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How Much Better Society Would Be If Government Followed The Constitution
Posted by M. C. on January 26, 2023
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Constitution, Government, society | Leave a Comment »
What If the Davos Agenda Has Already Been Defeated? | The Libertarian Institute
Posted by M. C. on January 26, 2023
WEF/NATO: “Weapons are the way to peace”
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/what-if-the-davos-agenda-has-already-been-defeated/
by Tom Luongo
DAVOS/SWITZERLAND, 27JAN11 – George Soros, Chairman, Soros Fund Management, USA, is captured during the session ‘Redesigning the International Monetary System: A Davos Debate’ at the Annual Meeting 2011 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 27, 2011. Copyright by World Economic Forum swiss-image.ch/Photo by Michael Wuertenberg
In November 2021 I wrote a piece entitled “Have We Finally Reached Peak Davos?” This article was scarily spot on. When you’ve written as much as I have over the past five years, however, it’s easy to look back and point at how prescient you were.
Even if you’ve gotten a whole lotta stuff wrong, which I have.
That particular article, though, was nearly point-for-point correct in assessing the state of The Davos Crowd’s Great Reset project.
I wrote a Twitter thread about this the other day to pound the next few nails in Davos’ coffin before the opening of this year’s convocation of clueless globalists.
In this business the goal isn’t to get everything right but to be right more often than you’re wrong while spurring debate and conversation. This is how we crowdsource something close to the truth and/or steelman our own arguments in an endless quest for process improvement.
I wrote about that process recently and why it’s important to identify those who are still on that journey, those who are starting it, and those who are stuck in the morass of their own preconceptions.
Embrace and encourage the first two groups and question the ethics of those in the last.
Because in 2023 the mission is beginning to shift, from trying to forecast what these Cantillionaire midwits will do next to further assisting people in improving their data parsing abilities.
The more people that parse the Davos bullshit in real time, the less time they spend abreacting to it and using that saved time more productively to thwart Davos‘ plans.
So here we are as Davos 2023 winds down and it’s pretty obvious, watching the proceedings, that their entire edifice built on a crude admixture of psychopathy and hubris is tumbling down.
And it’s not only because more of us can see them for what they are, cheap communists in expensive suits, but because there are stark divisions forming within their own ranks.
The problem, however, for most of the committed Davosians is that they still live in the wine-and-cheese-filled amniotic sack of this Swiss Alps version of Oz. They don’t see the gathering storm barreling down the yellow brick road as anything more threatening than a single mosquito is to a cow.
As anyone who has lived in central Florida or studied its cattle industry knows, a few million mosquitos can exsanguinate a cow in a matter of days.
So, watching the proceedings at this year’s Davos was fascinating because, for the first time, the sheen was gone. Too many people were seeing the walls of the echo chamber for what they were; old, shabby, and drafty rather than having the veneer of wisdom that comes with age.
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How Equifax Became A Private IRS | ZeroHedge
Posted by M. C. on January 26, 2023
Equifax aggressively raises prices on the Work Number product line annually, and has, according to Begor, “already got our January 1, 2023 price increases in the market.” Long term, he says, “we have an ability to grow price well in excess of GDP.” This is fairly shocking stuff from a CEO, who should know better than to confess to monopolization. Only, it seems as if Begor wasn’t confessing, he was bragging.
BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, JAN 25, 2023 – 11:00 PM
Authored by Matt Stoller via BIG (emphasis ours),
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/how-equifax-became-private-irs
The movie The Big Short is about the housing crisis and its collapse, along with all the fraudulent activity up and down the financial system that abetted it. It is as much a cultural story as it is one about finance, a film about what banking corruption does to human beings and the law itself. In it, there’s a famous scene where fund investors betting on a housing collapse are trying to learn about the Florida housing market, and are interviewing some frat-boy type Florida real estate agents. The agents keep discussing their self-serving and illegal behavior, like falsifying paperwork or selling to people who knowingly can’t pay back loans. At a certain point, the main character asks his colleagues, ‘why are they confessing?’ to which the others respond, “they’re not confessing, they’re bragging.”
The point of this scene is to show that people in the industry during the housing bubble weren’t just breaking the law, but saw the law itself as irrelevant. Enforcement was so weak that those in finance and real estate would just openly brag about all the crime they were doing.
It was a true story. And it continues to be a true story in most white collar areas.
