Tag: 2024 elections

It Hasn’t Worked Once, So Why Would A Politician Go All-In On Price Controls Now?

August 15th was the anniversary of the infamous “Nixon Shock”, when excessive spending and trade deficits had governments on the ropes, as prices climbed relentlessly, inflation soared into the double digits, while economic growth stalled.

In 1971 of that year, Nixon “temporarily” suspended convertibility of the US dollar for gold (still in effect), while simultaneously proclaiming a 90-day freeze on all wages and prices across the United States.

The stagflationary ’70s also saw Trudeau the 1st enact “The Anti-Inflation Act of 1975”, with his infamous “6 and 5” measures (a 6% cap on wage increases with a 5% cap on prices was supposed to put 1% back into the pocket of the peasants).

None of this worked, and as the lumpenpublic were mulched by higher prices and growing government, gold served as a barometer to it all – soaring from $35/oz at the time of the Nixon Shock to $850/oz in 1980 (that all-time high still won’t be exceeded in inflation adjusted terms until gold cracks about $2,580).

It took Paul Volcker  to get inflation under control with double-digit interest rates – (when the news came that he had been elevated from President of the New York Fed under Gerald Ford to Chairman by Jimmy Carter, Volcker’s wife burst into tears).

Today, 50 years later with a monetary regime that makes the ’70s look austere, double-digit interest rates are simply not an option – we’ve just seen a 5-sigma event nearly blow up the global monetary system from the BoJ nudging interest rates from the zero bound to 25bps.

With an unprecedented levels of monetary expansion and debt levels somewhere beyond nosebleed elevations, policy-makers and central bankers are trapped.

This is why we’re seeing a resurgence in popular rhetoric around the idea of price controls – everywhere from Jagmeet Singh here in Canada, who blames grocery store CEOs for inflation, to Dem nominee and incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris, channeling him with promises of food price controls as part of her election campaign.

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Obama’s Proxy Presidencies: No, You Can’t!

Mattieu Mabin, France 24’s Washington correspondent, reported on Barack Obama’s DNC 2024 speech Tuesday, noting:

It is remarkable to see how little Barack Obama has changed. What’s even more surprising is that, after leaving the White House nearly eight years ago, he can pick up his presidential rhetoric exactly where he left off, adding some required updates, and most notably, as if he were himself a candidate in 2024.

Oui, Monsieur Mabin, you’re right!  Barack Obama is, in effect, seeking his fourth term.

Obama served two terms as president from 2009 until 2017.  Following Donald Trump’s four years in the White House, Joe Biden was elected.  The Trump-Biden debate and Joe’s ouster as the 2024 candidate made it clear that Biden was not capable of being in charge for much of the past three and half years.  So who was? 

There are several candidates among the Democrat elite, among them the power pair, Bill and Hillary Clinton; Nancy Pelosi; Chuck Schumer; and Barack Obama.  There are certain indications that it was mostly the last.

Approximately three quarters of Biden’s key aides served under Obama. 

Biden’s key foreign policy posts (Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Wendy Sherman as deputy secretary of state, Victoria Nuland as undersecretary of state for political affairs, and Jon Finer as deputy national security adviser) were primarily promotions from the Obama administration.

Even the leftist Washington Post reported on January 5, 2021 that the “concern around Washington is that the same people who crafted and defended President Barack Obama’s foreign policy won’t be willing or able to recognize, much less rectify, its shortcomings. “

Those concerns have turned out to be well founded.

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RFK Jr. Exposes Democrats’ SUBVERSION OF DEMOCRACY Under Guise of “Saving” It

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy took a flamethrower to the Democrat Party establishment Friday while announcing he’s suspending his campaign for president and throwing his support for Donald Trump.

Check out highlights from RFK’s historic speech below.

During his address to the nation Friday, RFK condemned Democrats for becoming a shadow of their former selves, saying they’d “become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money.”

The nephew of former President John F. Kennedy went on to describe how Democrats subverted democracy by blocking his campaign from appearing in ballots in several states while claiming to save it.

Kennedy also bashed the military industrial complex for its complicity in Ukraine’s war against Russia.

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Three Quarters Of Democrat Voters Don’t Know What Any Of Kamala Harris’ Policies Are

A new poll has found that around three quarters of Democrat voters have no clue what Kamala Harris’ positions on key political issues are.

The survey, conducted by the Media Research Center, found that over 70 percent of “registered Democrats“ as well as Independents said they “either had not heard of Harris’s position or were unsure” on ten different issues.

The poll found that 78% of voters surveyed were unaware that Harris promoted a fund that aided violent BLM agitators to be bailed out of jail during the 2020 unrest. 

Seventy-four percent said they were unaware that Harris supported decriminalizing illegal immigration, and 72 percent had no clue that Harris “never visited a conflict zone on the border as Border Czar.”

