Month: December 2022

The global inflation crisis paired with lackluster economic growth and an outlook clouded by uncertainties have led to a decline in real wages around the world, a new report published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) has found.

As Statista’s Felix Richter reports, according to the 2022-23 Global Wage Report, global real monthly wages fell 0.9 percent this year on average, marking the first decline in real earnings at a global scale in the 21st century.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The multiple global crises we are facing have led to a decline in real wages.

“It has placed tens of millions of workers in a dire situation as they face increasing uncertainties,” ILO Director-General Gilbert F. Houngbo said in a statement, adding that “income inequality and poverty will rise if the purchasing power of the lowest paid is not maintained.”

While inflation rose faster in high-income countries, leading to above-average real wage declines in North America (minus 3.2 percent) and the European Union (minus 2.4 percent), the ILO finds that low-income earners are disproportionately affected by rising inflation. As lower-wage earners spend a larger share of their disposable income on essential goods and services, which generally see greater price increases than non-essential items, those who can least afford it suffer the biggest cost-of-living impact of rising prices.

“We must place particular attention to workers at the middle and lower end of the pay scale,” Rosalia Vazquez-Alvarez, one of the report’s authors said.

“Fighting against the deterioration of real wages can help maintain economic growth, which in turn can help to recover the employment levels observed before the pandemic. This can be an effective way to lessen the probability or depth of recessions in all countries and regions,” she said.

Authored by Robert Gore via StraightLineLogic.com,

You will sacrifice and sacrifice until there’s nothing left to sacrifice…

If we’re all responsible to everybody, what’s in it for you? How does it work, exactly? Can you claim anything—your production, property, expression, body, mind, life, or soul—for yourself? If you can’t, if everyone else has first claim to them, what can you claim for yourself? Do you give up everything for our eight billion fellow earth-citizens as they give up everything for you? Do you get one eight-billioneth of what’s nominally everyone else’s? Or is this supposed to be pure sacrifice—give up everything and receive nothing in return? If you give up everything, is there any you left?

It’s best not to think about such questions, they won’t get you anywhere but confused. What you do know is what you’ve been told your entire life: everything you do for others is good; everything you do for yourself is selfish and bad. Just look what happens when everyone pulls together in a cause greater than themselves, like war. Isn’t that a cause greater than yourself, maiming and killing people you don’t know? You must be doing it for the greater good, because you might be maimed or killed by those people you don’t know. Oh, you can’t let yourself think of it that way. Everyone has to pitch in.

Government must be a cause greater than yourself, because you spend several months every year working to pay your taxes. That’s a good chunk of money, and you and millions of other hard-working Americans pay it. People complain a bit, but everybody pays, because it’s necessary to keep the country running and fund all the great things the government does. Like what, exactly? You’re funding those wars, and a lot of money ends up in the pockets of people who are of no discernible benefit to you. A lot of it stays right there in Washington. And even with all the money they take in they are still $31 trillion in the hole. Stop it! You can’t let yourself think of it that way; we’ve got to have government.

Think what would have happened the last couple of years if we hadn’t had the government. We saw that pull-together spirit, with everyone wearing their masks and getting vaccinated. Well, almost everybody. There were a few people who didn’t wear masks or get vaccinated.

But here’s where things started to break down. Because you know a few antisocial refuseniks and they either didn’t get sick or if they got sick, they took care of themselves, took the medicines they weren’t supposed to take, and got well. And you know people who had both rounds of vaccines and every booster and got sick. And there are those stories, all over the Internet, about apparently healthy people, young people, collapsing, some dying; you’ve seen the videos.

The thoughts you can’t shut down started when somebody close to you, a relative or friend, had a severe reaction after a shot, or told you about someone they know who did. And maybe you brushed it off, but then it happened again . . . and again. These weren’t stories on the Internet; this was direct experience, or direct experience once removed. And it wasn’t just severe reactions, the afflicted recovering after hospitalization. There were long term effects for which there are apparently no cures, lives ruined. And there were those who died. You know of more people harmed by the cure than the disease.