Late last year, the CEO of Equifax Mark Begor presented at a Goldman Sachs conference for investors, and openly told the investors how much market power his firm has in the business of selling income verification services to creditors. “We have meaningful pricing power,” he said, because “only Equifax has that income and employment data.” Equifax aggressively raises prices on the Work Number product line annually, and has, according to Begor, “already got our January 1, 2023 price increases in the market.” Long term, he says, “we have an ability to grow price well in excess of GDP.” This is fairly shocking stuff from a CEO, who should know better than to confess to monopolization. Only, it seems as if Begor wasn’t confessing, he was bragging.
Here’s the audio.
Still, why wouldn’t Begor brag to investors? Equifax’s controversial behavior is near-legendary. The firm is an important credit bureau, and credit data is exactly what we wouldn’t want to fall into the hands of hackers, who could then easily use it to engage in identity theft, en masse. But in 2017, Equifax had a massive scandal, one of the biggest data breaches in history, when it accidentally exposed the personal data of 147 million people. The Federal Trade Commission fined the company more than $575 million, and the CEO, CIO, and chief security officer were all forced out.
Yet the firm didn’t suffer any long-term reputation damage. And in all the hoopla around the scandal, there really wasn’t a lot of discussion about why that is, and how Equifax actually makes money. So looking at Begor’s braggadocio around the firm’s market power is useful. The product Begor told investors about at the Goldman Sachs confab is called The Work Number, which is a business line that bundles data about the incomes of hundreds of millions of people and sells it to interested parties, like lenders, landlords, employers, and government agencies. Payroll and data is by some estimates a $10 billion market, and now brings in a majority of the firm’s domestic revenue.
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Massive Corruption Scandal In Ukraine
Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2023
You can make a buck selling US taxpayer funded arms. I hear the Swiss real estate market is booming also.
https://rumble.com/v26ycwi-massive-corruption-scandal-in-ukraine.html
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“Chinese Aggression” Sure Looks An Awful Lot Like US Aggression
Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2023
It’s just taken as matter of fact when the US says it’s moving more and more war machinery into the waters around China as a defensive precaution to deter Chinese aggression. Because the narrative is coming from the most effective propaganda machine ever devised, we hear “No bro, the US is militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival on the other side of the planet defensively. Because like what if China tries to do something aggressive?”
Now you know why McCarthy’s approval was never in doubt.
Punchbowl News reports that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is planning a trip to Taiwan, which will be yet another incendiary provocation against Beijing if it occurs. The previous House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sparked a significant escalation in hostilities with her visit last year, the consequences of which are still reverberating today.
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explains:
Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was viewed in Beijing as a major provocation, and it sparked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around the island. The exercises included China firing missiles over Taiwan and simulating a blockade of the island, both unprecedented actions.
China has kept up the military pressure on Taiwan since Pelosi’s visit, and its warplanes regularly now cross the median line, an informal barrier that divides the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Before Pelosi’s trip, China barely crossed the line. Now, it’s an almost-daily occurrence.
Beijing views the US House speaker visiting Taiwan as an affront to the one-China policy and the understanding the US and China reached in 1979, when Washington severed formal relations with Taipei.
Report: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy Plans to Visit Taiwan Nancy Pelosi’s visit when she was House speaker provoked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around Taiwan by Dave DeCamp @DecampDave #Taiwan #China #KevinMcCarthy #Pelosi news.antiwar.com/2023/01/23/rep…
US-led provocations and escalations against China are becoming a regular occurrence, both from the US itself and from its imperial assets like Australia and Taiwan. Yet according to the western political/media class, the urgent threat of our day is “Chinese aggression”.
After the House of Representatives voted to approve the new Select Committee on China — a Republican initiative designed to increase internal pressure in the US government to ramp up the new cold war — the committee’s chairman Mike Gallagher put out a statement saying that it is “time to push back against the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression in bipartisan fashion.”
Gallagher is a particularly noxious warmonger who says urgent efforts must be made to stop China from “destroying the capitalist system led by the United States in order to make way for the triumph of world socialism with Chinese characteristics.” He advocates the “selective decoupling” from specific sectors of the Chinese economy and says the US is in “the early stages of a new cold war” against China. He advocates pouring weapons into Taiwan in much the same way the US did in the lead-up to its proxy war in Ukraine, and asserts that the US needs to be preparing for a direct hot war with China in the near future.
Gallagher’s hawkishness on China is quickly becoming the mainstream consensus position in the western political/media class as the US-centralized empire ramps up aggressions while continually complaining about Chinese aggression.
