RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/prosperity-requires-a-stable-dollar-federal-reserve-fomc-rates-easing-2024-vivek-bdfed87b?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

With a recession looming, and on the heels of recent regional bank failures, the Federal Open Market Committee meets this week. The standard account for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and now First Republic is that the Federal Reserve held interest rates too low for too long, only to hike rates too high too quickly. The deeper problem, however, is how the Fed has tried to achieve its mandate.

Attempting to balance low inflation and full unemployment—trying to hit two targets with one arrow—has proved to be disastrous since the Phillips Curve cult gained prominence at the Fed around 2000. If elected president, I will return the Fed to a narrower scope: preserving the U.S. dollar as a stable financial unit to help prevent financial crises and restore robust economic growth.

Beginning in the 1980s and lasting through most of the 1990s, the Fed governors, including Vice Chairman Manley Johnson and Wayne Angell, used a framework first adopted by Paul Volcker in 1982 to stabilize the dollar. The idea was to consider the dollar’s value in terms of commodities, letting it serve as a reference point for other nations’ floating fiat currencies. This provided financial stability for two decades following the stagflation of the 1970s.

Beginning in the late 1990s, the Fed’s scope drifted to include “smoothing out” business cycles. This was a mistake, since business cycles serve a healthy function by transferring the assets and employees of poorly run companies to more capable management. Even worse, the Fed’s actions often exacerbated business cycles by creating transitions that create boom-bust-bailout cycles instead. The Fed now typically tightens when an economic slowdown is impending, engineering a downturn of liquidity that catalyzes a profit downturn, leading to a credit-cycle downturn in which credit events—bankruptcies, credit spreads and financial-institution failures—prompt cries for bailouts. This was the pattern in 2000, 2008 and—so far—2023.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-ethics-reform-hearing-senate-democrats-john-roberts-clarence-thomas-ketanji-brown-jackson-sonia-sotomayor-d0304d65?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Senate Democrats are holding another hearing on “Supreme Court Ethics Reform” on Tuesday, and it’s important to understand that this isn’t about ethics at all. This is another front in the political campaign to delegitimize the Supreme Court, with a goal of tarnishing its rulings and subjecting it to more political control.

The campaign is on full display in the press, with reporters at multiple publications suddenly searching for supposed ethics violations or conflicts of interest. Our writers have examined and debunked these reports highlighting Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch in recent weeks.

It’s useful to expose for the record how thin these accusations are. But it’s also a mistake to assume that the facts matter to Democrats and their media researchers. This is a political project, and hyped accusations will continue to be asserted as if they are serious.

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“Ethics” is a time-honored political weapon in Washington, and it’s being used now against the Court because conservatives have a majority that is cleaning up some of the legal mistakes of recent decades. It has sent abortion policy back to the states (to the political benefit of Democrats in most places), expanded protections for the Bill of Rights, and is slowly restoring constitutional guardrails on the administrative state. Most of all, the Court is no longer a backstop legislature for progressives to impose policies they can’t get through Congress.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-constitution-under-fire/

An awakening is sweeping across the land causing more and more people to recognize their welfare and that of the United States are in deep trouble, with increasingly visible forces destroying the country, the family, and the people’s security and standard of living.

America is now in a war—not a shooting or kinetic war—but one with many fronts. Assaults on the spiritual, cultural, and informational fronts are the most important because they shape what happens downstream in politics and economics.

Enemies of the American Republic are found both inside and outside the United States—and they advance by deceiving,  demoralizing, and dividing the American people. Their goal is to nullify the Constitution. If the latter succeeds it will bring a swift end to the United States as we have known it, and make recovery all but impossible.

When we connect the dots, we can see that the manipulation of public opinion and the creation of narratives is directed at undermining traditional institutions such as law enforcement, the family, church, schools and other “carriers” of civility, tradition, and continuity.

War has been declared on average Americans through the Biden administration’s southern border policies that have resulted in unprecedented illegal entries—including criminals, terrorists, and human, child, sex, and drug trafficking cartels, a development that hurts American families by overwhelming law enforcement, schools, and the healthcare system.

Traditional families are being attacked in other ways and from every direction.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fake-history-and-a-profile-in-courage/

A culture-war squall occurred recently over a Netflix series about Cleopatra, who is played by a black actress. The biggest protest came not from ancient historians calling out fake history, but from Egypt, where a lawyer filed a complaint with the public prosecutor alleging that the casting promotes “the Afrocentric thinking . . . which includes slogans and writings aimed at distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity.”

It seems that Egyptians, rightfully proud of their ancient civilization and its Greco-Roman history, don’t appreciate “cultural appropriation” and “stolen legacies”––crimes that “woke” identity-politicians and activists are so quick to caterwaul about––any more than the “woke” Stasi do. I guess like free speech, for the “woke” it’s “cultural appropriation” for me, but not for thee.

