Calamity Joe: Geopolitical Catastrophes Multiply as American Power and Influence Crash to New Postwar Lows By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/calamity_joe_geopolitical_catastrophes_multiply_as_american_power_and_influence_crash_to_new_postwar_lows.html

In only two years, Joe Biden’s presidency has produced multiple catastrophes from which recovery will be difficult, if it is even possible. Domestically, we see the banking system teetering on insolvency, as the rapid escalation in interest rates has devalued long term Treasury notes that used to be considered a safe place for banks to park funds in excess of what could be safely lent. The reason for these Federal Reserve interest rate hikes is the inflation that was immediately triggered by Biden’s jihad against domestica oil, gas, and coal production, that triggered an inflationary spiral that continues today, devaluing the life savings of thrifty Americans, and pushing food and energy costs up so fast that many families have had to drastically reduce their standard of living.

Bad as these catastrophes are, the potential for serious damage to the welfare of the American people from the military and diplomatic policies of the Biden administration is much worse. Losing a war – or even just fighting a nuclear war – makes a mere Depression look like a day at the beach. And make no mistake, the Biden administration is flirting with a nuclear confrontation with Russia that China might well decide to join and eliminate for good the power of the United States to oppose its aims for dominance of the Asia/Pacific region (for starters). Meanwhile, as the potential for an ultimate confrontation increases, resources for America to counter the threat are rapidly diminishing.

Start with the monumental blunder of driving together China and Russia, not necessarily natural allies, indeed with a recent history of serious tension. But now Xi Jinping is about to visit Moscow, and the two are united in opposition to American hegemony. They are joined in the task of replacing the dollar as the world reserve currency by other rising powers of the BRICS.

Government Tyrants Play with Fire By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/government_tyrants_play_with_fire.html

If Trump is really arrested on Tuesday, it will say something deeply disturbing about the state of our country.

The communist thugs controlling America’s legal system have chosen to cross the Rubicon, it seems.  President Trump says he will be arrested Tuesday now that New York City’s corrupt, Soros-funded district attorney has cooked up some cockamamie criminal indictment against him involving Stormy Daniels — the same political pawn who was already ordered to pay the president 300,000 dollars in legal fees as restitution in a prior case.

If anyone needed further evidence that we reside under a post-constitutional Uniparty regime with utter disdain for the rule of law, add this to the long list of government crimes and usurpations committed against the American people.

No doubt the politicians and their State-controlled agents in the press will actually hail President Trump’s arrest as shimmering validation that “no one is above the law.”  What poppycock!  What glittery abuse of power.  What abominable descent into tyranny!

If Bill and Hillary Clinton had ever been properly charged for their decades-long crime spree involving perjury, rape, investment swindling, real estate scams, stolen White House furniture, Chinese bribery, campaign finance violations, family foundation fraud, mishandling of classified secrets, conspiracy to defraud the United States with the Russia hoax, Epstein-linked prostitution and child-trafficking, or their uncanny proclivity for leaving a trail of dead associates in their wake, their rap sheets would stretch from here to the moon.  Had Barack Obama ever had to properly answer for illicitly using the IRS, EPA, DOJ, FBI, and Intelligence Community to target, harass, and persecute his political opponents or account for his stunning success in using his political office to transition from one of America’s poorest presidents to one of its wealthiest, he and his wife would not so absurdly yet flippantly claim that his presidency was aboveboard and “scandal-free.”  If there were not a two-tier “justice” system that exists only to protect Deep State friends and demolish Uniparty enemies, Joe Biden’s notorious reputation over the last half-century as a bought-and-paid-for stooge of foreign governments and domestic crime syndicates — with a family of drug users and reprobates who profit solely from his politically-protected name — would have at least kept him far from the White House, if not serving time in prison.

Only Donald Trump — the man who donated his salary for serving the American people and who has lost a fortune parrying endless and spurious criminal, civil, and regulatory attacks — finds himself in legal jeopardy, with his life, liberty, and property all on the line.

The Great Comeuppance will soon be upon us Whenever SVB has been mentioned in the past few days, you wonder if they have any employees Christopher Caldwell

https://thespectator.com/topic/great-comeuppance-economy-silicon-valley-bank/

You can measure the health of the American republic, or at least its governing institutions, on a weekday-morning Acela train from Washington to New York. It’s too expensive to use for pleasure ($337 if you plan late and are unlucky), too time-consuming (almost three hours for the 225-mile trip) to permit idling in the café car. So the train is always full of strivers, working their cell phones. On Tuesday morning, the phone chitchat was anxious. Even in Washington, where analysts and economists had been working all weekend to contain the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the reeling of the financial system when markets opened on Monday caught people by surprise.

