Month: April 2022

Donald Trump Jr. told Fox News he is launching a new gun-rights group to combat the Biden administration and Democratic gun control groups. 

Called the “Second Amendment Task Force,” Trump Jr. will serve as the group chairman. The mission is clear: Protect Americans’ right to bear arms. 

“The Second Amendment is the whole ballgame; it’s the freedom that protects all of our other freedoms. Unfortunately, the Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress are hellbent on eroding our Constitutional right to keep and bear arms, whether it’s nominating radical gun-grabbers to senior positions in the executive branch or pushing anti-gun legislation,” Trump Jr. said. 

He explained more about his new gun-rights group: “The Second Amendment Task Force is entirely devoted to ensuring the Left is never successful in disarming American citizens.”

The group will also fight against Biden administration nominees for the ATF and Democrat legislative initiatives that could jeopardize Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

Trump Jr. tweeted up a storm in the summer of 2021 against the Biden administration’s ATF nominee David Chipman. The nomination was eventually withdrawn because of Chipman’s radical views. Biden’s attempt to get gun-grabbing Chipman as ATF head inspired him to launch the group. 

“The idea for the group came from our successful effort to stop a radical anti-gun lobbyist from becoming the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). 

“We had to make sure that the American people knew what was going on, especially with Red State Democrats. If they’re considering casting an anti-Second Amendment vote, we’re going to make sure they feel the pain. This new group will help us put more structure and resources around those efforts to make sure we’re as successful as we can be.,” Trump Jr. said. 

What remains a question is why Trump Jr. is starting his own gun-rights group when there’s the NRA, Gun Owners of America, Firearm Policy Coalition, and the Second Amendment Foundation. 

A new gun-rights organization with Trump Jr. at the helm could undoubtedly increase in popularity among law-abiding, gun-loving citizens and become a powerful voice that gun-grabbing Democrats fear.

Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Competition between the United States and China in the realms of electric and autonomous vehicles could determine the future control of global supply chains in an unprecedented way, according to a lawmaker and several experts.

“Our competitors, particularly in China, are not holding back,” said Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) during an April 27 event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a security-focused think tank.

“We cannot fall behind on the global stage.”

Peters said that the future of the automotive industry was in electric vehicles (EVs) and autonomous vehicles (AVs), and that the nation to best develop those industries would win a great advantage in the global marketplace.

To that end, former Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair noted that both EVs and AVs were singled out in Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” industrial plan as part of its top 10 high-tech areas to seize leadership in. This, he said, demonstrated a clear effort to displace the United States as the lead controller of global supply chains and the international industrial ecosystem.

“If the United States loses full spectrum industrial capacity in the automotive industry, and this means designing the cars, testing them, building them, fixing them, the whole ecosystem, then we are hollowing out the industrial sector that we counted on to become the arsenal of democracy in the second world war,” Blair said.

“The big picture is China’s all-of-government push and the importance of the automotive sector to American industrial capability.”

Blair added that the ongoing technological decoupling of China from the rest of the world in terms of its data and systems standards would prove a vital component of how Sino-American competition in the sector unfolded.

“This sort of decoupling of the Chinese economy from the rest of the world is something you need to watch in this space,” Blair said.

“It may be that separate AI [artificial intelligence] industries and AV technologies grow up in China and the rest of the world.”

John Bozzella, President of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, agreed that China could effectively seize control of vital supply chains by seizing industrial prominence in EV and AV technologies, thus pushing the United States out of access to vital technologies.

“The countries that really take the lead in developing cutting edge innovative technologies in the auto sector are going to control the supply chains, set the standards, set the running rules, and really own global markets,” Bozzella said.

“With regard to EVs, you see the U.S. industry already behind China because we’re competing with a national effort,” Bozzella added.

With that in mind, Bozzella suggested that the United States would need to better unite the powers of its private industry with a national strategy, and work to develop the utilities and infrastructure needed to transition its industrial base to produce EV and AV technologies.

“The China story does suggest that this private sector leadership ought to be supported by a national strategy,” Bozzella said.

“We are competing with the Chinese government, not the Chinese auto manufacturers.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is set to raise the state’s gasoline tax despite record-high prices at the pump and sinking poll numbers of President Biden ahead of the midterm elections.