Behold the “woke” egregious double standards, and the fake history like the “1619 Project” that has corrupted academic history for political power and financial gain. A similar offense was committed against Israeli actress Gal Gadot a few years ago, when the Wonder Woman star was cast as Cleopatra. Her offense? Being “bland” and “too pretty,” and especially “white.” One “journalist” despicably Tweeted, “shame on you, Gal Gadot. Your country steals Arab land & you’re stealing their movie roles”––two lies in one smear.

So, an Israeli can’t portray a descendent of Macedonian Greeks, who were typically fairer than southern Greeks, because a historically challenged “journalist” thinks Cleopatra was an Arab? Christian, Greek, and Roman Egypt didn’t become an Arab nation until 645 A.D. with the Muslim conquest and subsequent occupation of Egypt, which continues to this day.

Usually I wouldn’t bother with such patent ignorance, but it reminds me of an early example of “cancel culture” and fake history: the vicious public assaults on Wellesley College classicist Mary Lefkowitz for challenging and exposing the historical distortions and racialist politicization wrought by Afrocentrism.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/30/2026-and-all-that/

Joe Biden is running in 2024 and Gavin Newsom will not challenge the 80-year-old Delaware Democrat. Newsom is also termed out as California’s governor, and Lt. Governor Eleni Kounalakis has announced a run for the post in 2026. 

“I will fight fiercely to build a future where everyone—regardless of race, class, or immigration status—has the same opportunity that my family and I had,” Kounalakis proclaimed on social media. Sounds good, but as she revealed last year, California’s white lieutenant governor has a problem with black Supreme Court justices. 

“Who is Clarence Thomas? Is he my Saudi Arabian father who’s going to tell me what I can and cannot do with my body, with my life?” That was Kounalakis after the Supreme Court’s 6-3 takedown of Roe v. Wade. She added: “Be prepared to live in defiance of these six people who think that they have the right to tell you what you can do with their [sic] bodies.” 

As Californians might note, of the six justices voting in the majority, Kounalakis named only Thomas, the sole African American on the High Court, and compared only him a “Saudi Arabian father.” People of all nations, faiths and races might wonder what California’s lieutenant governor is all about. 

Eleni Kounalakis is the daughter of real-estate tycoon Angelo Tsakopoulos. According to Greek USA Reporter, Angelo is a “top political donor to the Clintons as well as the Democratic Party,” whose “donations to former President Bill Clinton were rewarded with a night in the prestigious Lincoln Bedroom.” In 2013, Tsakopoulos “confirmed that Hillary Clinton will seek the Democratic nomination in the next Presidential election.”

Angelo’s daughter Eleni, a protégé of Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, raised more than $1 million for Hillary Clinton in 2008, and that money found its reward. On January 7, 2010, Clinton, as Barack Obama’s secretary of state, swore in Kounalakis as U.S. ambassador to Hungary. She served until 2013, and, like Hillary, she forms a two-for-one package with her husband.

According to the lieutenant governor’s website, Dr. Markos Kounalakis is “an award-winning, nationally syndicated foreign affairs columnist, author, and scholar.” A political scientist, “Markos is currently a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Markos earned his Ph.D. from Central European University.” That’s the outfit founded by billionaire George Soros in 1991.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-female-scientists-are-all-right-women-engineering-wage-gap-sexism-discrimination-b186f9d9?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The toy maker Mattel recently honored International Women’s Day by making “role model dolls” of women in science, tech, engineering and math jobs, while lamenting that “girls are systemically tracked away from STEM.” It’s a cliché that these fields are rife with sexism, but at least in academia the data disagree, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

“The literature on women in science, both scholarly and popular, portrays academic sexism today as an omnipresent, pervasive force in the daily lives of tenure-track women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields,” write Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell and Shulamit Kahn of Boston University. Yet their review of the evidence from 2000 to 2020 shows that women in scholarly sciences are doing fine.

Tenure-track women are at parity with their male counterparts in grant funding, recommendation letters and having research accepted by journals, the authors say. In hiring, women have an advantage over men: “Women are less likely than men to apply for tenure-track jobs, but when they do apply, they receive offers at an equal or higher rate than men do.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/the_ruling_classs_stalinist_purge.html

Recent history has shown us the end result of the injustices Joe Biden and his administration are committing.

