RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/walls-closing-joe-biden-corruption-hunter-irs-white-house-trump/

Confronted with devastating evidence of Biden family grifting, the president’s advocates are abandoning their old defenses and trying some new ones. 

Some are attempting to change the subject. Nancy Pelosi offers a sterling example. Asked about the latest evidence connecting Joe Biden with Hunter’s corrupt schemes, she replied that she was too busy defending women’s reproductive rights. Not exactly a full-throated defense of the president. Still others are repeating the familiar refrain, “But Trump is worse.” (More on that in a minute.) 

Finally, a shrinking band of Biden supporters are sticking with their old line: you may have caught everyone who shares Joe’s DNA, but you haven’t caught ol’ Joe himself. That’s true, but the evidence of the president’s involvement is mounting and the allegations are detailed. The charges are so obvious and the evidence so serious that even mainstream reporters are asking about them. The president’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, stands mute. So does her more competent stand-in, John Kirby. KJP not only told the press she knows nothing, she told them she would not privately ask the president about the charges so she could respond to press inquiries. 

What Joe’s defenders are increasingly reluctant to say is, “He had absolutely nothing to do with the vast sums raked in by his son, brother, daughter-in-law and minor grandchildren. He knew nothing. He had no knowledge of the intricate web of shell companies his family used to move money around and hide its sources and recipients. He doesn’t know any honest business people who have used these covert methods. He did nothing to help his son, Hunter, his brother, James, or other family members. The president is completely ignorant of anything they did and did nothing to help them.” That’s his story. 

Many of Joe’s defenders have backed away from a straightforward declaration that “he’s innocent,” and instead render the Scottish verdict, “Not proven.” So far, they are right — the case isn’t proven yet. But the walls are closing in, both on Joe himself and on his defenders at the Department of Justice, IRS and FBI. 

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/28/san-francisco-harbinger-of-democratic-horrors-to-come/

Earlier this month, President Biden held a reelection campaign rally in San Francisco. For a campaign that has already suffered numerous gaffes and scandals, and will likely suffer more, the choice of locale sent a powerful message. As a recent visit revealed to me, the City by the Bay is absolutely as bad as everyone says.

The downtown area, stretching down historic Market Street from the City Hall to bayside Embarcadero, is gutted, with 47% of businesses in the city having closed their doors since 2020. There and in the surrounding neighborhoods, commercial storefronts are almost all empty except for the occasional liquor store. After nightfall, the sidewalks are crowded by groups of homeless people living in makeshift encampments. Most looked like they were on drugs and/or severely mentally ill. The only people walking with purpose appeared to be selling drugs or women.

The ground was covered with all manner of filth. Being around it felt less safe than in any American city before urban governments adopted policies advocated by Black Lives Matter, which are now the heart and soul of the Democratic Party and anyone who aspires to leadership in it. Most notably, San Francisco gutted its police force’s budget and scaled back criminal prosecution of a wide range of crimes directly affecting quality of life.

A 26-year old tech executive friend who tolerates the city but, like many young people is looking to move, calls his fellow residents in this category “zombie people.” The number of people in his age group living in the city has fallen 21% since April 2020, while the number of San Franciscans in their thirties fell by 13% in the same period. Office attendance is hovering at about 45% of capacity. In the first quarter of 2023, the city’s murder rate was up a staggering 83% over the same period last year. This followed on an annual increase of 17 percent in 2021 and 20 percent in 2020.

This year’s victims included prominent tech CEO Bob Lee, who was stabbed to death in the once-posh Mission district. Entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose Twitter headquarters sits precariously on Market Street, has publicly stated that many people he personally knows have been violently assaulted. On the night I arrived, nine people were shot in a gang incident despite strict gun control laws that almost totally outlaw private gun ownership.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/the_controlled_demolition_of_nationstates.html

Generally speaking, central banks are empowered to control the supply of money by employing a number of tools that include buying government debt, selling government bonds, adjusting reserve requirements, and setting official interest rates.  Operating under various legal mandates to sustain an overall healthy economy, central banks ostensibly pursue policies that will produce relatively low inflation, steady economic growth, and low public unemployment.  

What if these stated goals are merely talking points meant to justify a central bank’s continued monopoly over a nation’s creation of money, and the true objective of any central bank is to maximize wealth for the wealthiest economic players?  Central banks, after all, are usually institutionally independent from government interference.  They are private firms managed by the world’s financial elite.  How might a central bank pursue a hidden agenda to grow the wealth of its friends at the public’s expense?

The easiest and most effective way would be to create artificial “boom and bust” cycles during which economies greatly expand and then quickly shrink.  How does this work in practice?  First, a central bank lowers interest rates — the cost of borrowing money — and thereby encourages ordinary citizens to take out loans.  These loans are used to buy houses and cars and start small businesses.  By artificially lowering interest rates below the natural market rate, central banks stimulate consumer purchases and small business expenditures beyond what Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” would have rendered on its own.  Investors who have an economic interest in selling houses, cars, and inventories for small businesses all benefit from the central bank’s intervention.

Additionally, because central banks have encouraged borrowing, they have pumped more money into the greater economy.  With the supply of money artificially increased, some individuals are willing to pay more now than before for the same goods or services.  Consequently, the prices of goods and services increase, producing inflation.  There are two important effects stemming from inflation: (1) a middle-class citizen on a fixed income must now pay more for living expenses, while (2) a higher-class citizen who owns stocks, homes, and other assets will see the currency-denominated value of those assets increase.  In other words, inflation acts as a tax on poorer individuals who own little and a supplement for wealthier individuals who own much.  While a middle-class citizen living paycheck-to-paycheck will effectively have less income, a higher-class citizen whose principal wealth exists in the form of assets will have increased net wealth.  Inflation effects a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/29/the-democrats-definition-of-democracy-is-like-the-marxist-definition-of-peace/

‘The meaning of peace,” Karl Marx said, “is the absence of opposition to socialism.” To the Soviets, peace was the state in which resistance to their territorial and philosophical ambitions was not only futile, it was fatal. If Democrats were as straightforward as their philosophical consigliere, they would define democracy, which they refer to in worshipful tones, as the absence of any challenge to their political power. Given how that party has continually revealed its authoritarian core, there can be no other explanation.

We’ve argued before that the Democrats don’t want to govern under constitutional limits but instead rule without constraint, which can happen only when their power is unchallengeable. We could point to the current administration’s direct and proxy prosecutions of the previous president. Its effort to eliminate a threat to its agenda is without precedent in our country, primarily because in the past Americans avoided a never-ending cycle of persecution and prosecutorial paybacks in which political stability is undermined. We have a long tradition of primarily civil politics and the peaceful transition of power. 

The criminalization of politics is only one iteration of the left’s doctrine that politics are war by other means, though. The Democrats, with in-kind aid from the media, are also trying to bully the Supreme Court into submission to their will. Their message to the Court’s conservative justices: Rule our way or we will harass you until you resign.

In this war with multiple fronts, the Democrats are attempting to establish a permanent majority through a direct assault on elections. We’re talking about far more than the “cabal” that was mobilized in 2020 to guarantee the presidency for Joe Biden.