Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
What Kim Jong Il's Death Means for the Global Economy / Politics / Global Economy
By: Money_Morning
Kerri Shannon writes:
All eyes are on North Korea and its repressed economic system this week after the country announced early Monday that Kim Jong Il, the ruling dictator for 17 years, died Saturday. The political instability to follow Kim Jong Il's death could ripple through the global economy, weighing on confidence and growth.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
How Important is North Korea's Leadership Change? / Politics / North Korea
By: James_Pressler
This weekend, North Korean officials announced the passing of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il, supposedly from a heart attack. Not too surprisingly, the next day Pyongyang heralded Kim's youngest son, Kim Jong-un, as the new head of state along with the title of "Great Successor." While it is widely known that the elder Kim was in poor health and rushing the grooming process for his son's succession, the Supreme Leader's sudden death leaves plenty of reasons to speculate as to just how the transition will impact North Korea and its relations with the world.
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Monday, December 19, 2011
Thatcher's Last Stand Against Socialism / Politics / UK Politics
By: Mike_Shedlock
Please consider this humorous video of Margaret Thatcher's last House of Commons Speech on November 22, 1990. What Thatcher said then about the Euro, European politics, socialism and wealth creation makes as much sense today as it did then, when she made fools of the opposition in Parliament to much laughter from the conservatives.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Bankrupt MF Global's Fractional Reserves / Politics / Credit Crisis 2011
By: Douglas_French
Jon Corzine told the House Agriculture Committee, "I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date." The public is outraged that the former CEO of bankrupt global financial-derivatives broker and prime dealer in US Treasury securities MF Global doesn't know where the missing $1.2 billion in client funds went.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Is the United States Too Big to Succeed? / Politics / US Politics
By: MISES
Roman Skaskiw writes: Although European libertarians continue to produce great works of theory and activism, the United States has been, and seems to remain, the epicenter of the libertarian movement. There are no prominent protests in Europe calling for less governmental help as there are in the United States. Murray Rothbard's essay "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty" refers to the United States as "the great home of radical liberalism."[1] In 1996, Dr. Yuri Maltsev presented a lecture at a Ludwig von Mises Institute summit entitled "Why America Must Be Saved," making the case for the United States as the greatest hope in the struggle for freedom.[2] Writing favorably of the tea-party movement, Peruvian writer and recent Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa distinguished the American individualist tradition as stronger than the European one:
Monday, December 19, 2011
Threat to Canada's National Sovereignty From North American Homeland Security Perimeter / Politics / Canada
By: Global_Research
Dana Gabriel writes: After months of negotiations, the U.S. and Canada have unveiled new trade, regulatory and security initiatives to speed up the flow of goods and people across the border. The joint action plans provide a framework that goes beyond NAFTA and continues where the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) left off. This will take U.S.-Canada integration to the next level and is the pretext for a North American Homeland Security perimeter.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Lessons for Europe From Argentina Testing Ground for Engineering Financial Collapse / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: Global_Research
Adrian Salbuchi writes: Exactly ten years ago Argentina suffered a full-scale financial and governmental collapse. That was the end-result of over a decade of doing exactly what the IMF, international bankers, rating agencies and global “experts” told us to do.
Then President Fernando de la Rúa kept applying all IMF recipes to the very last minute, making us swallow their poisonous “remedies”.
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Monday, December 19, 2011
Fukushima is Not Safe, Time to Panic! / Politics / Nuclear Power
By: LewRockwell
Ian Goddard writes: Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Japanese Government raised the level of allowable radiation from 1 to 20 millisieverts per year. This so-called “safety level” is the cut-off criterion for compensation for damage to private property incurred by fallout contamination. The reasoning is: if doses below 20 millisieverts per year are safe, then property holders have no grounds upon which to file suit for compensation and the perpetrators are thereby shielded from liability.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Third Anniversary of Occupy Wall Street’, “Why I Occupy” Show in Times Square / Politics / US Politics
By: Danny_Schechter
New York, December 17 2001: Saturday marked the third month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. It was also Bradley Manning’s Birthday. It was one of those days that confirmed the validity of the chant: “All Day, All Week, Occupy Wall Street”.
Ok, maybe, it wasn’t a whole week but felt like a week in one day.
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Saturday, December 17, 2011
The End of Canada as a Sovereign Nation State, the path Towardw the North American Union / Politics / Canada
By: Global_Research
James Corbett writes: When Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and US President Barack Obama announced the much-anticipated border agreement between the two countries at a press conference in Washington last week, those mainstream media outlets that bothered to cover the story at all compensated for the lack of details about what specifically is going to be accomplished by this accord by focusing on issues of no practical significance.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
The Way to Occupy a Bank is to Own One / Politics / US Politics
By: Ellen_Brown
The campaign to "move your money" has gotten a groundswell of support. Having greater impact would be to "move our money" -- move our local government revenues out of Wall Street banks into our own publicly-owned banks.
