N. Joseph Potts Archive

Financial Censorship Growing

November 19, 2009 6:35 PM by N. Joseph Potts

If you want to buy a book or DVD from the Web site of Writer David Irving, you'll no longer be able to use your American Express card, and that wasn't Irving's idea. It was the idea, evidently, of New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who represents the district of Borough Park, Brooklyn, New York. Accusing Irving of neo-Nazism for Irving's defense of Adolf Hitler's actions as Führer of Nazi Germany and his revisionist inquiries into the Holocaust, Hikind wrote a letter to American Express and got eleven other New York elected officials to add their signatures to his.

Congress, of course, got the ball rolling for financial censorship in a big way when it barred use of credit cards to fund bets with offshore gaming Web sites, but this might be the first case of a "private" shutdown at the initiative of a group not exercising actual "legal" power over the card operator.

You can still buy books and DVDs, even reserve a place at a series of private meetings he's holding with fans in the US (Irving is British) currently using your Visa, MasterCard, or PayPal accounts, at least so far. Hikind may not be pursuing the matter further as he's currently in Israel, encouraging Americans to purchase real estate in East Jerusalem on formerly Jordanian territory occupied by Israel since its 1967 War.

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Truth in Media? Only from Pravda.

August 15, 2009 10:10 AM by N. Joseph Potts

Pravda is no longer the house organ of the Soviet state, or of any state officially, but I find this April 27 article contains more truth than any article I can recall on any similar subject in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.

Has the US out-communized Russia? If not yet, it may be soon at the rate things are Changing (or, better stated, "being Changed").

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How That Nasty Gold Caused the Depression

July 25, 2009 9:20 AM by N. Joseph Potts

One of the many myths today receiving retrospective support from today's servants of power is that adherence to the gold standard caused the economy in countries that did so in the 1930s to recover more slowly from the Depression.

Probably the leading proponent of this apology is Barry Eichengreen, author of the very-successful "Golden Fetters." As this article in the Economist reports, he has now produced a paper showing that, with one enormous exception, countries "clinging" to the gold standard too long adopted protectionist policies more than did countries that did not. Duh...

So, we're tacitly invited to consider the proposition that countries that enacted protectionist trade policies recovered more-slowly from the Depression than did those that kept their borders more open to trade.

I buy that!

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Hitler's Intellectual Property?
2009.06.26 | Comments (11)

Government Product Design: Eliot Spitzer's Entry
2009.06.09 | Comments (0)

How Much? It's Political, Now.
2009.06.04 | Comments (1)

Truth from Power? Merkel on the Fed
2009.06.04 | Comments (19)

Euro Parliament Speech Garnered 2M+ British Viewers
2009.04.05 | Comments (22)

Read 'Em and Weep
2009.02.06 | Comments (6)

Free Speech Still the Enemy of Financial Stability
2009.01.18 | Comments (6)

The Keynesian Economist
2008.12.05 | Comments (1)

Blog Carefully!
2008.12.01 | Comments (12)

Deregulation Reduces Racial Discrimination
2008.11.16 | Comments (4)