What I See for 2022: Interest Rates, Mortgage Rates, Real Estate, Stocks & Other Assets as Central Banks Face Raging Inflation thumbnail

What I See for 2022: Interest Rates, Mortgage Rates, Real Estate, Stocks & Other Assets as Central Banks Face Raging Inflation

By Wolf Richter

An extra-special cocktail of three powerful ingredients with no cherry on top awaits us in 2022.

Super-inflated asset prices such as housing, stocks, and bonds; massive inflation; and central banks that have started to react.

Many central banks have started pushing up interest rates; others have ended asset purchases. And Quantitative Tightening (QT) – central banks shedding assets – is on the table.

Rising interest rates in the US won’t catch up with raging inflation in 2022 – CPI inflation is now 6.8%, the highest in 40 years.

But unlike 40 years ago, inflation is now on the way up. In the early 1980s, it was starting to head down. We need to compare the current situation to the 1970s, when inflation was spiraling higher. So we’re entering a new environment where the economy will be doing things we haven’t seen in many decades. It will be a new ballgame for just about everyone.

As is always the case, the year-over-year inflation figures will fluctuate. CPI could go over 7% or 8% and then fall back to 5% only to jump again, providing moments of false hopes – as they did during the waves of inflation in the 1970s – only to race even higher.

Inflation has now spread deep into the economy, with services inflation picking up, and there are no supply-chain bottlenecks involved. This includes the inflation measures for housing costs. Those housing inflation measures have begun to surge.

We know that the figures for housing inflation, which account for about one-third of total CPI, will surge further in 2022, based on housing data that we saw in 2021, and that is now slowly getting picked up by the inflation indices. They started heading higher in mid-2021 from very low levels, and they’re going to be red-hot in 2022.

This is inflation is fueled by enormous monetary and fiscal stimulus, globally, but particularly in the US – with nearly $5 trillion in money-printing since March 2020, and over $5 trillion in government spending of borrowed money.

The stimulus has broken price resistance among businesses and consumers. Enough businesses and consumers are willing to pay even the craziest prices – a sign that the inflationary mindset has taken over for the first time in decades. All this stimulus has broken the dam.

Inflation is not going away until central banks remove the fuel via QT to allow long-term interest rates to rise, and by pushing up short-term interest rates via rate hikes, and until these policy actions are drastic enough to shut down the inflationary mindset and reestablish price resistance among businesses and consumers.

Central banks around the world react

The Bank of Japan ended QE in May 2021 – the longest-running money-printer has stopped printing money.

The Fed started tapering QE in November and doubled the speed of the taper in December. If it doesn’t accelerate it further, QE will end in March.

The Bank of Canada ended QE in October. The Bank of England ended QE in December. The ECB announced that it would cut its huge QE program in half by March. Several smaller central banks that did QE have ended it.

Central banks in developed markets already hiked rates:

  • The Bank of England: by 15 basis points, in December, for liftoff.
  • The National Bank of Poland: three hikes, totaling 165 basis points, to 1.75%.
  • The Czech National Bank: five times by a total of 350 basis points, to 3.75%.
  • Norway’s Norges Bank: for the second time, by a total of 50 basis points, to 0.5%.
  • The National Bank of Hungary: many small hikes totaling 180 basis points, to 2.4%.
  • The Bank of Korea: twice, by 50 basis points total, to 1.0%.
  • The Reserve Bank of New Zealand: twice, by 50 basis points total, to 0.75%.
  • The Central Bank of Iceland: four times, by 125 basis points in total, to 2.0%.

Central banks in developing markets have been much more aggressive in hiking rates to get inflation under control and protect their currencies; a plunge in their currencies would make dollar-funding very difficult. They’re trying to stay well ahead of the Fed. Among them:

  • The Central Bank of Russia: seven times, totaling 425 basis points, to 8.5%.
  • The Bank of Brazil: multiple huge rate hikes, by 725 basis points since March, to 9.25%.
  • The Bank of the Republic (Colombia): three hikes totaling 125 basis points, to 3.0%.
  • The Bank of Mexico: five hikes, totaling 150 basis points, to 5.5%.
  • The Central Bank of Chile: four hikes, 350 basis points in total, to 4.0%.
  • The State Bank of Pakistan: three hikes, totaling 275 basis points, to 9.75%.
  • The Central Bank of Armenia: seven hikes, totaling 350 basis points, to 7.75%.
  • The Central Reserve Bank of Peru: five hikes, totaling 225 basis points, to 2.5%.

There are some exceptions, particularly Turkey, which has embarked on an all-out effort to destroy its currency via inflation and is succeeding in doing so by cutting rates. Over the year 2021, the lira has collapsed by nearly 80% against the dollar, with inflation raging at over 20%.

But in the US in my lifetime, there has never been a toxic combination of interest-rate repression to near-0%, amid 6.8% inflation, as the Fed’s money-printing continues for now.

*****

Continue reading this article at  Wolf  Street.

FLORIDA: DeSantis Investing $10m in Semiconductor Production to Combat China thumbnail

FLORIDA: DeSantis Investing $10m in Semiconductor Production to Combat China

By The Geller Report

Once again, Governor Ron DeSantis is the best governor in the nation. No one is fighting harder for the American people than the great governor. When DeSantis becomes POTUS in either 2025 or 2029, he will take the fight to China and all of America’s adversaries. And he will win. #DeSantis2024!

The Chinese Communist Party steals America’s technology and is a threat to the semiconductor supply chain.

I am investing funds to increase microchip and semiconductor manufacturing in Florida so that the CCP cannot hold our supply chain hostage. pic.twitter.com/ji1emvw7AG

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) January 5, 2022

DeSantis investing $10m in semiconductor production to combat China

By Red State Observer, January 6, 2022

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced a nearly $10 million investment in semiconductor production for the state of Florida to combat the United States’ reliance on China and other foreign countries for vital supplies, parts, and materials.

On Wednesday, DeSantis announced the investment whereby millions from the Florida Job Growth Grant Fund will go to Osceola County, Florida, and Valencia College to support semiconductor manufacturing.

DeSantis said the investment will support about 5,400 jobs in Florida, and Osceola County officials have suggested that tens of thousands of jobs will be supported by the investment once the infrastructure for the project is fully completed.

“Manufacturing is something that we need to do a better job of … semiconductors are a huge issue,” DeSantis said:

If you look at how the supply chain works, we are overly dependent on foreign nations, including Tawain which is a good ally of ours, but which is one that is under serious pressure from the Communist Party of China and so we have an opportunity to do more here in the United States and I think the more manufacturing of semiconductors here, the better off we’ll be. [Emphasis added]

The Chinese Communist Party steals America’s technology and is a threat to the semiconductor supply chain.

I am investing funds to increase microchip and semiconductor manufacturing in Florida so that the CCP cannot hold our supply chain hostage.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Quick note: Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. We will not waver. We will not tire. We will not falter, and we will not fail. Freedom will prevail.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

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Strength Of U.S. Dollar Slips After Poor Jobs Report thumbnail

Strength Of U.S. Dollar Slips After Poor Jobs Report

By The Geller Report

In 4 out of the last 5 months, the U.S. economy performed below expectations. But Decembers job report was the Biden Administrations worst one yet. It was gad awful. Less than half the jobs expected were created. As such, the U.S. dollar took a hit. America will not be able to withstand a second term of the Biden Administration.

This is the worst jobs report of Biden’s presidency so far.

Less than HALF the jobs expected were created.

It’s clear: His “plan” is not working!

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) January 7, 2022

In 4 out of the last 5 months, the economy has added fewer jobs than expected.

Joe Biden is failing Americans.

— GOP (@GOP) January 7, 2022

Joe Biden has failed as president. pic.twitter.com/rUKzDOSP9A

— GOP (@GOP) January 5, 2022

Strength Of U.S. Dollar Slips After Poor Jobs Report

By Daily Wire, January 8th, 2022

The price of the U.S. dollar slipped on Friday following a weaker-than-expected jobs report as the U.S. economy struggles to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns.

The Department of Labor reported on Friday morning that the U.S. economy added 199,000 jobs in the month of December. The gain was roughly half of what economists predicted.

The unemployment rate dropped to 3.9%, outpacing economists’ expectations of 4.1%. The share of working adults, however, still has not returned to pre-pandemic levels as many continue to stay out of the workforce, according to Axios.

“Employers want to create new jobs, and are hiring the formerly unemployed, driving down the jobless rate,” Axios reported Friday. “But that isn’t coaxing more people to work. The share of adults in the labor force was unchanged in December and remains 1.5 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels.”

The report preceded a dip in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, which fell in value compared to a basket of other currencies. As Reuters reported:

The dollar index fell 0.269% at 96.001. Even with Friday’s weakness, the dollar was still on track for a weekly gain, its first in three weeks.

The euro was up 0.3% to $1.1325 as it strengthened against the greenback in the wake of the payrolls report, after showing little reaction to data showing euro zone inflation rose to 5% in December.

Euro zone policymakers have said they expect inflation to gradually slow down in 2022 and a rate hike will likely not be needed this year.

The Japanese yen strengthened 0.12% versus the greenback at 115.71 per dollar. The yen has taken the brunt of the damage while the greenback has strengthened recently, with the dollar hitting a five-year high versus the yen earlier this week.

Sterling was poised for its third straight weekly gain and was last trading at $1.356, up 0.24% on the day, even after data showed growth in Britain’s construction sector cooled in December as the Omicron variant of coronavirus spread.

Biden reacted to the jobs report on Friday, ignoring the poor jobs added number and instead focusing on the unemployment rate.

“It’s a historic day for our economic recovery,” Biden said, according to Fox Business. “Today’s national unemployment rate fell below 4% to 3.9%, the sharpest one-year drop in unemployment in United States history … Years faster than experts said we’d be able to do it, and we have added 6.4 million new jobs since January of last year.”

