Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Governments Raising Taxes: 73% of Nothing is Nothing / Politics / Taxes
By: Colin_Twiggs
President Francois Hollande recently increased the top income tax rate in France to 75 percent — for incomes in excess of €1 million. This is part of a wider trend with President Obama targeting the wealthy in his election campaign, promising to raise taxes on incomes in excess of $1 million. Shifting the tax burden onto the wealthy might be clever politics, but does it make economic sense? To gauge the effectiveness of this strategy we need to study tax rates and their effect on incomes in the 1920s and 1930s.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
How Doom & Gloom Disappeared with the Protoevangelium / Politics / Religion
By: Ashvin_Pandurangi
Anyone who is familiar with my writing at The Automatic Earth will know that I am no stranger to uber-doom and uber-gloom. The crises we humans face as a species are unprecedented in history, and, no, that is not an over-statement. History is full of natural disasters, slavery, bloody conflict, mindless terrorism, civil wars, international wars, genocides and the general human depravity that accounts for many hours in many days of our lives.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
EU Bites the Hand That Powers It: Gazprom Will Bite Back / Politics / Natural Gas
By: OilPrice_Com
Gazprom has Europe's natural gas market in a stranglehold and Europe is attempting to fight back, first with a raid last year on the Russian giant's offices and then with a probe launched earlier this week against its allegedly illicit efforts to control the EU's natural gas supplies.
The bottom line is that the same natural gas revolution in the US, which was enabled by hydraulic fracturing (fracking), is now threatening to loosen Gazprom's noose on the EU, and Gazprom simply won't have it.
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Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Ron Paul - U.S. is a Republic, Not a Democracy / Politics / US Politics
By: Dr_Ron_Paul
Last week marked the conclusion of the grand taxpayer funded spectacles known as the national party conventions. It is perhaps very telling that while $18 million in tax dollars was granted to each party for these lavish ordeals, an additional $50 million each was needed for security in anticipation of the inevitable protests at each event. This amounts to a total of $136 million in taxpayer funds for strictly partisan activities - a drop in the bucket relative to our disastrous fiscal situation, but disgraceful nonetheless. Parties should fund their own parties, not the taxpayer.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Grade Inflation has Made GCSE's, Most State Education Certificates Worthless to Employers / Politics / Education
By: Nadeem_Walayat
Governments don't just like to print money and debt with inflationary consequences but virtually every aspect of government action via the bloated socialist public sector is to inflate towards infinity that ultimately diminishes value towards zero be it pieces of paper called currency or pieces of paper called GCSE certificates.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Obama’s Post-Bubble Job-Surge Still on Track: But Will it Get Teachers Back to Work? / Politics / Employment
By: Andrew_Butter
The idea is that an economy can be over-stimulated by what Mises called mal-investment, and investment and the bounce in spending, whether that was stupid or not, creates jobs…until the bubble pops. Then you have to grind through what Mises called…the slow process of recovery.Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
War and Bluff: Iran, Israel and the United States / Politics / Middle East
By: STRATFOR
For the past several months, the Israelis have been threatening to attack Iranian nuclear sites as the United States has pursued a complex policy of avoiding complete opposition to such strikes while making clear it doesn't feel such strikes are necessary. At the same time, the United States has carried out maneuvers meant to demonstrate its ability to prevent the Iranian counter to an attack -- namely blocking the Strait of Hormuz. While these maneuvers were under way, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said no "redline" exists that once crossed by Iran would compel an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The Israeli government has long contended that Tehran eventually will reach the point where it will be too costly for outsiders to stop the Iranian nuclear program.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Why the ECB's Rescue Plan Can't Save Europe / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: Money_Morning
Shah Gilani writes:
So, Thursday was a big deal. Did you get that?
Markets rallied around the globe, especially European markets and U.S. markets.
But did you get what really happened?
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Tuesday, September 11, 2012
The Real Reason the US Invaded Afghanistan, Afghan War / Politics / Afghanistan
By: LewRockwell
Russ Baker writes: When the United States decided to invade Afghanistan to grab Osama bin Laden – and failed, but stayed on like an unwanted guest – could it have known that the Afghans were sitting on some of the world’s greatest reserves of mineral wealth?
