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Leftist Donors Use Arabella Advisors to Finance Massive Gun Control Push

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2019

Hope and Heal Fund itself was launched in October 2017 with $2 million from eight far-left funding groups, including the Akonadi Foundation, the California Endowment, Blue Shield of California Foundation, and California Wellness Foundation…

I guess it pays to take a look at anyone you do business. In the case of health care you probably don’t have much choice. Make a fuss and you may end up out of coverage.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/10/01/leftist-donors-use-arabella-advisors-to-finance-massive-gun-control-push/

by Capital Research Center (Sponsored)

The following article is sponsored by Capital Research Center.

A massively funded strategy company that operates below the radar to push the interests of wealthy leftist donors quietly helps lead a funding nexus that advocates for gun control policies.

The secretive Arabella Advisors is a centralized hub that runs nonprofit arms that in turn have spawned a nexus of hundreds of front organizations outwardly designed to appear grassroots but actually working against ordinary people by expanding government control in the lives of Americans.

Arabella’s vast network was unmasked in an extensive exposé by conservative watchdog Capital Research Center, which documents the shadowy system developed by, housed in, and staffed by the for-profit, privately held Arabella Advisors.

The Arabella firm in turn manages four nonprofits: the New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Windward Fund, and Hopewell Fund. These nonprofit entities play host to hundreds of groups and projects that promote interests and political movements strategically deployed in a long-term campaign to nudge the country to the left.

Capital Research’s Center’s report spotlights the Hope and Heal Fund, a donor collaborative based in California that itself serves as a central funding hub tied to scores of other donor groups that finance other groups that advocate federal gun control measures.

The Hope and Heal Fund is sponsored by Arabella’s New Venture Fund. It is led by Brian Malte, a longtime senior national policy director for the gun control advocacy group Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

The Hope and Heal Fund’s website lists 12 other “member” groups, most of which themselves fund large numbers of individual gun control organizations.

Hope and Heal’s funding collaborative members include:

  • The Akonadi Foundation, whose website says the organization engages in “ecosystem grantmaking” that “recognize(s) how history and culture have allowed the privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and the disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure, adapt, and accumulate over time.”
  • The Heising-Simons Foundation, which finances scores of far-left organizations.
  • The Weingart Foundation, which boasts it works to “provide unrestricted funding to organizations advancing racial, social and economic equity.”
  • The California Wellness Foundation, which has awarded over $1 billion in grants since 1992 and focuses in part on “gun violence prevention.”

Hope and Heal Fund itself was launched in October 2017 with $2 million from eight far-left funding groups, including the Akonadi Foundation, the California Endowment, Blue Shield of California Foundation, and California Wellness Foundation, Capital Research’s report documents.

The report also reveals that, besides gun control advocacy, Arabella Advisors has been quietly behind a hydra-like dark money network of pop-up groups designed to look like grassroots activist organizations. These front groups push everything from opposition to President Trump’s proposed border wall to support for Obamacare to gun control to government control of the Internet to pro-abortion activism and other left-wing causes.

Arabella’s nonprofits raised a combined $1.6 billion from 2013-2017 with the aim of advancing “the political policies desired by wealthy left-wing interests through hundreds of ‘front’ groups,” according to the report. “And those interests pay well: the network’s revenues grew by an incredible 392 percent over that same period.”

“Together, these groups form an interlocking network of ‘dark money’ pop-up groups and other fiscally sponsored projects, all afloat in a half-billion-dollar ocean of cash,” states the report. “The real puppeteer, though, is Arabella Advisors, which has managed to largely conceal its role in coordinating so much of the professional Left’s infrastructure under a mask of ‘philanthropy.’”

Read the full Arabella report here.

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Confessions Of A Climate Scientist

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2019

via Confessions Of A Climate Scientist

A new book by a Japanese climate scientist explains why the predictions of climate models are useful but insufficiently reliable for large scale public policy action. None of this is new information. None of it is widely known.

Forecasting with models
Illustration 100719 © Kheng Guan Toh – Dreamstime.

