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The Fed Is Making It Up as It Goes, So It Ditched Forward Guidance

Posted by M. C. on July 30, 2022

https://mises.org/wire/fed-making-it-it-goes-so-it-ditched-forward-guidance

The fact the Fed has no idea how things will go is emphasized by Powell’s admission that the Fed isn’t planning to offer any more forward guidance this year, which frees it up to make more last-minute decisions and to more aggressively make things up as it goes. Specifically, Powell said that moving forward “we think it’s time to just go to a meeting by meeting basis, and not provide the kind of clear guidance that we did on the way to neutral.”

Translation: “Things might go even more off the rails at any time, so let’s just play it by ear.”

Ryan McMaken

The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee announced Wednesday it is raising its key policy rate—the federal funds rate—by 75 basis points to 2.5 percent. According to the FOMC’s press release, the committee recognizes that economic activity is declining but that Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation also “remains elevated”:

Recent indicators of spending and production have softened. Nonetheless, job gains have been robust in recent months, and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation remains elevated, reflecting supply and demand imbalances related to the pandemic, higher food and energy prices, and broader price pressures.

The committee goes on to state that with these conditions in mind, it will raise the target rate in order to “achieve … [CPI] inflation at the rate of 2 percent over the longer run.” Moreover, the committee states it “will continue reducing its holdings of Treasury securities and agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities.”

There were not many surprises here. Most Fed watchers were predicting a 75 basis point increase, and that’s what the Fed delivered.

This then leaves us with the question of what now. The Fed doesn’t know, and the weakness of the present economy will keep the Fed very cautious moving forward.

As is clear from Powell’s press conference Wednesday, following the release of the FOMC statement, the Fed is still holding out hope for a “soft landing” in which it can significantly reduce inflation without sizably reducing employment or causing a greatly weakened economy.

How the economy will react to the Fed’s changes remains a complete mystery to the Fed, however, as has long been clear. It only took six weeks, after all, for the Fed to go from a stance of “economic activity appears to have picked up” (at the June meeting) to noting how “recent indicators of spending and production have softened” (in its July report).

See the rest here

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Too Secret? The Secret Service’s Long, Troubling History of Omerta

Posted by M. C. on July 30, 2022

Before the text messages’ convenient disappearance, the agency also trashed records related to the JFK assassination.

 But we must ask ourselves: Do we have the right people — with the right skills and temperament — to perform these vital tasks? 

By Russ Baker
Going Deep

https://russbaker.substack.com/p/too-secret-the-secret-services-long?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The conduct of the Secret Service during the January 6 Capitol attack was highly confusing, but the ongoing kerfuffle over its erratic behavior elides one consistent fact: Our modern-day Praetorian Guard has long been a problematic institution.

As I wrote last week, although the Secret Service’s actions around the JFK assassination were most egregiously suspect, the history of our elected officials’ bodyguards is riddled with scandal and incompetence. Despite this, the agency itself — with its more than $2 billion annual budget — has never been seriously investigated or called out for its failings. And it’s naive to believe that the ongoing and widening text message scandal will change this sad status quo.

In apparent violation of agency policy, as many as 10 agents on the security details of Donald Trump and Mike Pence may have sent text messages on or before the Capitol riots on January 5 and 6, 2021, only to either delete them or to have the agency conveniently “lose” them when they were requested by Congress. Only one message was turned over to the January 6 committee.

Joseph Cuffari, the Trump-appointed inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, has opened a criminal investigation, but since Cuffari may have known about the vanishing texts months before he told Congress, several top Congressional Democrats are asking him to recuse himself. Meanwhile, top agents and security officials — including Anthony Ornato, who was a top aide in the Trump White House while still carrying a Secret Service badge — have lawyered up. (Ornato is still assistant director of training at the agency, “responsible for the oversight, administration, policies, and forecasting of required training and professional development for all Secret Service personnel.”)

This is all highly suspicious, so much so that there are calls for the Biden administration to appoint an outsider to clean house. “You cannot fix this agency from within,” said CNN analyst Juliette Kayyem, an Obama-era DHS official. Even The Washington Post smells a rat. “Maybe the secret service is incompetent,” the Washington establishment’s paper of record wrote July 23, “or maybe there’s something fouler afoot.”

The text messages matter because they could reveal crucial insider details about Donald Trump’s intentions and state of mind on January 6. They could be vital to a criminal indictment and prosecution of the former president — so one easy explanation for the missing messages is that the Secret Service, which has always played favorites with the presidents it’s supposed to protect, is covering for Trump.