It shouldn’t have. The last time bankers ran off with the savings of their compatriots was only fifteen years ago. A lot of people at the time asked: “How could we have been so gullible?” But really, Americans, Englishmen and other finance-dependent peoples had reason to be trusting. The young bankers in all those photos from the time may have looked ridiculous — standing with their backs to the plate-glass windows of a Lehman Brothers conference room to receive their walking papers, or lined up with cardboard boxes to cart their office possessions home. But what strikes us now is that they were so numerous. There were whole skyscrapers full of them, devising their multivariable hocus-pocus and bragging about their sailboats to young women in wine bars after work. Few liked them as a group. But they seemed the product of a real, stable, indispensable service industry. By contrast, whenever SVB has been mentioned in recent days, you see a lot of B-roll of automatic teller machines. You wonder if they have any employees. Whenever the cryptocurrency-focused Signature Bank is mentioned, you see empty shop fronts in malls. You wonder if they have any customers.

When You Can’t Bank on Acumen Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/money/2023/03/risky-and-risque-banking-business/

” A $100 five-year bond paying 1 percent becomes worth much less than $100 (about $80 I think) if interest rates rise to 5 percent. Thus SVB realised steep losses when forced to sell bonds. Makes no sense unless you’re incompetent, hired to satisfy DEI requirements. Or distracted, occupied by the skin colour and sexual wotnots of you and your colleagues.”

Tucker Carlson of Fox News enjoyed himself the other day (15 March), making fun of the very woke Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). The risk manager of the UK arm of the bank – which sold for £1 to HSBC – described herself as a “queer person of colour from a working class background.” What has that do with banking or risk management, Tucker queried; as he did other woke performances from both SVB and, its fellow failed bank, Signature Bank. Apropos dancing bankers. Apropos a seminar on gender-neutral pronouns hosted by Signature Bank’s president Scott Shay, and featuring Finn Brigham, who identifies as a ”genderqueer trans male.” I can’t define that for you.

I worked in the second half of the 1980s for State Bank Victoria (SBV not SVB) as chief economist. You can’t imagine a set of people less woke. Yet the bank failed in 1991. So it isn’t wokeness per se that brings down a bank. It’s inattention to risk management. However, wokeness, particularly when exhibited in the cause of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), surely doesn’t help. It can mean that focus is taken away from the main game. And it can mean that people are employed and promoted on the basis of irrelevant criteria such as skin colour, sex, sexual preference and having gender-bending proclivities.

Risk management is a serious business. In fact you can say it’s the only game in town when it comes to commercial banking. At its core, banking itself requires few skills. Money is accepted on deposit at one rate of interest and then lent at a higher rate. Costs are paid and profit is earned. In normal times, it’s hard to make a mess of that. Thus bankers on the whole are not the brightest kids on the block. They don’t need to be.

A true story. Waiting in line to get the bad news of my redundancy, following the failure of SBV, a fellow executive, older than me and also for the chop, spoke to me in his distress. He told me of his father saying to him, “you’re not that good at schoolwork son, a bank’s the place for you.” He wasn’t at all sure what he would or could do next.

Run of the mill banking is one thing, when it comes to bank risk management, bright people are needed.

Putin, Russia and the Purpose of Power Daryl McCann

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/03/putin-russia-and-the-purpose-of-power-daryl-mccann/

Motivating Vladimir Putin is the inviolability of Russia’s imperial past, be it the Great Northern War (1700–21) or the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). No sacrifice by the people of Russia, let alone Ukrainians, appears too high a price to pay to the gods of war as long as the greater glory of Russia is restored. Putin’s concept of the “Russian world” (Russkiy Mir) is simultaneously a language and a geographical location, a civilisation and an all-powerful state, a nation-state and an empire and, most perilous of all, his personal destiny and the fate of Russia. We can see, in retrospect at least, that the likelihood of a new incarnation of the Cold War increased as Putin began to contemplate his place in the textbooks of future generations of schoolchildren. The grandiloquence of this one man, served by the lethal but compliant siloviki, casts a terrible shadow over the world.

An unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine was not inevitable. But Putin’s early career in the KGB, an enduring enmity towards the West, and more than two decades of holding the reins of power in the Kremlin, doubtless increased the chances. On June 9, 2022, with the death toll of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians soaring, Putin told the young engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists attending the annual St Petersburg Economic Forum:

Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for twenty-one years. On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it … He was not taking away anything, he was returning. That’s how it was. The areas around Lake Ladoga, where St Petersburg was founded. When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised this territory as part of Russia; everyone recognised it as part of Sweden. However, from time memorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control. The same is true of the western direction, Narva and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing.