Excerpts from Confessions of a climate scientist (2019)

By Mototaka Nakamura.

He wrote an introduction and summary in English for a Kindle version of his Japanese book. This excerpt show some of his findings and explanations.
Read the e-book to see his detailed and technical analysis, and his references.

Climate simulation models are fine tools to study the climate system, so long as the users are aware of the limitations of the models and exercise caution in designing experiments and interpreting their output. In this sense, experiments to study the response of simplified climate systems, such as those generated by the “state-of-the-art” climate…

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Trump tweeted ‘billions of dollars’ would be saved on military contracts. Then the Pentagon fired the official doing that.

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2019

In case you were wondering what the “Deep State” looks like, this is one of it’s faces.

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-promised-to-save-billions-of-dollars-on-military-contracts-then-the-pentagon-pushed-out-the-official-responsible-for-doing-that-090005221.html

Martin de Bourmont and Sharon Weinberger

Authors

In December 2016, just a few weeks before moving into the White House, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted that once he was in office, “billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases.”

Presidential candidates often campaign for or against defense spending, but Trump was perhaps the first to promise that his business acumen — an image bolstered by his bestselling book “The Art of the Deal” — would enable him to shave billions of dollars off costly weapons, like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, estimated to top $1 trillion.

While Trump’s critics were questioning whether he was actually capable of achieving big savings in the military budget, over at the Pentagon the man whose job it was to negotiate those weapons deals welcomed the president’s attention to the issue.

“When you get somebody who is the president of the United States who understands precisely what you do for a living and understands how it’s actually done, it becomes a pretty rewarding thing to do, especially when someone at the top is world-class himself in terms of negotiating,” Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s pricing director, told attendees at a conference held by McAleese and Credit Suisse in March 2017, just two months after Trump’s inauguration.

Assad had already built a reputation as the Department of Defense’s toughest contract negotiator, having spent more than a decade battling defense companies on behalf of taxpayers, trying to get the prices down on skyrocketing weapons costs. Over the course of his career, he has been decorated with a panoply of awards from the Pentagon for his work, and praised for saving the government billions of dollars. A 2016 Politico profile described Assad, known for his dogged campaigns to force defense industry companies to justify their costs, as “the most hated man in the Pentagon.”…

Yet within two years of Trump’s entrance into the White House, Assad would find himself removed from his job, and his efforts to save money and recover hundreds of millions of dollars in potentially fraudulent spending tabled.

His treatment, he contends, was the direct result of his attempts to save the Pentagon money and identify potential contract fraud, which brought him into conflict with the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer. It was a conflict that ended dramatically, he says, when shortly after he emailed senior Pentagon officials about potential fraud, details about his travel records and his demotion were published in the press.

Assad, who is now retired, says the issues he brought up involved potentially billions of dollars in waste and fraud, and still aren’t being addressed. It’s a claim that’s backed up by multiple interviews conducted by Yahoo News with Assad and those who worked with him at the Pentagon, as well as by documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

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The Pentagon’s senior leadership, many of whom came directly from the senior leadership of defense companies, are only making the problem worse, Assad argues. “There’s a lot of inappropriate pricing going on by major companies dealing with the Department of Defense, and there is an inherent conflict of interest when you have people coming in from industry,” he said.

While the Pentagon, in response to detailed questions, objected broadly to the notion of any ethics violations, it declined to comment on Assad or his specific allegations, other than to argue over the scale of the potential contract fraud. Documents obtained by Yahoo News showed that the amount of overcharges identified to date by Pentagon auditors, who reviewed a relatively small sampling of contracts, is close to $900 million.

Assad isn’t alone in his concerns. Before his death, John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, railed against the defense industry’s influence on the Pentagon and expressed concerns about the appointment of Patrick Shanahan, a Boeing executive, to the No. 2 spot in the Defense Department. More recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, expressed similar concerns when Mark Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist, was nominated to the top job in the Pentagon.