Rep. Gallagher Press Office @RepGallagher
The US empire has been increasingly positioning its war machinery around China since the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia” in ways that would have led to an immediate third world war if the roles were reversed, and its aggressions have escalated with each subsequent administration. Just in the last couple of months we’ve had news that the US is planning on returning to its Subic Bay base in the Philippines as part of its encirclement campaign against China, and also intends to station missile-armed marines along Japan’s Okinawa islands. The US is also reportedly working on building a network of missile systems on a chain of islands near the Chinese mainland, explicitly for the goal of countering China. The US and its allies have dramatically increased their naval presence in disputed waters near China, viewed as acts of aggression by Beijing.
None of this would be tolerated by the United States if China were openly moving its war machinery into adjacent areas with the stated goal of “countering the US”. If China were doing this, it would be a near-unanimous consensus throughout the western world that China was engaged in hostile provocations and was clearly the aggressor. Nobody would listen to China if it claimed it was militarily encircling the US for defensive purposes.
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Dailywire Article-Walmart Raises Minimum Wages As Worker Shortages Crunch Labor Market
Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2023
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has remarked that the workforce “participation gap” is largely a result of “excess retirements” that occurred beyond “what would have been expected from population aging alone,” even as younger cohorts largely return to the job market.
“Excess retirements” is government speak for people laid off due to worthless, disastrous government lockdowns and restrictions that have found other ways to survive.
Excess retirements reminds me of when our local government over regulated hospitals experience “excess receipts” yet still always seem to be in dire financial straits.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/walmart-raises-minimum-wages-as-worker-shortages-crunch-labor-market
By Ben Zeisloft
Walmart announced on Tuesday that the grocery and retail corporation will increase average wages for many associates as the job market witnesses a persistent shortage of labor supply.
Walmart U.S. CEO John Furner revealed in a memo that the company plans to implement raises in select stores such that rates are more appealing relative to competitors. Average pay for Walmart employees across the nation will now surpass $17.50 per hour.
“Starting next month, we’ll begin investing in higher wages for associates,” Furner wrote. “This includes a mixture of associates’ regular annual increases and targeted investments in starting rates for thousands of stores, to ensure we have attractive pay in the markets we operate.”
Walmart is one of the largest private sector employers in the United States; the company currently has 1.7 million domestic associates, according to the retailer’s website. The firm also announced the expansion of various programs related to education initiatives for employees, including an increase in the number of college degrees for which associates can be reimbursed.
Amazon, another leading private sector employer, likewise unveiled nationwide wage increases toward the end of last year: average hourly pay for employees in customer fulfillment and transportation are slated to increase above $19.00 per hour, with employees earning between $16.00 per hour and $26.00 per hour depending on their position and location in the United States, according to a press release from the e-commerce firm.
The wage increases occur as private and public sector employers struggle to hire.
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Laurels for Sanity on Ukraine – The American Conservative
Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2023
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/laurels-for-sanity-on-ukraine/
The world is fast approaching the one-year anniversary of Russia’s—awful, no-good—invasion of Ukraine. The tragedy was soon compounded by Western leaders and media warmongers taking a highly simplistic ideological approach to a complex conflict. Sobriety and restraint went out the window, as foreign policy establishments soon forgot the wreckage of Afghanistan and Iraq, and set out on a new proxy war—this time against the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and most valuable energy reserves.
Readers of this column, and this magazine, have already been treated to plenty able critiques of this approach. So it is worth taking a different tack now: by handing out laurels to the few dissident voices who, resisting enormous pressure to the contrary, have spoken out for realism and restraint and against mindless escalation over the past year.
First up, a laurel to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for recently hitting the breaks on deliveries of advanced artillery—specifically, the Leopard 2 tank—to Ukraine. Yes, it is true that Berlin won’t get in the way of others, such as Poland, dispatching the same hardware to the battle zone. But even this minor, and mostly symbolic, dilatory gesture on Scholz’s part suggests that there is some limit to how far the most important country on the Continent will go in fueling a Russo-European war.
And let us hand one to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, for pursuing a nimble strategy when his neighbors have given in to hysteria. Orbán and his nation are as wary as anyone else in Central and Eastern Europe of Russian imperialism. But Orbán doesn’t believe that the West can or should transform an intra-Slavic conflict into an all-out, ideological war. He has also warned that Europe can’t win an energy war against Russia—not without devastating her own industrial base and working class. As he told me in an interview in September, “If someone believes you can beat Russia, and change things in Moscow, it is a pure mistake.”
