RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-are-grocery-bills-so-high

At the presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris told the American public she has “a plan” to alleviate America’s housing shortage, help small businesses, and “address the price of groceries.” That plan, like the rest of her policies, is elusive, but in a recently released “issues page” on her campaign site, she listed cracking down on “on anti-competitive practices” as a top priority. On the campaign trail she has promised that, if elected, she’ll call for “the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries” within her first hundred days in office. 

With that line of attack, Harris has certainly tapped into a vein of voter anger: Lots of Americans are upset about their grocery bills, which rose dramatically during the inflation that followed the pandemic and have never come back down. Food prices increased by 11 percent in 2022, professor Ricky Volpe, of Cal Poly’s Agribusiness Department, told The Free Press. And while they’re only projected to rise 0.7 percent in 2025, those 2022 grocery prices have stuck. Americans still notice when they pay $5.24 for a pound of ground beef that cost only $3.80 a few years ago.

Unsurprisingly, a survey conducted by the Food Industry Association last month found that 69 percent of Americans feel their income hasn’t kept up with food inflation. That group includes significant percentages of older consumers (Boomers and Gen X) as well as people at the low end of the income scale. 

But it’s worth asking: Why have food prices gone up so much? And does price gouging—the practice of jacking up prices during a natural disaster or other short-term emergency—really have anything to do with it? Volpe told me that, in fact, if food prices are rising beyond what consumers feel is reasonable, the food companies themselves play a surprisingly small role in the price hikes. Grocery stores, for instance—even giant superstores—are intensely competitive. Grocery store profit margins are among the lowest in all of American business, often as low as 1 percent. 

According to Volpe, the rising costs of labor, shipping, and packaging have increased more than food prices since the onset of the pandemic and have played a more significant role. Matt Lind, 31, owns a food distribution company, Farmlind Produce, that purchases fresh fruits and vegetables from farms nationwide and trucks them to grocery stores and restaurants on the East Coast. “Post-Covid,” he told me, “freight out of California was around $6,000 this time of year. Last week, I paid as much as $8,400.” 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/09/the_deep_state_is_past_its_shelf_life.html

At the Economic Club of New York, President Trump announced: “I will create a Government Efficiency Commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government — and making recommendations for drastic reforms.”  Elon Musk is eager to get involved with the project.  In one fell swoop, every other reason for re-electing Donald Trump took a back seat to the tantalizing possibility of turning his second term into an Office Space sequel.  

No government since the Byzantine Empire has been in more desperate need of immediate downsizing.  Can you picture the billionaire boys putting on their “efficiency expert” hats and shearing the bloated federal workforce one incompetent functionary at a time?  Commissioner Musk: “So what is it that you would say you do here?”  Crickets.  President Trump: “You’re fired.  Bring in the next one.”  If that’s all those two did for four straight years, round two of Trumpalooza would be a colossal success.  

Most of the federal blob is dead weight.  Its chief purpose is to hook so many families on a federal paycheck that tens of millions of Americans will never stop voting for its continuing expansion.  Even worse, it’s a Janus-faced monstrosity with internally conflicting mission objectives.  We’ve got departments dedicated to fomenting wars abroad and departments dedicated to stopping them.  We’ve got agencies tasked with confiscating taxpayers’ income and agencies tasked with providing economic relief.  Committees are organized to study “problems,” but those problems can’t be officially solved because doing so would mean that committee-members are out of jobs.  That possibility becomes the only “problem” that needless federal workers decide to solve, and they “solve” it by doing absolutely nothing.  The end result is that an unknowable number of ghost programs dedicated to issues that arose decades ago are still bouncing around the bureaucratic ether for no other reason than to keep the federal blob paid and happy.  There’s probably some group out there still ostensibly studying whether the popularity of compact cassette tapes will adversely affect the 8-track cartridge industry — and still probably another group filing seasonal reports on the likelihood that 8-track will end demand for cassette tapes!  It’s madness.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/09/the-biden-harris-world-is-afire/

Somehow the United States ended up this summer with no engaged president and an absent vice president who avoids the missing president and is frantically repudiating everything she co-owned the last three years.

The world was already confused over how President Joe Biden was apparently declared by unnamed Democratic insiders and donors unfit and unable to continue as their presidential candidate—as if he were a dethroned Third-World usurper.

