STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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August 05, 2015
Americans were ready for a change when Jimmy Carter left office in 1981. No amount of money would have outweighed the damage a weak economy and an Iranian hostage crisis did to his presidency. Almost 35 years later, Carter is now the longest surviving ex-presid ...
August 05, 2015
We're living in two worlds, you and I. There's the world we see (or are made to see) and then there's the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and ...
August 04, 2015
New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton, never a privacy zealot, now just denies the whole concept. "There are no secrets," he says. We will remember that next time one of his officers kills an unarmed citizen. If he's serious, the investigation will ...
August 04, 2015
Liberty is a demanding ideal to believe in and live by. It requires consistency of principle and acceptance of much in the actions of others that we may disagree with or even find personally repulsive. Unfortunately, too many in our society do not sufficiently ...
August 03, 2015
That the super-rich are not like you and me is no surprise. Among other differences, they have billions of Federal Reserve Notes to their name – more than they can possibly spend. How does one join them? The author profiled in today's article asks that questi ...
August 03, 2015
During my time in Congress, I regularly introduced legislation forbidding organizations that perform abortions from receiving federal funding. The US Government should not force taxpayers to subsidize an activity they believe is murder. Thus, while I was horrif ...
August 02, 2015
The counterfeiting business, like any other, has fundamental economic constraints. At one end, operators must produce a product. That, in turn requires very specialized equipment and supplies, all of which cost money. The better the product is to be, the more i ...
August 01, 2015
It takes more than raw power to run a successful state; people must believe that laying their wealth at your feet is a righteous thing to do. This week, we'll look at a big part of how this idea came to Europe. Continued from last week… THE RE-CONQUEST The Ch ...
July 31, 2015
Today's excerpt is by Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor. The Sandra Bland arrest video he discusses will – or at least should – outrage anyone who respects justice and decency. The way the officer repeatedly screams, "I'm giving you a ...
July 30, 2015
Modern technology makes life easier, but it can also change our perception in potentially dangerous ways. For instance, the Internet lets us see news and political commentary from many different perspectives. Intuitively, this might seem positive. We can easily ...
July 30, 2015
Due to Obamacare, my health plan has become something other than insurance. It is now, for the most part, nothing other than a wealth transfer scheme to benefit the politically connected over others. In order to identify the difference between health insurance ...
July 29, 2015
In the 2008 election, Tea Party conservatives embraced Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as one of their own. Many still revere her and insist the "liberal media" distorted her record. In fact, no one needed to distort Palin's record; reality was bad enough. She rose ...
July 29, 2015
Samuel Dubose, also unarmed, was pulled over for a missing front license plate. He was reportedly shot in the head after a brief struggle in which his car began rolling forward. Levar Jones was stopped for a seatbelt offense, just as he was getting out of his c ...
July 28, 2015
The news last week that "friendly" hackers could seize remote control of a vehicle forced Fiat Chrysler to recall 1.4 million vulnerable cars and trucks. Fiat Chrysler said in its statement, "The Company is unaware of any injuries related to software exploitati ...
July 28, 2015
There are many economic fallacies that surround the issue of freer or open immigration into the United States, and few of them can stand up to serious critical examination. The Fallacy that Immigrants "Steal" Jobs from Americans: Opponents of more open immigrat ...
July 27, 2015
Last week we featured a refreshingly candid retired U.S. general. Today we have another one, who is far too candid in the opposite direction. General Wesley Clark thinks the government should send "radicalized" Americans to internment camps. We need not explain ...
July 27, 2015
Last week, Retired General Wesley Clark, who was NATO commander during the US bombing of Serbia, proposed that "disloyal Americans" be sent to internment camps for the "duration of the conflict." Discussing the recent military base shootings in Chattanooga, TN, ...
July 27, 2015
Legal recreational marijuana use in the state of Washington is now two-and-a-half-years old and retail sales of marijuana have been legal for one year. What are the results of this experiment? Who was wrong and who was right on legalization? A new study has bee ...
July 26, 2015
Seven years before Dancing Fawn made her first crossing, two men sat in a large, well-appointed Federal Government office. One, the older, leaned over his heavy desk with the air of patient expectation. The other, the younger of the two, sat at a table in the m ...
July 25, 2015
There's a reason why Hobbes and Rousseau are revered thinkers to this day: they saved the legitimacy of rulership as the Divine Right of Kings was failing. Performing the same job more than a thousand years earlier was a man named Augustine of Hippo. We'll exam ...
July 24, 2015
The two authors of today's story draw an interesting parallel between financial manipulation and genetic manipulation. Both, they say, are interventions in complex, imperfectly understood systems that risk dangerous negative consequences. Big Finance and Big Ag ...
July 24, 2015
In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten defined chutzpah as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan." Today we have a new paradigm for chutzpah: the Israeli governmen ...
July 23, 2015
We have to wonder what Michigan Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga is thinking. His effort to remove the New York Fed's permanent position on the Federal Open Market Committee is probably doomed to failure. It will accomplish almost nothing of consequence in the unl ...
July 23, 2015
Many investors still view gold as a safe-haven investment, but there remains much confusion regarding the extent to which the gold market is vulnerable to manipulation through short-term rigged market trades, and long-arm central bank interventions. First, much ...
July 22, 2015
Retired generals frequently land jobs with Wall Street or defense contractors, through which they can convert their military knowledge into substantial income. At least one is going a different direction, though. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn appears uninterested in a ...
July 22, 2015
Justice in America is not all it’s cracked up to be. Just ask Jeffrey Deskovic, who spent 16 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. Despite the fact that Deskovic’s DNA did not match what was found at the murder scene, he was singled out b ...