Biden also touted that from the time he took office in January 2021, the U.S. “went from 20 million people on unemployment rolls to under 2 million on the unemployment rolls today.”

“This is the economy I promised and hoped for, for the American people,” the president said. “Where the biggest benefits go to the people who work the hardest and who are more often left behind. The people who have been ignored before. The people who just want a decent chance to build a decent life for their families.”

RELATED ARTICLE: Milton Friedman: “Inflation is a disease.”

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Quick note: Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. We will not waver. We will not tire. We will not falter, and we will not fail. Freedom will prevail.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

Follow me on Gettr. I am there, click here. It’s open and free.

Remember, YOU make the work possible. If you can, please contribute to Geller Report.

Covid-19 Economic Zombification thumbnail

Covid-19 Economic Zombification

By Daniel Fenandez

Editors’ Note: Discussion of “Minsky Moments” may strike the reader as obscure. However, it is noted in this article that the whole world, including real estate much of the private corporate sector, has become more leveraged than before the 2008 financial crisis. With the sharp rise in inflation,  global central banks have the difficult choice of either letting the inflation run, or increasing interest rates and reducing money supply growth, the very fuel which is supporting the record-setting debt expansion. Either choice could be upsetting to financial markets. Economic trauma always takes on greater power when financial leverage is excessive. Just as debt expansion fuels the boom, its contraction can fuel a bust. Thus, for those of us with money in markets, either building our estates or living off our estates in retirement, this issue becomes very immediate. Economic theory cannot time these events precisely but it can tell us the kind of environment in which we are operating. This level of debt, coupled with a sharp rise in inflation, suggests some sort of confrontation is ahead with serious consequences for investors. That confrontation is the Minsky Moment, and it can be very real for those with money at risk.

Economists and finance specialists are warning of the potential arrival of a new “Minsky moment” in increasing numbers. The last time this term was used with such conviction was in 2008, at the onset of the Great Recession. It seems that 2021–22 could have some parallels with the world’s last severe recession.

The Twentieth-First Century: The Century of Debt

Until now, the 21st century could be called the century of debt, and if things continue the way they are, it could well be called the century of the great debt default. At the beginning of the century, extremely low-interest rates promoted by central banks in practically the entire developed world caused a frenzy of private credit creation and a gigantic financial and real estate bubble that exploded in 2008 with dire consequences for the world economy.

Central banks, heavily pressured by politicians, redoubled their commitment to low-interest rates, causing public overindebtedness to a degree unprecedented in times of peace. In 2020, when the growth model based on the accumulation of public debt and low interest rates seemed to start to weaken, the Covid-19 recession arrived. The worldwide excess of public spending in 2020 has not been corrected, and it does not appear it will be corrected anytime soon. The new public debt is adding fuel to the fire. And the accumulation of it (and also private debt, especially that issued by companies) could be reaching the point of no return.

Global debt reached $200 trillion at the beginning of 2011, while global GDP was $74 trillion (275 percent debt/GDP). In the second quarter of 2021, global debt reached almost $300 trillion with a global GDP of $83.9 trillion (330 percent debt/GDP).

What Is a Minsky Moment?

Hyman Minsky was a post-Keynesian economist who developed a very insightful taxonomy of financial relationships. According to him, the finances of a capitalist economy can be summarized in terms of exchanges of present money for future money. The relationship proposed by Minsky is as follows:

Present money is invested in companies that will generate money in the future.

When companies make a profit, they return the money to investors from their profits.

Income or profit expectations determine the following:

  1. The flow of present money to companies
  2. The price of financial assets such as bonds and stocks (financial assets that articulate the exchange of present money for future money)

Present business income, meanwhile, determines the following:

  1. Whether expectations about past income (included in already-issued financial assets) have been met
  2. How to modify expectations about future income (and therefore, indirectly, the flow of present money to companies and the price of financial assets issued in the present)

Minsky articulates three possible types of income-debt relationship in companies (although he extends the analysis to all economic agents):

  1. Hedge. Hedge finance companies can meet all of their debt obligations with their cash flows. That is, their inflows exceed their outflows. Such companies are stable.
  2. Speculative. Companies can pay the interest on their debt but cannot pay down the principal. They are forced to constantly refinance. These companies are unstable, as any minor problem can bankrupt them.
  3. Ponzi. Ponzi companies do not generate enough income to pay down the principal or pay the interest. They must sell assets or issue debt just to pay the previous interest on their debt. They end up defaulting on the new debt sooner or later. Their chances of survival are minimal.

According to Minsky, when things are going well in an economy and income expectations are met, corporations begin to err on the side of optimism and excessively increase their debt. This causes a shift from a stable situation (in which hedge companies are the norm) to an unstable one (in which Ponzi companies are the norm). In a Ponzi situation, the economy will experience widespread defaults and a financial and economic crisis.

An economy is said to be in a Minsky moment if debtors are unable to pay down their debts (a speculative situation) or unable to pay the interest and the principal (a Ponzi situation).

Minsky was partly right. He accounts for a common truth of financial crises: issuance of debt was abused in previous periods. As a caveat, though, taking into account monetary and financial state interventions—mainly but not solely those of central banks—perhaps the cause of this degradation of debt quality is not a market problem, or at least not exclusively. The crisis may be exogenous to the market (caused by public authorities) or endogenous but amplified by exogenous factors (public authorities contribute to it).

The Economy Has Been Zombifying for Two Decades

As already discussed, global debt has grown more rapidly than the global economy over the last ten years, so it seems credit quality has indeed degraded. The income needed to pay off debt is growing much more slowly than is the debt itself.

An additional piece of evidence to support this argument is the increase in the number of “zombie companies.” A zombie company is one whose earnings before interest and taxes are less than or equal to its debt service (it coincides exactly with Minsky’s definition of speculative and Ponzi companies, taken together). A zombie is a wonderful metaphor because a zombie moves and appears to be alive but is in fact dead. A zombie company also moves and appears to be alive—it generates activity, employs workers, and produces goods—but in reality is (almost) dead. It is (almost) certain to die given its inability to pay its debt with its own means. The number of zombie companies has increased exponentially in the United States in recent years, according to a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) report. Furthermore, the probability of remaining in a zombie state has increased. And in fact, zombification is a reality in almost every part of the world.

Figure 2

Source: Banerjee & Hofmann

Figure 3

Source: Banerjee & Hofmann

However, the BIS data end in 2017. What has Covid-19’s impact been on an already-zombified global economy?

Covid-19 Hit a Zombie Economy: Now What?

The most recent data on company interest coverage (financing cost/earnings) are from the Fed, and refer to the North American economy. In the figure below we can see that the median coverage ratio began to fall at the end of 2018, which is consistent with our hypothesis that the economy’s growth model, based on cheap debt, was beginning to run its course. The pandemic has hammered the median coverage ratio. Although the ratio has been recovering since the second half of 2020, it is currently at the level seen in 2009, in the middle of the Great Recession.

Even more revealing is the interest coverage ratio of the companies in the first quartile (that is, the 25 percent of companies with the lowest ratio). This indicator has been below 1 since 2012; in other words, zombification has accelerated since then. Keep in mind that a ratio lower than 1 means that a company’s profits are insufficient for it to pay its financing costs (it is a Ponzi company).

The interest coverage ratio for companies in the twenty-fifth percentile reached almost 0 just before the pandemic (their profits had almost disappeared). Since then, the ratio has been negative (these companies recorded losses). Observe that these companies have not recovered, while companies in other quartiles have. Their ratio is currently just above −1, which means that their losses (before interest) are nearly equal to their financing cost. This is a total disaster. At least 25 percent of US companies are financially dead.

Valuation of Zombified Companies

One would expect that these companies would begin to go bankrupt, and this is indeed what is happening. According to the Fed, 2.5 times more zombie companies (as a fraction of all companies) went bankrupt in 2020 than in 2019 (<2 percent in 2019 and around 4.5 percent in 2020).

Curiously, the zombie companies that survived 2020 are seeing their valuation skyrocket. Their aggregate value already exceeds $6 trillion, while in 2019 it was close to $2 trillion.

Figure 5

Conclusion

Markets are now extremely complacent. The fundamentals do not seem to justify their optimism. Zombie companies, which were already a problem in 2019, have not been killed off; indeed they have multiplied. The zombie apocalypse could be closer than we imagine.

*****

This article was originally published by AIER, American Institute for Economic Research and is reproduced with permission.

Biden Wrecking Ball: Over 3 Million Jobs Lost Due To Employer Closures Or Lost Business thumbnail

Biden Wrecking Ball: Over 3 Million Jobs Lost Due To Employer Closures Or Lost Business

By The Geller Report

Destroying your livelihood, your ability to make a living, is a form of murder.

The Biden Effect: Over 3 Million Jobs Lost Due To Employer Closures Or Lost Business

A new report revealed on CNBC Friday that 3.1 million people have been unable to work due to their employer closing or losing business as inflation and government regulations continue to cripple the job market.

The information was discussed during a “CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer” report on Friday morning.

“3.1 million people reported they’ve been unable to work because their employer closed or lost business,” Cramer said.

CNBC: “3.1 million people reported they’ve been UNABLE TO WORK because their employer closed or lost business.” pic.twitter.com/vkKREXflEf

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 7, 2022

“This is what I’m hearing from a lot of CEOs is that basically, look, we can’t staff, or we’re looking for people, or a lot of our customers are going under,” he added.

The report also comes as CNBC reported the nation’s economy added just 199,000 jobs in December, falling far short of expectations.

BREAKING: The U.S. economy added 199,000 jobs in December, falling far short of expectations. https://t.co/lize4vONr5 pic.twitter.com/7EewsHHRCc

— CNBC (@CNBC) January 7, 2022

The December drop was largely blamed on the large surge of COVID-19 cases in December.