Newsom’s office said earlier this week that California lawmakers are unlikely to stop the annual summer increase in the state’s gasoline tax ahead of a May 1 deadline. This means California motorists will be hit with a 5.6% gas tax hike scheduled to take effect on July 1. 

“But lawmakers will almost certainly fail to stop the gas tax increase from taking place because they would need to pass legislation by Sunday in order to do so – and have yet to introduce a bill on the matter,” Fox News said. 

Newsom’s spokesperson Alex Stack said the governor could offer gas relief to Californians via direct payments (stimulus checks). 

“It is clear now that the Legislature will not act in time to provide that immediate, limited relief, but we look forward to working with lawmakers on the Governor’s proposal for direct payments to Californians wrestling with rising prices,” Stack said. 

California leads the nation with the highest gas tax at 51 cents per gallon. The gas tax after July 1 will stand at 53.9 cents per gallon, an increase of 3 cents.

Earlier this year, Newsom proposed to suspend the scheduled adjustment on the state gas tax, though it appears that won’t be happening. He has also offered stimulus checks for drivers to offset soaring fuel costs. Still, nothing has been passed to give drivers relief. 

Newsom’s timing of letting the gas tax pass comes as President Biden’s polling numbers have cratered ahead of the midterm elections. 

This year, many folks will be voting with their empty wallets as the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve have failed to tame inflation. There’s even a risk gas prices could be headed higher as global oil markets tighten amid shrinking Russian supplies. Biden’s SPR releases have yet to curb higher prices. 

Tightening global crude supplies are set to release the “second wave” of the oil price shock that could increase prices (again), effectively dooming Democrats even more in midterms. 

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.

Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it they’re spouting the slogans they’ve been programmed to spout and waving the flags the flags they’ve been programmed to wave and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants in that moment.

Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it.

But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to oppose war and push for peace, those who’d previously proclaimed themselves “anti-war” are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked.

This is because the theory of being anti-war is very different from the practice. In theory people are just opposed to the idea of exploding other people for no good reason. In practice they’re always hit with a very intense barrage of media messaging giving them what look like very good reasons why those people need exploding.

Being truly anti-war isn’t easy. It doesn’t look like people picture in their imaginations. It looks like getting smashed with a deluge of information designed to manipulate and confuse and working through it while getting screamed at by those who’ve fallen for the brainwashing. It’s not cute. It’s not fun. It’s not the feel-good flower power time that people intuit it is when they look at the part of themselves that seeks peace. It’s standing up against the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed while being offered every reason not to.

When people think of themselves as “anti-war”, they’re usually imagining themselves as anti- another Iraq war, or anti- some theoretical Hitler-like president starting a war because he likes killing people. They’re not picturing the reality of what being anti-war actually is in practice.

Because selling the war to the public is a built-in component of all war strategy, the war will always look necessary from the mainstream perspective, and it won’t look like those other wars which we now know in retrospect were mistakes. It’s always designed to look appealing. There’s never not going to be atrocity propaganda. There’s never not going to be reasons fed to you selling this military intervention as special and completely necessary. That will be the case every single time, because that’s how modern wars are packaged and presented.

This is why you’ll always see a number of self-described leftists and anti-imperialists cheering for the latest US war project. They are ideologically opposed to the idea of war in theory, but the way it actually shows up in practice is always different from what they pictured.

Our entire civilization is shaped by domestic propaganda, but the only time you ever hear that word in mainstream discourse is when it’s used to discuss the comparatively almost nonexistent influence of Russian propaganda on our society. All the mainstream alarm ringing about Russian propaganda gives the impression that it comprises close to 100 percent of the total propaganda that westerners consume, when in reality it’s a tiny fraction of one percent of the total propaganda that westerners consume. Almost all of it comes from western sources.

Propaganda is the single most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our society. It has far more influence over how the public thinks, acts and votes than any of our official mechanisms for doing so, yet it’s barely discussed, it isn’t taught in schools, and even the best political ideologies barely touch on it relative to their other areas of focus.

All the fretting about Russian propaganda from establishment narrative managers comes so close to giving away their secret: that they know it’s possible to manipulate the way the public thinks, acts and votes using media. They just don’t admit that they’re the ones who are doing this.