One day, out of nowhere, the question popped into your head: Who’s collecting the sacrificial offerings? Because that’s what all this is—sacrificial offerings—not to propitiate some unseen deity, but to line the pockets and to increase the power of . . . of those telling you that you have to sacrifice! That’s the thought you’ve pushing down all these years: All this sacrifice is a damn scam, a racket! Once you gave it some thought, you realized it’s been going on for years, decades, centuries. Somebody telling people they must sacrifice for some greater good, and those same somebodies collecting the sacrificial offerings.

If we’re all responsible to everybody, what’s in it for you? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Actually, less than nothing. You no longer have whatever it is you offer. It’s not even an offering, something you do voluntarily. Your “offerings” are taken from you under implicit or explicit threat of force. What you get back, if anything, is worth less to you than what you gave up.

You’ve never minded giving up things for something you regarded as a greater value—saving for the down payment on a house or a child’s college education. Paying for groceries and utilities rather than taking a vacation you couldn’t afford. Those weren’t sacrifices, not like the sacrifices you’re told you must make for the greater good, where you give up something and get nothing in return.

If you’re giving something and getting nothing, somebody’s getting something and giving nothing. Think of what they’ve done with your sacrifices—your money, your time, and your life—and what you could have done with them. There’s nothing greater or good about their greater good; the country’s going to hell in a hand basket. We’re riding a ruination train downhill, the grade is getting steeper and steeper, and the engineer has it on full throttle.

Their greater good is your greater bad—your life gets increasingly risky and difficult. What you’re paying out is rising faster than what you’re taking in. All while money is tossed down the toilet of the latest war and domestic boondoggles and the trillion-dollar milestones on the national debt come faster and faster. You hear the bell tolling: doom, doom, doom.

You’re dealing with reality to the fullest extent of your capacity so that people you despise, and who despise you, don’t have to. Accept the morality of sacrifice, accept that everybody and everything is more important than you, and you’ve issued them a blank check. They have, they are, and they will continue to take everything you offer, up to and including your life.

The lie has always been that the sacrifices of you and your fellow sacrificers would build a better world for everyone. Now they no longer try to hide it: sacrifice gets you worse, not better. Bugs instead of meat; an urban apartment instead of a house and land; mass transit instead of a personal automobile; a guaranteed income instead of meaningful work; computer entries instead of money, surveillance instead of privacy; compliance instead of freedom; punishment instead of reward.

“And you will be happy.” That assurance is as stale and false as the phony causes they trot out to justify your unhappiness: the climate, the earth, a virus, a war, an alien invasion, the common good, etc. We do owe them one debt. The last few years have made it obvious to anyone who will look that it’s not about the phony causes, it never has been; it’s about power and control, and always has been.

That’s not nothing, for from that recognition comes the realization: run from those demanding sacrifice, which at the least means every government on the planet. Sadly, running is only possible in the metaphorical sense. Gangster governments are the order of the day, regardless of how they cloak their intentions and actions.

And when you ask ’em, “How much should we give?”
Ooh, they only answer, “More, more, more, more!”

“Fortunate Son,” John Fogerty, Credence Clearwater Revival, 1969

You will sacrifice and sacrifice until there’s nothing left to sacrifice, and then they’ll discard you like last night’s garbage. Your life means one thing to them—enslaved, subjugated submission. It’s the less than zero existence, the logical consequence, of everybody and everything is more important than you.

Accept that—and most people do—and you’ll deserve what you get—less than zero. Claim your life and resolve that nothing is more important to you than the freedom to live it, and your course will be fraught with danger. It’s not the less-than-zeros who change things; expect nothing from them but opposition. If you want what’s yours you’re going to have to fight for it, and yes, fight means fight. That is the truth that can no longer be evaded.

Resistance is lonely and dangerous. Choose it, and you may have compatriots, but if you’re not careful, you’ll also have false friends who will betray you in the darkest hour. You will, fortunately, have an ally in the incompetence and evil of those who seek to enslave you. Nothing they’ve established can last and their system is collapsing. In some ways that will make things easier—bankrupt and collapsed governments don’t have the wherewithal to maintain order. However, chaos presents its own dangers.