It further wondered how those who staged his removal had no problem allowing him, in his debilitated state, to continue as America’s commander-in-chief until January 20, 2025. They demonstrated their priorities that focus on retaining power, not the welfare of the nation or the will of over 14 million Biden primary voters.

Vice President Kamala Harris, until Biden’s forced abdication, was judged by these same backroom fixers as too incompetent to ever be commander-in-chief and thus for three years a good reason why Biden apparently was not forced out earlier.

Now nominal Vice President Harris is on the campaign trail nonstop, while Biden has taken the most vacation time off and worked the shortest workweek in presidential memory.

The world again wonders who is in charge, what they believe, who is a friend, and who is an enemy. Harris is busy trying to get elected on three premises: disowning her prior co-ownership of what was mostly a disastrous Biden term and certainly no recommendation for reelection; reinventing her affluent radical past and present as moderate and working-class; and keeping absolutely silent about any detailed agenda or policy plan for governance as president.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/manhattan-attorneys-spokesman-braggs-case-against-trump-is-nonsense/

It has been obvious right from the beginning that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump was a half-baked mélange of wild exaggeration, unwarranted conclusions, and legal sleight of hand, all in pursuit of allowing Bragg’s fellow Democrats to intone sanctimoniously that Trump was a “convicted felon.”

In a refreshing twist, however, now a top spokesman for Bragg’s own home base, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, has admitted as much, calling Bragg’s case “nonsense.” As of this writing on Thursday afternoon, the poor fellow is not yet looking for new employment, but he may be soon.

Nicholas Biase, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office’s chief spokesman, didn’t mean to out Bragg as a corrupt, politically motivated destroyer of our legal system. He did so in a private conversation with a woman who turned out to be an undercover operative for podcaster Steven Crowder. Instead of impressing his date, Biase ended up on Crowder’s “Mug Club,” ripping into his boss in front of the whole aghast world.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/08/the-biden-harris-jobs-con-continues/

As it has done every month this year, the Biden administration continues to gaslight the public about job growth. Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports headline-grabbing job-creation numbers, then quietly cuts that number in subsequent months – often by huge amounts.

The latest report is no exception. The headline Friday is that the economy created 142,000 jobs in August – a figure that is close to economists’ expectations and that prompted CNN to cheer “The sky is not falling.”

But buried in the report is the fact that the BLS sharply cut the number of jobs created in both June and July.

Where the BLS had initially claimed that 206,000 jobs were created in June – which was treated as good news because it beat economists’ expectations – after two subsequent downward revisions it now says job growth in June was just 118,000.

In other words, it had overestimated job growth in June by 42%! Did anyone see a headline announcing that?

And while the BLS first claimed that 114,000 jobs were created in July, it slashed that down to 89,000 – a 22% cut.

It has done the same thing all year. It first claimed that 353,000 jobs were created in January. Now it says that number was 256,000. In April, it reported 175,000 new jobs. Now it says there were only 108,000.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/09/trump_harris_and_communism.html

What does “full communist” even mean to generations of young people who have no idea what communism has wrought in the world?

Kamala Harris has “vowed to lower prices at the grocery store with price controls and open up the increasingly out-of-reach housing market with tax subsidies for homebuyers.” Harris asserts that she “will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food. Her plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules.”

As a result, Donald Trump said that Harris has gone “full communist.”

But what does “full communist” even mean to generations of young people who have no idea what communism has wrought in the world?

At the American Institute for Economic Research a reader learns that:

Most people in [communist] Cuba are skipping meals [.] These shortages of food are intimately linked with socialist governments, related economic policies, and, in particular, price controls.

In July, Cuban authorities imposed a new round of price controls on powdered milk, chicken, and pasta, among other goods. Vendors in Cuba are now not allowed to sell chicken parts above a price of 680 pesos, whereas market prices are typically around 700 pesos. 

Price controls are huge red flags. These are not red flags celebrating socialism. Price control’s reddest flags relate to the nature of exchange, morality, and freedom [emphasis mine].Price controls increase poverty and hunger. Contrary to the utopian dreams of policymakers, price controls distort market activity in perverse ways.

And they always lead to shortages.

Recently, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson commissioned a study looking into creating grocery stores operated by the city of Chicago. The move “by Mayor Johnson is a step to implement a communist system where the city or state owns the production and distribution of food, which history shows us [always ends] disastrously.”

As goes Cuba — so goes America?

