Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
The Ignorance of “Intelligence” / Politics / US Politics
By: Danny_Schechter
Some years ago, I meet a major in American intelligence, a member of the “Red Cell Unit.”
As he explained it to me, his unit was actually charged with assessing other spy shops by offering other views, critiquing intelligence estimates and perhaps even evaluating security systems like the specialists who test airport systems by probing for their soft spots and vulnerabilities, and seeing if they can beat them.
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Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Ron Paul - Audit the Fed Moves Forward! / Politics / US Politics
By: Dr_Ron_Paul
Last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed my legislation calling for a full and effective audit of the Federal Reserve. Well over 300 of my Congressional colleagues supported the bill, each casting a landmark vote that marks the culmination of decades of work. We have taken a big step toward bringing transparency to the most destructive financial institution in the world.
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Monday, July 30, 2012
U.S. Backs Al Qaeda Death Squads in Syria / Politics / Middle East
By: Stephen_Lendman
Washington's agenda involves death squad diplomacy. Evidence mounts proving it. It's standard practice in all US direct and proxy wars. It's how America treats its enemies.
Massacres and unspeakable atrocities are committed. Women are raped. Civilians are treated like combatants. They're indiscriminately killed.
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Sunday, July 29, 2012
Doctors Are Like Cops, Dangerous / Politics / Healthcare Sector
By: LewRockwell
Jack D. Douglas writes: This is a good study of the soaring rate of dangerous MRSA infection from hospital stays by academic hospital insiders who used their inside knowledge of the U. of Chicago hospital and three others to correct for the massive 30% to 50% official underreporting and found that one out of twenty plus patients now gets serious MRSA hospital infection in the U.S., more than all the influenza and AIDS hospitalizations combined. That was a 100% increase in five years and the study ended in '08, so there has probably been another near doubling, or less if the growing infection control efforts coming out of Hopkins, etc., are beginning to pay off.
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Auditing The Fed is Like Auditing a Mafia Counterfeiting Operation / Politics / Central Banks
By: Jeff_Berwick
Ron Paul’s Federal Reserve Transparency Act (H.R. 459), or “Audit the Fed,” passed Wednesday July 25, 2012 in the U.S. House of Representatives by a wide margin of 327-98, exceeding the two-thirds majority needed. It had 274 cosponsors. But, by the evening of the same day, mainstream press around the country was already preparing the people for the bill’s fate in the Democrat-controlled Senate. As the Chicago Tribune and others reported, it had little chance of passing in the Senate, let alone being signed into law by the President. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has already said that the Senate will not even consider the bill, because, as Ron Paul told CSPAN, he didn’t have the “guts.” With this in mind, as well as their own reputations, Romney, Boehner and Cantor backed it. Even Harry Reid backed it… in 1987 and 2010, but now he has changed his mind on a Fed audit for some reason.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Our Debts Must be Redeemed / Politics / Global Debt Crisis 2012
By: Ashvin_Pandurangi
In mid-October 2011, a group of Occupy protesters in London set up tents and encamped outside of St. Paul's Cathedral for almost four months before finally being evicted by the Corporation of London. At first, the Church welcomed the protesters and preached to them, acknowledging the ways in which governments and banks were clearly contravening Christian teachings.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Fukushima - Japanese Local Children Radioactive Guinea Pigs / Politics / Environmental Issues
By: OilPrice_Com
Seventeen months after the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the Tokyo Electric Power Company's six-reactor complex at its Fukushima Daiichi, discussions continue about the possible effects of the radiation "dusting" the prefecture's inhabitants received, and their consequences.
Far outside most media coverage, 2012 is shaping up to be the media battleground between the massed proponents of the ongoing 'safety' of nuclear power, as opposed to a motley coalition of environmentalists, renegade nuclear scientists and anti-nuclear opponents, largely bereft of media contact.
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Thursday, July 26, 2012
The South China Sea Spat, A Glimpse into the Future / Politics / Energy Resources
By: Money_Morning
William Patalon III writes: If you've been following the worrisome and escalating South China Sea controversy, you know that China has been flexing its muscles laying claim to thousands of square miles of islands and ocean that other countries - Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines, to name the main ones - also claim to control.
This isn't some foreign skirmish that we can easily dismiss because of its distance, and because it doesn't affect us here at home.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
London Olympics Economic Boost Failing to Materialise / Politics / UK Politics
By: Adrian_Ash
"Hello London, this is the mayor, and this is the big one."
- Tannoy announcement replayed endlessly over the last month to London commuters waiting for the city's creaking transport system to cough out their train
LAST TIME the UK government backed and boosted a major export industry, we got the banking and finance crisis. This time they got smart – and spent lots of taxpayer cash in advance.
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Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Project Europe is Over / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: Raul_I_Meijer
I don't really know why it is, but as much as I see pundits and experts and everyone in between address the euro mudbath lately, nobody seems to have caught on to the two main events (inflexion points?!) that shape the latest reincarnation of said bath. So here's for them, and you, and anyone who's not yet tired of the story:
Event no. 1: it’s not so much that it's an entirely new notion, it's the realization that it has come to pass that is new. And even then it will take a while for most pundits and experts to understand the significance.