“The new year is off to a rocky start,” wrote Nick Bunker, economic research director at job placement site Indeed told CNBC. “These less than stellar numbers were recorded before the omicron variant started to spread significantly in the United States. Hopefully the current wave of the pandemic will lead to limited labor market damage. The labor market is still recovering, but a more sustainable comeback is only possible in a post-pandemic environment.”

Rising inflation was another issue cited in the report.

“Average hourly earnings rose more than expected as the U.S. sees its fastest inflation pace in nearly 40 years. Wages climbed 0.6% for the month and were up 4.7% year over year. That compares with respective estimates of 0.4% and 4.2%,” CNBC said.

Related to the lower than expected job numbers in December was the growing number of vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions in American workplaces. Some companies reinstated mask mandates in December in response to the surge in cases related to the Omicron variant, a factor that may have lowered customer traffic and impacted jobs.

Other businesses closed storefronts temporarily or limited services during December. One notable example was Apple. It temporarily shuttered some locations, including ending in-store shopping in its New York City locations in December……

RELATED ARTICLE: After First Year, New Poll Shows RECORD HIGH Disapprove of Biden Job Performance

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Quick note: Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. We will not waver. We will not tire. We will not falter, and we will not fail. Freedom will prevail.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

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Phoenix Six-Figure Job Growth Ranks Second Among Large U.S. Metros thumbnail

Phoenix Six-Figure Job Growth Ranks Second Among Large U.S. Metros

By Elizabeth Troutman

Phoenix has the second-highest percentage change in high-paying jobs out of a list of large U.S. metros, according to a Stessa report.

Phoenix saw a 217.1% increase in six-figure jobs from 2015 to 2020, marking the second-largest percentage increase among the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.

More Phoenix workers made six-figure salaries in 2020 than the national average. Out of Valley workers, 180,740, or 8.6% of the workforce, made six-figure salaries in 2020, while only 7.9% of workers nationally made $100,000 or more. Only 57,000 workers in the Valley reported salaries of $100,000 or more in 2015. Phoenix’s percentage beats all but two of the study’s 15 largest metros, including first-ranked Nashville.

“We are leading the nation in high-wage industry growth, including semiconductors, electric vehicle manufacturing, biosciences, start-ups and more,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego’s office told The Center Square. “Our efforts to accelerate and strengthen the business operating environment in Phoenix and the greater region are reflected in this exciting job growth, a sign of our economic vitality.”

In response to the report, Gallego called Greater Phoenix a “national leader and top relocation destination for families, jobs, and businesses.”

Phoenix provides residents with more opportunities and a higher quality of life, Gallego said.

Tucson ranked eighth on the list with a 156.2% percentage change in six-figure jobs between 2015 and 2020.

*****

This article was published on January 1, 2022, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

Forty-Five Years of Mask Studies Prove They’re Worthless thumbnail

Forty-Five Years of Mask Studies Prove They’re Worthless

By Kelleigh Nelson

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” –  H.L. Mencken

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” – C. S. Lewis

“A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection.” – Crystal Eastman

“Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.” – Sidney Hook


The masking of America, especially our children, has been detrimental to our mental and physical health.  I weep when I see parents put these evil things on their little ones.

This article is for parents with children in our government schools.  The following information needs to be distributed to school boards who will not listen to worried parents. Use it to save your little ones!

DOJ Calls Parents “Domestic Terrorists”

Parents who are standing up against the masking of their children at school board meetings are being threatened. Attorney General Merrick Garland admits he took the word of the National School Boards Administration that parents voicing concerns at their local school board meetings should be targeted as “domestic terrorists.”

Citing an increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s government run schools, AG Garland met with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this “disturbing trend.”  What?  Parents concerned for their children is a “disturbing trend?”

However, when Garland was questioned by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), not one citing of intimidation or violence could be shown by parents across the USA against any school board members.  The lies of the stakeholder authoritarians keep pile up.

At an elementary school in Portland, Oregon, kindergartners were videotaped eating lunch outside and sitting on buckets socially distanced in 40-degree weather. That is child abuse, and parents are infuriated. State and local health departments are still mandating masks for school children and parents have realized how detrimental masks are to their child’s mental and physical health.  They’ve complained to their local school boards.

The mask tyranny has even hit the red state of Tennessee in Shelby County.  Parents were enraged that they weren’t allowed into the board meeting and police were there to keep them out.

Oxygen Deprivation

Research reveals that prolonged use of Covid masks, homemade or N95, can cause anywhere from five percent on up to 20 percent loss of oxygen, leading to hypercapnia (excessive carbon dioxide in the bloodstream typically caused by inadequate respiration), panic attacks, vertigo, double vision, tinnitus, concentration issues, headaches, slowed reactions, seizures, alterations in blood chemistry and suffocation due to air displacement.

We are killing our children!  Wake up America and get these things off your children’s faces!

We cannot allow children to continually breathe in exhaled carbon dioxide (CO2).  Even National Institutes of Health (NIH), a stakeholder in this vile jab for Sars-coV-2, states this is dangerous to your health.  It can lead to a light-headed, dizzy, flustered feeling from repeatedly re-breathing back in your own already processed air. Those are just the beginning warning signs of much more serious health problems.

According to Amesh A. Adalja, MD, and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Maryland, “wearing a mask day in and day out can lead to alterations in blood chemistry,” and that leads to “changes in level of consciousness.”

A German neurologist, Dr. Margarite Griesz-Brisson, MD, PhD (in pharmacology), who specializes in neurotoxicology and environmental medicine, warns that oxygen deprivation from prolonged Covid-mask wearing can cause permanent neurological damage.  She states in her research, “The re-breathing of our exhaled air will without a doubt create oxygen deficiency and a flooding of carbon dioxide. We know that the human brain is very sensitive to oxygen deprivation. There are nerve cells for example in the hippocampus, that can’t be longer than 3 minutes without oxygen – they cannot survive. The acute warning symptoms are headaches, drowsiness, dizziness, issues in concentration, slowing down of the reaction time – reactions of the cognitive system.”

People think they’ve gotten used to wearing masks, but what they’ve actually gotten used to is having less oxygen in their brains.  They no longer mind the masks because once a person has chronic oxygen deprivation, all of those symptoms disappear.  The person gets accustomed to the deprived state; however, their efficiency remains impaired and the lack of appropriate oxygen delivery to the brain continues to dangerously progress.  They literally are losing their minds.

People have so fallen for the fear factor of this virus with a 99.8% recovery, that they are wearing their masks in their cars, their homes, when they are outdoors or exercising.  Children are forced to wear their masks all day at school, with minimal or zero mask breaks, even during recess.  This is child abuse!

Masking Our Wee Ones

The oxygen deprivation mask syndrome is sweeping the globe and more are at risk.

Dr. Mark McDonald, a double board-certified clinical psychiatrist told of the damage to our children. Dr. McDonald said, “We’re not in a medical pandemic, we’re in a fear pandemic.”

He believes that what is driving the fear now is propaganda.  He said that children, unlike adults, don’t just bounce back; those children will not regain their psychological health.  As a child psychiatrist, he treats children all day long.

He stated, “The developmental stage children need to go through, babies, toddlers, young adults, is being foreclosed on them.  Brown University Department of Pediatrics published a study in mid-September that found that babies born after January 1st, 2020, when this whole pandemic started, had an IQ point drop of 20 points compared to babies born before January 1, 2020.  That’s huge!  Why?  They don’t see faces, they don’t play, they don’t have exposure to friends, they don’t go to school.  They’re basically locked in their homes looking at their parents for two years and their brains have not developed.”

“My concern is that we are building a generation of young people who are so traumatized that they will never fully recover from this.  Even if we give them therapy and treatment, they’re always going to be damaged from this and be scarred emotionally.  I don’t mean for it to be depressing, I mean for it to be alarming so that everyone can finally say, ‘STOP.’ We’ve got to stop the damage and then figure out what to do about it.”

It’s way past time to acknowledge what has been done wrong and the biggest problem was masks on children who rarely get or pass the virus.  To close their faces off from their peers and to wear face diapers in public is a developmental atrocity to our youth; I see it as child abuse.  Many parents home school, and those children have no social disabilities, but masks are a blockage that destroy interpersonal relationships and change the lives of these children for decades to come.  And they destroy the brains of these youngsters by depriving them of proper oxygen.

Fear is a great driver, when fear is in the minds of people, they actually don’t want much public discourse, they don’t want much discussion, they basically just want to be told what to do.  The easiest thing to do is to defer to some type of agency.  The agencies who are calling the shots here are ones that typically don’t call the shots.

The FDA doesn’t tell doctors how to treat patients.  The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is a drug regulatory, drug safety watchdog agency.  The National Institutes of Health (NIH), they don’t tell doctors how to treat patients.  They’re a government funded research organization.  The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) certainly doesn’t because they’re an infectious and chronic disease, epidemiologic and analytic organization.  We should not look to those groups to advise physicians how to treat patients.

Nor should we look to other unelected parties to tell us what to do, and that includes our local health departments who have advocated mandates that are destructive not only to children, but to all citizenry.  And the latest is the euphemistically named Congressional bill H.R.550 (Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act of 2021) which paves the way for state and local health departments, as well as public and private health care providers, to share personal health data with the federal government. The bill has hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars allocated to the tracking system’s success.

Mask Studies

Do masks actually work? The best studies suggest they don’t, appeared in The Washington Examiner on August 12, 2021.  (Please read the short article.)

“Of the 14 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless — whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone — or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.”

One free-thinking university professor at New York University was finally cleared for questioning masks in his class on propaganda.  Mark Crispin Miller took the stance of many independent scientists, questioning some of the motives of government and public health officials, as well as their often-vacillating stances on Covid-19.  Both students and other professors found it reprehensible that Miller was “thinking outside the box.”

Detrimental Surgical Masks

In August of this year, I wrote an article, The Mask Nazis Have Blood on their Hands, and told the story of Dr. Orr who found that not wearing surgical masks cut infections in half.  When I’ve told people about this, they wanted the article.