Assad has his own description of what’s taking place inside the Defense Department. “It’s kind of like the fox is in the chicken coop,” he said…

In January 2018, Lord called Assad to her office to vent her frustration with the inconsistent performance of major defense firms. She said she wanted to find a way to get better results from defense companies — a message that was frequently repeated by the president. “I said, ‘Sure, you impact their cash flow, you’ll get their attention to whatever you think is important,’” Assad recalled telling her. “If you tell companies their cash flow is dependent on it, they will respond.”

 
 

Assad’s proposal had to do with what are known as progress payments, or periodic payments made to contractors in order to alleviate their operating costs. The Pentagon hadn’t conducted a comprehensive assessment of its contract financing policies in three decades. Since that time, interest rates had plummeted to a historic low, which meant the Pentagon was perhaps fronting too much money to companies. It was an area, Assad believed, that was ripe for reform.

“We have been mostly overpaying these companies in the program’s payment,” Assad said. “By overpayment, if you went back to the original rule in the mid-1980s, it was based on having an interest rate of about 12.5 percent.”

At a meeting in late February 2018, Assad said he briefed his plan to reform progress payments to Lord as well as to Eric Chewning, head of the Pentagon’s industrial policy office, and Kevin Fahey, assistant secretary for acquisition. Assad explained that his plan would tie progress payments to company performance, rather than stages of production process. The progress payment rate is set at 80 percent of total costs of delivering on a contract, and Assad wanted to reduce that to a base rate of 50 percent.

Assad recalls that Lord approved of the proposal, and they agreed not to discuss it with industry until after Congress was briefed. Over the next few months, Assad held a host of briefings on the rule with representatives of various branches of the armed forces and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. There were, he said, no objections to the rule.

But by August, though the rule had been approved by the OMB, Assad said he still hadn’t gotten approval from Lord, despite his multiple requests, to speak to Congress. Nonetheless, on Aug. 24, 2018, the proposed rule was published in the Federal Register.

Defense companies were outraged…

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deep state media

It’s Always About Control

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A Better Question Might Be Who Are They Paying And For What.

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2019

If Russia hacked

 

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Just as Iraq begins to find peace, it once again becomes the battleground for an American proxy war | The Independent

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2019

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iraq-us-iran-israel-proxy-war-middle-east-peace-abu-alaa-al-walai-shia-a9123436.html

Baghdad is full of new restaurants and shops and the streets are thronged with people until late at night. But many Iraqis wonder how long this will last if the US-Iran confrontation escalates into a shooting war

People in Baghdad are fearful that the next war between the US and Iran will take place in Iraq, which is only just returning to peace after the defeat of Isis. Alarm that Iraq will be sucked into such a conflict has increased here because of recent Israeli drone attacks on the bases of the Iraqi paramilitary group known as the Hashd al-Shaabi, which is accused by the US and Israel of acting as a proxy of Iran.

“The new development is that Israel has entered the conflict in Iraq,” says Abu Alaa al-Walai, the leader of Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, a militant Shia paramilitary movement with ties to Iran, speaking in an exclusive interview with The Independent in Baghdad. He says that three Israeli drones attacked one of his bases in the Iraqi capital, called al-Saqr, on 12 August, leading to the explosion of 50 tons of weaponry. The Israelis confirm that they carried out the raid, which was preceded by several others, claiming that they hit Iranian missiles on their way to Syria and Lebanon.

It is the likelihood of US complicity in the Israeli action which could provoke a political crisis in Iraq. Abu Alaa says that an unpublished Iraqi government report on the attack reveals that the Israeli drones were launched from a US base called Kassad in Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria. “Iraqi radar tracked one out of three of the drones travelling at 140km before, during and after the attack,” he says.

US policy in the Middle East is notoriously incoherent and contradictory under President Trump, but allowing Israel to make pin-prick attacks from a US base against the Hashd looks peculiarly like self-destruction from an American point of view. It has already led to a bill passing through the Iraqi parliament demanding the withdrawal of US forces from the country.

