RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19501/the-white-house-is-whistling-past-america-bank

Once I built a railroad, I made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it’s done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it’s done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Written by E. Y. Harburg and Jay Gorney during the height of 1930s, the song became America’s grim national anthem during The Great Depression.

As we watch the instability of our banking system unfold, those 90 year old lyrics may be more relevant than we wish to acknowledge.

Part of today’s banking crisis was instigated by the Federal Reserve whose micro-management of interest rates created a balance sheet gap for some regional banks, institutions that have played a crucial role in powering our economy by working with small and middle size businesses.

Another lit fuse in this crisis is a White House that has allowed crypto currency to be considered a genuine part of our economy. It is not. It is little more than a digital set of zeroes and ones with illusionary value, dictated hourly by an online marketplace. Then there is Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellin, who is currently engaging in a national theatrical performance seeking to convince Americans the banking system is secure. Her performance on and off stage leaves much to be desired.

https://www.city-journal.org/california-victimhood-forever

In December 2022, California’s nine-member Reparations Task Force, formed by Governor Gavin Newsom two years earlier, estimated that, if a reparations program were ever adopted, each black person in the state descended from slaves could receive as much as $223,200 in compensation for past injustice. The projected total cost, to California taxpayers, could reach $569 billion—almost two and a half times the state’s current budget. The task force is due to give its final recommendations in June 2023, including the exact monetary amount of compensation. “We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” said one task-force member.

And yet: California was never a slave state. It entered the Union as a free state in 1850 after its acquisition from Mexico, which had banned slavery in 1837. So the task force, while dictating that only descendants of slaves can receive payouts, has focused on housing discrimination that took place between 1933 and 1977, a period beginning 68 years after slavery was abolished in the United States. But this is just a baseline. Other areas—mass incarceration, forced sterilization, unjust property seizures, and devaluation of businesses—might warrant “future deliberation.”

Lawmakers in Democratic-controlled states such as Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon have similarly introduced (or hoped to revive) proposals to study reparations; so far, only California has successfully advanced the cause. Its work could become a model not only for other states but also for a federal reparations plan. Meantime, San Francisco has introduced its own reparations initiative and has proposed a $5 million payment to each black resident.

California Democrats’ intention to pursue racially targeted financial payouts could prove politically risky.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-endorses-race-reparations-to-cost-each-non-black-family-600000/

The slave state of San Francisco is moving forward on a plan to pay reparations for generations of slavery under the Bay Area Confederacy. And all it will take is $600,000 from every non-black family in the area.

“San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee submitted a proposal to the city’s Human Rights Commission that would pay every eligible African American adult living in San Francisco $5 million. The report calls for 18 other financial recommendations, including the cancellation of personal debts, annual income supplements for 250 years, and the conversion of public housing to condominiums that would be gifted to recipients.”

The cost, “presented on a per-household basis, will be nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.”

And that’s a conservative estimate.

The major cost component of the proposal is the $5 million payment for each eligible African American who is 18 years or older. The Census Bureau estimates there are 46,466 African Americans in San Francisco. Among them are about 35,445 individuals who are 18 years or older, given the age distribution of the African American population.

Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/17/the-lefts-criminal-abuse-of-young-people/

Democrats have long portrayed themselves as the great guardians of the children. In truth, they are destroying the young. The harm they’ve done to children, teens and young adults has spiked in recent years, from scaremongering about global warming to pandemic lockdowns that have unnerved a generation to teaching them a divisive, politically charged curriculum.

According to ​​an online medical journal, the University of Calgary has determined there was a spike “in emergency department visits for attempted suicide and suicide ideation among children and adolescents” during the period of “social isolation” that coincides with the pandemic lockdowns. The university conducted a meta-analysis of 42 studies representing more than 11 million pediatric emergency department visits in 18 countries, and compared “the data on visits prior to the pandemic with those that took place during the pandemic, up to July 2021.”

Researchers found “a 22% increase in children and adolescents going to emergency departments for suicide attempts, and an 8% increase in visits for suicide ideation,” even though there was “a 32% reduction in pediatric emergency department visits for any health-related reasons during the pandemic.”

And which party was almost fully responsible for forcing the young into isolation? It was the Democrats in this country and their ideological kin in others, with the encouragement and approval of their media department, who placed the young under virtual house arrest and closed schools, houses of worship, playgrounds and other settings where social interaction takes place. No wonder so many lost hope.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/03/16/the-avignon-presidency-or-the-american-schism-n1679061

When one surveys the American scene today, socially, culturally, politically, and economically, what may come to mind is a historical analog with what is known as the Western Schism that divided the 14th-century papacy between Rome and Avignon. Of course, analogical correlates are almost never fully cognate, yet they will often provide instructive parallels between past and present. What we are currently observing in the U.S. is a case in point.

A brief survey of the Schism may be helpful. The Western Schism refers to the fissure within the Catholic Church that saw pontiffs residing in Rome and Avignon, both claiming to be the true pope. As Edwin Mullins meticulously documents in The Popes of Avignon: A Century in Exile, the situation involving rival claimants to the Holy See was as complex as it was ferocious, the seat of theological power alternating between Rome and Avignon and leading eventually to the removal of the papal enclave to Avignon for forty years.

Altogether there were nine Avignon Popes, many of whom were called antipopes, but only two of whom, Clement VII and Benedict XIII, were canonically known as antipopes. Both, as P.G. Maxwell-Stuart writes in Chronicle of the Popes, were unsavory characters: Clement, a weak and unscrupulous man, who collaborated in the destruction of the Knights Templar, and Benedict who refused to resign, barricading himself in his castle and continuing to fraudulently elect new cardinals. The Council of Constance finally put an end to the reign of the Avignon popes in 1418.

Similarly, the political schism in the U.S. can be regarded as equally disruptive, entailing historic consequences that may ultimately destroy the life and continuity of a great nation. The presidential election of 2020 is frequently described as “irregular.” This is a patent euphemism. As many have come to believe, and as considerable evidence suggests, the election was mired in corruption, scandal, and covert manipulation. A system involving vote harvesting, absentee ballots, mysterious closures of voting stations in the dead of night, malfunctioning tabulators, suppression of critical information by the major digital platforms “to warp an election,” in the words of Victor Davis Hanson, and the furtive operation of hired mules, occurring especially in swing states, cannot be said by any stretch of the imagination to ensure an indisputable or reliable electoral outcome.