That’s consistent with the school of thought that the Secret Service is riddled with Trump acolytes, but the full picture is more complicated. Vice President Mike Pence’s detail, for example, apparently feared for their lives or at least their safety on January 6. Pence appears to have feared for his.

And yet, if members of the Secret Service are covering for Trump or participated in an aborted coup, how do you square that with the bizarre, disturbing, and inconsistent image of Trump trying to wrest control of the presidential limousine when his security detail told him he would not be joining the mob outside (and inside) the Capitol? (And how do we square that with the fact that Ornato himself, via Cassidy Hutchinson, was the source for that anecdote? If Ornato was part of some plot to keep Trump in power, did he have second thoughts — and if so, why?)

In an ideal situation, high-level security jobs require rigor, competency, and fearlessness. The possibility has occurred to me that one reason Trump’s protectors may have destroyed those messages is what they might have revealed about their own inadequacy for the task at hand. As well as their candid thoughts about what was happening, including Trump’s role in the chaos.

Read the Whole Article

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Subsidizing Hate: The FBI’s Role in Revitalizing the Aryan Nations

Posted by M. C. on July 30, 2022

“We’d go out shooting with [the FBI informant] and he funded many of our trips to Aryan Nations in Idaho. He was always loaded with a lot of money, always had $100 bills on him,” the former Aryan Nations member told Painting. “Anything we wanted, [the informant] had the cash. He drove to Aryan Nations with us in the summer of ’94.”

by Ken Silva

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/subsidizing-hate-the-fbis-role-in-revitalizing-the-aryan-nation/

When reading the recently released book on racist extremism, “A History of Hate in Ohio,” I was struck by a statistic about the growth of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations between the time of the Waco massacre in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing two years later.

“In 1993 Aryan Nations was present in only three states. As Klanwatch reported in March 1995, Aryan Nations staged an alarming comeback in 1994,” write authors Michael Brooks and Bob Fitrakis. “Aided by money from the Aryan Republican Army [a domestic terrorist group that committed numerous armed robberies], the Idaho-based group swept into 15 states, including Ohio, in 1994, and ended up in 30 states by 1995.”

This statistic went against my understanding of the Aryan Nations, which was a notorious white supremacist organization in the 1980s, but whose members were mostly dead, dying, or neck-deep in legal woes by the 90s.

What could have accounted for the resurgence? While incidents such as Ruby Ridge and Waco inflamed anti-government sentiment, why would they revitalize a neo-Nazi organization that, by all accounts, was largely irrelevant by that time?

I asked historian Wendy Painting, author of the 2016 doctoral thesis-turned-book “Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh.”

In response to my question, Painting provided me with an excerpt of an interview she conducted with former Aryan Nations head of security John Bangerter, who explained that the FBI flooded the organization with cash in 1994, the year of its resurgence.

“That’s just the way it was at that time. We were infiltrated. We knew it and we always used that to our advantage. It was normal to have to deal with that. We didn’t stop talking to them, we talked to them more to try to feed them as much disinformation as we could,” the former Aryan Nations security head, who has long since disavowed his racial ideologies, told Painting. “Plus, we kept them close for the money. We always got money from them. They paid for everything. They handed out stacks of money like it was paper.”

See the rest here

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Online Event: Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters in Support of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

Posted by M. C. on July 30, 2022

by Scott Horton

antiwar.com

On the 8th of August at 3:00 Eastern, Roger Waters will be joined by retired U.S. Army major Todd Pierce in an event to support Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and his resistance to being extradited to the U.S. on bogus espionage charges.

RSVP here.

The event is sponsored by:

Project for the Study of American Militarism,
World BEYOND War,
Women Against Military Madness,
CODE PINK,
Veterans For Peace,
Andy Worthington,
Mondoweiss,
Just Peace Advocates/Mouvement Pour Une Paix Juste,
Antiwar.com,
RootsAction.org.

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Student Loan Crisis: It Couldn’t Have Happened Without The Fed

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2022

When government claims that it’s going to make something (anything) “more affordable” or “more accessible” … watch out! Their attempt to tilt the tables in a certain direction always backfires. It ends up ultimately hurting those who they intended to help. There are countless examples, but on today’s program, we discuss how the government (and Fed) created the student loan mess.