“Dr. Orr was a surgeon in the Severalls Surgical Unit in Colchester. And for six months, from March through August 1980, the surgeons and staff in that unit decided to see what would happen if they did not wear masks during surgeries. They wore no masks for six months, and compared the rate of surgical wound infections from March through August 1980 with the rate of wound infections from March through August of the previous four years. And they discovered, to their amazement, that when nobody wore masks during surgeries, the rate of wound infections was less than half what it was when everyone wore masks.”

Their conclusion: “It would appear that minimum contamination can best be achieved by not wearing a mask at all” and that wearing a mask during surgery “is a standard procedure that could be abandoned.”

Dr. Arthur Firstenberg took all of this a step further in his research and published the following in August of 2020.  He scoured the medical literature, sure that this was a fluke and that newer studies must show the utility of masks in preventing the spread of disease. But, “the medical literature for the past forty-five years has been consistent: masks are useless in preventing the spread of disease and, if anything, are unsanitary objects that themselves spread bacteria and viruses.”

Here are his amazing findings:

  • Ritter et al., in 1975, found that “the wearing of a surgical face mask had no effect upon the overall operating room environmental contamination.”
  • Ha’eri and Wiley, in 1980, applied human albumin microspheres to the interior of surgical masks in 20 operations. At the end of each operation, wound washings were examined under the microscope. “Particle contamination of the wound was demonstrated in all experiments.”
  • Laslett and Sabin, in 1989, found that caps and masks were not necessary during cardiac catheterization. “No infections were found in any patient, regardless of whether a cap or mask was used,” they wrote. Sjøl and Kelbaek came to the same conclusion in 2002.
  • In Tunevall’s 1991 study, a general surgical team wore no masks in half of their surgeries for two years. After 1,537 operations performed with masks, the wound infection rate was 4.7%, while after 1,551 operations performed without masks, the wound infection rate was only 3.5%.
  • A review by Skinner and Sutton in 2001 concluded that “The evidence for discontinuing the use of surgical face masks would appear to be stronger than the evidence available to support their continued use.
  • Lahme et al., in 2001, wrote that “surgical face masks worn by patients during regional anesthesia, did not reduce the concentration of airborne bacteria over the operation field in our study. Thus they are dispensable.”
  • Figueiredo et al., in 2001, reported that in five years of doing peritoneal dialysis without masks, rates of peritonitis in their unit were no different than rates in hospitals where masks were worn.
  • Bahli did a systematic literature review in 2009 and found that “no significant difference in the incidence of postoperative wound infection was observed between masks groups and groups operated with no masks.
  • Surgeons at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, recognizing the lack of evidence supporting the use of masks, ceased requiring them in 2010 for anesthesiologists and other non-scrubbed personnel in the operating room. “Our decision to no longer require routine surgical masks for personnel not scrubbed for surgery is a departure from common practice. But the evidence to support this practice does not exist,” wrote Dr. Eva Sellden.
  • Webster et al., in 2010, reported on obstetric, gynecological, general, orthopedic, breast, and urological surgeries performed on 827 patients. All non-scrubbed staff wore masks in half the surgeries, and none of the non-scrubbed staff wore masks in half the surgeries. Surgical site infections occurred in 11.5% of the Mask group, and in only 9.0% of the No Mask group.
  • Lipp and Edwards reviewed the surgical literature in 2014 and found “no statistically significant difference in infection rates between the masked and unmasked group in any of the trials.” Vincent and Edwards updated this review in 2016 and the conclusion was the same.
  • Carøe, in a 2014 review based on four studies and 6,006 patients, wrote that “none of the four studies found a difference in the number of post-operative infections whether you used a surgical mask or not.”
  • Salassa and Swiontkowski, in 2014, investigated the necessity of scrubs, masks, and head coverings in the operating room and concluded that “there is no evidence that these measures reduce the prevalence of surgical site infection.”
  • Da Zhou et al., reviewing the literature in 2015, concluded that “there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination.”

Schools in China are now prohibiting students from wearing masks while exercising. Why? Because it was killing them. It was depriving them of oxygen and it was killing them. At least three children died during Physical Education classes — two of them while running on their school’s track while wearing a mask. And a 26-year-old man suffered a collapsed lung after running two and a half miles while wearing a mask.

Mandating masks has not kept death rates down anywhere. The 20 U.S. states that have never ordered people to wear face masks indoors and out have dramatically lower COVID-19 death rates than the 30 states that have mandated masks. Most of the no-mask states have COVID-19 death rates below 20 per 100,000 population, and none have a death rate higher than 55. All 13 states that have death rates higher 55 are states that have required the wearing of masks in all public places. It has not protected them.

“We are living in an atmosphere of permanent illness, of meaningless separation,” writes Benjamin Cherry in the Summer 2020 issue of New View magazine. A separation that is destroying lives, souls, and nature.

Arthur Firstenberg

August 11, 2020

Conclusion

This last portion of this article should be used by the many parents fighting school boards who want to put these horrid face diapers on children for many hours every day.  Feel free to distribute widely.  God help us to get these evil things off everyone’s faces, but especially the wee ones.

©Kelleigh Nelson. All rights reserved.

RELATED STUDY: COVID-19 Masks: How Effective and How Safe?

Here’s Why San Francisco is Experiencing a Shoplifting Surge That’s Putting Some Stores Out of Business thumbnail

Here’s Why San Francisco is Experiencing a Shoplifting Surge That’s Putting Some Stores Out of Business

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here.


“I’m new to San Francisco,” New York Times journalist Thomas Fuller told a grocery store clerk shortly after moving to the city. “Is it optional to pay for things here?”

It sounds like an absurd thing to ask, but Fuller explains in a new article that he was genuinely forced to wonder what was going on after he witnessed people walk into Walgreens and Safeway, grab stuff, and walk out. He says that the problem has only gotten worse in recent years—and is now literally forcing businesses to close their doors.

“Representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable,” Fuller reports. Meanwhile, CVS told him that San Francisco had become “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime” and that the chain has scaled back its security guards’ shoplifting enforcement because it’s become so dangerous.

You might understandably be wondering: What the heck is going on?

One of the richest cities in America is struggling with sticky fingers. https://t.co/bgliOnHFp1

— NYT National News (@NYTNational) May 21, 2021

In 2014, a ballot referendum passed that downgraded the theft of property less than $950 in value from a felony charge to a misdemeanor. In the years since, enforcement of shoplifting charges has waned significantly.

“It has become part of the landscape,” local politician Ahsha Safaí remarked of the shoplifting. “People say, ‘Oh, well, that just happens. [Thieves] are obviously choosing locales based on what the consequences are. there are no consequences for their actions, then you invite the behavior. Over and over.”

It’s not just based on anecdotes and it’s not just happening in San Francisco.

One study found that in Santa Monica, California, crimes unaffected by the ballot referendum fell by 9 percent but those that were downgraded increased 15 percent. Another analysis found that statewide, larceny thefts increased 9 percent after the 2014 change.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here. Many different factors impact crime rates, but when the government fails to protect property rights and enforce the law, theft becomes more common and innocent business owners are victimized. The resulting economic uncertainty discourages growth and, in extreme cases like San Francisco, literally leads stores to close.

Protecting property and enforcing the rule of law is one of the core, legitimate functions of government. That the Golden State has chosen to focus its government’s robust spending and involvement in social life elsewhere speaks to a grave misalignment in priorities.

COLUMN BY

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. Like this story? Click here to sign up for the FEE Daily and get free-market news and analysis like this from Policy Correspondent Brad Polumbo in your inbox every weekday.

STEEP LOSSES: Democrat-run states of NJ, NY & CT saw more wealthy residents flee in 2021, annual moving survey shows thumbnail

STEEP LOSSES: Democrat-run states of NJ, NY & CT saw more wealthy residents flee in 2021, annual moving survey shows

By The Geller Report

Droves of residents fled Democrat-run states with surging crime and COVID-19 restrictions last year — with New York, New Jersey and Connecticut among the five that suffered the steepest losses, a sobering new survey shows. Let’s hope these escapees don’t destroy the states they move to by importing their poisonous Democrat policies.

Democrat-run states of NJ, NY & CT saw more wealthy residents flee in 2021, annual moving survey shows

Droves of residents fled Democrat-run states with surging crime and COVID-19 restrictions last year — with New York, New Jersey and Connecticut among the five that suffered the steepest losses, a sobering new survey shows.

By Carl Campanile, New York Post, January 3, 2022:

New Jersey led the nation with 70 percent of the people involved in moves fleeing the Garden State, compared to just 30 percent who migrated in, according to United Van Lines’ 45th Annual National Movers Study.

Illinois — home to crime- and shooting-ridden Chicago — came in second with 67 percent of the moves recorded were of residents leaving the state, while just 27 percent were in-bound.

New York ranked third, with 63 percent of movers headed for the exits and 37 percent settling in.

Nearly 30 percent those who fled the Empire State said “family” was a primary factor in their decisions, with about 12 percent citing “cost.”

The survey also showed that the exodus largely involved the wealthy, with those making $150,000 or more comprising 45.3 percent of the total.

It’s unclear when those moves took place, but in April the state adopted a record $212 billion budget that targeted big earners with new taxes that rise as high as 10.9 percent.

Meanwhile, six of the top 10 metro areas suffering from the worst exodus were in the New York-New Jersey region.

Nearly 80 percent of the moves in Long Island’s Nassau-Suffolk counties were exiters — the highest outbound rate of any region in the country.

About 75 percent fled Binghamton and 73 percent exited Poughkeepsie/Dutchess County. Three New Jersey areas — Bergen-Passaic, Newark and Middllesex-Somerset-Hunterdon also had among the worst outbound rates.

Neighboring Connecticut didn’t fare much better — 60 percent of the moves recorded were outbound and 40 percent inbound.

