Tag: economy

Biden Policies Could Spell the End of Freelance Contractors, Republicans Say

Republican members of Congress say President Joe Biden’s administration is waging war on independent contractors. Democrats counter that they are trying to ensure workers are not exploited and businesses compete on a level playing field.

Kim Kavin, a freelance writer from New Jersey, said this is not a partisan issue.

“Our members have voted for everybody from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump,” Kavin told the Subcommittee on Workforce Protection of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

“All of us are in agreement on this.”

Kavin is one of five witnesses called before the committee for a hearing entitled “Examining Biden’s War on Independent Contractors.”

The hearing was called because the Biden administration is pushing a policy to deny Americans a fundamental right, according to Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.).

“Today’s hearing is about the right to earn a living. In a free society, few rights are as fundamental,” he said.

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Countless Americans Plunge Into Despair As Hunger Spreads Like Wildfire All Across America

We haven’t seen anything like this in a long time.  A couple of factors are combining to push millions of Americans into a state of food insecurity.  First of all, food prices have been rising aggressively throughout the past year, and so our money does not go nearly as far as it once did.  Meanwhile, food stamp benefits are being slashed.  The federal government had greatly enhanced food stamp benefits for many Americans during the pandemic, but now that emergency program is coming to an end.  So what this means is that many Americans are going to have very little money to spend on food at a time when economic conditions are starting to get really rough.

The Washington Post recently sent a reporter named Tim Craig to Kentucky, and he discovered that poor people are waiting in “a mile-long line” just to get some free food…

As he claimed the first spot in a mile-long line for free food in the Appalachian foothills, Danny Blair vividly recalled receiving the letter announcing that his pandemic-era benefit to help buy groceries was about to be slashed.

Kentucky lawmakers had voted to end the state’s health emergency last spring, by default cutting food stamp benefits created to help vulnerable Americans like Blair weather the worst of covid-19. Instead of $200 a month, he would get just $30.

Blair actually gets up at 4 AM in the morning so that he can be first in line for these handouts.

On the Friday that the reporter from the Washington Post interviewed him, he ended up staying in that line for nine hours.

I couldn’t imagine waiting in line for that long, but Blair feels like this is what he and his wife must do in order to survive…

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Can’t Afford Groceries In Biden’s America? Wall Street Journal Says Just Don’t Eat!

As many Americans struggle to put food on the table, The Wall Street Journal proposed an idea this week: Instead of Biden taking responsibility for his destructive public policy, you should just skip breakfast.

Titled “To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast,” the article analyzed three popular breakfast foods — eggs, juice, and cereal — and offered explanations for why they cost significantly more since last year. According to the Journal, eggs are up a whopping 70 percent, frozen orange juice is up more than 12 percent, and cereal is up 15 percent since just one year ago.

Why the crippling increases? The explanations were as plentiful as they were diverse: avian flu, bad weather, citrus disease, dead chickens, and Vladimir Putin.

Global food supply includes a myriad of liabilities and moving parts, and of course, a drop in supply will play in role in rising prices. But the Journal neglected to mention perhaps the most important contributor to Americans’ economic woes: Biden’s apparently limitless federal spending.

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Distract, Divide and Conquer: The Painful Truth About the State of Our Union

Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness.

These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.

Foreign interests are buying up our farmland and holding our national debt. As of 2021, foreign persons and entities owned 40.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, 47% of which was forestland, 29% in cropland, and 22% in pastureland. Foreign land holdings have increased by an average of 2.2 million acres per year since 2015. Foreign countries also own $7.4 trillion worth of U.S. national debt, with Japan and China ranked as our two largest foreign holders of our debt.

Corporate and governmental censorship have created digital dictators. While the “Twitter files” revealed the lengths to which the FBI has gone to monitor and censor social media content, the government has been colluding with the tech sector for some time now in order to silence its critics and target “dangerous” speech in the name of fighting so-called disinformation. The threat of being labelled “disinformation” is being used to undermine anyone who asks questions, challenges the status quo, and engages in critical thinking.

Middle- and lower-income Americans are barely keeping up. Rising costs of housing, food, gas and other necessities are presenting nearly insurmountable hurdles towards financial independence for the majority of households who are scrambling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, mounting layoffs in the tens of thousands are adding to the fiscal pain.

The government is attempting to weaponize mental health care. Increasingly, in communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, even if they pose no danger to others. While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with the government’s ongoing efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), the specter of mental health round-ups begins to sound less far-fetched.

The military’s global occupation is spreading our resources thin and endangering us at home. America’s war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin. In 2022 alone, the U.S. approved more than $50 billion in aid for Ukraine, half of which went towards military spending, with more on the way. The U.S. also maintains some 750 military bases in 80 countries around the world.

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Inflation Used To Squeeze The Middle Class. Now It’s Hitting The Poor The Hardest

The primary burden of inflation has shifted from middle class to low-income households thanks to a shift in the spending categories hardest hit by price hikes, according to a study published Wednesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

At the onset of rising inflation in the spring of 2021, middle-income households, defined as those earning between $50,000 and $150,000 per year, bore the brunt of inflation as they purchased more used cars and gasoline than other demographics, according to the New York Fed. However, as the cost of gas falls and the price of food and housing surges, lower-income households, defined as those earning less than $50,000, now face higher effective costs — roughly 0.3 percentage points higher than average — since they spend a larger portion of their income on food and housing than middle and high-income households.