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Watch “Steve Vai – “Knappsack”” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2022

https://youtu.be/aMjmjXHJoPg

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What you can’t say

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2022

https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/whatyoucantsay?e=fa1aba8cd8

Years ago my friend Michael Malice told me about Paul Graham’s essay “What You Can’t Say,” and said the ideas in it had influenced him quite a bit.

Well, I finally got around to reading it, and I see what he means.

Here’s a passage I like:

Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think what you’re told.

The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. 

And that’s pretty unlikely, isn’t it?

This passage reminds me of the challenge that Professor Robert George poses to his students at Princeton. He asks them: how many of you, in 1840, would have been abolitionists?

Of course all their hands go up. Why, they would all have been abolitionists, silly!

And George says to them, in effect: I don’t believe you.

Approximately two percent of northerners were abolitionists. And yet everyone in George’s classes would have been among them. What are the odds!

His point is: it’s easy to say now that you would have been an abolitionist, when that is the opinion of everyone. It would have been hard to be one in 1840, when you would have been shunned.

And how many times, he asks, have you taken a position that caused you to lose friends, possibly your job, and become exceedingly unpopular? May I guess probably never?

So why am I supposed to believe you would have done so in 1840?

What we have is a very large population that considers itself brave for believing what all right-thinking people are expected to believe. Meanwhile, they condemn anyone who has the genuine bravery to stand against the crowd.

Here’s an example of something you can’t say, or you’ll be shunned and ruined. Try arguing, in a woke HR indoctrination session at your company, that disparities in income among the races is not evidence of “discrimination.”

It won’t matter that Thomas Sowell smashed this woke argument in his books Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? and Discrimination and Disparities. Because none of this has to do with facts or reason.

Here’s the podcast episode I did on Graham’s essay and these topics:

Ep. 2166 What You Can’t Say

Now think about this:

There are things you can’t say in health — as we’ve seen with Big Tech suppression of dissident voices, and the Fauci/Collins collaboration against dissident scientists.

There are things — perfectly true things — you can’t say on the job.

Schoolteachers are going out of their way to teach things that are downright false.

The Biden Administration is redefining what a recession is, and its compliant media is dutifully spreading that redefinition.

This is Clown World, ladies and gentlemen.

And we either live in a world of lies, or we live by the truth.

That means withdrawing from the liars, and rallying to the truth-tellers.

And of course, those truth-tellers are the people you’ll hear from and have your life improved by inside my School of Life.

We reopen on Monday. Watch this space.

Tom Woods

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Ireland Joins Canada and the Netherlands in Contributing to World Famine

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2022

Fewer than 500 million people. The rest of us are extraneous and would be better as natural fertilizer than as living, breathing CO2 polluters. 

Are Klaus and Bill winning?

By Andrea Widburg
American Thinker

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/ireland_joins_canada_and_the_netherlands_in_contributing_to_world_famine.html

Thomas Malthus predicted that famine was the inevitable byproduct of agriculturally successful populations: A well-fed population would breed faster than the agricultural sector could grow. For him, that was an unavoidable tragedy. Modern leftist governments, though, have a new approach to this: They are forcing Malthusian famines by mandating fertilizer reductions and seizing farmers’ lands. It’s all part of the Great Reset that the New World Order of Klaus Schwab et al have planned for us: You’ll have nothing, including no food, while they live in their castles on the hill, insulated from the Hobbesian terrors they’ve created.

First, we heard about the complete collapse of the Sri Lankan government. That occurred because the government, anxious for the approval of the World Economic Fund and other green activists, decided to mandate organic farming practices. The world had entirely organic farming in the pre-modern era and there was a name for it: subsistence farming. That meant that farmers subsisted on the margin of famine, with a single bad growing season or blighted crop sufficient to destroy a society.

Next, we learned that farmers in the Netherlands were striking because the government announced that they must reduce their nitrogen output by 30%-70%, something that will destroy farms—and that the government is seizing farmland to ensure this reduction goes forward.

Up until now, Holland has been one of the preeminent food-producing countries in the world but the farmers’ own government seeks to end that. To add insult to injury, Geert Wilders published a letter showing that the government intends to use the expropriated land to house “asylum seekers.”

Two more countries are joining the list of countries with governments that are deliberately embracing famine. Despite the disruption in the world food supply because of the two years of COVID lockdowns, Justin Trudeau’s government is planning to implement a plan from 2020 that will see the country reduce its nitrous oxide emissions by 30% over the next ten years—and, preferably, to reduce them by 40-45%. The ministers in both Alberta and Saskatchewan have complained, noting that this will substantially reduce food production.