Asked if Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada would attack US forces, if there is a war between the US and Iran, Abu Alaa replies: “Absolutely, yes”. He expresses enthusiasm for drone warfare, saying that the successful drone assault on the Saudi oil facilities on 14 September makes battlefields more equal for groups like his own. “We are working day and night to develop drones that can be put together in a living room,” he says…

There are good reasons for them to be worried: US and Saudi authority in the Middle East has been damaged by Iranian-inspired attacks – the Iranian modus operandi is normally to act through others – on oil tankers in the Gulf, a high-flying US drone, and the Saudi oil industry. So far, Mr Trump has not thought it is in the US’s interest to hit back, but he cannot indefinitely absorb this kind of punishment without looking weak.

Iraq is one place where the US and its allies could try to retaliate and their main target is likely to be the Hashd. This could in turn provoke attacks on US bases which look vulnerable in the age of the drone. Iraqis dread the idea of another military conflict, but they fear it may in any case be heading in their direction.

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?u=https1.bp.blogspot.com-N5KeHtWp0VoWPk9_EDQBHIAAAAAAAB9bgzrYtrOntm10oXbjMPGjqKRsOiCBHc0deACLcBs160011warmongers.png&f=1&nofb=1

 

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A Picture (of a War Crime) Is Worth a Thousand Words – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2019

“I want no prisoners, I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.”
– General Jacob Smith to subordinates on Samar Island during the Philippine-American War (1902)

https://original.antiwar.com/danny_sjursen/2019/09/30/a-picture-of-a-war-crime-is-worth-a-thousand-words/

As U.S. induced Afghan civilian casualties spiked this month (and year), few Americans noticed these veritable atrocities. This wasn’t always the case. Consider the Philippine War.

by

US soldiers pose with Filipino Moro dead after the First Battle of Bud Dajo, March 7, 1906, Jolo, Philippines

Not so long ago, in November 2010, I took command of B Troop, 4th Squadron, 4th US Cavalry in a ceremony at Fort Riley, Kansas. It was, for me, a proud day. Army officers are taught to revel in their unit’s history, and the 4th Cavalry Regiment had a long, storied past indeed. On that cool, late fall day, the squadron’s colors – a flag with battle streamers – fluttered. One read: Bud Dajo, Philippine Islands – a reference to one of the regiment’s past battles. The unit crest pictured on the flag and pinned on our uniforms included a volcano and a kris – the traditional wavy-edged sword of the regiment’s Moro opponents in the Philippines – but hardly a trooper in the formation knew a thing about that war, battle, or the 4th Cavalry’s sordid past in the islands.

Bud Dajo was hardly a battle at all. It was a massacre. Some 1,000 Moro separatists, including their families, who opposed the US military occupation of Jolo Island, had fled to the crest of a volcano to avoid American conquest and retribution. Then, from 5-8 March 1906, the 4th Cavalry, along with other army formations, bombarded the overmatched Moros – few had firearms at all – then rushed the summit. The Moro men fought desperately and managed to inflict some 20 deaths on the charging American troopers, but they’d never stood a chance. Reaching the volcanic top, the cavalrymen fired down into the crater until all but six defenders and occupants were dead, a 99% casualty rate. The victorious troopers then proudly posed for a photograph, standing above the dead – which included hundreds of women and children – as though they were naught but big game trophies on a safari hunt…

Back home in the states, many prominent consciences were indeed shocked by the massacre, and, in particular, the trophy photo taken by the victorious troopers. The image flooded the papers, the 1906 version of going viral…

The photograph also galvanized African-American civil rights activists. W.E.B. Du Bois declared the crater image to be “the most illuminating I’ve ever seen,” and considered displaying it on his classroom wall “to impress upon the students what wars and especially wars of conquest really means.”