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Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Be Reasonable, Decarbonize Britain / Politics / Climate Change
By: Andrew_McKillop
During the 1968 French student revolt a key slogan was: "Be reasonable, demand the impossible". In the UK of 2012 this concerns "decarbonization". Officially, clean energy is still very close to godliness, as could be expected in a country of Protestant religious origins, but just like the definitions of sin, the British have strange definitions of "clean" energy, in particular taking this to mean nuclear power and propping up the now ramshackle edifice of carbon trading. Among other things.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Geopolitical Consequences of the Fall of the Syrian Regime / Politics / GeoPolitics
By: STRATFOR
We have entered the endgame in Syria. That doesn't mean that we have reached the end by any means, but it does mean that the precondition has been met for the fall of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. We have argued that so long as the military and security apparatus remain intact and effective, the regime could endure. Although they continue to function, neither appears intact any longer; their control of key areas such as Damascus and Aleppo is in doubt, and the reliability of their personnel, given defections, is no longer certain. We had thought that there was a reasonable chance of the al Assad regime surviving completely. That is no longer the case. At a certain point -- in our view, after the defection of a Syrian pilot June 21 and then the defection of the Tlass clan -- key members of the regime began to recalculate the probability of survival and their interests. The regime has not unraveled, but it is unraveling.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
The Politics of Economic Collapse: The Center Will Not Hold! / Politics / Great Depression II
By: Danny_Schechter
Sometimes, we have to turn to our poets for real insight into our current global condition.
It was back in 1919 in the aftermath of World War l, that Irish wordsmith William Butler Yeats put pen to paper and came up with “The Second Coming,” verses that have stood the test of time. Yeats was born the year the American Civil War ended in 1865 and died in 1939, the year World War 2 began.
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Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Economic Austerity, Adjustment, and Social Genocide: Political Language and the European Debt Crisis / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: Andrew_G_Marshall
Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. - George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946
Political language functions through euphemism, by employing soft-sounding or simply meaningless words to describe otherwise monstrous and vicious policies and objectives. In the European debt crisis, political language employed by politicians, economists, technocrats and bankers is designed to make policies which create poverty and exploitation appear to be logical and reasonable. The language employed includes the words and phrases: fiscal austerity/consolidation, structural adjustment/reform, labour flexibility, competitiveness, and growth. To understand political language, one must translate it. This requires four steps: first, you look at the rhetoric itself as inherently meaningless; second, you examine the policies that are taken; third, you look at the effects of the policies. Finally, if the effects do not match the rhetoric, yet the same policies are pursued time and time again, one must translate the effects as the true meaning of the rhetoric. Thus, the rhetoric has meaning, but not at face value.
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Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Social Media Panic in Italy: 'Enough of this Agony; Give Us Back the Lira' / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: Mike_Shedlock
Black Monday messages on Facebook and Twitter have gone viral in Italy as people have had enough of austerity, job losses, and uncertainty. La Stampa reports on Panic in the Network.
What follows is a Mish-revised translation of select ideas and quotes from the article. My specific comments are in brackets.
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Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Spain's Molasses Jeopardizing Eurozone? / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: Axel_Merk
Spain's regional government debt is in focus again. Spanish 10-year government bond yields are trading near 7.5% as Spain's central government is expected to bail out its regions - and in return may ask for a bailout itself. Guarantees don't make a system safer, quite the opposite: everything is safe until the guarantor itself is deemed unsafe. While the failure of any one business of regional government is a tragedy, providing a guarantee puts the system as a whole at risk.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Argentina Economic Crisis to Accelerate Grab of Energy Resources from Corporations / Politics / Oil Companies
By: OilPrice_Com
Angering Spain by seizing and nationalizing a majority of Repsol's shares in YPF and ramping up the rhetoric over the Falkland Islands as exploration deals promise to make the territory a major oil player overnight, Argentina is making few friends in the fossil fuels industry these days. Sam Logan, owner of the Latin America-focused private intelligence boutique, Southern Pulse, speaks to Oilprice.com about the politics of populism behind Argentina's energy aggression.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Luciferian Technocrats Rule the New World Order / Politics / Conspiracy Theory
By: BATR
The condition of the state of the world is bleak. All signs point to a catastrophic day of reckoning. The worldview that places God as the creator of the universe is routinely dismissed as a myth or superstition. The adoration of scientific theory void of metaphysical presence is the Holy Grail for a culture of technocrats that manage the institutional components of a global order that places little value on life and individual Inherent Autonomy. Orderly obedience to the dictates of elitist secret societies is deemed the orthodox standard to manage a controlled chaos for the masses. By denying God and His sovereignty over man, the appeal of a Luciferian devotion immerges as the ultimate destiny for perfecting the evil nature of aspiring totalitarians.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Putin’s Geopolitical Chess Game with Washington in Syria and Eurasia / Politics / GeoPolitics
By: F_William_Engdahl
Since reassuming his post as Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin has lost no minute in addressing the most urgent geopolitical threats to Russia internationally. Not surprisingly, at the center of his agenda is the explosive situation in the Middle East, above all Syria. Here Putin is engaging every imaginable means of preventing a further deterioration of the situation into what easily could become another “world war by miscalculation.” His activities in recent weeks involve active personal diplomacy with Syria’s government as well as the so-called opposition “Syrian National Council.” It involves intense diplomacy with Erdogan’s Turkey regime. It involves closed door diplomacy with Obama. It involves direct diplomacy with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Dark Days Ahead, American's Are Armed and Ready / Politics / US Debt
By: Andy_Sutton
After spending an hour on Joe Cristiano’s Liberty Talk Radio program the other night, I was filled with an excitement that I haven’t felt since I posted my first ‘Two Cents’ piece back in early 2006. I got to thinking about all the progress that we together have made in the past half dozen years regarding the public’s knowledge of the causes of the financial crisis, to the role of the federal reserve in our economic fate. The great thing is that outside the political realm, this massive outpouring of information and coalescence of support has basically been leaderless, which is exactly what is needed for a meaningful change to be made.