Medical workers load patient into an ambulance

“The study also revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic continued to accelerate many decisions to move, indicating that Americans were on the move to lower-density areas ” United Van Lines said in a release.

Getty Images

For the entire Northeast, 60 percent of the moves were outbound.

The results from 2021 mirrored United Van Lines’ 2020 findings, when the COVID-19 pandemic first ravaged the NY-NJ metro region and later the entire country.

“The study also revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic continued to accelerate many decisions to move, indicating that Americans were on the move to lower-density areas and to be closer to their families throughout last year,” United Van Lines said in a release.

And sunny California is no longer the Golden State — with more people leaving than “California Dreamin’.”

California — long a driver of population growth — was fifth-worst for movers heading for the exits, with 59 percent fleeing the state while only 41 percent of newcomers moved in.

All five states with the highest outbound rates have a few things in common: they are run by Democrats, are high-taxed and suffer from spikes in crime.

Crime in New Jersey

States with highest moving rates have a few things in common: They are run by Democrats, are high-taxed and suffer from spikes in crime.

Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Less populous Vermont, represented by democratic socialist Senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, broke the mold. It had the highest in-bound migration in the U.S., with 74 percent of the moves reported were of those coming into the state.

The other top in-bound states were South Dakota (69 percent), South Carolina (63 percent), West Virginia (63 percent) and Florida (62 percent).

In addition to the state-by-state data, United Van Lines also conducts an accompanying survey to examine the motivations and influences for Americans’ interstate moves.

This analysis found that about one-third of Americans who moved did so in order to be closer to family – a new trend coming out of the pandemic as priorities and lifestyle choices shifted.

Read the rest ……

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

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Barbra: ‘Joe Biden’s Economic Record… the Best in 40 Years’ thumbnail

Barbra: ‘Joe Biden’s Economic Record… the Best in 40 Years’

By Discover The Networks

In a stunning example of how the entertainment-media complex colludes to disseminate the totalitarian left’s blatantly false messaging, Democrat mega-donor and former entertainer Barbra Streisand took to Twitter on New Year’s Eve to insist that puppet President “Joe Biden’s economic record in his first year is the best in 40 years.”

She added ludicrously, “The media largely ignores this.” Barb’s suggestion that the almost uniformly leftist, sycophantic news media would somehow cover up such an accomplishment, if it were remotely true, is laughable.

The blame isn’t entirely Streisand’s. She was simply echoing one of Biden’s own tweets. On Dec. 29, he or his handlers wrote, “We’re ending 2021 with what one analyst described as the strongest first-year economic track record of any president in the last 50 years. Let’s keep the progress going.”

Biden didn’t identify that “one analyst,” because he or she doesn’t exist. The demonstrable truth is that Biden’s first year has left Americans with skyrocketing inflation, energy prices explicitly aimed at bankrupting the fossil fuel industry, economic “growth” that even the state media functionaries at CNN have labeled “disappointing,” and fears that 2022 will bring even more financial misery for the middle class.

To paraphrase Chico Marx: Who ya gonna believe – Hollywood and the media, or your lyin’ eyes?


Barbra Streisand

99 Known Connections

In February 2020, Streisand tweeted: “Trump is directly responsible for the hate and discrimination that is growing in this country. And for our children — This is heartbreaking!” Her tweet was in response to a recent Washington Post report about alleged incidents of young children saying things like “build the wall” and “go back to where you came from” to their nonwhite peers. But the Post article provided no statistical evidence whatsoever to back up the claim that such incidents were in fact becoming more common.

In February 2020 as well, Streisand was angered when President Trump, during his address at the National Prayer Breakfast, said of congressional Democrats who self-identified as people of faith: “They love people and sometimes they hate people. I’m sorry. I apologize. I’m trying to learn. … It’s not easy. When they impeach you for nothing and then you’re supposed to like them, it’s not easy folks, I do my best.” Streisand tweeted in response: “It would’ve been so nice to hear President Trump bring people together in bi-partisan fashion at the prayer breakfast. You know, let’s let bygones be bygones and work together to put through infrastructure, healthcare. But no, his insults and vindictiveness always shines through.”

To learn more about Barbra Streisand, click here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Arizona Republic Report Leaves Out Important Details and Context On Universal Licensing thumbnail

Arizona Republic Report Leaves Out Important Details and Context On Universal Licensing

By Jeffrey A. Singer

The Arizona Republic recently published a report entitled, “Universal Licensing: Arizona opened the doors to less qualified workers‐​the public bears the risk.” In its investigation of Arizona’s universal licensing recognition law enacted in 2019—a reform so successful and popular that it is being emulated by more than a third of other states—it mentioned irrelevant incidents and presented out‐​of‐​context data to malign this bold and enlightened reform.

The article begins and ends with a heart-wrenching story about a California‐​licensed veterinarian who received a temporary Arizona license, granted under a 1967 law, to work at a Mesa, Arizona clinic. She’s been accused of poor surgical technique while operating on a kitten brought to the clinic on death’s doorstep. The kitten died and the veterinarian was fired from the clinic. Her temporary license expired after 30 days, and she was never granted the permanent license for which she applied. Yet readers are expected to view this as an indictment of Arizona’s universal licensing law.

Universal licensing dilutes the authority of state occupational licensing boards, so it is no surprise that a spokesperson from an organization representing that constituency, the Federation of Associations of Regulatory Boards, would be quoted in the article criticizing universal licensing over the fact that Arizona grants licenses to workers from states with less onerous licensing requirements—providing their out‐​of‐​state licenses are in good standing for at least a year.

It is wrong to assume that more onerous requirements are better. In many cases, incumbent occupations lobby state licensing boards to make requirements tougher for new entrants, usually “grandfathering” those already licensed, to reduce competition. Thus, EMTs must complete, on average, 33 days of training and pass 2 exams to get a license while cosmetologists need 11 months of training and interior designers need 73.

When it comes to the medical profession, licensing requirements are virtually identical in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. They include graduating an accredited medical school, passing a standardized national licensing exam, and completing at least one year of postgraduate training. Yet few people realize that private third‐​party certification organizations do the heavy lifting when it comes to quality assurance.

For example, I am a general surgeon. As a licensed medical doctor, I can legally decide to switch my specialty to obstetrics and gynecology or dermatology, or even psychiatry and display it on my door. However, health care facilities will not grant me practicing privileges without proof I completed postgraduate training in the specialty and will likely require board certification. Specialty boards will not grant me certification unless I complete accredited specialty training and pass their exams. Health plans will not include me on their provider panels without proof I completed the specialty training, and I will be unable to get malpractice insurance coverage for the same reason. Note how many independent, private third parties provide information and protection to consumers of already‐​licensed physicians. These are the real guarantors of safety.

The Republic report implies to readers that malpractice is automatically a reason to deny or revoke a license. Oftentimes, when medical or other professional malpractice cases are settled, the defendants do not stipulate liability. Both settlements and convictions get reviewed by licensing boards. But unless convictions are repetitive or egregious, boards rarely restrict or revoke licenses. The same is true when boards investigate complaints directly lodged by customers or patients.

Yet the authors of the report infer that something must be amiss if an applicant receives a universal license from a licensing board when they have a history of a malpractice settlement in the state where they are already licensed. If every malpractice settlement justified denying or revoking a license, the entire country would have a desperate shortage of doctors, dentists, and other health care practitioners.

Historically, it has been the incumbent members of professions and occupations who lobbied state legislatures to license and regulate them—not the customers, clients, or patients. While incumbents promoted licensing under the guise of protecting the public, they were really protecting themselves by reducing competition from new entrants and, in the process, inflating prices for their services. The report’s authors cite another organization that represents the interests of incumbents, the Alliance For Responsible Professional Licensing, that defends occupational licensing by saying “licensing helps to solve problems of income disparity, boosting wages most at the bottom end of skill distribution.” But that doesn’t account for the innumerable people who are locked out of the opportunity to lift themselves from poverty by using their skills to make an honest living.

For example, at one time Arizona required African‐​style hair braiders to spend nearly one year and close to $10,000 to get a cosmetology license, which includes training to use chemicals to dye or treat hair, as well as hair cutting. They’re taught nothing about hair braiding. A lawsuit pushed lawmakers to end that requirement in Arizona, but such obstacles to hair braiders still exist in several other states. Louisiana florists “protected” the pubic from people who want to simply arrange flowers by successfully lobbying for a law that requires them to get a license. License requirements include passing a four‐​hour exam during which the applicant must arrange flowers while being judged by licensed florists. Louisiana is the only state that licenses flower arrangers. Does the Federation of Associations of Regulatory Boards criticize Arizona for having less onerous requirements on flower arrangers who relocate from Louisiana? The Republic’s reporters didn’t say.

The proliferation of occupational licensing laws, from interior decorators to fire alarm installers, may have boosted the income of those protected by a license, but they have prevented many people from lifting themselves out of poverty by entering such fields of endeavor. Indeed, in 2016 President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors issued a report detailing how licensing leads to higher prices and reduced opportunity. The Obama administration convinced Congress to appropriate grants to help states “enhance the portability of occupational licensing.”

In an earlier time, licensing laws were also used to exclude racial and ethnic minorities. The Cato Institute held a policy forum on this subject in November 2020 called “Race and Medical Licensing Laws.”

Furthermore, most state licensing boards deny licenses to people who have a history of a felony conviction. With nearly one‐​third of Americans these days having a record in the criminal justice system, licensing laws deny many people a second chance to better themselves. In May 2021 Governor Ducey signed into law HB 2067, which provides “Certificate[s] of Second Chance” to people convicted of certain felonies, which will help them obtain occupational and business licenses. The law does not apply universally to all crimes and convictions. For example, driving with a suspended license and criminal speeding are among the convictions excluded. Nevertheless, the new law at least helps some who’ve made mistakes in the past to clear the occupational licensing hurdle and forge a new and better life.