It’s actually the weirdest thing in the world that there’s something that has been directly affecting our minds our entire lives, and which directly affects the way our entire society is organized, but we don’t talk about it constantly. It should be at the front and center of our attention.

But of course that’s the whole idea. Propaganda only works on those who don’t know they’re being propagandized. The US-centralized empire’s ability to hide its propaganda machine is a foundational element of its brilliance.

Being truly anti-war is necessarily a commitment to finding out not just what’s true about all the war narratives currently promulgated by the imperial war machine, but all the narratives you’ve been fed about the world since you were young. It’s a commitment to truth that takes on an almost spiritual quality in the way it informs every aspect of your life when truly espoused.

It’s important to research and learn new things about the world, but what’s equally important and which doesn’t get emphasized nearly enough is the practice of examining the beliefs you already hold about your society, your government, your nation and your world. Inquiring as to whether they’re really true, and who might benefit from your believing them.

Don’t make the error of assuming you’ll be aware and informed enough to spot all the lies right away. You’re dealing with the single most advanced and powerful propaganda machine that has ever existed, and you’ve been marinating in its effects your entire life. It takes some time. Even the most aware among us were indoctrinated into the mainstream worldview to some extent earlier in their lives, and to this day most of the information they get about the world has some of its roots and branches in parts of the propaganda matrix.

It takes work to see things clearly enough to form a really truth-based worldview. But unless you do this it’s impossible to be truly anti-war, because you can’t skillfully oppose something you don’t understand. To fight the imperial war machine is to fight the imperial propaganda machine.

*  *  *

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

The first sign that the red-hot New York City apartment rental market has hit a snag could be the increasing number of apartment renters not renewing leases, as average rents hit a record high in March. 

“Deal seekers choose to move out versus paying the higher current price,” Equity Residential’s CEO Mark Parrell told investors during an earnings call on Wednesday.

Parrell said, “We’re renewing about 60% of our residents, which is healthy, but 5% lower than at the beginning of the year.”  

Equity Residential’s NYC apartment building locations. 

Equity Residential’s renewed 1Q22 leases in NYC saw a 21% rent hike, compared with a 14.5% hike in the fourth quarter of 2021. New agreements were even higher, with a 29.7% increase in 1Q22. The company’s NYC area apartment building portfolio spans from Manhattan to Brooklyn to New Jersey. 

Here are some of the going rental prices. 

So already, there’s slippage in renewals as prices in the Manhattan apartment rental market rocketed to a new high in March. 

A recent report from appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate showed tenants paid an average rent price of $3,644 on new leases signed in March. Rents have soared 23% from a year earlier and are up $14 from the previous record high recorded in February. 

The threat of a renter strike is soaring as the cost of living in the metro area is out of control. 

 

 

 

By George Lei, Bloomberg Markets Live Commentator and reporter

China announced on Thursday a 50% reduction to the clearing fee on stock transactions in another piecemeal effort to prop up financial markets. Investors, however, increasingly sense a doomsday scenario for both the real economy and equities. As senior leaders gather for a critical meetingin the coming days, quick, bold measures are urgently needed to stop the downward spiral.

China’s CSI 300 Index rallied a total of 3.6% on Wednesday and Thursday, trimming its year-to-date loss to less than 21%. Performance for the first four months of 2022 is poised to be the worst start to a year since 2008.

Back then, at the height of the global market rout, then-Premier Wen Jiabao famously proclaimed that “in front of crisis, it is critical to have courage and confidence, which are even more important than gold.” Today, however, confidence among China-focused investors is sorely lacking.

Banxia, a Shanghai-based asset manager which topped local rankings in 2020, cut its equity exposure to zero in anticipation of a worsening economy and further market rout. “This year could be even worse for fund managers than 2008” in the sense that “it’s now very difficult to find a place where they can make money,” founder Li Bei told Bloomberg.

Weijian Shan, founder and chair of Hong Kong-based private equity fund PAG that manages more than $50 billion, also diversified away from China and was being “extremely careful” about portfolios in the country, the Financial Times reported. “We think the Chinese economy at this moment is in the worst shape in the past 30 years,” Shan said in a video of a meeting, adding that “market sentiment toward Chinese stocks is also at the lowest point in the past 30 years.”