Occupy Wall Street has been both criticized and applauded for not endorsing any official platform. But there are unofficial platforms, including one titled the 99% Declaration which calls for a "National General Assembly" to convene on July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia. The 99% Declaration seeks everything from reining in the corporate state to ending the Fed to eliminating censorship of the Internet. But none of these demands seems to go to the heart of what prompted Occupiers to camp out on Wall Street in the first place – a corrupt banking system that serves the 1% at the expense of the 99%. To redress that, we need a banking system that serves the 99%.
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Saturday, December 17, 2011
Bankers Rule the World, The Network of Global Corporate Control / Politics / Credit Crisis 2011
By: Stephen_Lendman
Bankers rule the world. A new Swiss Federal Institute of Technology study says so. Written by Stefania Vitali, James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston, it's titled "The network of global corporate control," saying:
"We find that transnational corporations from a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic 'super-entity' that raises new important issues both for researches and policy makers."
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Saturday, December 17, 2011
Is Operation GLADIO on the rebound in Europe? / Politics / Conspiracy Theory
By: Patrick_Henningsen
Thirty years ago, Europeans were caught in a seemingly endless story of domestic terror which claimed thousands of lives over a generation – a disturbing epoche which was instrumental in bringing forth the modern domestic police state we have today. We now know that the wave of terror which swept across Europe then was run by a state-sponsored terror program called Operation G.L.A.D.I.O., organised by NATO and funded in part by the CIA.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Britain Going to Make the Great Escape from European Union Titanic Heading Towards Economic and Democratic Disaster / Politics / UK Politics
By: Videos
"Why would a successful country that has enjoyed a thousand of years of independence give up its right of self government to the un elected non entities that we see before us and the answer that comes back from the foreign office is ....."
"Britain is going to make the great escape from the European Union, we will have our democracy back, our liberty back as you lot head for disaster"
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Saturday, December 17, 2011
German Solar Dreams - So Long Or Goodbye ? / Politics / Renewable Energy
By: Andrew_McKillop
IS IT SO LONG - OR GOODBYE ?
Solon SE, in 1998, was Germany’s first listed solar photovoltaic producer. In Frankfurt trading on 15 December it stock price fell 46 percent to around 50 euro cents. The Berlin-based company had filed for insolvency after failing to reach an “arrangement” with banks and investors, its brief statement said. This was the first publicly traded German solar cell-making company to file for insolvency. Analysts noted the company had failed to cut costs fast enough and was unlikely to repay a 275-million-euro loan from Deutsche Bank and a group of seven German banks, due by 31 December.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Canada Withdraws from the Kyoto Convention on Greenhouse Gas Emissions / Politics / Climate Change
By: OilPrice_Com
Canada has announced its intention to withdraw from the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emissions (GGE), sandbagging the other signatories to the convention. The Kyoto protocol, initially adopted in Kyoto, Japan in 1997, was designed to combat global warming with the agreement allowing countries like China and India take voluntary, but non-binding steps to reduce their greenhouse gas carbon emissions.
Friday, December 16, 2011
The Five Most Idiotic Things U.S. Congress Did This Week / Politics / US Politics
By: Money_Morning
David Zeiler writes:
As life for the average American has gotten harder and harder, elected officials in Washington have done little to help.
Congress wastes much of its time on political posturing and bickering. And in those rare instances when our representatives actually do something, they usually make a mess if it.
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Friday, December 16, 2011
U.S. Exposure to Europe - Unknowns Unknowns / Politics / Global Debt Crisis
By: Fred_Sheehan
"[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - there are things we do not know we don't know." - Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002
There were reasons to criticize Donald Rumsfeld's turn as Defense Secretary but this was not one of them, even though the media quoted and re-quoted this most sensible approach to uncertainty as proof of a retarded intellect.
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Friday, December 16, 2011
The New Left - Neoliberal Climate Alliance / Politics / Climate Change
By: Andrew_McKillop
CHOMSKY WRONG AGAIN
Strange causes throw together strange bedfellows with even stranger offspring. Naom Chomsky, always sure to place himself with the angriest-seeming part of the New Left crowd, has no problem ranging himself alongside the Climate Crazies despite them receiving yet another big setback, in Durban. Packing their suntan lotions and picking up their air tickets somebody else paid for, the overfed bureaucrats and overpaid lobbyists who profit from climate craziness failed in their quest to suck more subsidies and garner more public cash for their Great Cause, once again. The strange band of New Left climate radicals is breaking up, as its upstream cause fed by one-liner slogans and Rentacrowd Science fails to amuse, beguile, fool or provoke like it used to. Climate change is a big yawn.
Friday, December 16, 2011
French Central Bank Attacks British Economy As Eurozone Rescue Plan Starts to Disintegrate / Politics / Global Debt Crisis
By: Nadeem_Walayat
French President Sarkozy let his attack dogs loose on Britain as illustrated by comments form the head of the French central bank, Christian Noyer attacking the British economy following threats of Standard & Poor's credit ratings agency downgrade of French Government debt as a consequence of the French banks exposure to bankrupting PIIGS debt.