Free Republic

Gerard Jackson BrookesNews.Com Monday 24 July 2006 That Wall Street has no understanding of what drives economies was made abundantly clear by its rampant confusion in late 2000 when it became obvious that the US economy was tanking. Whenever the economy slows slowdown or contracts Wall Street immediately targets consumer spending as the culprit. When the US economy booms, consumer spending is applauded as the saviour. The result is that eyeing consumer spending means that other trends are either misunderstood or largely ignored. Economic folklore — and that’s all it is — on Wall Street and in the mainstream media...

Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man, His enemies say he's on their land. They got him outnumbered about a million to one, He got no place to escape to, no place to run. He's the neighborhood bully. The neighborhood bully just lives to survive, He's criticized and condemned for being alive. He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin, He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in. He's the neighborhood bully. The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land, He's wandered the earth an exiled man. Seen his...

On July 7, the United Kingdom observed the first anniversary of the bus and Underground attacks in London that claimed fifty-two lives. One year later, according to the New York Times, "Britons are still asking what inspired the onslaught by British-born Muslims and whether the dark undercurrents of July 7, 2005, could resurface in a new attack." If they really are asking whether such an attack could happen again, there's a new book they ought to read. It is titled Londonistan, by British journalist Melanie Phillips. It is Phillips's response to what she calls Britain's state of denial regarding the...

Readers often ask if economic history is particularly important. No it is not — it is vitally important. When we examine, for example, the bodies of past recessions (or depressions as they should be called) we are in fact carrying out post-mortems. But if we are to successfully determine the cause of death we need to apply the appropriate analytical tools. America’s last recession caused some observers to note that it bore a striking resemblance to the nineteenth classical boom-and-bust situation. What passed them by is that this has always been the case. Examining the Clinton boom will tell us...

Right-wingers are prematurely gloating because Keith Windschuttle has now joined fellow conservatives Janet Albrechtsen, John Gallagher Stephen Skala and Ron Brunton on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s board. Naturally supporters of the ABC (Australian Bolshevik Corporation) and its ideologically homogeneous crew of phony journalists are outraged that the Government is making a serious attempt to hold these vicious lefties accountable to the taxpayers — you know, the ones who actually pay their salaries. However, these anti-Australian America-hating lefties can rest in peace. The only permanent solution to the political corruption that is permanently and deeply ingrained in the ABC is to...

Since the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq the Democrats’ Leninist core, the leftwing MainStream Media Party and the left’s Hollywood collaborators have been doing everything in their power to demoralise the troops, delegitimise the President, subvert the war on terror and sabotage victory over the terrorists in Iraq. In other words, they have behaved like traitors. Yet when Bill Clinton continuously bombed the Serbia from a height of 15,000 feet without UN permission he was overwhelmingly hailed by the left as a great humanitarian and liberator. President Bush liberates 50,000,000 Muslims from tyranny and he’s Adolf Hitler. America’s cause in...

Today, Muslims reign as the Number 1 Death Cult on the planet, closely followed by America’s Democrat Party. In 1,400 years of terror Muslims have slaughtered hundreds of millions forcing their faux religion on others. They are in the process of murdering 500,000 Dafurian Muslims because they are black. They recently murdered 2 million Southern Sudanese because they were Christian. Muslims are a “Black Plague” on this Earth. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot were sick despots who ordered millions killed. Democrats are more subtle, they killed more than any one of them under color of “higher” cause. Democrats have murdered...

Two economic fallacious are gaining ground in Australia. The first one is that free trade is hollowing out the economy: the second one has that we will run out of resources, particularly oil. At least the first fallacy is plausible; the second one, however. is pure tripe. The Australian Bureau of Statistics show that for the March quarter the value imported consumer and business products jumped by 16 per cent. The Australian Industry Group argues that by next December 25 per cent of the country’s manufacturing base will have moved abroad. This will mean a loss of 70,000 manufacturing jobs...

LONDON: British Prime Minister Tony Blair, struggling to overcome two major ministerial scandals, suffered a fresh blow when a poll showed most people think his Labour government is "sleazy and incompetent". The poll for the Sunday Times, which also shows a slide in his personal ratings to a historic low, comes just five days before local elections that are seen as a test of how long Blair can cling on to power. Blair has said he will not stand for a fourth term at the next election, expected in 2009, but it is unclear when he will step aside. Finance...

Amid the current panic about gas prices many people are embracing ethanol. But that's not such a good idea During the comment period for the RFG (reformulated gas) program, supporters of ethanol had argued that the volatile organic compound (VOC) emission standards in the program -- 42 U. S. C. 7545 (k) (3) (B) (i) -- would preclude the use of ethanol in RFG because adding ethanol to gasoline increases its volatility and raises VOC emissions, especially in the summertime. Background The American Petroleum Institute v. the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [Docket #94-1502 (Heard by the U. S. Court of...

