RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/02/stagflation-makes-its-appearance-on-bidens-70s-show/

Joe Biden got his start in politics in the 1970s and appears determined to recreate the world as it existed back then.

Misguided federal policies have pushed energy prices to punishingly high levels. Americans are struggling with inflation. Radical Muslims are holding American citizens hostage in the Middle East. Our adversaries, including Russia, are on the march. Even bell bottoms are making a comeback.

And, now, the pièce de résistance of the 1970s is also making a comeback: stagflation.

Stagflation. It’s a term that most young people and plenty of not-so-young people have probably never heard before because it’s been nearly 50 years since the U.S. suffered this leftist policy-induced madness. A combination of stagnant economic growth and high inflation.

It’s something that liberal Keynesian economists say can’t happen. Inflation, they say, is caused by a too-hot economy and a tight labor market. A sluggish economy should push prices down.

And yet stagflation did happen then, and appears to happening again, thanks to massive spending and growth-choking taxes and regulations imposed by the Biden administration.

Last Thursday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that GDP growth in the first three months of the year was an anemic 1.6%, well below the consensus forecast. The next day, the “personal consumption expenditures” price index, a key policy barometer for the Federal Reserve Board, climbed 2.8%, higher than anticipated, marking the third-straight month in which prices went up faster than expected. In other words, inflation was accelerating during the same months the economy was flatlining.

https://tomklingenstein.com/this-regime-is-built-on-a-lie/

Editor’s Note: The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.

In the following essay, Scott Yenor examines the “mandatory ideology” of the emerging regime: “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the all-consuming paradigm by which our schools and (in due course) our nation are being reoriented toward the principle of group outcome equality. This is the first in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”

As red states burden and ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices across the country, DEI operators broadcast defiance. “Under Siege,” reads one headline in the industry-standard Chronicle of Higher Education, “DEI Officers Strategize to Fight Back.” “Leaders Create Informal Support Network Amid DEI Opposition,” reads a headline in Insight into Diversity. Conferences are held to organize resistance. Even “College Presidents Are Quietly Organizing to Support DEI,” reads another Chronicle headline.  

An alleged moral necessity underlies this open political defiance. The current environment, it is assumed, is saturated with racism. It must be re-engineered with DEI policies: racial preferences in admissions and hiring, mandatory diversity training, a race-centered curriculum. Peace, harmony, achievement, and opportunity will then reign in workplaces and on campuses—after a generation or so of such policies. 

https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/how-soros-helped-hamas-go-mainstream

The left-wing billionaire and his Open Society Foundations have poured untold millions into pro-Palestinian, anti-American groups. We’re seeing the results on college campuses across the country.

George Soros, who for decades has been funding progressive, neo-Marxist leftist groups, also poured money into groups and individuals that reject the existence of Israel. So, it is not surprising that his son, Alexander, who now runs the ironically named Open Society Foundations, is now funding, directly and indirectly, pro-Hamas demonstrations and Hamas-supporters’ encampments on university campuses across the United States.

The campus “occupations” are reminiscent of Kyiv’s Maidan Square encampment in the winter of 2004-2005, when Soros helped fund the Orange Revolution. He also supported the 2014 demonstrations of the Maidan Revolution, for which he was awarded Ukraine’s Order of Freedom by the Ukrainian president he helped elect, Petro Poroshenko.

Soros is the prime mover behind a decades-long effort culminating with a tsunami of anti-Semitic attacks on Israel and Jews everywhere.

When Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, took over Gaza in 2007, Soros criticized Israel for refusing “to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government.” He deliberately ignored the fact that the Islamist terrorist group’s explicit and well-advertised objective is the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel.

Soros has been funding, directly and indirectly — and apparently with the acquiescence of U.S. administrations — Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Arab leftist groups, as well as media outlets, that oppose Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

https://pjmedia.com/john-stossel/2024/05/01/make-government-work-n4928660

President Joe Biden says, “I know how to make government work!”You’d think he’d know. He’s worked in government for 51 years. But the truth is, no one can make government work. 

Biden hasn’t.

Look at the chaos at the border, our military’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rising cost of living, our unsustainable record-high debt …

In my new video, economist Ed Stringham argues that no government can ever work well, because “even the best person can’t implement change. … The massive bureaucracy gets bigger and slower.”

I learned that as a consumer reporter watching bureaucrats regulate business. Their rules usually made life worse for consumers.

Yet politicians want government to do more!