For an asset manager operating in U.S. dollars, the MSCI China Index has delivered an inferior return than the change in waste paperprices in the U.S. producer price index over the past decade. The performance gap becomes more pronounced over a five-year time span, with the China gauge doing worse even when factoring in reinvested dividends.

The watershed moment was 2021, when policy and regulatory risks — wrapped in political slogans — came front and center for China Inc. “Homes are for living in, not for speculation,” President Xi’s famous catchphrase, led to an aggressive de-leveraging bid named “three red lines” and culminated in the Evergrande debacle as well as a crisis-ridden real-estate sector. The “common prosperity” drive to prevent “disorderly expansion of capital” smashed valuations for Internet and tutoring firms. And finally, almost all industries face the chilling economic consequences from Covid Zero.

To be fair, Beijing has moved to rein in some of its policy excesses with efforts to salvage housing and ease tech crackdowns after months of economic pain. Amid unprecedented capital flight, however, neither institutional investors nor individuals making daily business decisions may have deep enough pockets or strong enough patience to wait for any eventual loosening of Covid measures.
“China feels to us like the U.S. and Europe in 2008,” according to PAG’s founder Shan. What policy makers do in the next few months will largely determine the path ahead: a U.S.-style recovery or yet another lost decade in the case of Europe or Japan.

The effects of pandemic lockdowns, related supply chain strains, and conflict in Ukraine are wreaking havoc on the world’s agricultural system. Readers have heard the likes of the UN warning that Middle Eastern countries are at “breaking points” as food prices hit record highs, and as of last week, the Rockefeller Foundation began the countdown (about six months) to a “massive, immediate food crisis.”

Now, Goya Foods CEO Bob Unanue has issued a similar warning: “We are on the precipice of a global food crisis.” 

In a Wednesday interview, Unanue told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, “Americans will have to tighten their belts and consume less,” in response to her question about a potential food shortage crisis.

Bartiromo then asked a series of questions, such as “Do you think things will get worse?” and “Do you think food prices will go even higher later this year?” 

He warned about an imbalance in world food production, indicating “farmers are paying double for fertilizer, they’re planting less and yields will be less.” 

Unanue then spoke about “30% of the global wheat production in Ukraine goes unplanted.” He said the “global food supply chain is a very tight balance. If we interrupt the food production, we will have a food crisis that will send prices through the roof.” 

He went on to say, “as a rich country, we can afford higher-priced food, but other countries won’t be able to bear it,” suggesting the US will be the last affected.  

To the Unanue’s point, the dominos are already beginning to fall as inflation riots have already sparked socio-economic turmoil in Sir Lanka and Peru. Countries across Africa and the Middle East, many of which are importers of food, are experiencing soaring prices and imminent shortages. 

Unanue’s interview is more proof the world’s agricultural system is fracturing and storm clouds are gathering. 

Watch the full interview here. 

Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

The New York Times earlier this week ran a guest essay by Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers, fulminating about Elon Musk’s effort to purchase Twitter. She wrote:

What exactly does [Musk] believe can’t be said on the platform right now? It certainly doesn’t take long to find discredited race science, arguments that women are intellectually inferior, antisemitism… It is easy to assume that the banned speech that Mr. Musk is standing up for is worse even than that. As the comedian Michael Che put it on “Saturday Night Live,” the $44 billion deal shows “how badly white guys want to use the N-word.”

 

This is the elite argument against free speech in a nutshell: “If you favor ‘all legal speech,’ you really just want to slander, threaten, and harass. Now please let me tiptoe up to libel myself, as I tell millions of New York Times readers I ‘assume’ you’re a racist itching to use the N-word.”

The hypocrisy of America’s self-appointed culture-protectors this week is breathtaking. They really seem not to realize that what they’ve been seeking for years isn’t an end to speech abuses, but a monopoly on them. They see Musk as a traitor to his class, threatening to upend what they see as a natural order that in recent years placed bluenose squads in deserved roles as vanguards and truth-arbiters. Whether or not Musk ever upends anything is a different question, but critics believe he will, and now they’re panicking, in tones of maximum sanctimony. They’re even pulling out “Who will protect the children?”-style language:

My latest op-ed for the @latimes with @rashadrobinson :Under Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, who will protect users? https://t.co/uurD1vdZLW

— Safiya Umoja Noble PhD (@safiyanoble) April 28, 2022

When billionaires like Elon Musk justify their motives by using “freedom,” beware. What they actually seek is freedom from accountability.