Arizona ignited a national trend in breaking down barriers to people of all backgrounds seeking to make an honest living while expanding options and choices for consumers. Universal licensing reform has bipartisan appeal. From blue states like New Jersey to red states like Missouri, lawmakers are uniting around the goal of removing the barriers to upward mobility that occupational licensing laws erect. Sadly, by citing irrelevant narratives, cherry-picking data, and failing to provide adequate context, the Arizona Republic article did this reform a great injustice.

*****

This article was published on January 2, 2022, and is reproduced with permission from The CATO Institute.

The Fed’s Doomsday Prophet Has a Dire Warning About Where We’re Headed thumbnail

The Fed’s Doomsday Prophet Has a Dire Warning About Where We’re Headed

By Christopher Leonard

Thomas Hoenig knew what quantitative easing and record-low interest rates would bring.

Thomas Hoenig doesn’t look like a rebel. He is a conservative man, soft-spoken, now happily retired at the age of 75. He acts like someone who has spent the vast majority of his career, as he has, working at one of the stuffiest and powerful institutions in America: the Federal Reserve Bank. Hoenig has all the fiery disposition that one might expect from a central banker, which is to say none at all. He unspools sentences methodically, in a measured way, never letting his words race ahead of his intended message. When Hoenig gets really agitated he repeats the phrase “lookit” a lot, but that’s about as salty as it gets.

This makes it all the more surprising that Tom Hoenig is, in fact, one of America’s least-understood dissidents.

In 2010, Hoenig was president of the Federal Reserve regional bank in Kansas City. As part of his job, Hoenig had a seat on the Fed’s most powerful policy committee, and that’s where he lodged one of the longest-running string of “no” votes in the bank’s history.

Hoenig’s dissents are striking because the Fed’s top policy committee — called the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC — doesn’t just prize consensus; it nearly demands it. The committee likes to present a unified front to the public because it is arguably the most powerful governing body in American economic affairs. Hoenig’s string of dissents shattered that appearance of unanimity at a critically important time, when the Fed was expanding its interventions in the American economy to an unprecedented degree. It was a hinge point in American history, and the economy has never been the same since.

Between 2008 and 2014, the Federal Reserve printed more than $3.5 trillion in new bills. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly triple the amount of money that the Fed created in its first 95 years of existence. Three centuries’ worth of growth in the money supply was crammed into a few short years. The money poured through the veins of the financial system and stoked demand for assets like stocks, corporate debt and commercial real estate bonds, driving up prices across markets. Hoenig was the one Fed leader who voted consistently against this course of action, starting in 2010. In doing so, he pitted himself against the Fed’s powerful chair at the time, Ben Bernanke, who was widely regarded as a hero for the ambitious rescue plans he designed and oversaw.

Hoenig lost his fight. Throughout 2010, the FOMC votes were routinely 11 against one, with Hoenig being the one. He retired from the Fed in late 2011, and after that, a reputation hardened around Hoenig as the man who got it wrong. He is remembered as something like a cranky Old Testament prophet who warned incessantly, and incorrectly, about one thing: the threat of coming inflation.

But this version of history isn’t true. While Hoenig was concerned about inflation, that isn’t what solely what drove him to lodge his string of dissents. The historical record shows that Hoenig was worried primarily that the Fed was taking a risky path that would deepen income inequality, stoke dangerous asset bubbles and enrich the biggest banks over everyone else. He also warned that it would suck the Fed into a money-printing quagmire that the central bank would not be able to escape without destabilizing the entire financial system.

On all of these points, Hoenig was correct. And on all of these points, he was ignored. We are now living in a world that Hoenig warned about.

The Fed is now in a vise. Inflation is rising faster than the Fed believed it would even a few months ago, with higher prices for gas, goods and automobiles being fueled by the Fed’s unprecedented money printing programs. This comes after years of the Fed steadily pumping up the price of assets like stocks and bonds through its zero-percent interest rates and quantitative easing during and after Hoenig’s time on the FOMC. To respond to rising inflation, the Fed has signaled that it will start hiking interest rates next year. But if that happens, there is every reason to expect that it will cause stock and bond markets to fall, perhaps precipitously, or even cause a recession.

“There is no painless solution,” Hoenig said in a recent interview. “It’s going to be difficult. And the longer you wait the more painful it will end up being.”

To be clear, the kind of pain that Hoenig is talking about involves high unemployment, social instability, and potentially years of economic malaise. Hoenig knows this because he has seen it before. He saw it during his long career at the Fed, and he saw it most acutely during the Great Inflation of the 1970s. That episode in history, which bears eerie parallels with the situation today, is the lodestar that ended up guiding so much of Hoenig’s thinking as a Fed official. It explains why he was willing to throw away his reputation as a team player in 2010, why he was willing to go down in history as a crank, and why he was willing to accept the scorn of his colleagues and people like Bernanke.

Hoenig voted no because he’d seen firsthand what the consequences were when the Fed got things wrong, and kept money too easy for too long…..

*****

Continue reading this article at Politico.

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The Thirty Tyrants

By Lee Smith

The deal that the American elite chose to make with China has a precedent in the history of Athens and Sparta

In Chapter 5 of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create “therein a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.”

The example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly government Sparta established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war in 404 BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that Sparta’s system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military aristocracy ruling over a permanent servant class, the helots, who were periodically slaughtered to condition them to accept their subhuman status. Athenian democracy by contrast gave too much power to the low-born. The pro-Sparta oligarchy used their patrons’ victory to undo the rights of citizens, and settle scores with their domestic rivals, exiling and executing them and confiscating their wealth.

The Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and understanding its role and function helps explain what is happening in America today.

For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.

A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.

Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and send millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?

Returning those jobs to America, along with ending foreign wars and illegal immigration, was the core policy promise of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the source of his surprise victory in 2016. Trump was hardly the first to make the case that the corporate and political establishment’s trade relationship with China had sold out ordinary Americans. Former Democratic congressman and 1988 presidential candidate Richard Gephardt was the leading voice in an important but finally not very influential group of elected Democratic Party officials and policy experts who warned that trading with a state that employed slave labor would cost American jobs and sacrifice American honor. The only people who took Trump seriously were the more than 60 million American voters who believed him when he said he’d fight the elites to get those jobs back.

What he called “The Swamp” appeared at first just to be a random assortment of industries, institutions, and personalities that seemed to have nothing in common, outside of the fact they were excoriated by the newly elected president. But Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite gave them collective self-awareness as well as a powerful motive for solidarity. Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public and private sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits but also the same center of gravity—the U.S.-China relationship. And so, the China Class was born.

Connections that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent now became lucid under the light of Trump’s scorn, and the reciprocal scorn of the elite that loathed him.

A decade ago, no one would’ve put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album, but here they are now, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing (Nike sneakers, iPhones, etc.) and a growing Chinese consumer market. The NBA’s $1.5 billion contract with digital service provider Tencent made the Chinese firm the league’s biggest partner outside America. In gratitude, these two-way ambassadors shared the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party with their ignorant countrymen. After an an NBA executive tweeted in defense of Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans to watch their tongues. “Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech,” said James, “it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.”

Because of Trump’s pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from the U.S.-China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.

The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. But the schools and their name faculty were in fact in the business of selling that research, much of it paid for directly by the U.S. government—which is why Harvard and Yale among other big-name schools appear to have systematically underreported the large amounts that China had gifted them.

Indeed, many of academia’s pay-for-play deals with the CCP were not particularly subtle. In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity, and national security.”

*****

To read the rest of this article, click here, and go to Tablet Magazine.

TAKE ACTION: CVS is Putting Racism Ahead of Health thumbnail

TAKE ACTION: CVS is Putting Racism Ahead of Health

By 2ndvote .com

CVS (3.42) is one of 2ndVote’s top-ranked drug stores with a previous score of 3.72 which has recently dropped to a 3.42. But that score might drop even further as company executives spent $600 million on Critical Race Theory (CRT) employee training programs. Fox Business reports that CVS implemented a four-week program last year which required staff to engage in self-reflection about bias and to stop alleged biases by other staff.

The program was launched as other major corporations responded to George Floyd’s death with false claims that America – and, by association, Americans – are racist. As leading CRT critic Chris Rufo noted in September, the program was implemented by a CEO who makes tens of millions of dollars per year, and would mostly impact people making only a few tens of thousands of dollars per year.

We are launching a campaign urging CVS to return to prioritizing customers’ health needs and the well-being of their staff. This is a huge course change for them, and we need your help to redirect CVS to treat their 300,000 employees and millions of customers truly equally – on the basis of their humanity, not their skin color.

The details of the program are outlined in this document, and they go well beyond training staff to view each other through a racial prism. CVS’ vendor partners will be chosen on the basis of their race, not the value they bring to CVS, its staff and customers, and the general public. CVS’ charitable donations will be based upon race, not upon the quality of a charity’s work.

Of course, no corporation can ever be “woke” enough for those who believe America is racist. Just a few months after the initiative launched, an alleged CVS customer harassed a CVS manager who called police on alleged shoplifters. Apparently, $600 million wasn’t enough to convince the customer that CVS cared enough.

2ndVote doesn’t want CVS to take sides on America’s continued debate on how to heal the scars of slavery and racism. Tell CVS to invest their well-earned money into real programs that uplift our citizens instead of teaching their employees to judge a customer based on the amount of melanin in their skin.

Use this link to use your voice TODAY!

With your help, we can show them how to get back on track.

EDITORS NOTE: This 2ndVote column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Our Top 21 Fiscal Charts of 2021

By The Editors at CRFB

2021 was a busy year for fiscal policy, which gave us ample opportunities to conduct substantive policy analyses using charts and tables. This year, we published over 210 papers, blog posts, and other products. As we get ready to pop the champagne and ring in the new year, here are our top fiscal charts of 2021.