July 22, 2015
In an article on April 13, I used the so-called Civil War and the myths with which court historians have encumbered that war to show how history is falsified in order to serve agendas. I pointed out that it was a war of secession, not a civil war as the South w ...
July 21, 2015
The immigration issue has once more bubbled to the surface in America because of the provocative statements and assertions by one of the Republication contenders for the party's presidential nomination. Immigrants – especially illegal immigrants – are accus ...
July 21, 2015
Don't feel bad if you had to look twice at the source of today's media excerpt. It's not every day the Washington Post reports a law outlived its original purpose. The Jones Act of 1920 was probably a bad idea in the first place, but it certainly serves no purp ...
July 20, 2015
Rev. Franklin Graham may be a fine preacher and a decent man, but his incoherent view of the Iran nuclear agreement does not enhance his credibility. It does the opposite, exposing him as simply another neoconservative hypocrite. That Rev. Graham opposes the de ...
July 20, 2015
Last week's successfully concluded Iran agreement is one of the two most important achievements of an otherwise pretty dismal Obama presidency. Along with the ongoing process of normalizing relations with Cuba, this move shows that diplomacy can produce peacefu ...
July 19, 2015
The young mother got off the bus less than a block from the Cleveland Boxing Club with only twenty minutes until her meeting. She planned to have more time to get to know the neighborhood, but the buses were running late because of some lake-effect snow. Now, s ...
July 18, 2015
Rome, it must be said, adapted greatly as it failed. This rather begs the question of what types of ruling adaptations we will be seeing in the not-too-distant future. Continued from last week… THE CHURCH IS ESTABLISHED Of course, Constantine hoped that his m ...
July 18, 2015
In thinking about libertarian strategy, I find it useful to revisit the framework set out by Murray Rothbard in "For a New Liberty" (FNL). What counts here is not that Rothbard, a builder of the modern libertarian movement, was the author, but that it is an elo ...
July 17, 2015
A few months ago we looked at Citigroup's apparent desire to abolish cash altogether. Now we learn they are actively working in that direction, using bitcoin's blockchain technology as a model. More shocking, however, is the news that Citigroup has an "Innovat ...
July 17, 2015
Each time a gunman goes on a killing spree, there is no shortage of psychological analysis in every mainstream news outlet as to why the person snapped when they did. Every environmental factor these individuals had ever been exposed to has been made the object ...
July 17, 2015
Last week, former Secretary of Education and US Senator Lamar Alexander wrote in the Wall Street Journal that a college degree is both affordable and an excellent investment. He repeated the usual talking point about how a college degree increases lifetime earn ...
July 16, 2015
New documents from WikiLeaks show the National Security Agency spies on French companies as well as its government. That's not especially surprising. What is surprising is seeing the Federal Reserve Board on the list of "supported elements" for whom the NSA spi ...
July 16, 2015
All of Europe, and insouciant Americans and Canadians as well, are put on notice by Syriza's surrender to the agents of the One Percent. The message from the collapse of Syriza is that the social welfare system throughout the West will be dismantled. The Greek ...
July 15, 2015
As Americans prepared to celebrate Independence Day, their government did its best to spoil the party with ominous terrorism warnings. No such attacks were even attempted, so far as we know. In the maniacal mind of FBI Director James Comey, the lack of attacks ...
July 15, 2015
For those whose minds have been short-circuited into believing the candy-coated propaganda peddled by the politicians, here is an A-to-Z, back-to-the-basics primer of what life in the United States of America is really all about. A is for the AMERICAN POLICE ST ...
July 14, 2015
Greece is ahead of the economic curve. While the rest of the world is stuck with various state-sponsored paper currencies, Greece has a chance to start fresh. Unpayable debt will drive it from the Eurozone at some point. No paper currency can last forever, not ...
July 14, 2015
For months, now, the mass media and the financial markets have anxiously watched and waited to see the outcome of a war of words, accusations and threats that have been fought between Greece and its Eurozone and European Union partners. Over several decades Gre ...
July 13, 2015
When the successor to the chair of J. Edgar Hoover feels he must reassure the nation that he is not a maniac, we have strong evidence that he is probably a maniac. FBI Director James Comey may be a fine family man but he also wishes to "keep people safe" in way ...
July 13, 2015
The drama over Greece's financial crisis continues to dominate the headlines. As this column is being written, a deal may have been reached providing Greece with yet another bailout if the Greek government adopts new "austerity" measures. The deal will allow al ...
July 12, 2015
With this introduction, prepared by the author for our readers, The Daily Bell is pleased to present the first installment of 'Thieves Emporium,' by Max Hernandez. ... We are, for the first time in the history of the human race, experiencing something new in ...
July 11, 2015
Rulers specialize in creating scapegoats, for the purposes of uniting people behind them ("We'll defeat these intruders!") or for grabbing the wealth of the "others." The later emperors of Rome did both of these things in a unique way, by changing religions. Co ...
July 10, 2015
The drama gripping Europe seems to have grown tiresome for the continent's leaders. They look intent on ending it one way or the other at summit meetings this weekend. Greece may leave the currency union, voluntarily or not. We hope they do. A "Grexit" would be ...
July 10, 2015
This month, Portugal celebrates fourteen years of drug decriminalization. The grand experiment is now considered a happy success considering it was adopted out of desperation and in the face of dire warnings from proponents of the global drug war. What Led to D ...
July 09, 2015
UK Prime Minister David Cameron is a seriously deluded man. First, he apparently believes Facebook and Twitter users currently have "absolute privacy" in their communications. That is nonsense. Second, Cameron believes this nonexistent absolute privacy is unsus ...