We can only assume he believed his bloody assault on Ukraine was a question of “returning and reinforcing” what rightfully belonged to Greater Russia—however many years it took, however many lives were lost and whether or not “European countries recognised [his conquest] as part of Russia”.

“Sustainability” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Sustainability is an over-used word. Or is it? Googling the word generates over three billion hits, almost three times the number of hits generated by its parent, sustain. It is a relatively new word, first appearing in the United Nation’s 1987 Brundtland Report, which defined sustainable development as meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It generally refers to climate and the environment and what man is doing (or not to doing) to sustain it, along with racial, gender and equity issues. Wikipedia defines sustainability as “a societal goal that relates to the ability of people to safely co-exist on Earth over a long time.” (Sustain is defined: to support, uphold, or strengthen.)

In 2015, the United Nations adopted a collection of 17 interlinked objectives called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include: the elimination of poverty, reduced inequalities, climate, peace, justice, decent work, responsible communities, and strong institutions – all goals with which no reasonable person would disagree, but also words whose definitions are amorphous, and which can vary with user. Nevertheless, woke universities and colleges have been quick to add “Sustainability Institutes.”

But might the word be more inclusive? We must harbor our resources and protect the environment. But we must not constrain man’s propensity to create and adapt. It was underestimating man’s capacity to innovate that led to Thomas Malthus’ faulty prediction in 1798, that population growth would exceed resources. People need the freedom to express ideas, and the freedom to go where aspiration, ability and dedication take them. For that they need a sustainable political environment, which allows for individual freedom, functions under the rule of law, includes property rights, and provides access to free markets.

The Tyranny of the DEI Bureaucracy Diversity, equity and inclusion offices become weapons to intimidate and limit speech

https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-kyle-duncan-stanford-law-school-tirien-steinbach-dei-students-babc2d49?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Critical race theory is becoming institutionalized across American universities, and a major reason is the educational bureaucracy. Most universities now have offices for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, that exercise a broad writ on campus and act as speech police within the university.

That power was on ugly display last week at Stanford Law School, where a mob of law students shouted down Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan in a spectacle unfit for any institution of higher learning. (Judge Duncan relates his experience nearby.)

Heckling unpopular speakers is common on campus, but what makes this episode stand out is the role played by administrators. As the room grew unruly, Judge Duncan asked that a college official step in. The law school’s associate dean for DEI, Tirien Steinbach, took the podium. “Me and many people in this Administration do absolutely believe in free speech,” the dean said, but then went on to ask if “the juice is worth the squeeze”—that is, whether tolerating free speech is worth the pain it causes.

Ms. Steinbach characterized the judge’s speech as something “that feels abhorrent, that feels harmful, that literally denies the humanity of people.” And she lectured Judge Duncan: “Do you have something so incredible and important to say about Twitter, Guns and Covid that it is worth the division of these people?”

Feds’ Foreign-Corruption Double Standard The feds protected the Bidens even as they bore down on Trumpworld. Paul Sperry

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/17/feds-foreign-corruption-double-standard/

At the same time Department of Justice officials were using spying and corruption statutes to aggressively pursue Donald Trump’s allies based on what turned out to be rumor and innuendo, they declined to use those same laws to investigate evidence of wrongdoing involving Biden family members and one of their corrupt Chinese business partners, Justice Department documents and federal court records reveal.  

In 2016-2017, the evidence shows, the FBI raided the offices and intercepted the communications of Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, a Chinese national suspected of espionage even as he was negotiating business deals with former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and brother James. 

The Justice Department later used information obtained from the searches and wiretaps—which included conversations with the current president’s son and brother—to convict Ho of bribery and money laundering, as part of a separate corruption case involving United Nations officials. But it declined to tap into its trove of evidence—including “over 100,000 emails”—to explore the connections between Ho and the Bidens, who received millions of dollars from Ho and a Chinese intelligence front and discussed sharing office space. 

At Ho’s 2018 trial, prosecutors hid Hunter’s connection to Ho, redacting his name from court exhibits (see here) while describing Ho as “the person who flies around the world paying bribes to advance the interest of the oil company [CEFC China Energy],” according to hearing transcripts. 

A federal database shows the Bidens failed to register as foreign agents while engaged in activities on behalf of CEFC, a state-owned entity suspected of being a front for Chinese intelligence. Federal anti-spying laws require anyone acting as a lobbyist for a foreign power to register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).  

