RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/16/americans-oppose-corporate-diversity-quotas-poll-crc/

The vast majority of Americans believe U.S. companies should hire executives based solely on merit, character and quality, according to a CRC Research poll shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Among respondents, 87% supported a merit-based approach, compared to 8% who supported a quota system for race and gender and 5% who were unsure or refused to answer, according to the CRC Research poll conducted for the 85 Fund. The pattern held true across political affiliations, with most Democrats, Republicans and independents favoring a merit-based hiring approach for executives.

At 93%, Republicans were only slightly more likely to oppose racial and gender quotas in corporate hiring compared to other groups: 90% of independents and 86% of Democrats supported a merit-only hiring approach, according to the poll.

“Instead of simply finding the best people to serve their customers, companies utilizing these quotas admit that they are prioritizing catering to extreme Leftists over the people who actually purchase and use their products,” Will Hild, Executive Director of Consumers’ Research, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As we have seen with SVB, there are real-world consequences when businesses focus on identity politics over their core business.”

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed Friday in one of the largest bank failures in history, and some have linked the failure to the bank’s massive spending on left-leaning initiatives.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/17/why-woke-frisco-fed-chief-missed-silicon-valley-banks-warning-signs/

Wokeness has replaced competence and merit across the banking sector, and San Francisco Fed Chief Mary Daly is the poster child of this pernicious trend.

A protege of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and short-list candidate for Federal Reserve vice chair, Daly was supposed to be supervising Silicon Valley Bank but apparently was too busy playing politics and pushing woke agendas to regulate rogue banks like SVB, the second-biggest bank failure on record.

Daly had other priorities, including climate change, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, inequities between blacks and whites, LGBTQ+ rights and a host of other woke social-justice issues that had nothing to do with banking and finance.

Daly’s Fed bio gushes she’s committed to “understanding the economic and financial risks of climate change and inequities.” Never mind the more existential threat of banks in her jurisdiction amassing mortgage bonds with longer maturities that exposed investors to greater interest-rate risk.

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed rapidly within 48 hours. 

In a recent LinkedIn post, Daly appeared sidetracked by racial justice, writing: “What Black voices have I lifted up? Equity & inclusion begins with me. #GeorgeFloyd.” She also posted selfies with local Black Lives Matter activists.

Meanwhile, Daly missed all the warning signs of runaway inflation, which led to the steep interest-rate hikes that made SVB’s investments worthless.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/how_leftists_help_you.html

Make problems. Solve problems with other problems. Repeat

Progressivism’s response to issues of concern to the proletariat:

Since 2010, GDP has increased 53%, from $15T to $23.4T.  Since 2010, total government debt has increased 157%, from $14T to $36T.  Government debt has increased three times faster than national productivity.  Not to worry…we handle that by raising the debt ceiling, selling treasuries, and printing money.

Household debt is $17T.  We’ll help by canceling student loan debt ($1.8T).  You can show your appreciation at the ballot box, or by early or absentee voting.

Inflation persists, triggered in large part by the post-COVID fiscal stimulus programs the government cavalierly infused into the economy after shutting it down in homage to “science.”  Maybe, but we can blame it all on Russia.

Recent bank failures have occurred, due in part to Fed-mandated interest rate hikes instituted to combat the inflation it helped start in the first place.  We’re on it.  We’ll bail them out, probably with your money, especially if they funded the Tech industry…big Democrat donors.

Middle-class share of the U.S. aggregate income has fallen from 62% in 1970 to 43% in 2018.  Yes, but we’ll continue to send blue-collar manufacturing jobs to Asia.  Let them be responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, not us.  And since most of the ultra-wealthy in the nation are now of the left, we’re no longer too concerned with income inequality.

Health care costs amount to 18% of GDP, due largely to drugs, devices, and end-of-life care.  Assuring universal access to health care through Medicaid expansion will somehow take care of that.

We have no border security…but lots of new potential Democratic voters.

College dropout rates are around 40%.  A lot of degrees now awarded don’t have any marketplace relevance anyway.  It’s all about indoctrination.

Male labor force participation rate has fallen from 86% in 1950 to 68% in 2022.  Only natural.  As we have evolved from a manufacturing-based to an information-based society, we now have a female-based workforce.  A man’s place is now in the home.

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.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/15/are-we-the-byzantines/

When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had survived for 1,000 years beyond the fall of the Western Empire at Rome.

Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines’ survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence.

Generations of self-sacrifice ensured ample investment for infrastructure. Each generation inherited and improved on singular aqueducts and cisterns, sewer systems, and the most complex and formidable city fortifications in the world.

Brilliant scientific advancement and engineering gave the empire advantages like swift galleys and flame throwers—an ancient precursor to napalm.

The law reigned supreme for nearly a millennium after the emperor Justinian codified a prior thousand years of Roman jurisprudence.

Yet this millennium-old crown jewel of the ancient world that once was home to 800,000 citizens had only 50,000 inhabitants left when it fell. 

There were only 7,000 defenders on the walls to hold back a huge Turkish army of over 150,000 attackers.

The Islamic winners took over the once magical city of Constantine and renamed it Istanbul. It had been the home of the renowned Santa Sophia, the largest Christian church in the world for over 900 years. Almost immediately, this “Church of the Holy Wisdom” was converted into the then largest mosque in the Islamic world, with minarets to follow.

So what happened to the once indomitable city fortress and its empire?

Christendom had cannibalized itself. Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy fought endlessly. Westerners often hated each other more than they did their common enemy.

In the final days of Constantinople, almost no help was sent from Western Europe to the besieged city.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-murder-of-the-humanities/

For nearly 50 years the “humanities,” those courses in higher education that focus on the liberal arts, have been in crisis. This important front in the culture wars recently saw a brief skirmish touched off by a New Yorker article about the last days of the English major. But such analyses are in fact obituaries. The “woke” purveyors of “boots are better than Shakespeare” philistinism have finished their march through the institutions and now occupy our universities. Liberal education, the passing on of the “best that is known and thought,” survives only in a few scattered outposts.

Most of the assaults have come from the political and cultural Left and its more recent guise in the “woke” tribunes who have rebranded the old multicultural, identity victim-politics founded on the Leninist principle, “who whom”–– who is the oppressor, who is the oppressed. We all know the answer: Western civilization and all its works, including its fine arts and “great books,” which are mere “epiphenomena,” as the Marxiste village explainers put it, of the hegemonic ideologies, values, “truths,” “facts,” and “narratives,” all the “hidden persuaders” who exploit the “false consciousness” of the masses.

Onto this dubious and question-begging explanation for the success of capitalism and liberal democracies, Cultural Marxism grafted “identity politics,” the reduction of people’s complex, undetermined humanity, to the superficial characteristics of color and “race,” and to “culture,” one that, particularly in the case of Americans, is fabricated from fake history or crude stereotypes. As French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut writes,

“Like the racists before them, contemporary fanatics of cultural identity confine individuals to their group of origin. Like them, they carry differences to the absolute extreme, and in the name of the multiplicity of specific causes destroy any possibility of a natural or cultural community among peoples.”

It follows, then, that the cultural artifacts of one ethnicity are incompatible with those of another. Standards of excellence are inherently racist and oppressive, for they invidiously exclude those of the marginalized “other,” whose history of racist, sexist, and xenophobic oppression and exclusion is thus erased.