Nothing even approaching that level of intellectual outrage exists now, as the American Empire spreads its tentacles the world over. Few public intellectuals – to the extent that endangered species even exists these days – even notice the extent of their nation’s ongoing war crimes in the Greater Middle East. Take Afghanistan, for example, the only war longer than the American debacle in the Philippines. After 18 indecisive and bloody years of combat, the US military and its Afghan allies now kill more civilians annually than the vicious Taliban. That ought to be cause for pause, reflection, concern. Only it isn’t, not in Washington, not even in most universities. We’re a long way from Du Bois posting the Bud Dajo picture on his classroom wall…

So consider this modest piece of mine, this brief history lesson and connection to contemporary US empire, a plea of sorts to the teachers of America. Want to be a true patriot, a forceful educator, and decent human being? Well, do your students a favor: post the photos of recent US military airstrikes upon civilians in Afghanistan – the war crimes of the 21st century – on your classroom walls. Du Bois, and Twain, would be proud…and that’s hardly bad intellectual company to keep…

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Men carry the coffin of one of the victims after a drone strike that killed 30 pine nut farmers in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, 19 September 2019

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Trump and Libertarians – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/10/laurence-m-vance/libertarians-and-trump/

By

I have never been a member of the Libertarian Party. I don’t vote, so I’ve never voted for the Libertarian Party candidate in any presidential election. If I did vote, I would have probably clamped my nose in a vice and voted for Donald Trump before I would have voted for the pathetic 2016 Libertarian Party ticket of Gary Johnson and William Weld.

I don’t believe anything—no matter how good it sounds—that comes out of the mouth of any politician, and especially those who run for president. I don’t even get excited if they say “zero tariffs, zero subsidies, zero non-tariff barriers” because they will say whatever they think people want to hear if they think it will increase their chances of getting elected.

Donald Trump is no exception. I was never part of the “Libertarians for Trump” movement (but neither am I a member of the “never Trumpers”). I took every “good” thing Trump said during his presidential campaign with a truckload of salt. Now that Trump has been in office for over half of his term, I think it should be clear that Trump has been a disaster for liberty and limited government…

It is a myth that Trump has cut the number of federal employees. The federal leviathan is as big, as powerful, and as intrusive as ever. Have any federal assets been sold?…

Although Trump talked about reducing the national debt during his presidential campaign, that debt now exceeds $22 trillion and is expected to reach $23 trillion by the end of 2019. By the end of Trump’s first term, he will have added over $5 trillion to the national debt…

Trump is said to have cut federal regulations. To give credit where credit is due, I believe he has rescinded some of President Obama’s regulations. But what major federal regulations has Trump cut? No one ever lists them. The federal government still regulates every facet of American life from the amount of water that toilets are allowed to flush to the size of holes in Swiss cheese.

Trump’s tax cut “is also undoubtedly the smallest, not the biggest, individual tax cut in history,” according to David Stockman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (1981–1985) under President Ronald Reagan. And don’t forget that Trump’s individual tax cuts are only temporary. Trump should be praised, however, for getting the corporate tax rate permanently cut. But not, of course, for increasing refundable tax credits, a form of welfare.

Americans still live in a virtual police state. If you have any doubt, then just see the many articles on this by John Whitehead that regularly appear on this website.

The federal war on drugs continues unabated. Has the budget of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) been cut? Have any of its employees been laid off? True, Trump commuted the life sentence of drug trafficker Alice Johnson. But over 2,000 federal prisoners are serving life sentences for nonviolent drug crimes…

Trump has been absolutely horrible on foreign policy. U.S. soldiers are still dying in Afghanistan. U.S. troops still occupy hundreds of foreign military bases and are still stationed in over 150 countries. The United States has never been closer to war with Iran. Trump has brought home from North Korea the bodies of some dead U.S. soldiers, but not one living U.S. soldier has been brought home from some country where he has no business being…

Trump’s trade policies have been an absolute disaster for the economy. Trump is an ignorant protectionist and economic nationalist, through and through…

The United States may now be the world’s top oil producer, but it hasn’t resulted in something far more important—U.S. disengagement from the Middle East…

Crumbs indeed are what we are getting from Donald Trump as far as liberty and limited government are concerned. Trump may be “better” than Hillary, Obama, and Bush, but not by enough to cheer him.