The Justice Department did not prosecute either Biden family member for potential violations of FARA for representing the interests of the Chinese.  

This stands in stark contrast to the Justice Department’s aggressive pursuit of alleged FARA violations involving no fewer than six Trump campaign officials. In August of 2016, shortly after receiving a tip that a low-level Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had allegedly been told that the Russians might have dirt on Hillary Clinton, the bureau opened FARA investigations into Papadopoulos and three other Trump associates with no clear ties to Papadopoulos: national security adviser Michael Flynn; campaign manager Paul Manafort; and campaign adviser Carter Page. The FBI subsequently investigated Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates and Trump’s Mideast adviser Walid Phares under the same statute.  

Iran’s Mullahs Mission: Wipe Out America by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19496/iran-mission-wipe-out-america

A radical regime, whose mission is to “Export the Revolution” and bring Islamist rule to the rest of the world, will not alter its aims through policies of appeasement.

Currently, thanks to the Biden Administration’s appeasement where it would not matter and inaction where it would, the Iran’s ruling mullahs are closer than ever to acquiring nuclear weapons. The Biden administration would do well to realize that a nuclear Iran is not just an existential threat to Israel; a nuclear Iran is major threat to the region, Europe, America, the world.

The regime has made its intentions clear. Especially now that it is aligned with Putin’s Russia and the Chinese Communist Party, it would like to conquer the US.

As recently as November, Khamenei vowed, “Death to America will happen. In the new order I am talking about America will no longer have any important role.”

The headline of a report by Iran’s state-controlled Afkar News reads (in Farsi): “American Soil Is Now Within the Range of Iranian Bombs”. The report boasts about the damage that Iran could inflict, and clams that the Islamic Republic can use “a high-altitude electromagnetic bomb to attack the United States.

“The same type of ballistic missile technology used to launch the satellite could carry nuclear, chemical or even biological weapons to wipe Israel off the map, hit US bases and allies in the region and US facilities, and target NATO even in the far west of Europe….” — Afkar News, August 15, 2020.

American politicians shortsightedly fail to harden America’s electric grid, probably because it will not show up as an accomplishment that donors will respond to, electorally or financially, during their election campaigns.

Tragically, through its appeasement policies and failure to take on the Free World’s adversaries in a serious and credible way, the Biden Administration has been empowering at least one predatory regime that is determined to accomplish its mission of Jihad to rule the world at any cost; even if that requires wiping out other states. And now, thanks to the catastrophic policies of the Biden Administration — suppressing US fossil fuel production, thereby enriching Russia so it could launch a war against Ukraine; and by snubbing America’s historical ally, Saudi Arabia — it has brought US national security to the brink.

“Students are actually offered official credit, which will appear on their BMCC transcripts, for participating in these anti-Israel events,” a professor told United with Israel. By Atara Beck

https://unitedwithisrael.org/horrifying-antisemitic-campus-sponsored-display-featured-at-cuny-students-get-academic-credit-for-participating/?

‘Horrifying, Antisemitic, Campus-Sponsored’ Programs at CUNY; Students Get Academic Credit for Participating

Pro-Israel and Jewish students and faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College were appalled by a “horrifying, antisemitic, campus-sponsored display” featuring antisemitic, anti-Israel propaganda, including support for terrorism.

S.A.F.E. CUNY, a non-governmental and nonprofit organization that “advocates for Zionist Jews systemically discriminated against and excluded” at CUNY, announced Thursday morning on social media and in a press release that “yesterday, we were tipped off to a horrifying, antisemitic, campus-sponsored display at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC-CUNY).”

“In addition to sympathizing with Intifada (a call to murder Israeli Jews), among the falsehoods and tropes leveled at Jews and Israel are that Israel ‘targeted’ journalist Shireen Abu Akleh for murder, that Israel is guilty of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and that Israel is a settler-colonial state, and more,” the announcement read.

The display claims to document a “timeline of occupied Palestinian land” but is riddled with falsehoods and antisemitic tropes,” the organization said.

Dr. Jenna Hirsch, Associate Professor of Mathematics at CUNY- BMCC, told United with Israel that the exhibit was up Wednesday morning at 9 a.m., “located prominently next to the vice office of student affairs.”

“I went into the office and asked them if they were responsible for the exhibit. They said no, and when I asked them who was, they told me the women’s resource center.  I asked them if anyone else had complained, and they told me one student came in really distressed about it,” Hirsch said.