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) April 24, 2022

Now that Elon Musk is buying Twitter, the question for all of us is: Will he allow a Criminal who used this platform to lie and spread disinformation to try to overthrow the US Government to return and continue his Criminal activity? And if he does, how do we combat it?

— Rob Reiner (@robreiner) April 25, 2022

I spent a good part of the last four years warning that asking unaccountable billionaires to meddle more in speech would result in exactly such a table-turning episode, in which the political mainstream’s cocky censor squad would wake up one day to find the wrong tycoon in charge, at which point they would cry foul and howl suddenly about the evils of oligarchy. For failing to cheer their vision of enlightened censorship, colleagues denounced me as a reactionary pervert in the employ of (pick one) Trump/Assad/Putin. So it’s hard to do anything but chuckle at their anguish this week.

According to mainstream legend, Twitter executives were forced to re-think their hands-off, “free speech wing of the free speech party” approach after watching the @RealDonaldTrump account become the world’s most-followed news network during the 2016 election campaign. In doing so, they upended the power of traditional news media figures to filter out what they deemed unacceptable political candidates. The Washington Post would later describe how anguished Twitter general counsel Vijaya Gadde and CEO Jack Dorsey realized after Trump’s election that their product had escaped its pen and needed putting down:

Twitter’s largely liberal employee base faced growing criticism, and workers complained that the first question they were asked when they told someone they worked at the social media service was, what about Trump’s account? His account was even briefly deactivated once by a rogue Twitter employee in 2017.

By 2018, Dorsey and Gadde, whose title is legal, policy and trust and safety lead, knew they had to rethink their approach to powerful people’s megaphones. Executives began to devise new policies and product features that would enable the company to place a specific label to cover up a tweet.

The Post went on to describe a Shakespearean tragedy, in which executives like Dorsey and Gadde tried, against all logic and evidence, to cling to doomed speech principles throughout the Trump presidency. Blind to their fate as all tragic figures must be, they held on past the bitter end, leaving Trump’s account up long enough to imperil democracy itself via the insurrection (democracy was always “democracy itself” in the Trump years). January 6th in this version of the story was clearly Twitter’s fault, caused by “a mob of Trump supporters, following the president’s calls on Twitter,” as the Post put it. When the company then belatedly did the right thing and deactivated Trump’s account, the Post said it “brought to an end an era of free speech online” that Twitter “itself helped create.”

That’s one version of history. I remember another.

To continue reading, subscribers can click here.

The top of the first water intake pipe at Lake Mead is now visible as the lake’s plummeting water level hit a new record low. 

“It’s official – the top of Intake No. 1 is now visible and the low lake level pumping station is now operational,” tweeted Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA).

After nearly half a century, the first intake is out of service and can no longer draw water. Water levels at the lake hit record lows this week, falling to 1,056 feet. Luckily, SNWA has two other intakes at much lower levels that are still operational. 

“There was no impact to operation’s ability to deliver water,” Bronson Mack, public outreach officer SNWA, told CNN. “Customers didn’t notice anything. It was a seamless transition,” he said while referring to the switch of intake number 2.

Water flowing down the Colorado River supplies Lake Mead and Powell. The river system supports 40 million people across seven Western states and Mexico.

But as the Western half of the US faces one of the worst megadroughts in 1,200 years, water officials, such as Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s director of water resources, recently warned of an impending water crisis that could affect the drinking water for millions of people.

“I never thought this day would come this quickly … But I think we always knew that this day was potentially out there,” he said. 

Meanwhile, in Southern California, water officials declared a water shortage emergency for the first time, according to KTLA in Los Angeles. New restrictions for Ventura and San Bernardino counties go into effect on June 1 and restrict people’s ability to outdoor watering. 

Social media users responded in shock to Lake Mead’s intake pipe above the surface. 

“Holy Christ, that’s bad,” one person said, quoting SNWA’s tweet. 

Water wars in the West? 

“It’s time to pull California’s straws from the Colorado River,” said one person. 

The good news is Lake Mead has two other water inlets at lower depths to draw from, though levels are dropping fast as there is no sign the megadrought will be abating anytime soon.