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aipac

 

 

 

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Dems want to impeach a president for trying to expose a crime, then elect the person who actually committed the crime – NaturalNews.com

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2019

https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-09-30-dems-want-impeach-president-exposing-crime-elect-the-criminal.htmlby:

by:

Dems want to impeach a president for trying to expose a crime, then elect the person who actually committed the crime

Monday, September 30, 2019 by:
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Image: Dems want to impeach a president for trying to expose a crime, then elect the person who actually committed the crime

(Natural News) For the first two years of President Trump’s administration, Democrats and their sycophant allies in the fake news media and the Deep State hamstrung him with a phony “Russian collusion” scandal.

On top of that, the Trump White House was also beset by an ongoing coup attempt known as “Spygate.” Launched by the Obama regime, Spygate involved some of the highest-ranking officials in the FBI, intelligence community, and Justice Department who, together with their Dear Leader, weaponized and politicized one government institution after another to throw a duly-elected president out of office.

Spygate has since been exposed and those who were involved in it are being scrutinized by Attorney General William Barr, U.S. Attorney John Durham, and others within the Trump administration who are attempting to bring some semblance of trust and respect back to these institutions.

But the coup attempt continues and unless Barr and Co. get off their duffs and start indicting guilty parties, the deep state is going to succeed.

The conspirators have shifted away from Spygate and Russian collusion to UkraineGate, accusing President Trump last week of doing something improper in attempting to enlist the Kiev government in his administration’s efforts to get to the bottom of the greatest political scandal ever committed in America.

You may have read that Democrats are once again beating the impeachment drum — as if they ever stopped from the moment Trump won the presidency — because they say Trump engaged in a quid pro quo with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Specifically, they claim Trump threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless Zelensky agreed to help expose corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

According to a transcript of the phone call between Trump and Zelensky released by the White House, the president did no such thing. In fact, Zelensky himself has said publicly that Trump never pressured him to do anything.

In reality, it was Joe Biden who threatened to withhold aid from a previous Ukrainian president. And by every indication, it appears he did it to protect his son…

Except the current occupant of the White House didn’t do anything wrong. Biden, on the hand, admitted he intervened on behalf of his son.

The former VP can be seen on video at an event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations last year admitting he threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko unless the latter fired the government’s prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating corruption tied to a gas firm called Burisma. (Related: UNCOVERED: Ukraine ‘whistleblower’ is an anti-Trump Deep State CIA employee who used fake news reports to lodge complaint.)

The company just so happened to have had Hunter Biden as one of its board members — at $50,000 per month.

Biden has, of course, claimed that he never did anything to help protect his son — though, again, he’s on video admitting what he did.

Democrats know this. They’ve not only seen the video, they know Joe Biden.

The Democrat-aligned “Mainstream” media knows this. They know Biden and they, too, have seen the video. All the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders know too, but they’re political partisans so they refuse to criticize Biden.

And yet, Democrats want to impeach President Trump, who was actually trying to get to the bottom of corruption and criminal behavior while trying to elect a guy president who is guilty of corruption and abuse of power.

Only in America is something like this even remotely possible. You just can’t make this up.

 

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Ukraine Opens Investigation Into Company Hunter Biden ...

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Student Debt Cancellation: A Good Idea AND a Political Hoax, by Steve Penfield – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2019

http://www.unz.com/article/student-debt-cancellation-a-good-idea-and-a-political-hoax/

Debt Cancellation will come whether we like it or not. So it’s in everyone’s interest to develop a sensible plan that liberates the (mostly) innocent and assigns responsibility where appropriate.

There are certain moments in history where each person—and eventually the larger community—must decide which path to follow, ultimately leading us in vastly different directions. With the U.S. student debt fiasco now approaching $1.6 trillion and 45 million borrowers, we seem to be rapidly advancing towards such a moment.

At present, one of the biggest problems regarding the student loan debacle is the dismal nature of the polarized “debate.” Not just on debt relief, but on the many dysfunctions of the college system and its financing mechanisms as well.

