence and productive prosperity.
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Hurricane Katrina: A 10-year review of lessons NOT learned / Politics / US Politics
By: Walter_Brasch
This week is the 10th anniversary of the destruction of the southeastern gulf coast by Hurricane Katrina.
More than 1,800 people died. There is no estimate for the number of pets and wildlife. Damage was estimated at more than $100 billion.
About 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded. In Mississippi, the water surge flooded as much as 10 miles from the beaches.
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Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Israel: The Case Against Attacking Iran / Politics / Israel
By: STRATFOR
George Friedman: On Aug. 21, Israeli Channel 2 Television aired a recording of Ehud Barak, Israel's former defense minister and former prime minister, saying that on three separate occasions, Israel had planned to attack Iran's nuclear facilities but canceled the attacks. According to Barak, in 2010 Israel's chief of staff at the time, Gabi Ashkenazi, refused to approve an attack plan. Israeli Cabinet members Moshe Yaalon and Yuval Steinitz backed out of another plan, and in 2012 an attack was canceled because it coincided with planned U.S.-Israeli military exercises and a visit from then-U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
Monday, August 24, 2015
Ron Paul - For Immigration Answers, Look to Liberty / Politics / Immigration
By: Dr_Ron_Paul
What should be done with the estimated 15 million people living in the United States without the legal right to be here? It seems most politicians and many Americans come down on one or the other extreme. Many Republicans, including Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, have the idea that they can round up 15 million people and ship them back to wherever they came from. Many Democrats, on the other hand, would grant them blanket amnesty, give them citizenship, and make sure as many as possible are fully signed up to the welfare ranks.
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Sunday, August 23, 2015
Ankara: the New Capital of Jihad, U.S. Policy for Strengthening ISIS / Politics / Syria
By: Mike_Whitney
“The US and it’s allies want to keep this monster (ISIS) in check, but they don’t want to destroy it. All their military, political and media campaigns are smokescreens. What the West has done so far has strengthened terrorism not ended it. The proof of this is the fact that terrorism has spread everywhere, its material resources have increased, and its ranks have swollen.” — Syrian President Bashar al Assad
Has US policy in Syria fallen prey to the political ambitions of one man, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan?
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Thursday, August 20, 2015
Moving Toward a Geopolitical Marketplace / Politics / GeoPolitics
By: STRATFOR
Jay Ogilvy writes: This column frames a question to which I do not have the answer. Or think of it as a historical agenda: How can we bring the logic of free market exchange into the domain of geopolitical conflict?
Why would we want to do such a thing? It's not simply a matter of substituting gold for guns, or nonviolent exchange for violent exchange. The question I am posing is not based on some utopian hope for perpetual peace. The distinction I want to focus on is the difference between zero-sum conflict and positive-sum exchange.
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Thursday, August 20, 2015
What's Really At Stake With The Iran Nuclear Deal / Politics / GeoPolitics
By: OilPrice_Com
Recently, I wrote on these pages that a remarkable turnaround was taking place in the President's fortunes. It's an impressive display of rising from the depths of falling popularity last fall, and it is starting to be felt in many areas, with major impacts on the future of energy. At his lowest point, the U.S. President was widely regarded as a lame duck, shedding influence and power, and on a down-hill slide.
This was followed by a number of embarrassments, with one of the worst coming from Russia, when it chose to provide sanctuary to Edward Snowden who revealed that the U.S. was hacking the strategic communications of its closest allies.
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Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Solution Space / Politics / Social Issues
By: Nicole_Foss
To use the word ‘solution’ is perhaps misleading, since it could be said to imply that circumstances exist which could allow us to continue business as usual, and this is not, in fact, the case. A crunch period cannot be avoided. We face an intractable predicament, and the consequences of overshoot are going to manifest no matter what we do. However, while we may not be able to prevent this from occurring, we can mitigate the impact and lay the foundation for a fundamentally different and more workable way of being in the world.
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Struggling To Make Ends Meet / Politics / Social Issues
By: Rodney_Johnson
I recently wrote about the cost of child care, which got me thinking of my own experience. My wife and I were in our mid-20s when we had our first child. To prep for the expenses, we sold my car. I replaced it with a 10-year old pickup painted in primer. It had an AM radio, vinyl seats, and no air conditioning. I took our son to daycare, so we commuted in the Texas summer heat with 2-by-60 air conditioning. By that, I mean rolling down both windows (by hand) and driving 60 miles per hour.Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Blind Alleys and Techno-Fantasies / Politics / Social Issues
By: Nicole_Foss
The majority of proposals made by those who acknowledge limits fail on at least one of the previous criteria, and often several, if not all of them. Solution space is smaller than we typically think. The most common approach is to insist on government policies intended to implement meaningful change by fiat. Even in the best of times, government policy is a blunt instrument which all too often achieves the opposite of its stated intention, and in contractionary times the likelihood of this increases enormously.
Monday, August 17, 2015
The Seamless Web of Liberty / Politics / US Politics
By: Dr_Ron_Paul
Many people think the Internal Revenue Service was violating civil liberties when it harassed tea party groups. After all, the groups were targeted because they wanted to exercise their civil liberty to challenge government policies. However, the specific issue in the IRS case was the groups' application for tax-exempt status, which seems to be an aspect of economic liberty. In fact, the IRS case demonstrates that there is no meaningful distinction between civil and economic liberties. A true friend of the free society defends both civil and economic liberties.
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