Fight for your life, or accept endless sacrifice and less than zero. There are no other choices, no middle ground. It’s your choice. It’s your life.

As if the West needed more reason to hate Vladimir Putin, the Russian president on Monday signed into law updated legislation which expands the current ban on the prohibition of what it dubs LGBT propaganda to children, shrugging off widespread Western human rights criticisms leveled at Moscow.

The new law now expands to banning anything that promotes LGBT propaganda before the entire population, regardless of age or demographic, which makes it much more sweeping and broad. 

The law also aggressively targets transgender ideology. At this point, anything interpreted as advancing or displaying information that “can make minors want to change their gender” is banned, according to the new law. This includes promoting “non-traditional sexual relations”.

Violation of the law, for example with media campaigns or formal organizing and activism, could see entities face a fine of up to 4 million rubles (or just under $64,000). Time in jail is also possible as a punishment. It further effectively bans all future attempts at ‘pride’ parades.

According to details in The Moscow Times: 

People of all ages are now banned from accessing certain content under the new legislation. From now on, LGBT relationships and “lifestyles” cannot be displayed or mentioned, according to activists.

The display of LGBT relationships is also banned from advertising campaigns, films, video games, books and media publications. Outlets that break the new law could be fined or shut down by the government.  

Foreigners could also be booted from the country if they are found in violation of the law. 

For years it has been illegal to promote ‘alternative’ sexual lifestyles among minors, based on an initial 2013 law that focused on rooting out “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” aimed at children. As it previously existed, violators could face 15 days in prison, or also a fine. 

President Putin has over the last few years increased his focus on fighting against gender ideology in speeches, vowing to protect the country and the Russian people from “gender obscurantism” – as he dubbed it in a 2021 speech. Many Russian officials also associate it with nefarious intentions from NATO.

“I am a proponent of the traditional approach that a woman is a woman and a man is a man,” Putin said at the time – in a theme which has since been reiterated. “A mother is a mother, a father is a father. And I hope that our society has the internal moral protection dictated by the traditional religious denominations of the Russian Federation.”

Authored by Dave Smith via AntiWar.com,

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the head of the House Armed Services Committee, said Saturday that the growing calls for more oversight of the billions of dollars the US is spending on Ukraine are “part of Russian propaganda.”

While the majority of Republicans strongly favor continuing to arm Ukraine, even the more hawkish GOP members have said they favor increased oversight for the aid. Smith said that the concern from Republicans for more transparency “makes me a little crazy.”

“Ukraine is spending the money really well; that’s why they’re winning,” Smith said at the Reagan National Defense Forum, according to Defense News. “Yes, we need oversight, but we don’t need that as an excuse to not fund what we’re doing.”

Last month, a small group of House Republicans opposed to arming Ukraine led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced a bill that would require an audit of the funds that the US has spent on the war so far. Greene said that if she needed to, she would reintroduce the legislation after the next Congress is sworn in this January.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who is expected to be the speaker in the next Congress, has said a Republican-controlled House wouldn’t send a “blank check” to Ukraine.

McCarthy later downplayed his comments and said the lack of oversight was the issue, and other Republican leaders insisted they would keep arming Ukraine. But McCarthy’s comments were still enough to prompt a push to approve a massive new Ukraine aid package.

The White House is looking for Congress to approve $37.7 billion in new Ukraine aid during the lame-duck period. If authorized, the new funds will bring total US spending on a proxy war on Russia’s border to about $105 billion.

US consumers, the biggest economic force in the world, are rapidly altering their spending habits and where they get groceries due to persistently high inflation, 19 months of negative real wage growth, and threats of recession. 

Bank of America’s report on consumer trends titled “Supermarket Swap” found consumers are “trading down” (i.e., shifting spending from more to less expensive items within the same category), with yearly growth spending at value grocery stores up more than a third versus premium stores. 