Closer to home, a laurel to Senator Josh Hawley, for questioning the seemingly limitless amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars his fellow lawmakers are prepared to spend on a proxy war against Moscow. In May, the Missouri populist voted no on a $40 billion package (since then the total aid has added up to some $100 billion). “This package,” he explained, “treats Ukraine as a client state of America, a fraught relationship that will put us on the hook for financing the war and then the reconstruction. If this isn’t a classic case of misplaced priorities, I don’t know what is.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Josh Hawley, Olaf Scholz, Sanity, Ukraine, Viktor Orbán | Leave a Comment »
The End of Reality Consensus Disorder – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2023
“We’ve quite literally outsourced the definition of reality to a small group of technocrats in nondescript offices whose names we’ll never know and who self-selected for issue advocacy and whose interests likely diverge severely from those of we the people.” –El Gato Malo on Substack
Elon Musk shocked the Twitterverse (and beyond) by confessing that he only took the vaxxes because international travel for business required it, and his second shot was a near-death experience (while his cousin developed myocarditis from it). Meanwhile, the UN issued a warning to him through a WEF mouthpiece, EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency, Vera Jourova: comply and regulate speech on the platform, or else….
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/01/james-howard-kunstler/the-end-of-reality-consensus-disorder/
The big annual World Economic Forum meet-up concluded last week with a mighty “So, What?” as the world struggled with some success to get its mind right after years of relentless WEF-inspired psy-ops. Own nothing… eat bugs… great re-set… yeah, right. These days, fewer sovereign individuals believe der Schwabenklaus bullshit about the necessity of becoming menials for the “fittest 0.1 percent” of mankind who comprise the WEF’s cabal of elite “strategic partners.” News reports pegged the attendance in Davos this year at a shocking mere half of invitees. Did the absentees quail at the risk of all being together in the same auditorium (what with all those drones and missiles available on the black market)? Or could they not find enough unvaccinated pilots to fly their private jets?
By no strange coincidence, one of the WEF’s most sadistic leadership implants, PM Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, dropped out of office the same week, declaring she had “no gas left in the tank.” Old George Orwell had a pretty keen eye for the arc of history, but it never occurred to him that Big Brother would turn out to be Big Sister. Ms. Ardern was the one who said of her regime, “We will continue to be your single source of truth… Unless you hear it from us it is not the truth.” Polls indicated her party would get thrashed in this year’s parliamentary election. Next door in equally vaxxed-to-the-max Australia, the government had to confess last week that the country had more Covid-19 deaths in the first half of January this new year than in all of 2021.
Europe is starting to emerge from its Covid coma, France especially, where disgruntled masses marched in the streets last week, evincing growing disgust with WEF poodle Emmanuel Macron. Germany, not so much. Is it possible they really haven’t learned anything from what went on 1933-1945? Great Britain, a basket-case of Woke double-think and economic tribulation, is crumbling over excess all-causes mortality and a public health officialdom addicted to lying. British doctors are in revolt against the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, the UK equivalent of the FDA.
A wake-up is underway in these sore-beset United States. It was no small thing, for instance, that former “vaccine” cheerleader, Scott Adams, the podcaster of the Dilbert comic strip fame, admitted pretty forthrightly that he was wrong about all that. “The thing that [the unvaxxed] don’t have to worry about is what I have to worry about: what happens with this vaccination five years from now? All my fancy analytics took me to a bad place.”
Elon Musk shocked the Twitterverse (and beyond) by confessing that he only took the vaxxes because international travel for business required it, and his second shot was a near-death experience (while his cousin developed myocarditis from it). Meanwhile, the UN issued a warning to him through a WEF mouthpiece, EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency, Vera Jourova: comply and regulate speech on the platform, or else….
We have the rules which must be complied with and otherwise there will be sanctions. I think that the confidence has been weakened, and I had quite a high level of confidence when it comes to Twitter. I have to say that we worked with knowledgeable people, with layers, with sociologists, who understood that they have to behave in some decent way. Not to cause really big harm to society…” she said.
Something tells me that Mr. Musk will invite these busybodies to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. As the Tweeter @BlackFlagExpat explained: “Musk can simply set up the server capacity outside of EU jurisdiction (UK, Andorra, Switz, Russia?) and move all data to those physical and virtual servers. Then lay off all European employees and stop paying rent on all leases.” Nice!