On one side, we have free-lunch Democrats that want to “give” everything away in order to buy votes and seize control of higher education; their Debt Forgiveness schemes merely dump liabilities onto taxpayers and give banks and colleges a free pass. Republicans and conservatives, meanwhile, prefer to lecture students on the morality of paying your bills, while forgetting that students didn’t create the corrupt system of mandatory college or its skyrocketing costs. That came from “responsible” adults. And both sides insist that federal involvement in all levels of learning is essential.

Since Debt Cancellation is one of those explosive topics that can lead to partisan bickering and empty sloganeering, I should start by saying that I disagree with nearly everything that BOTH official sides are saying. After much searching, I was able to find a few sensible voices in the wilderness as detailed and expanded upon later. But at this point, anything rational or productive on this issue remains strictly forbidden in the mainstream press, which strongly favors centralized banking and collective education, preferably sold in easily digestible sound-bites.

Taking a broader approach to this looming decision, the major themes of this essay are:

  • Weak Arguments against Debt Cancellation from the ‘Right’
  • Weak Arguments for Debt Cancellation and ‘Free’ College from the ‘Left’
  • Winners and Losers of Honest Debt Forgiveness

I’ll try to fill in some related gaps along the way, mainly to address entrenched ideologies on overall education and financing.

My conclusions are: 1) people can learn quite well without federal involvement and the suffocating strings attached, 2) after over a century of massive (over 2,000%) inflationary stresses, Americans could benefit from an overdue Inflation Dividend, and 3) student Debt Cancellation will come whether we like it or not, so it’s in everyone’s interest to develop a sensible debt re-structuring plan that liberates the (mostly) innocent and assigns responsibility where appropriate. As for culpability, I’m talking about banks and colleges, not taxpayers.

For demographics, I don’t mind saying that I turned 50 this year and never had any debt from college when I graduated in 1991, back when state school in New York was pretty cheap. I work in the private sector and find time to research and write on the side, among other things.

Washington Orthodoxy: Education Must Be Centrally Controlled

With “education” becoming increasingly politicized over the last century, it’s hard to find valuable information through the haze of overt and subtle misinformation. As usual, if you follow the money it leads back to a common theme. Total government spending for combined federal, state and local levels (K through college) came to a staggering $1.1 trillion for FY2019. That enormous pot of “free” gold comes with heavy strings attached and influences nearly all modern decisions on the topic of learning.

First of all, both parties in Washington and at the State capitols almost unanimously view individual learning as a group decision. Proceeding from that bias, public schools in America have become burdened with licensing restrictions, teacher credentials and accreditation requirements to justify accessing their “fair” share of public funds. Read the rest of this entry »

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Something Is Wrong: The Fed Is Offering $100 Billion A Day In Loans To Unnamed Banks

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2019

https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/something-is-wrong-the-fed-is-offering-100-billion-a-day-in-loans-to-unnamed-banks_09302019

Mac Slavo

The Federal Reserve is once again secretly shelling out trillions of dollars in the dark, while Congress willingly looks the other way.  In other words, the central bank has initiated a replay of the 2007-2010 financial crisis.

You can call it QE4 if you want, or don’t call it QE4.  What it’s labeled isn’t as important as what it’s doing. Arguing semantics is not going to change the outcome.  The central bank is injecting $100 billion per day into the financial markets.  Any label on that cannot hide the fact that if this economy was doing well or was “robust” than there wouldn’t be a need for any of this.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York first initiated its emergency overnight loans to Wall Street this year on Tuesday, September 17, starting off at the rate of $75 billion daily. It then increased its loans by adding, in addition to the $75 billion daily, 14-day term loans in the amount of $30 billion to be offered three times this past week. But after the demand for the first 14-day loan was more than double the $30 billion offered, the New York Fed boosted the next term loans to $60 billion and increased its overnight loans to $100 billion. –Wall Street on Parade

This mirrors the Great Recession of a decade ago.  When the Fed is secretly handing out money to banks at low rates to bail them out, you’ve got a repeat of the previous crisis. It’s hard to say, however, if this crisis will be worse than the last one. And simple math tells you that something is very wrong…

Be seeing you

Wumo Collection: Something is Wrong Hard Cover 1 (Andrews ...

 

 

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