“As of December 2022, the bottom 40 percent have the highest year-on-year inflation rate of the three groups, and the inflation rate of the middle-income group is below the national average,” the report reads. “It is likely the case that the same rate of inflation represents a greater welfare loss for lower-income than higher-income households because of the former’s lower capacity for substituting to less expensive goods, greater liquidity constraints, and larger marginal utility of real income.”

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Things We Should Understand: The Aristocracy Is Eating The Peasants

Most people (especially most Americans) still seem to view the events of the past half-century as more or less random.

Booms and busts erupting out of nowhere, impoverishing all but a handful of lucky elites. Political crises that end up dividing rather than uniting. Wars that cost fortunes and resolve nothing. Everything is bad, and nothing is related to anything else.

But of course that’s not true. Each of the above events serves the same purpose: to enrich a modern aristocracy at the expense of everyone else. And the endgame is looking even worse.

To see the scam play out, let’s go back to 1995. Two decades previously, in 1971, the US and by extension the world had ditched sound, gold-backed money in favor of “fiat” currencies that their governments, via their central banks, could create in infinite quantities out of thin air. The result was spiking inflation and exchange rate chaos in the 1970s and soaring government deficits in the 1980s.

By the 1990s it had become clear to the people running major governments and big corporations that unsound money would lead to unsustainable debt, which in turn would destabilize the financial world and bring about a hyperinflationary depression followed by a French Revolution-style reckoning for those responsible.

That generation’s elites were thus left with two choices:

  1. Return to the gold standard and avoid monetary collapse — but at the cost of giving up the ability to create money at will.
  2. Or use their fictitious currencies to steal as much real wealth as possible from the peasants and let future elites deal with the eventual collapse.

They, as the sociopaths we now know them to be, chose the second strategy.

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Biden-Buttigieg DOT fails to track aviation imports while prioritizing equity, climate justice

The Transportation Department and the Federal Aviation Administration do not track imports of plane parts, creating serious vulnerabilities that could increase the risk of supply chain disruptions, according to a new report by the department’s internal watchdog.

The DOT and FAA are not required to track aviation imports, but the “COVID-19 pandemic caused major disruptions in the aviation supply chain and highlighted the need for Federal intervention to address associated vulnerabilities,” the Transportation Department Inspector General wrote in a report published last week. 

“We identified several vulnerabilities that increase the risk of aviation supply chain disruptions,” the IG reported, “including the lack of visibility into supply chains, dependence on sole-source or limited suppliers, and lack of access to rare earth metals and elements.” 

The report came in response to a request from Republicans on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and its Aviation Subcommittee after members asked in April 2021 how the agency tracks critical aircraft imports and the number of aviation parts produced exclusively in China or India. 

Overall, France is the leading source of U.S. imports of aviation products, with 24% of the total. Canada ranks second, with 17%. China, accounting for 2% of U.S. aviation imports, comes in at number 10.

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Fed Blames Inflation on Americans ‘Splurging’ on Goods — Not the Trillions of Dollars they Printed

A few weeks ago, US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen appeared on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert to discuss a range of issues both political and personal.

The most widely reported moment in the interview came when Yellen talked about practicing her signature (don’t ask me why this is newsworthy, I have no idea). However, a significantly more important moment has not gotten the attention it deserves.

When asked by Colbert to explain the reasons behind the worst inflation the US has experienced in 40 years, the former Federal Reserve chair blamed it primarily on rising consumer spending—Americans “splurging” on goods—at the start of 2021 once the Covid-19 lockdowns were lifted. This, compounded with supply chain issues and the war in Ukraine can sufficiently explain inflation, Yellen claims.

But can it really? Let’s take a closer look.

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We’ve entered into a “new world order” says BlackRock Chairman

In its 2023 Global Investment Outlook, multinational investment firm BlackRock stated that “we’ve entered a new world order,” in which “geopolitical cooperation and globalization” are “evolving into a fragmented world with competing blocs.”

The report noted that we are now in “the most fraught global environment since World War Two.”

According to the report, the fragmentation of the world into power blocs (especially the US, Russia, and China) “comes at the cost of economic efficiency.” Western sanctions against Russia, for instance, have made “energy security” a priority for many European nations.

This “geopolitical fragmentation” will “likely contribute to the new regime of greater macro and market volatility – and persistently higher inflation,” according to the BlackRock report.

On page 3, it also says, “The transition to net-zero carbon emissions has caused energy supply and demand mismatches.”

BlackRock manages almost $10 trillion in investments, making it the world’s biggest asset manager. It’s played a key role in pushing the globalist agenda. It supports cashless societies and digital currencies, green energy transitions, and ESG scores.

ESG scores promote investments in companies with leftist social justice goals, like renewable energy, racial equity, and abortion access.  In addition to incorporating ESG principles, BlackRock has promised to leverage its “ESG-focused financial products” to promote “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

BlackRock lists the World Economic Forum as one of its “key diversity partners,” which promotes mandatory vaccinations and lockdowns, abortion access, and the globalist “Great Reset.”

BlackRock’s promotion of a “New World Order” legitimises what many still call conspiracy theories. In March the World Government Summit 2022 asked the question, ‘Are We Ready for a New World Order?

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