Flip-Flopping Trump Impeachment Witness Registers As Ukraine Foreign Agent, Claims Allegiance “Still 100% To The United States”

Flip-Flopping Trump Impeachment Witness Registers As Ukraine Foreign Agent, Claims Allegiance “Still 100% To The United States”

Former US Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, who testified for the Democrats against Donald Trump during the former president’s impeachment, has registered as a foreign agent on behalf of Ukraine and the European Union, the Daily Caller reports.

Sondland initially testified in Trump’s impeachment inquiry that there was no quid pro quo when President Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens while withholding US military aid (unbeknownst to Zelensky at the time).

Sondland later flipped his story, claiming that he told a top Ukrainian official that a meeting with President Trump may be contingent upon its new administration committing to investigations Trump wanted regarding the Biden family and other matters, according to the New York Times.

And now, he’s a registered agent for Ukraine.

Sondland filed a registration statement with the U.S. Department of Justice, declaring himself a foreign agent of Ukraine and the E.U. in order to legally represent their interests in the country, according to a document obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Sondland’s registration is required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a 1938 law that governs how foreign governments and other entities may lobby U.S. officials. FARA registration is required regardless of U.S. citizenship and must occur before an individual begins lobbying.

See the registration below:

During his time in the Trump administration, Sondland personally dealt with various high-ranking Ukrainians, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has been trying to lobby members of Congress and executive branch officials to support its war with Russia.

Sondland Responds

In a statement to the Daily Caller, Sondland said “This term ‘Foreign Agent.’ It sounds very sinister because that’s the way the FARA laws are written. You’re designated as a foreign agent. I’m not an agent of anyone. I haven’t been asked by Ukraine or the E.U. to represent them. I’m simply having conversations that everyone has all the time with members of Congress and with members of governments of other countries to try and bridge and divide,” adding “The problem is the FARA laws require this registration and you become known as a ‘foreign agent,’ and that’s very different than someone who is hired by the E.U. or hired by Ukraine and paid to do a certain job on their behalf. I am not doing either.”

My allegiance is still 100% to the United States, not to the European Union. Unfortunately, I can’t have these conversations without registering,” he continued.

He also pushed back on the ‘flip-flop’ criticisms, telling the Caller: “I relayed facts that occurred in 2019, some of which had the effect of having a negative…showing President Trump in a negative light and some showing President Trump in a positive light, but I had no agenda to testify against or for President Trump in 2019.”

Except, that’s not quite what happened.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/28/2024 – 19:20

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The Human Tragedy In Haiti

The Human Tragedy In Haiti

Authored by Callista L. Gingrich via RealClear Politics,

Since late February, gang violence in Haiti has surged, overwhelming government and security forces and plunging the nation into further turmoil. The United Nations estimates that armed gangs now control 80 percent of the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

The recent wave of violence in the Caribbean nation’s ongoing gang wars erupted as multiple armed groups banded together, pledging to oust Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who came to power after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 and announced postponing Haiti’s elections again last year.

Citing ongoing gang violence as one of the reasons for staving off elections, Henry flew to Kenya in February to press for the deployment of a U.N-backed police force to support the Haitian National Police in fighting the gangs. The armed groups responded by launching a series of coordinated attacks in Port-au-Prince and preventing Henry’s return to Haiti.

In the weeks that followed, gangs ravaged two prisons releasing more than 4,000 inmates into the country; destroyed power substations; attacked airports, police stations, and neighborhoods; and took control of major ports and water facilities.

More than 15,000 people have fled their homes in recent weeks. According to an anonymous woman who spoke with CBS News, “People go inside your house, killing, raping, all those things, burning your house.”

Americans have been urged to leave the country. Nearly 1,000 have filled out crisis intake forms asking for help or assistance to escape the turmoil. At the time of this writing, hundreds of Americans have not been able to evacuate.

During a briefing on March 12, the U.S. State Department announced that in addition to pledging a total contribution of $300 million, the United States helped to broker a deal that will form “a new presidential council that will select a new interim prime minister and pave the pathway for elections, as well as the deployment of the Multinational Security Support Mission.” Once the transitional council is established, Kenya will deploy the police force and Henry will step aside.

Despite this development, the situation on the ground for the people of Haiti remains desperate. A U.S. State Department spokesperson said during a press briefing on Monday, “It is not hyperbole to say that this is one of the most dire humanitarian situations in the world.”

Tragically, fear and suffering from gang violence in Haiti is not new – but is a daily reality for many Haitians.

There are an estimated 200 gangs operating in Haiti, and approximately 95 operate near Port-au-Prince. In 2023, more than 8,400 people were reported killed, injured, or kidnapped, more than two times the amount as the previous year. Further, compared to 2022, rape cases skyrocketed by 49 percent from January to August 2023.

Bringing violence to neighborhoods, gangs demand so-called protection money from residents, and when they can’t pay, threaten impoverished civilians. Twenty-eight-year-old Annie, who fled Port-au-Prince with her family two years ago, told the BBC, “I saw so many awful things I never thought I would see. We were afraid for our lives.”

She added, “We are living with death on a daily basis.”