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
The Declining West: Tragedy or Comedy? / Politics / US Politics
By: Paul_Craig_Roberts
During the Vietnam War, Sweden was an independent country with a moral conscience, and Sweden gave sanctuary to US war protestors who refused the draft. Washington realized the cost to itself and purchased the Swedish government in order to prevent a reoccurrence of moral conscience on the part of any Western government.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2012
China Number Two Man Xi Jinping Assassination Attempt? / Politics / China
By: Jesse
It is hard to tell exactly what is happening in China from these reports of two top officials who were injured on the same night in two separate car accidents, one in which Xi was sandwiched between two military jeeps, and another where He Guoqiang was mysteriously hit from behind by a truck.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
What Makes Mario Draghi So Dangerous For Europe / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: Raul_I_Meijer
The plan to "save the euro through unlimited bond-buying" that ECB president Mario Draghi presented last week shows one thing above all, and with blinding clarity to boot - why nobody picks up on it is beyond me: it shows that Draghi is the least suitable person to present any such plan.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Creativity and Empathy: How to Capitalise on Complexity in the Conceptual Age? / Politics / Social Issues
By: DK_Matai
History as-we-know-it is now ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley and lost its vitality. As the inevitable chaos approaches, people are now looking for metaphors and answers to their societal and personal quandaries including the type of future their children are likely to inherit. We were reminded by The Prince's Trust recently in regard to rising youth unemployment and youth poverty which has crossed more than twenty percent in the United Kingdom and more than fifty percent in Spain. The Geneva-based International Labour Organisation (ILO) is also projecting global youth unemployment to worsen with the spill over of the euro crisis spreading from advanced to emerging economies. However, when we try to isolate any challenge to resolve it on its own, we find it interlinked with everything else. The crux is no longer about finding the answer; it is to face the answer which already exists courageously, and with full awareness of its interconnectivity with the rest of the whole. The key re-discoveries of the new Conceptual Age -- now unfolding -- are Creativity and Empathy.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Soros Tells Germany to Lead or to Leave the Euro: He’s Right / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: Andrew_Butter
George Soros was interviewed by the Financial Times yesterday, his message, prior to a speaking engagement the next day was that if Germany wanted to continue to doggedly promote a hard-currency anti-inflation, pro-austerity stance, then they should leave the Euro.Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, September 10, 2012
Rewarding Idiots with Democratic Totalitarianism / Politics / US Politics
By: BATR
Now that the Democrat Party convention concluded their class warfare rally, those with saner minds are left with the task of identifying the magnitude of the sociopathic disease that infects the vast mindset of the worship government sect. The rhetoric of the Left has little trouble with identifying the ills of the world, but when the collectivists start to rattle off their measures to make the world safe for democracy, the ugly fascist face of totalitarianism emerges. The bond among statists, span all ideological spectrums. Commies and Nazis share the same gene. In Amerika, that same defiled DNA proliferates in all the half-wits that still believe that government is or can be a force for good. Essentially, the people are a herd of corruption enablers.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Bailouts and the Wonderland U.S. Economy / Politics / Credit Crisis Bailouts
By: William_Anderson
I guess it is good that the Democratic National Convention is over if for no other reason than Paul Krugman can get some sleep, given his heart was pounding with joy and admiration over the brilliance of the speakers. No doubt, all this fall he will coordinate his columns and blog posts with talking points from the Obama campaign and the DNC, and I am sure that some real howlers are in store for us lucky readers.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Draghi's Fatal Mistake, German Constitutional Court Approval of ESM Not a Done Deal / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: Mike_Shedlock
One puzzling aspect of ECB president Mario' Draghi's Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) plan to save the eurozone is his doing so before the German constitutional court had approved the ESM.
In spite of Draghi's emphasis on conditionality, OMT puts Germany directly at risk in an unlimited way. This modification to the ESM makes the constitutional case against it is much stronger.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Central bankers and politicians are running out of ideas / Politics / Credit Crisis 2012
By: Alasdair_Macleod
My father, who at one time was an education minister in the Kenyan government, used to tell a story of a long-forgotten crisis when the leaders in the educational establishment could only turn to him and ask: ”minister, what shall we do?” The point of the story is that these were all highly qualified senior academics, while my father had left school at 16 with no qualifications at all. It amused him.
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Sunday, September 09, 2012
US Sponsored “Islamic Fundamentalism” / Politics / Middle East
By: Global_Research
Benjamin Schett writes: The alliance between the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia helped spread the ideology of fundamentalist Sunni Islam all over the globe. The majority of its victims are not citizens of Western countries, but citizens of countries that U.S. elites consider a threat to their economic and geopolitical interests. Many victims of Sunni extremism (often called Wahhabism or Salafism[1]) are in fact Muslims (often with a secular leftist or nationalist political background), moderate Sunni or members of Shiʿite Islamic faith.
Sunday, September 09, 2012
Governments Spinning Bad Economic News Into Good / Politics / Economic Statistics
By: Paul_Craig_Roberts
Friday’s payroll jobs report says that 96,000 new jobs were created in August and that the unemployment rate (U.3) fell from 8.3% to 8.1%. As 96,000 new jobs are not enough to keep up with population growth, the decline in the U.3 unemployment rate was caused by 368,000 discouraged job seekers giving up on finding employment and dropping out of the work force as measured by U.3. Discouraged workers are not included in the U.3 measure of unemployment, which makes the measure useless. The only purpose of U.3 is to keep bad news out of the news. the U.3 unemployment rate only measures those who have not been discouraged by the inability to find a job and are still actively seeking employment.