Like a hammer smashing anyone who seeks to “make America great,” the ruling class pounds Trump, his supporters, and now even Tucker Carlson.  A “great America,” you see, is antithetical to the technocratic police State that the Marxist globalists are busy building.  When individual rights and liberties are respected, self-sufficient Americans do not need government apparatchiks to fashion drab, one-size-fits-all, welfare-dependent, groupthink-dominated futures.  When American families are independent and strong, there are no psychologically unstable, lost, “woke” generations to crave parenting from the State.  When Americans choose God’s truth over the government’s lies, then man-made institutions look frail next to the divine.  Anybody who does not toe the Establishment line must go because totalitarianism cannot survive even a whisper of condemnation.  Lies built from sand can withstand no breeze.

I think this difficult period of American history — during which the Marxist globalists and their appeasers have openly embraced censorship, political persecution, and social “cancelation” — will be remembered as a kind of Stalinist “purge” long in the making.  I should say “Soviet purge,” because Lenin used murder and imprisonment to silence dissent (or potential dissent) just as ruthlessly as his successor.  It was Stalin who really took it to the “intellectuals,” though, and many who ignored Lenin’s brutality out of a self-sabotaging allegiance to communism belatedly learned that any system predicated on total control over individual minds will eventually find anybody with a mind a threat.  

The more general “Soviet purge” has been ongoing for decades, as defenders of liberty — often politically conservative in their outlook and in possession of true religious faith — have been run out of academia, denied promotion within the federal bureaucracy, and kept from having any editorial voices on the pages of the nation’s leading newspapers.  Everybody has been aware that the Marxists’ “long march through the institutions” has been trudging along unabated, but because those who parroted “politically correct” opinions found professional advancement and steady accolades while their colleagues “disappeared,” they held their tongues and said nothing.  Now the “Stalinist purge” begins in full swing, and many who have traded their consciences for cushy lifestyles over these last few decades will learn that totalitarian systems always save their supporters for dessert.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-unions-heavy-grifting/

Over the years, the unions, especially the public employee variety, have heaped abuses on just about all of us. But finally, there are the seeds of resistance.

Tax exempt status

For starters, as 501(c)(5)s, unions have a special tax-exempt status with the IRS that is accorded to “Labor, Agricultural, and Horticultural Organizations.” As Mike Antonucci reports, the National Education Association took in $375 million during the 2019-20 school year, all of it tax-free. Additionally, the NEA sold more than $209 million of its stocks and securities during the year, but the union is also excused from paying capital gains taxes.

Antonucci further explains that the NEA doesn’t operate entirely tax-free. It still must pay income tax on “unrelated business income.” For example, revenue from businesses placing ads in NEA publications, book sales, etc. All told, the union paid $7.2 million in direct taxes of all types on more than $603 million in gross revenue in 2019-20 – an effective tax rate of 1.2 percent.

The NEA also has no sense of hypocrisy. At the same time the union benefits from this egregious tax exemption, it came out with a “playbook” in 2020. In the “Tax Fairness” section of the manifesto, the union maintains that we need to repeal or amend tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, and replace them with a progressive tax system. The NEA also opposes “tax loopholes or giveaways that reduce revenues and shelter corporations and high-income individuals from paying taxes.”

Release time

Then we have the quaint notion of “release time” or, perhaps more accurately, “union time, taxpayer dime,” which is common at all levels of government. This swindle allows public employees to conduct union business during working hours, with the taxpayer footing the bill. These activities include negotiating contracts, lobbying, processing grievances, and attending union meetings and conferences.

A 2020 Goldwater Institute policy report detailed the pervasive nature of release time provisions in union contracts. This bit of thievery costs taxpayers millions of dollars annually and forces them to fund private union activities, which are very often political in nature and work against the interests of the taxpayers. Even more painful is the fact that many local governments don’t bother tracking release time, meaning this corrupt practice is often carried out in secret.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/28/bidenomics-recession-return-to-70s-style-stagflation-or-both/

Americans expecting a better economy to emerge three years after the COVID shutdowns will no doubt be disappointed by the first quarter’s GDP gain of just 1.1% with higher inflation. And it’s even worse than it looks.

Of course, President Joe Biden denied the worsening news, saying, “Today, we learned that the American economy remains strong, as it transitions to steady and stable growth.”

“Strong”? Really? No one believes that. As recently as late March, economists were looking for a first-quarter GDP growth number exceeding 3%. Instead, they got 1.1%, down from 2.6% in the fourth quarter and 3.2% in last year’s third quarter.

See the trend?

It’s no accident. The Fed, responding to 9%-plus inflation during the COVID “emergency,” has jacked up interest rates to 5% from near zero, and is expected to add another quarter point in early May during its meeting.

More ominously, a big part of the Q1 GDP slowdown came from businesses reducing their inventories and, for the fourth quarter in a row, their capital investments. Typically, businesses do that only when they expect really rough times ahead.