That old rats-from-a-sinking-ship feeling emanates from the hazy region where “Joe Biden” dwells. Chief of staff Ron Klain is handing over his duties to former Covid-19 “czar” Jeff Zients — who did such a swell job keeping Americans mis-and-disinformed through the heart of the “vaccine” campaign (January 2021 to April 2022). Every thread of the Covid-19 narrative promulgated by this ass, and the sachems of the CDC and FDA, are shredded, proved to be not only lies, but deadly lies. Every angle of Covid policy was wrong, and treasonously wrong. This is who will soon be, ostensibly, leading the country — since you can be sure that “JB” is not. Nobody will believe a word that Jeff Zients utters. The mainstream media is even turning against this coterie of evil nincompoops.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Jacinda Ardern, Reality Consensus Disorder, unvaccinated, World Economic Forum | Leave a Comment »
‘Defend the Guard’ Receives Outstanding Committee Hearing in New Hampshire | The Libertarian Institute
Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2023
by Dan McKnight
“I didn’t know a lot about the Guard problem until I got involved in this, and the folks from Bring Our Troops Home sent me this very, extremely informative booklet on defending the Guard. And it’s now called the Defend the Guard bill.”
That’s how State Rep. John Potucek, a ret. U.S. Air Force staff sergeant and Vietnam veteran, introduced H.B. 229 at a hearing in front of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. The Defend the Guard Act would keep our National Guard out of unconstitutional wars and restore accountability over war and peace to our government.
We’re grateful for the credit. Bring Our Troops Home is the only organization in the country that works with legislators on Defend the Guard bills, prepares for committee hearings, and gathers testimonials from veterans.
That’s where all of your contributions go. When you become a member of our supporters’ group, the Ten Seven Club, your dollars go to getting bill numbers, finding co-sponsors, and making a show of force in front of committees.
That’s exactly what we did in New Hampshire.
Fourteen people testified in favor of H.B. 229. Six of them were members of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. And the amazing thing was, not all of them are bill sponsors. But they felt compelled in their hearts to show up—unprompted—and speak in favor of Defend the Guard.
Ten of them have served in either National Guard or some branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. A majority of them have seen combat firsthand. They showed up because soldiers, more than anyone, understand the oath we take to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. We put our lives at risk for the country we love.
So when we see politicians and desk-job generals breaking the law, subverting our representative government, and flippantly risking the lives of our brothers and sisters in uniform…well, that doesn’t sit right with us.
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‘Freedom for Assange and Journalism Are at Stake’: Belmarsh Tribunal Comes to DC – Antiwar.com Original
Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2023
“As long as the Biden administration continues to deploy tools like the Espionage Act to imprison those who dare to expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe,” said one of the tribunal’s co-chairs.
As Julian Assange awaits the final appeal of his looming extradition to the United States while languishing behind bars in London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, leading left luminaries and free press advocates gathered in Washington, D.C. on Friday for the fourth sitting of the Belmarsh Tribunal, where they called on U.S. President Joe Biden to drop all charges against the WikiLeaks publisher.
“From Ankara to Manila to Budapest to right here in the United States, state actors are cracking down on journalists, their sources, and their publishers in a globally coordinated campaign to disrupt the public’s access to information,” co-chair and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman said during her opening remarks at the National Press Club.
“The Belmarsh Tribunal… pursues justice for journalists who are imprisoned or persecuted [and] publishers and whistleblowers who dare to reveal the crimes of our governments,” she continued.
“Assange’s case is the first time in history that a publisher has been indicted under the Espionage Act,” Goodman added. “Recently, it was revealed that the CIA had been spying illegally on Julian, his lawyers, and some members of this very tribunal. The CIA even plotted his assassination at the Ecuadorean Embassy under [former US President Donald] Trump.”
Assange – who suffers from physical and mental health problems including heart and respiratory issues – could be imprisoned for 175 years if fully convicted of Espionage Act violations. Among the classified materials published by WikiLeaks – many provided by whistleblower Chelsea Manning – are the infamous “Collateral Murder” video showing a US Army helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqi civilians, the Afghan War Diary, and the Iraq War Logs, which revealed American and allied war crimes.
According to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his freedom since he was arrested on December 7, 2010. Since then he has been held under house arrest, confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in Belmarsh Prison, for which the tribunal is named.
Human rights, journalistic, peace, and other groups have condemned Assange’s impending extradition and the US government’s targeting of a journalist who exposed American war crimes.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Belmarsh Tribunal, Espionage Act, Julian Assange, Wikileaks | Leave a Comment »