However, when it comes to food production, Canada has a plan: Bugs. The government has invested in a plan to produce 9000 metric tons annually of crickets for animal and human consumption. If it’s any consolation, the solons of the New World Order will also be eating bugs. After all, lobster really is kind of like the grasshopper of the sea, right?

Read the Whole Article

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From Bill Gates to “The Great Refusal”: Farmers on the Frontline

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2022

By Colin Todhunter

https://www.globalresearch.ca/from-bill-gates-great-refusal-farmers-frontline/5788011

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***

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most humans were engaged in agriculture. Our relationship with nature was immediate. Within just a few generations, however, for many people across the world, their link with the land has been severed.

Food now arrives pre-packaged (often precooked), preserved with chemicals and contains harmful pesticides, micro-plastics, hormones and/or various other contaminants. We are also being served a narrower menu of high-calorie food with lower nutrient content.

It is clear that there is something fundamentally wrong with how modern food is produced.

Although, there are various stages between farm and fork, not least modern food processing practices, which is a story in itself, a key part of the problem lies with agriculture.

Today, many farmers are trapped on chemical and biotech treadmills. They have been encouraged and coerced into using a range of costly off-farm inputs, from synthetic fertilisers and corporate-manufactured seeds to a wide array of weedicides and pesticides.

With the industrialisation of agriculture, many poor, smallholder farmers have been deskilled and placed into vulnerable positions. Traditional knowledge has been undermined, overwhelmed or has survived only in fragments.

Writing in the Journal of South Asian Studies in 2017, Marika Vicziany and Jagjit Plahein state that farmers have for millennia taken measures to manage drought, grow cereals with long stalks that can be used as fodder, engage in cropping practices that promote biodiversity, ethno-engineer soil and water conservation and make use of collective sharing systems.

Farmers knew their micro-environment, so they could plant crops that mature at different times, thereby facilitating more rapid crop rotation without exhausting the soil.

Experimentation and innovation were key. Two terms modern agritech/agribusiness corporations lay claim to, but something farmers have been doing for generations.

Many farmers also used ‘insect equilibrium’ and their knowledge of which insects kill crop-predator pests. Food and policy analyst Devinder Sharma says he has met women in India who can identify 110 non-vegetarian and 60 vegetarian insects.

Complex, highly beneficial traditional knowledge systems and on-farm ecological practices are being eroded as farmers lose control over their productive means and become dependent on proprietary products, including commodified corporate knowledge.

Farmers in places like the Netherlands are now being blamed for harming the environment due to carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions. Although Dutch farmers are taking flak, what we are also seeing is an attack on large feed and meat producers. There are not many small farms left in the Netherlands and most animal farms are concentrated feeding operations.

The Netherlands’ farming sector is highly livestock intensive and there seems to be a policy to reduce the size of the meat industry in that country. Farmers have been told to get out of farming or shift to growing crops.

Instead of the authorities facilitating a gradual shift towards organic, agroecological agriculture and attract a new generation to the sector, farmers are in danger of being displaced.

But Dutch farmers are not the only ones in the firing line. Farmers in other European nations are also protesting because various policies make it increasingly difficult for them to make a living.

There seems to be a concerted effort to make farming financially non-viable for many farmers and  remove them from their land. The farmer protests in Europe follow in the wake of massive resistance by Indian farmers against corporate-backed legislation that would have seen an accelerated drive to push many already financially distressed farmers out of farming.

Farmer Bill  

The biggest owner of private farmland in the US – Bill Gates – has a vision for farming: a chemical-dependent, corporate-dependent, one-world agriculture (Ag One initiative) to facilitate the global supply chains of conglomerates. This initiative is side-lining indigenous knowledge and practices in favour of corporate knowledge and a further colonisation of global agriculture.

Gates’s corporatisation of smallholder agriculture is packaged in philanthropic terms –  ‘helping’ farmers in places like Africa and India. It has not worked out well so far if we turn to the Gates-backed Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), established in 2006.

See the rest here

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Fmr. Greenpeace President Dr. Patrick Moore Says the Elites Have a ‘Suicide Pact’ to Reduce the World’s Population

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2022

“We’re now facing a situation where a huge number of very powerful organizations and elites at an international and at national levels are calling for policies that are basically a suicide pact. Basically a death wish of some sort.”

Full Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rn3zdpMB8k

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