Those surveyed stated that they get news information primarily from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC.

“This suggests that the knowledge gaps found by our poll reveal a failure of these outlets to report on radical positions once (and perhaps currently) supported by the now-Democratic nominee for President,” Media Research Center noted.

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America’s Frontier Fund: The Venture Capital Firm with Ties to Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt

Americans are increasingly becoming aware of the fact that the secretive Bilderberg Group is funding both sides of the 2024 Presidential Election, with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt going all in on Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris, and Peter Thiel investing millions in support of Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump. Both Thiel and Schmidt are steering committee members of the Bilderberg Group.

While knowledge of this illusion of choice is spreading, the connections between Thiel and Schmidt — as well as other members of the Bilderberg Group — run deeper than surface level relationships. Rather, the intersection between the hidden ruling class represented at the Bilderberg meetings, and the Big Tech Technocrats, has immense influence on the U.S. government, U.S. military-intelligence at the highest levels, and, thus, the world in general.

One example of this incestuous relationship can clearly be seen at America’s Frontier Fund.

What is America’s Frontier Fund?

America’s Frontier Fund (AFF) describes itself as “the first investment platform committed to ensuring the United States remains the best place in the world for Frontier Technology innovation and investment returns”. The AFF operates as an investment fund and claims to have “assembled a world-class board of directors and a unique team of investors, scientists, technologists, and policy experts” dedicated to their pro-America vision.

Through their “Frontier Fund I” the AFF invests in domestic companies which align with their mission. They are also focused on “incubating” companies through their “national network of innovation hubs”.

AFF was first announced in May 2021, and has been described as a “for-profit investment fund housed within a nonprofit organization”. This will allow AFF to “leverage the assets of a for-profit business” while also obscuring its investors.

AFF is stacked with individuals with ties to the U.S. military, including Michèle Flournoy, former undersecretary of defense under President Barack Obama, former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and H.R. McMaster, U.S. national security advisor at the Trump White House.

In May 2022, a leaked draft of the announcement on the creation AFF was obtained by the Tech Transparency Project. This draft shows that AFF originally described itself as the first “public-private, deep-tech fund” in the United States. The implication was that AFF would receive taxpayer funds via the U.S. government, as well as private money from investors.

When Vox inquired about the draft, AFF said it “was not approved and was never meant to be released. We do not describe ourselves that way. We only describe ourselves as a ‘non-profit deep tech fund.’”

AFF said that, up to that point, it had not yet received money from the government, but also noted that it had responded to a request for information from the Department of Commerce about a semiconductor fund. As Vox noted, this is often a first step in the process of receiving funding from the government.

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Harris’s Price Control Plan is Worse Than You Think

The Myth of the Eternal Return is the title of a 1954 tome by the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade, although many other deep thinkers, from Pythagoras to Nietszche, have voyaged into the same poetic and philosophic recesses. 

My task is much shallower: To show how old, bad, ideas keep recurring in American politics. Yes, I bear witness to The Truth of Infernal Return. As with bad pennies and bad breath, it’s no myth that our politics are infested with nefarious ideas that never die and eternal lie. As with some Lovecraftian daemon, they await their infernal comeback. 

Case in point: Kamala Harris’s August 16 announcement of her plan for price controls—that being a fair way to describe federal monitoring of “price gouging.” Harris has revived one of the worst ideas from the stagflationary (stagnation + inflation) 1970s. More on that later, but let’s recall other bad ideas that have lamentably rebounded: 

First, unnecessary foreign war. Into this Baby Boomer, memories of the bloody futility of the Vietnam War are seared. So when the North Vietnamese finally conquered South Vietnam in 1975, my teenage self said, “Well, at least the U.S. will never make that mistake again.” Which only proves I had a lot to learn. As we all know, less than three decades later, the U.S. invaded Iraq, a military operation that made the Vietnam War look prudential. 

Today, 21 years after George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished”—the most grimly hilarious pronunciamento since Vietnam’s “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”—we still have troops in Iraq, which is now dominated, of course, by Iran. So what, now, are those Americans doing there? They aren’t looking for WMDs, and they aren’t building democracy. Instead, they are fighting Al Qaeda, ISIS, Daesh—or whatever new bogeyman emerges from the Middle East’s tireless terror-meme generator. 

According to reports, the U.S. has 3,400 troops in Iraq and adjacent Syria, but only a fool would vouch for the accuracy of that number, given officialdom’s history of fibbing, the slippery X-factor of contractors—and perhaps some other number-hiding shell-game that we’ll learn about only in the next investigative scoop. 