1. The National Debt is High and Rising

In July, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected debt would rise from 100 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at the end of Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 to a record 106.4 percent of GDP by 2031. Under an alternative scenario where policymakers extend most expiring tax cuts and grow annual appropriations with the economy instead of inflation, debt would reach 122 percent of GDP by FY 2031. 

Since this chart was published, we revised our debt projections to account for the enactment of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), changes to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and a lower-than-expected deficit in FY 2021. We estimate that under current law debt will reach a record 107.5 percent of GDP by the end of FY 2031.

Liberal Democrat political class is a ‘machine that’s just devouring the city,’ economist says of NYC’s COVID-19 mandates thumbnail

Liberal Democrat political class is a ‘machine that’s just devouring the city,’ economist says of NYC’s COVID-19 mandates

By The Geller Report

The Democrats have crushed the greatest city in the world.

‘We’ve lost our minds,’ economist Jeffrey Tucker says of NYC’s COVID-19 mandates

By Teny Sahakian | Fox News

NEW YORK CITY – Lifestyles forced onto New Yorkers through restrictive coronavirus mandates are “not the way we’re supposed to conduct public life in this country,” a libertarian economist warned after seeing the Big Apple’s lockdowns firsthand.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, New York City took dramatic action to curb the spread of COVID-19. In March 2020, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered all nonessential businesses to close statewide and had shut down schools. More recently, Mayor Bill de Blasio imposed the first-ever vaccine mandate on all private-sector workers in the city.

“Freedom is what made New York great, and now people just make fun of that,” Brownstone Institute President Jeffrey Tucker, referring to public figures who have dismissed or mocked those who opposed vaccine mandates for reasons of personal freedom, told Fox News.

Tucker, who’s been to New York countless times, was in the city on March 12, 2020, when initial panic of the novel coronavirus struck.

DE BLASIO HINTS NYC’S NEW YEAR’S EVE CELEBRATION IN TIMES SQUARE RETURNING TO IN-PERSON

“People were just running through the streets trying to get out,” he recalled. “Not because of the virus, but because of the fear lockdowns.”

He made another trip months later and said it seemed “like a post-apocalyptic revival was happening.” He noticed fewer masks, more open businesses and city-dwellers attempting a return to normalcy.

NEW YORK, NY – MARCH 22: A person walks across 42nd Street on March 22, 2020 in New York City. The “New York State on PAUSE” executive order, a 10-point policy to assure uniform safety for everyone goes onto effect at 8pm on Sunday.

NEW YORK, NY – MARCH 22: A person walks across 42nd Street on March 22, 2020 in New York City. The “New York State on PAUSE” executive order, a 10-point policy to assure uniform safety for everyone goes onto effect at 8pm on Sunday.

But more recently, Tucker traveled to New York in early December and was dismayed.

“Being back now since the mandates, it’s a complete shock what’s happened to the city,” he said, noting his initial surprise when he was asked show proof of vaccination at a bar.

“You can’t enter into any public building, any bar or restaurant, museum, library, anywhere without flashing the pass,” Tucker told Fox News.

Tucker called the requirement, which de Blasio dubbed the “Key to NYC Pass”, a “sadistic policy” that felt “degrading” and “un-American.” Only a handful of U.S. cities require proof of COVID-19 vaccination to enter certain indoor businesses.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, New York City has implemented some of the most restrictive coronavirus-related mandates in the country. Earlier this month, de Blasio announced the vaccine mandate, which required all private-sector employees to be at least partially vaccinated by Dec. 27.

“Today [is] a historic day in New York City,” he said Monday. “We’re implementing the strongest vaccine mandate in the country, all private-sector employers, today.”

“This is what we need to do everywhere,” the outgoing mayor added. “Every mayor, every governor, every CEO in America should do vaccine mandates now, because 2022 has to be the year we leave COVID behind.”

New York is also one the few cities that requires children five and older to show proof of vaccination to enter many indoor establishments.

Tucker pointed out that the legislature didn’t vote on any of these mandates.

“This is not the way we’re supposed to conduct public life in this country,” he told Fox News. “You’ve got a kind of extreme segregation that’s developing there in the city … and somehow this is just lost on people, what’s happening in New York.”

“Right now, the crime situation is really a very volatile situation,” Tucker said. “But what are the cops doing? They’re going from bars to restaurants and enforcing, with very heavy fines, the vaccine passports.”

The city has completed nearly 52,000 inspections since the policy started on Sept 13. So far, 31 businesses have been fined $1,000 for violations. Fines can reach as high as $5,000 if a business does not comply with the mandate.

And a video that recently went viral showed New York City police kicking a child and his family out of a restaurant for not having a vaccine card.

“We’ve lost our minds,” Tucker told Fox News.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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End of Easy Money: Global Tightening in Full Swing, While the Fed Promises to Wake Up in Time Next Year

By Wolf Richter

Central banks jacked up rates to catch up with run-away inflation, but most fell further behind; only Russia caught up. The Fed didn’t even try.

The Czech National Bank dished out another surprise today, raising its main policy interest rate by 100 basis points to 3.75%, the highest since February 2008, and the fifth rate hike this year. A hefty rate hike had been expected, but not this hefty: None of 11 analysts polled by Reuters predicted a 100-point hike.

At its prior meeting on November 4, the CNB had jacked up its policy rate by 125 basis points, the biggest shock-and-awe rate hike in 24 years. Since June, when it began its rate-hike tango, the CNB jacked up its policy rate by 350 basis points, from 0.25% to 3.75%.

This sense of urgency – sorely lacking from the Fed – was motivated by red-hot inflation which hit 6.0% for November, the highest since 2008, amid supply chain bottlenecks, labor shortages, and spiking energy prices.

Ironically, the Fed, which is confronted with an even higher inflation rate – 6.8% in November – hasn’t yet raised the target range for its policy rate, which is still stuck near 0%.

The Central Bank of Russia, on December 17, raised its policy rate by another 100 basis points to 8.5%, its seventh rate hike this year, totaling 425 basis points, from 4.25% to 8.5%, pressured by surging inflation, particularly food price inflation. Overall inflation in Russia hit 8.4%, food inflation hit 10.8%.

This makes the Central Bank of Russia the only central bank whose rate hikes have actually caught up with inflation. Interest rates that are below the rate of inflation are still stimulative and inflationary; Russia has reached some level of neutral.

Since July, the Bank of Russia has been using the term “persistent” in its statements to describe this inflation, while the Fed’s Powell was still clinging ludicrously to “transitory” and “temporary.”

The Bank of the Republic (Colombia), also on December 17, hiked its policy rate by 50 basis points to 3.0%, the third rate hike in a row, totaling 125 basis points since liftoff at 1.75% in September. Inflation hit 5.3% in November.

The Bank of England, on December 16, raised its policy rate by 15 basis points for liftoff, to 0.25%, dishing out a surprise to markets, after having walked back expectations of a rate hike at this meeting. Inflation in the UK surged to 5.1% in November, the worst in 10 years.

The BoE could start Quantitative Tightening as soon as February next year. In a strategy paper last summer, the BoE said that it would stop reinvesting the maturing bonds on its balance sheet, and would therefore allow its balance sheet to shrink, once its policy rate reaches 0.5%. A 25-basis-point rate hike to 0.5% could happen at its next meeting in February, which would open the door to QT.

Norges Bank, the central bank of Norway, also on December 16, hiked its policy rate by 25 basis points to 0.5%, its second rate hike, after its September liftoff from 0%. Inflation in Norway jumped massively from 3.5% in October to 5.1% in November, the worst since 2008.

The ECB, also on December 16, announced a sharp reduction of QE, from an average of €92 billion a month currently, to about €40 billion by March, and to €30 billion in Q3, and to €20 billion in Q4.

*****

Continue reading this article at Wolf Street.

Biden’s oil price heading to $100 a barrel. Read on … thumbnail

Biden’s oil price heading to $100 a barrel. Read on …

By Save America Foundation

“Dreams are the seeds of change. Nothing ever grows without a seed, and nothing ever changes without a dream.” – Debby Boone


Unless the treasonous usurper in The Peoples House and his evil, satanic administration changes course on the insane energy agenda of theirs, oil will reach at least $100 a barrel in 2022. Right now it is hovering around $72 a barrel as the oil market weighs up if there will be massive closures and shutdowns universally due to the new China Virus Omicron variant which will affect consumption.

You will all remember that under the last fairly elected president, Donald J. Trump, the U.S. became a net exporter of oil. We could supply all our own needs and had plenty left over to export. Now however, due to the communist green policies of these extremists who stole the 2020 election, we are now buying approximately 37% of our oil needs from OPEC ( Not our friends ) and Russia ( Not our friend ) both of which are making huge profits from us as they ship their overpriced oil to us. Russia especially is ecstatic as it now has billions of extra income coming in to pour into their military. This as Pervy Joe is weakening ours.

Both OPEC and Russia can control the spigot to shorten our supply at will and manipulate the price we pay. Biden has begged them to increase production but they just laugh at the pathetic little man he is. They have us under their thumb.

2021, under the aforementioned Biden, has seen inflation soaring as supply chain issues, unconstitutional covid lockdowns and restrictions, whole sectors of businesses being destroyed, has given us inflation not seen since 1982 – and it is growing. Understand when the Government says inflation rose by 6.8% in November, that doesn’t include fuel, energy and food increases which we all know have gone up well into double digits. Hyper-Inflation is almost upon us. Pay increases nationally which were substantial, have all fallen behind the inflator figures and in many cases people are worse off now. Unfortunately the poorer, the middle class and all ethnic minorities have suffered the most under the illegal dictatorship in stolen power. That is the opposite of what happened under President Trump.

Saudi Arabian energy minister Abdulaziz bin Salman has hinted that they may cut production by 30 million barrels a day which would be catastrophic for our economy and our people. It would however enhance that cartels dominance in the global market for oil and gas energy.

