News Commentary

There is no terrorist threat: The feds want you to think there is

"Nothing can be said for certain as to what prompted the State Department to close more than 20 embassies and consulates in the Middle East and North Africa last Sunday, and this is by design. But it is no excuse not to raise the possibility that Americans are eating a summer salad of nonsense served to justify objectionable surveillance practices now coming in for scrutiny. This prospect seems so self-evident that one feels almost silly raising it, except that so few have. Let us insert it into the conversation." Continue reading →

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3 Gold Facts You Can’t Ignore

"You might find these first two facts exciting. A potential gold comeback could mean a new trade—or even new life for an old position you had left for dead. But before you clear out a spot in your portfolio for a brand new gold position, there’s one last fact you must know. Out of everything I’ve already told you today, this piece of information is far and away the most important truth about gold today. Fact No. 3 is simple. It’s true. And it trumps every other analysis or assumption about gold. The third fact is this: Even as futures perk up this morning, gold remains stuck in a painful downtrend." Continue reading →

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Bill Bonner: Moms & pops to be skinned again

"The idea is to buy low and sell high. Poor old mom and pop can't seem to get it right. They buy high and sell low. Dalbar, an outfit that tracks investment performance, calculates that $100,000 invested 20 years ago would have grown to $484,000 if you just left it in the S&P 500 and did nothing else. But the typical investor waited too long to buy and then sold out when stocks went down. At the end of 2012, he had only $230,000. And now that stocks have been run up - by the Fed's easy money policies - for 5 years, Mom and Pop can't help themselves. They're back in the stock market...ready to be skinned again." Continue reading →

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The Detroit (or New American) Yard Sale … Coming to a City Near You

"I can’t help but wonder what America’s auto barons like the Dodges, Firestones and especially Edsel and Eleanor Ford – whose donations and charitable support over the decades has created the cultural gem that is the Detroit Institute of Art – would think of their art being auctioned off to pay government debt. Will Disney one day own Yosemite National Park or Old Faithful? Will Six Flags own Mt. Rushmore? Will hedge funds buy up tracks of national forests and manage them like they would manage other timber assets? Those are legitimate questions, given a federal debt so large it cannot possibly ever be repaid." Continue reading →

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Google Bus Hate: Give It a Rest

"Some San Franciscans define themselves by what they oppose. This spring they found a new focus for their outrage: the Google (GOOG) bus. Since 2007 the company has been using big, Wi-Fi-equipped, white-and-black coaches to collect employees around the Bay Area and bring them to the Mountain View Googleplex, 45 minutes south of the city. In early May there was a public protest against them at a Mission District transit stop. More than 20 cops were on hand—roughly a 1:1 ratio with protesters. The high point? Two slackers smashing a Google bus piñata." Continue reading →

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Ron Paul: Why Are We At War In Yemen?

"The US government is clearly at war in Yemen. It is claimed they are fighting al-Qaeda, but the drone strikes are creating as many or more al-Qaeda members as they are eliminating. Resentment over civilian casualties is building up the danger of blowback, which is a legitimate threat to us that is unfortunately largely ignored. Also, the US is sending mixed signals by attacking al-Qaeda in Yemen while supporting al-Qaeda linked rebels fighting in Syria. This cycle of intervention producing problems that require more intervention to 'solve' impoverishes us and makes us more, not less, vulnerable. Can anyone claim this old approach is successful?" Continue reading →

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The NSA-DEA police state tango

"As revolutionary and noted hypocrite Thomas Jefferson once observed, the spread of tyranny only requires our silence. Millions of people have been sent to prison on drug-war convictions over the last 20 years. Most of those people have been poor and black. We will never know how many of those cases resulted from secret evidence collected by spy agencies, but it might not be a small number. One of the Reuters articles that broke this story quotes DEA officials as saying that the 'parallel construction' tactic had been used by the agency 'virtually every day since the 1990s.'" Continue reading →

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Pepe Escobar: Vlad the Hammer vs Obama the Wimp

"Vlad the Hammer can sense a wimp of Carter-esque proportions like a polar bear hunting a seal. He quickly evaluated how the Obama administration turned its already shaky credibility to ashes on two simultaneous fronts; because of the scale of the Orwellian/Panopticon complex detailed by Snowden's leaks, and because of the way he was being mercilessly hunted. The New York Times posted an editorial justifying the cancelation of the summit, saying, 'Mr Putin is a repressive and arrogant leader who treats his people with contempt.' Right; and Snow White lives in the White House." Continue reading →

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‘Intelligence laundering’

"One of the things that is really telling in this story is that the DEA bizarrely didn’t seem to think that there was really anything wrong in what they were doing. I think they got blindsided by the reaction. It’s similar to the completely clueless statement by Michele Leonhart when talking about the perjury of supersnitch Andrew Chambers. They have gotten so used to considering themselves above the law, that they actually forgot that’s where they went. Lying it’s just what you do to get the job done. Re-creating an evidence trail from scratch is just part of the standard red tape that you go through to complete a drug arrest." Continue reading →

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The American Democracy Pitch

"The neocon brothers-in-arms, Senators John McCain & Lindsey Graham, put out a joint Op-Ed in WaPo this morning. They attempt to pitch 'Democracy' to the Egyptian people, who ironically just witnessed their first democratically elected President overthrown in a military coup. I have a different proposal for the Egyptian people, and it's called Liberty. Now, I realize that the prospects of Liberty breaking out in Egypt are close to zero (after all, we're struggling immensely with the idea catching on here, in the so-called 'Land of The Free'). But speaking about Liberty can only help." Continue reading →

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