"If there is any one strikingly obvious feature of the U.S. economy in the past 15 years, it's the serial asset bubbles, one after another. Take a look at this chart. Why did our economy become dependent on asset bubbles for 'growth'? One way to find an answer is to ask: cui bono, to whose benefit? Correspondent Jeff W. has the answer: the financial sector and the central government." Continue reading →
"UN agencies have drawn up emergency plans for a military strike on Syria but are determined to keep delivering aid in the stricken country, a top UN official said Friday. More than 4.25 million people have fled their homes in Syria and two million are registered as refugees in countries around Syria, according to UN figures. The UN said this week that it would have to cut aid to more than a quarter of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon because of funding shortages. The world body has launched its biggest ever annual appeal, $4.4 billion, for Syria. Less than half has been raised so far." Continue reading →
"UN agencies have drawn up emergency plans for a military strike on Syria but are determined to keep delivering aid in the stricken country, a top UN official said Friday. More than 4.25 million people have fled their homes in Syria and two million are registered as refugees in countries around Syria, according to UN figures. The UN said this week that it would have to cut aid to more than a quarter of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon because of funding shortages. The world body has launched its biggest ever annual appeal, $4.4 billion, for Syria. Less than half has been raised so far." Continue reading →
"UN agencies have drawn up emergency plans for a military strike on Syria but are determined to keep delivering aid in the stricken country, a top UN official said Friday. More than 4.25 million people have fled their homes in Syria and two million are registered as refugees in countries around Syria, according to UN figures. The UN said this week that it would have to cut aid to more than a quarter of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon because of funding shortages. The world body has launched its biggest ever annual appeal, $4.4 billion, for Syria. Less than half has been raised so far." Continue reading →
"Tax records will be shared around the world by 2015 as part of a G20 pledge to crack down on individual tax cheats and global corporations with complicated arrangements aimed at paying as little tax as possible. As business increasingly moves online and international, cash-strapped governments approved an aggressive timeline to adopt the automatic exchange of tax information among the G20. The deal was solidified after China, the last holdout, agreed to the plan just days before the summit in St. Petersburg. 'We are committed to automatic exchange of information as the new global standard,' states the G20 final communiqué." Continue reading →
"In 2008, Barack Obama made it sound as though his health reform was only designed to help people who couldn’t afford health insurance afford it. Everyone else was going to be left alone. ('If you like the health plan you have you can keep it.') Then, on the eve of passage of the legislation, the focus changed to those few people (very few, it turns out) who are denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition. But it very recently, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and others have been in print explaining that ObamaCare won’t work unless the government controls the premiums paid by everybody in the entire country! As far as the general public is concerned, this is a brand new idea." Continue reading →
"Jam it through. Worry about the consequences later. This behavior goes way back. I'd like to quote Patrick Henry who was trying to talk some sense to the Virginia delegates who were voting to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Henry was desperately urging them not to give in. Listen to his words and compare it to what we're seeing with the rush to war with Syria." Continue reading →
"The FTC is steadily hacking the law to make itself the country’s de facto privacy regulator. In this case, it’s using its right to punish a company for being 'unfair' to consumers. But its power is limited: it can’t fine TRENDnet; it can only require it to notify customers, establish 'a comprehensive security program' — that includes pen testing its products — and agree to 20 years of privacy audits (just like Facebook and Google). If TRENDnet messes up again after this, the FTC can then fine it up to $16,000 per violation (a power it used to fine Google $22.5 million). There may well be more FTC orders to come." Continue reading →
"It’s not just the Syrian troops and 'collateral-damage civilians' who will bear the cost of Obama’s punishment of Assad. Also paying the price will be us — the American people — who will continue to suffer the consequences of military empire, a national-security state apparatus, and an interventionist foreign policy. Our punishment will come in the form of continued destruction of our freedom, inner peace, harmony, and economic well-being at the hands of our own government." Continue reading →
"Nancy Pelosi suggests that the U.S. should bomb Syria to save children. Does the U.S. have a right to defend children in Syria by bombing government installations? Even if some international lawyers devised some new sort of argument in support of U.S. bombing by basing it on some humanitarian rationale, the U.S. would still have a very difficult case to make. The U.S. has basically forfeited even such an imagined or hypothetical right by its earlier actions of supporting the rebel side. If it bombs Syria now, it is part of a pattern of having chosen the rebel side." Continue reading →