Under President Trump, my President, inflation was kept low, contrary to many experts predictions, because the shale Revolution we created produced plentiful cheap oil and energy. Increases in normal businesses were kept offset by low energy costs. Simple!! Small and large businesses and corporations benefitted by our low cost oil and gas.

However, this administration made up of traitors, imbeciles, corrupt officials ( I am trying to be diplomatic here! ) are obsessed with the lies of Global Warming and supposed Climate Change. Alternative energy sources are just not ready for prime time!! We saw that in Texas. They cannot produce reliable energy in enough volume competitively priced to compete or replace fossil fuels. Period. Simple as that.

Since Biden took over the reins investment and much needed work and development in the fossil fuel industry has dried to a trickle. Biden holds responsibility for that and the resultant rises in the energy prices we have seen and are facing. Fears of new regulations, taxations and aggressive anti fossil fuel activities politically by this administration energy sector corporations are not willing to invest at the percentage needed. Right now investment is running just over 42% of what is needed. John Kerry, another slimeball politician and cowardly former Vietnam war liar on his non existent so called heroism, and now the climate czar, have been pressuring Wall Street, banks and financial institutions to cut investment and future investing in any fossil fuel and join or create a “Net-Zero Banking Alliance” Banks like BOA, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase among others hastened to join this alliance. There is a story about one large oil company being asked to close their account so that bank could reduce its carbon footprint. Insanity.

The climate control rules and regulations in Europe have forced prices of energy sky high. With the shorter production there is a distinct possibility that there may very well be major shortages of fuel this winter.

Combine that with the Russian oil economy booming and with their troops massing on the Ukrainian border readying for a likely invasion, Russia knows, despite feeble Joes pathetic threats about oil and energy sanctions should Russia invade, that a weakened Europe heavily relies now on Russia for gas and oil and will not risk their own countries by supporting energy sanctions on Russia energy supply’s as they will not want to be going without. Russia is in a great position greatly aided by Biden’s energy policies.

I guess Sniffer Joe likes to see our enemies strengthen while we contract.

Another aspect of our reduced oil production is other countries like China are being forced to burn dirtier fuel which increases pollution and counteracts any reductions in so called carbon footprint reductions by countries like America.

Nobody I know wants to harm planet earth but cyclical weather changes have been going on since the beginning of time. This whole green new deal and climate change rubbish is just about money, power, control and destroying the middle class and lower class citizens of the world. It is about a one world nation where the rich will become richer and more powerful and the rest of us will become property of the world government.

The above scenario is not something I could stand still and give into. I know all my friends and millions of Americans feel the same.

Let’s put a stop to this insanity in the mid term Elections. Let’s send the corrupt and extremist politicians where they belong. We know where that is America. Now let’s find the fortitude to accomplish that simple goal and let’s get on with Building a truly Better America, where capitalism trumps socialism and criminals, political included, are held accountable. Where we lead the world again in every aspect and we bury this insanity once and for all.

Do what needs doing America. It’s time to do the right thing by our Founding Fathers, the constitution and our kids.

©Fred Brownbill. All rights reserved.

What Is “Surveillance Capitalism” and Should We Be Concerned? thumbnail

What Is “Surveillance Capitalism” and Should We Be Concerned?

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Shoshana Zuboff’s book on so-called “surveillance capitalism” is written to fire up those already concerned about the “commodification” of online life.


“Pay attention.”

It’s a common exhortation, perhaps from a panicked parent to a careless child, or from a tolerant teacher to a sleepy student, or from a Zen master to his distracted disciples. Like our time, our attention is limited, and as such, what we trade our attention for matters a whole lot.

We spent some hours of our lives paying attention to a book on privacy in the digital world by philosopher and social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff. Zuboff’s book describes the evolution and impact of advertising-supported online services like Google and Facebook, and thus perhaps could have titled her book “Paying Attention.” But those words are too neutral and too unopinionated about online transactions that involve our attention.

Zuboff’s book is full of opinions, all supporting her overarching thesis that many consumer technology sector innovations, particularly those produced by Google, harm both consumers and society. Thus, much better suited is the title she did choose: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

Like her book, no one should mistake the title’s two key words, “surveillance” and “capitalism,” as neutral. Each conveys an essential aspect of Zuboff’s vision of the power dynamics at play in commercial collection and use of personal information.

A French word combining sur—over—and veiller—to watch—“surveillance” connotes someone or something observing another from a superior position. The word may have made its way into English from the comités de surveillance (watch committees) set up during the Reign of Terror in France. Surveillance in that context could lead to execution.

Likewise “capitalism.” Although occasionally used benignly today by those who defend markets and free exchange from socialism, the word “capitalism” started malignantly. Historian Fernand Braudel details how early users of the word meant to describe a kind of social pathology that put the desire for wealth and the wealthy at the core of social life.

Zuboff’s combination of “surveillance” and “capitalism” thereby convict the innovations she attacks as characterized by uneven power dynamics and rapaciousness, setting them on their back foot—or perhaps on the hindquarters—from the beginning of the discussion. The semantics of “surveillance capitalism” make a powerful argument even before the reader turns a single page. Professor Zuboff’s title, then, reveals her as a partisan for one side in a long-running argument.

And the title is only the beginning. On the first substantive page of the book, Zuboff defines surveillance capitalism as “a parasitic economic logic … [a] rogue mutation,” and “a coup from above.” Zuboff has barely a single kind word for a set of companies that have created enormous economic value for the world economy and beneficial services for consumers. Yet despite this one-sided view, and underneath her bombastic rhetorical flourishes—which are sure to puzzle and annoy those not in the choir to which she is singing— Zuboff identifies three genuine issues in the present-day information economy that are worth grappling with.

First, Zuboff is concerned with excessive commercialization or “commodification” of online life. This critique is not particularly isolated to the online world—it is a common concern of the relatively well-to-do who prefer picturesque downtown stores while their less wealthy neighbors enjoy Walmart’s everyday low prices. Still, every human likely believes there should be spaces online and off that are not overrun by marketers plying their wares. But given that, as in the retail shopping example, people draw this line in different places, wouldn’t it be better to permit a multiplicity of options to develop?

Second, Zuboff argues that much of the companies’ acquisition of personal information is morally or legally wrongful. Zuboff argues that consumer technology companies are “dispossessing” people of information about themselves, suggesting that companies are essentially stealing personal information.

But this doesn’t match our experience online.

Most of the data Google collects about me is created by my interacting with other people’s computers. Why is observing this interaction “stealing”? And to the extent consumers actively submit information, they are typically sharing it subject to contract and occasionally abandoning it. Zuboff describes little or no benefit to this information exchange except to the companies. This may surprise anyone who has benefited from the commercially valuable services powered by this information, which the companies use to serve consumers’ interests at the same time that they serve their own.

Third, Zuboff argues that consumers are relatively unable to apprehend how personal information is collected, stored, shared, and used. We agree. Users don’t understand the risks of such collections. Information companies are in a relatively powerful position to gather more than they might need and use it in ways consumers might not prefer. But user risk tolerances in this space differ widely (outside of financially harmful identity theft), and it is unlikely that tech skeptics have accurately computed the risk / benefit calculus, either. Given the problems with discerning consumers’ true interests and the many trade-offs involved, it takes a kind of arrogance to decide for consumers what information terms they are permitted to agree to.

While Zuboff’s book emphasizes the rather new and relatively weak power imbalances between users and internet companies like Google, she says very little about a demonstrably strong and persisting power imbalance: that between government and citizen.

Unlike Google, the government can throw you in jail. There is a strong case – left untouched by Zuboff – that we ought to closely monitor and restrict the methods by which governments access personal information from commercial firms. This includes reconsidering legal standards for government access to personal information that fall below the probable cause threshold in the Fourth Amendment. Her book would have benefited from an acknowledgement that the very government she would have protect us from surveillance capitalism often poses a threat to human well-being – especially the disadvantaged and disempowered – through regular old surveillance.

Surveillance Capitalism is written to fire up the already convinced rather than persuade the skeptical. Starting with the semantically powerful title, Zuboff provokes. But when it comes time to consider policies to address the concerns she raises, we hope people will pay attention to what she leaves out.

COLUMN BY

Neil Chilson

Neil Chilson is a senior research fellow at Stand Together and the Charles Koch Institute where he focuses on technology and innovation.

Jim Harper

Jim Harper is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on privacy issues, and select legal and constitutional law issues.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Covid Vaccination Incentives Could Cost Phoenix $29 Million

By Elizabeth Troutman

The city of Phoenix will offer bonuses up to $2,000 to vaccinated city employees, costing the city between $25 million to $29 million.

The Phoenix City Council voted, 6-3, this week to approve the bonuses, which will go out to full and part-time employees by Jan. 18. City employees who do not have the option to work remotely already were set to receive $500 bonuses from American Rescue Plan Act funds.

Councilmembers decided to grant an additional premium bonus to those same employees if vaccinated.

The approval allows the city to give an additional $1,500 bonus to full-time employees and a $750 bonus to part-time employees who are fully vaccinated by Jan. 18. The city of Phoenix will use the remaining $198 million from ARPA to fund the bonuses.

The city issued a vaccination mandate for more than 13,000 employees in November, but a federal court ruling temporarily blocked the mandate. City officials said they paused the mandate to “further explore our options regarding implementation of the requirement, should it stand” in a Dec. 7 announcement.

Councilmember Betty Guardado, who voted in favor of the measure, hopes the incentive will increase vaccination rates.

“This is money that is going to come very handy to a lot of people that are out there that continue to keep us safe,” Guardado told Fox 10.

Councilmembers Ann O’Brien, Jim Waring and Sal DiCiccio voted against the measure.

DiCiccio accused the council of “politicizing” the COVID-19 vaccine in his statement at the formal meeting.

“While certain leaders were cowering in their homes, hiding from COVID, brave men and women, primarily from police and fire, were out there protecting us,” he said.

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This article was published on December 17, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.