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/07/nazis-marxists-and-the-history-of-ideas/

In light of recent events and discussions attempting to rehabilitate the historical reputation of Germany’s Nazis, it might be worthwhile to re-examine the foundations of the ideology that underpinned National Socialism and its close cousin fascism. Those who embrace the revisionism that excuses the Nazis’ crimes appear to believe that by doing so, they are defending themselves and their ideological brethren from unfair and ahistorical attacks by the broader left. They think—or at least seem to think—that because fascism is considered a “right-wing” ideology that was specifically pitted against both Communism and Western liberalism, it can hardly be as awful as has been assumed and that its association with unvarnished evil is mere propaganda.

They are wrong. Indeed, the very foundations of their sentiments are mistaken and result from the radical mischaracterization of history and the evolution of ideas in the two centuries after the Enlightenment.

The simple truth of the matter is that the standard depiction of National Socialism and fascism as right-wing ideologies is inarguably false. While Hitler and Mussolini both expressed their opposition to and hatred of “Marxists,” they nevertheless embraced a leftism that was only marginally different from that embraced by Lenin and Stalin. Their hatred was a practical matter, a question of power rather than ideas. Both economically and socially, the Nazis and their Italian cousins were inheritors of the leftist traditions.

Almost from the moment he put pen to paper, Karl Marx’s enemies, as well as his friends, set about explaining why his theories about and solutions to the conflict between capital and labor had no serious application in the real world. Marx was a fantasist, and everyone—save perhaps his occasional partner in crime, Friedrich Engles—knew it.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alan-dershowitz-leaves-democratic-party-cites-dnc-i-disgusted

Prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz announced his departure from the Democratic Party, citing several “anti-Jewish” lawmakers that make up the ranks of the party and the recent Democratic National Convention in which Vice President Kamala Harris became the party’s presidential nominee. 

Speaking with radio host Zev Brenner on “Talkline with Zev Brenner,” Dershowitz cited the DNC, which he said gave legitimacy to anti-Israel speakers, and anti-Israel protesters outside the gathering. 

“It was the most anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist convention I’ve experienced,” he said. “I was disgusted at the Democratic National Convention. Absolutely disgusted.”

“I am no longer a Democrat. I am an Independent,” he added, noting that he wouldn’t reveal whom he was voting for president until possibly after Nov. 1. “I want to see how they deal with Iran. I want to encourage the current administration to support Israel.”

The Harvard Law professor emeritus said his departure from the party was a long time coming and that he gradually resigned over time. 

“Alot of things pushed me in that direction,” he said. Dershowitz noted Harris’ failure to preside over a joint session of Congress during an address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played a big role in his decision. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/05/how-ai-will-embolden-the-tyranny-of-big-tech/

The emergence of artificial intelligence marks the latest acceleration of the digital age. Like any revolution, this one has winners and losers and will likely transform the relationship between people and machines. It could also lend yet more power to Big Tech and their technocratic elites in government.

Just as the Industrial Revolution elevated manufacturers and their financiers over the old aristocratic classes, the current shift erodes the power of the large industrial, often unionised, corporations and hosts of smaller businesses, in favour of a small coterie of elite firms, which are aggressively anti-union and have an unprecedented hold on both the capital markets and increasingly the human consciousness.

In the past, a major tech breakthrough would have naturally created a market for upstarts. The first phase of the digital revolution in the early 21st century caught many larger players, like IBM and AT&T, flat-footed as firms like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook (now Meta) emerged, eventually well surpassing them in market value. These firms have now secured quasi-monopolistic control of everything from mobile browsers, operating-system software and online advertising sales. They also control two-thirds of the world’s cloud service infrastructure, which is critical for AI.

These Big Tech companies drive the economy, and with them the fortunes of the three-fifths of Americans invested in the stock market. About 60 per cent of the S&P 500’s gains for the year have been driven by just five tech companies – Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet (the parent company of Google). Altogether, seven tech stars, adding Tesla and Apple, account for a remarkable 30 per cent of the index’s total value, a domination almost unprecedented in market history.

These same companies are uniquely positioned to raise the trillions of dollars that are needed to develop AI capacity – at a time when cash for startups is at the lowest ebb in five years. Among the AI superpowers, there is only one relative newcomer, Nvidia. It started out mostly selling chips to the videogame industry, but its hardware has since become essential to the AI boom. Overall the field is utterly dominated by the top giant interests.