According to the findings of the report:

So who is “trading down” the most? Middle – and higher-income consumers have more scope to trade down and shift spending to less expensive versions of items, since lower-income consumers are more likely to be shopping at less expensive grocery stores already. For the higher-income consumers , spending at value-tier grocery stores in October 2022 was up 22% relative to January 2019, according to Bank of America data, likely due to persistent negative real wage growth this year

BofA reminds readers of the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) print via the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which shows prices for the ‘food at home’ category were still at a shocking 12.4% YoY in October. They said, “real (inflation-adjusted) grocery spending per household, estimated using Bank of America card data and CPI inflation, has slowed substantially since 2021 and was below 2019 levels in October,” but the number of transactions per household made at the grocery store was still holding levels in line with 2019, indicating “real grocery spending per household per transaction that has dropped meaningfully.” 

This means the consumer is trading down for cheaper items at the supermarket. BofA data shows consumer spending at value-tier supermarkets exploded earlier this year as inflation surged, “suggesting an increasing rotation into cheaper grocery options. This adds further evidence that consumers might have been looking for alternative ways to save on groceries by trading down and purchasing from less expensive stores,” the report said. 

And why are consumers shifting to value-tier supermarkets? One big issue has been 19 months of negative real wage growth. Essentially the vast majority of Americans find their cost of living is increasing faster than the income they bring home.

BofA said middle- and higher-income consumers are more likely to be the ones trading down since lower-income folks are already shopping at value-tier stores. 

The report focused on annual incomes of $50k – $100k and >$100k and found significant shifts in spending as value-tier supermarkets surged in popularity among wealthier Americans. 

And now, people in higher income brackets are trading down for cheaper items and shopping at value supermarket stores. 

Authored by Chris Menahan via InformationLiberation.com,

The FBI held “weekly meetings” with social media giants ahead of the 2020 election and sent in “lists of URLs and accounts” for them to take down in the name of fighting “foreign influence operations,” an FBI agent revealed Tuesday while under oath.

🚨BREAKING: In our deposition of FBI agent Elvis Chan on Tuesday, we found that the FBI plays a big role in working with social media companies to censor speech – from weekly meetings with social media companies ahead of the 2020 election to asks for account takedowns.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022

Chan, the FBI’s FITF, and senior CISA officials had meetings with social media companies in the lead-up to the 2020 election, in which Chan personally told the social media companies that there could potentially be a Russian “hack and leak” operation shortly before the election.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022

Those meetings were initially quarterly, then monthly, then weekly heading into the 2020 election.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022

Chan stated that the FBI regularly sent social media companies lists of URLs and social media accounts that should be taken down because they were disinformation from “malign foreign influence operations.” The FBI then inquired whether the platforms have taken down the content.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022

On many occasions, the platforms took down the accounts flagged by the FBI.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022

This is what real “election interference” looks like.

From Fox News:

On Tuesday, lawyers from the offices of Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana deposed FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan as part of their lawsuit against the Biden administration. That suit accuses high-ranking government officials of working with giant social media companies “under the guise of combating misinformation” to achieve greater censorship.

Chan, who serves in the FBI’s San Francisco bureau, was questioned under oath by court order about his alleged “critical role” in “coordinating with social-media platforms relating to censorship and suppression of speech on their platforms.”

During the deposition, Chan said that he, along with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency officials, had weekly meetings with major social media companies to warn against Russian disinformation attempts ahead of the 2020 election, according to a source in the Missouri attorney general’s office.

Those meetings were initially quarterly, then monthly, then weekly heading into the presidential election between former President Donald Trump and now President Biden. According to a source, Chan testified that in those multiple, separate meetings, the FBI warned the social media companies that there could be potentially Russian “hack and dump” or “hack and leak” operations.

In their complaint, the GOP AGs noted an Aug. 26 podcast episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” in which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that “the FBI basically came to us” and told Facebook to be “on high alert” relating to “a lot of Russian propaganda.” Zuckerberg added that the FBI said “there’s about to be some kind of dump… that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant.”

BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days based on a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation. pic.twitter.com/llTA7IqGa1

— Minds💡 (@minds) August 25, 2022

[…]

“Since filing our lawsuit, we’ve uncovered troves of discovery that show a massive ‘censorship enterprise,'” Attorney General Eric Schmitt told Fox News Digital. “Now, we’re deposing top government officials, and we’re one of the first to get a look under the hood — the information we’ve uncovered through those depositions has been shocking to say the least. It’s clear from Tuesday’s deposition that the FBI has an extremely close role in working to censor freedom of speech.”

Elon Musk released internal documents from Twitter last week showing the “Biden team” sent in requests for URLs to be taken down ahead of the election.

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.” pic.twitter.com/mnv0YZI4af

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022

As we saw with Zuckerberg’s comments on Rogan, the FBI’s “warnings” were a way to pressure Big Tech to censor content the regime viewed negatively.

https://t.co/j4EeXEAw6F can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”: pic.twitter.com/w1wBMlG33U

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022

Truly incredible — former Twitter executive @yoyoel, who just got caught fabricating a fake justification for censoring a media outlet, says the decision to ban Trump after Jan 6 was impelled by the “trauma” he and other “content moderators” experienced online that fateful day pic.twitter.com/JSE7tpXtGz

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 3, 2022

The FBI not only directed the censorship of the internet ahead of the 2020 election but also manufactured a fake terror plot in the swing state of Michigan to hype the phony threat of “right-wing extremism.”

As we detailed earlier, a clear division is arising between Europe and the United States over Washington’s more hawkish and hardline stance on resisting all negotiations with Russia, but instead which is centered on encouraging Kiev to pursuing ‘victory’ on the battlefield. “The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons,” one senior European official bluntly complained to Politico last month.

Underscoring that Europe is more ready to pursue avenues of negotiated settlement in Ukraine, over the weekend French President Emmanuel Macron urged for the West to take seriously Russia’s security concerns regarding NATO expansion near its border. He called for greater willingness to give Moscow the “guarantees” necessary for negotiations to be successful. He called them ‘essential’ if the West wants to get serious about talks and peaceful settlement. 

“We need to prepare what we are ready to do, how we protect our allies and member states, and how to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table,” President Macron said in an interview that aired Saturday.

That’s when he underlined something which a mere months ago would elicit rage and accusations of ‘pro-Kremlin’ stooge among Western mainstream punditry. “One of the essential points we must address — as President Putin has always said — is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors, and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia,” Macron said. 

The timing of the remarks was interesting given the interview was recorded while he was on the US on a state visit to the White House, and it aired as he departed. 

According to The New York Times, “The interview with TF1, a French television network, appeared sympathetic to the concerns of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and was immediately picked up prominently by TASS, the Russian state news agency. It prompted an angry reaction in Ukraine.”

While there was no immediate reaction from the Biden administration, the Ukrainian presidency’s office said such negotiations and security guarantees would only be possible “after tribunal, conviction of war authors and war criminals” and the “imposition of large-scale reparations.”

Separately, David Arakhamia, the chief of the Ukrainian negotiating group involved in short-lived ceasefire talks in the opening months of the war, also echoed that Russian forces must first “leave the territory of our country; pay reparations; punish all war criminals; voluntarily give up nuclear weapons.”

The Times further points out that Russian state media was quick to amplify Macron’s interview statements: 

Responding to a tweet from TASS featuring Mr. Macron’s remarks, Nicolas Tenzer, a prominent French political scientist and essayist, commented: “Devastating.”

During the summer months and prior, European leaders seemed to tilt toward Washington’s more hardline approach to the conflict, but with the energy crisis becoming more acute and now headed into the winter months it appears a new consensus is emerging.

As another example, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke with President Vladimir Putin on Friday, with the Kremlin side later saying that Scholz admitted the West’s policy on Ukraine is “destructive” and that Berlin may pursue a rethinking of its policy.