The Democrats have abandoned their pro-immigration policy which heretofore was even left of Bush and Republican Business. That is, of course, if one can believe Howard Dean’s attack on George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy. Dean sends a chilling message: Republican President Bush has failed at border security and Dean plans to make it a Democrat 2006 election issue. If Howard succeeds, because 81 per cent of the American people polled, demand action, then the law and order crowd in the Republican Party better get on the spore because the Democrats, with the help of their in-house pimp media, are...

DOES Singapore have a sound legal system or is Singapore just another autocracy with a leadership that subverts the law to preserve its own power? Should its court orders relating to commercial and other matters be enforced in countries that do have excellent legal systems? These are matters over which a Canadian court has been asked to rule in a case that is hugely embarrassing to Singapore's Government, particularly in an election year. Singapore does well in Transparency International's annual survey of perceptions of corruption, but it needs to be remembered perceptions are surveyed, not reality. Sure, it's unlikely you...

Nathan Tabor BrookesNews.Com There are some celebrities who simply cannot bring themselves to shy away from the spotlight — even years after their popularity has faded. Of course, there’s pop singer Britney Spears, who can’t seem to stay out of the tabloids…actor Alec Baldwin, who somehow believes that his political utterances are being followed by millions…and actress Sharon Stone, who’s still making headlines on the Drudge Report long after her movie career faded. And then there’s Bill and Hillary. Politics’ number-one odd couple appears to be determined to return to the White House. Pundits talk breathlessly of a Hillary Presidency,...

CANBERRA: Australia and China signed a nuclear safeguards deal that set the stage for huge uranium exports to Beijing for its power industry, but Canberra said the trade was unlikely to start for some years. Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and his Chinese counterpart, Li Zhaoxing, signed the nuclear safeguards deal in the presence of visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Australian Prime Minister John Howard. "Given China's high projected growth in electricity demand over the coming years, there are clear environmental benefits in diversifying from fossil fuels to low greenhouse-emission technologies such as nuclear power," Downer said in a...

Subscribe to BrookesNews’ Bulletin - http://prodoscope.com/mailman/listinfo/brookesnews For some weird reason the Wall Street Journal has become obsessed with defending the alleged benefits of increased immigration: even to the point of wilfully ignoring historical and economic evidence to the contrary. It is doing what it has rightly condemned the left for doing — and that is treating the truth with contempt. Without a shred of evidence to support its stance the paper asserts that more immigrants means a bigger per capita economy. This is just another version of the crude population-drives-growth fallacy. Let me draw on three vivid historical examples that...

Many of those on the left who are attacking President Bush for toppling Saddam Hussein were not so particular when Clinton was president. The man who sent American troops into Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, etc, did so with the support of liberal-leaning Congressmen and Senators. This fact needs to be borne in mind because I think provides a clue as to why the same Liberals are now snapping at President Bush’s heels. Taking a look at the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign we find that it provided the means by which those who are deeply hostile to American values and...

The War on Terror suffered a major blow three years before it was ever announced. It happened on this day in 1999, when the people of this democracy were misled into attacking the sovereign, emerging post-Communist democracy of Yugoslavia — over rumors of genocide and ethnic cleansing that proved false. In so doing, we put the final touch on delivering the Balkans to al Qaeda. Today we are being asked to seal that historical blunder, whose repercussions seven years later are only escalating as those we "rescued" turn their weapons against UN and NATO forces. While NATO spends most of...

It’s taken a few years, countless deaths and immeasurable suffering, but mainstream America finally seems to have arrived at the logical conclusions necessary for survival. One of the "barometers" of society: the popular media, which is accustomed to speaking in sound bytes, is beginning to sound like "the times, they are a-changing." Even the media pundits are choking on their own reports. It is disgusting the appeasements and politically correct garbage concerning the "Religion of Peace" they previously had us swallow . I'm delighted to see that the mainstream talk shows and other popular media, with Dr Michael Savage leading...

The Bush presidency has revealed the enormous ideological rift that has been developing for more than forty years in America, and yet the vast majority of Americans are still not fully aware of it even though there has probably been nothing like it since the civil war. On one side of the political gulf there are the fanatical win-at-all-costs Democrats whose vital ideological core does not believe in the legitimacy of the Republican Party just as abolitionists didn’t believe in the legitimacy of slavery and the Southern Democrats in the legitimacy of Lincoln’s presidency. To these Democrats, the Gores, Hillarys,...

Are [The minders of Ho Ching [The wife of Singapore prime-minister-by-order-of-his-father and poster-child of Singapore's corrupt nepotism*] losing their touch? That's what some are asking about Temasek Holdings' chief executive after a string of embarrassing setbacks. In February the Singapore government's wholly owned PSA was trumped by Dubai's deep-pocket sheikhs, who outbid it for Britain's port operator, P&O. Temasek walked away with a $50 million profit on its stake, but it was cold comfort for losing the chance to become the world's No. 1 port operator. [Though subsequent challenges could yet undo the Dubai deal] Then Temasek's $1.9 billion purchase...