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Another Brick in the Walz

Isn’t it curious how some people volunteer their personality’s skeleton key? They tell you, This is the most important thing about me, and, by thunder, they are right. But these kernels of soul-truth don’t necessarily mean what the naïfs think they do.

Tim Walz wants you to know he’s just a regular guy. He’s from a little town in Nebraska, he hunts, he was in the armed services. Most of all, he wants you to know he was a public school teacher. The Mankato Scarlets marching band delivered a musical interlude shortly before the Minnesotan governor and vice-presidential nominee took the stage Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention. “Never underestimate a public school teacher!” he crowed as he recounted his first congressional race. He subjected his audience to the tedium of endless and sometimes mixed football metaphors (although, I will admit, Walz’s record as a coach is pretty impressive).

This has been incorporated into the media campaign to cast Walz as an aspirationally avuncular or paternal character. (It’s gotten kind of weird.) Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), a prototype for Walz, also enjoyed or endured this kind of fawning as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate. President Joe Biden, in the happy days before he became a revenant, underwent something similar too. Kaine and Biden, however, had a serious handicap relative to their Minnesotan successor. They maintained a basic sanity or dignity that told them, at the end of the day, they were politicians, not people’s actual honest-to-God parents. 

That is, they were not teachers. They could only aspire to the self-righteousness of a man who works for two-thirds of the year as a guard at a minimum-security juvie facility, and thinks that gives him the right to have his pension plan bankrupt the state. The fanaticism of the public school teacher is rivaled only by that of the unionized transit official. (Stiff competition. I once met a minor MTA bureaucrat who freely admitted to drawing about $60,000 of falsified overtime annually, and went on to explain in tones of outraged dignity that he was the aggrieved party.) 

These peoples’ professional lives are in fact premised on the idea that they know how to raise other people’s children better than they can—can do a better job of feeding them, sheltering them, and occasionally, when the great white wings of the Pädogogesgeist are spread over the face of the earth, even educating them. The social upheaval of the early 2020s centered on schools for a reason.

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Trump again vows to reopen JFK assassination case — this time with RFK Jr. at his side

Former President Donald Trump unveiled Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on stage with him at a Turning Point rally in Glendale, Arizona, on Friday hours after Kennedy suspended his own presidential campaign and threw his support behind Trump.

“He deserves it, he deserves it,” said Trump in response to the applause of his supporters for Kennedy, noting it might be the loudest applause of anyone he ever brought onstage.

“For the past 16 months, Bobby has run an extraordinary campaign for President of the United States,” said Trump, noting that he even “went after me a couple of times.”

Trump then claimed without evidence that Kennedy “would have easily beaten Joe Biden, but they wouldn’t let him in” to the Democratic primary.

Before turning the mic over to Kennedy, Trump vowed to create an independent commission on assassination attempts, which would review the assassination of John F. Kennedy and release all documents on the matter.

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Texas investigates reports of noncitizens being illegally registered to vote

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Wednesday that he has opened an investigation into reports that groups in the state may be registering noncitizens to vote in violation of both state and federal laws.

Investigators with the Texas Attorney General’s Election Integrity Unit conducted undercover operations to identify potential voter registration of noncitizens in the state, with the investigation already confirming “that various nonprofit organizations have been located outside Texas Department of Public Safety Driver License offices, operating booths offering to assist in voter registration for persons doing business at the driver’s license offices,” a press release from Paxton’s office stated. These undercover operations are ongoing.

The press release noted that “all citizens have already been presented an opportunity to register to vote as part of the process of renewing or being issued an identification card or driver’s license, so there is no obvious need to assist citizens to register to vote outside DPS offices—calling into question the motives of the nonprofit groups.”

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Judge Rules RFK Jr. Can Sue Biden Admin Over Censorship After Supreme Court Rejects Challenge From States

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can continue to pursue his lawsuit against the Biden administration over censorship at the direction of the government.

The decision comes after a June ruling by the Supreme Court, which established who can sue the Biden administration for violating their First Amendment rights when government officials pressured social media companies to suppress free speech did not have standing to sue.

According to District Court Judge Terry Doughty, Kennedy meets the standard set by the Supreme Court because there is “ample evidence” to show he was censored at the direction of government actors, and is at “substantial risk” that the censorship will continue, the Daily Caller reports.

Under the Supreme Court’s Murthy v. Missouri ruling, Doughty explained that “a court must make specific findings that a particular defendant pressured a particular platform to censor a particular topic before the platform suppressed a particular plaintiff’s speech on that topic.”

Kennedy was named by one of the “Disinformation Dozen” – and was specifically targeted by the government over what they alleged was COVID-19 misinformation, Doughty noted in his ruling – adding that there is “not much dispute” that Kennedy, and his organization – Children’s Health Defense, were “were specifically targeted by the White House, the Office of Surgeon General, and CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency].”

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