In addition to gang violence, chronic political instability, natural disasters, foreign intervention, and debt have crippled Haiti’s economy, fueled violence, and hindered development.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and more than half of the population lives below the World Bank’s poverty line. In a population of 11.7 million people, approximately 5.5 million Haitians require humanitarian assistance, more than 4 million people are affected by food insecurity, and 19,000 are experiencing famine. 

I wake up in the morning and if we have sugar in the house, we make sugar water and put a bit of salt in it, just to drink it and stop the pain of hunger,” Kerby, a Haitian who fled Port-au-Prince due to gang threats, recently told the BBC.

Amid the recent developments, it is unclear what the governance of Haiti will look like and how it will impact the future of the Caribbean nation.

As gang violence and chaos continue to wreak havoc, the international community must work to bring peace and stability to Haiti.

For more commentary form Callista Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/28/2024 – 19:00

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Moody’s Warns Bridge Collapse Is “Credit Negative” For Baltimore As Economic Shock Emerges 

Moody’s Warns Bridge Collapse Is “Credit Negative” For Baltimore As Economic Shock Emerges 

Instead of the woke Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott utilizing his precious time by going on corporate media’s leftists Joy Reid’s MSNBC show and asserting that white conservatives “should be afraid” of the consequences of calling him the ‘DEI Mayor,’ perhaps the unseasoned youngster who over-promised about fixing imploding Baltimore City (after fifty years of a Democratic-controlled City Hall) should realize the local economy is on the cusp of meltdown and potential negative credit risk event following the bridge collapse and resulting paralyzed port. 

The Port of Baltimore is a significant economic driver for the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland, and an extended closure will spread like cancer through the local economy as snarled supply chains will result in job losses, lower warehouse activity, and tax revenue loss for the government. 

“I would say the Port of Baltimore is the leading economic driver for the region in Baltimore,” Anirban Basu, chairman and CEO of Baltimore-based Sage Policy Group Inc., told FreightWaves

Basu said, “One could argue that the leading driver is Johns Hopkins. It’s a difficult comparison, because you’re talking about two very different fields of endeavor. But the Baltimore region has been one of the nation’s underperformers in recent years. In the Baltimore region, we have had to clawback the jobs lost early during the pandemic.”

Cargo to the paralyzed Port of Baltimore will be diverted to other US East Coast ports. Scott Cowan, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association Baltimore local chapter, warned that thousands of port jobs could soon vanish. 

Source: Bloomberg 

On Thursday morning, Moody’s published a note that said a prolonged closure of the port would ripple through the local economy and could spark negative credit risk events for the city and state:  

The bridge collapse threatens to disrupt aspects of the State of Maryland (Aaa stable) and City of Baltimore (Aa2 stable) economies. The suspension of shipping traffic to the Port of Baltimore will likely divert cargo to other East Coast ports, which may affect jobs and tax revenue. The accident also has the potential to hurt the transportation and warehousing sector, though that accounts for a small share of state GDP.

More from Moody’s about the credit fallout that could soon hit Baltimore: 

In recent years, the state and Baltimore County (Aaa stable) have provided incentives and worked with developers to facilitate the redevelopment of Sparrows Point, a more than 3,000-acre contaminated industrial site once home to a Bethlehem Steel plant. Over the last nine years, Sparrows Point has seen almost $2 billion of private investment resulting in the development of 14 million square feet of warehousing and distribution facilities. With the Key Bridge providing the only direct access route between Sparrows Point and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, further development at Sparrows Point could be delayed.

There is no timetable for how long salvage crews will take to remove the massive bridge blocking the harbor’s only entry and exit. Some figures are six weeks, while others are several months. Shippers diverting operations to other East Coast ports will also hit warehousing and trucking businesses in the area. 

We have described to readers for years that Baltimore has been trending down. It’s only in a downward trend when a shock forms that the real troubles begin materializing. And that shock started this week. Sorry, Scott. It’s not a race thing like you describe on MSNBC—you’re just an inexperienced leader. The persistent crime chaos and failed progressive policies are evidence of this. It’s time for new leadership. 

Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/28/2024 – 18:40

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Bahrain Opposition Activist Arrested For Criticizing McLaren Ownership

Bahrain Opposition Activist Arrested For Criticizing McLaren Ownership

Via Middle East Eye

A leading opposition activist has been arrested and detained in Bahrain for criticizing on social media the island kingdom’s ownership of the sportscar brand, McLaren.

Ebrahim Sharif was arrested by Bahraini authorities on Monday morning over social media posts critical of Bahrain’s decision to take full ownership of the McLaren Group, which is involved in Formula One, other motorsports and the manufacture of luxury supercars. 

The former secretary general of the National Democratic Action Society (Wa’ad), Bahrain’s largest leftist political party, Sharif was arrested and detained for three social media posts he wrote in the wake of the McLaren ownership news. 

Last Friday, Mumtalakat, Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund, which was already McLaren’s biggest shareholder, having first invested in 2007, took over full ownership of the troubled British company, which has been experiencing heavy financial losses.

Abdulla bin Khalifa al-Khalifa, CEO of Mumtalakat and a member of Bahrain’s ruling royal family, welcomed the deal, heralding “the next phase of the company’s trajectory of growing its leadership position in the luxury super car and motorsports industries.”

Sharif was interviewed by police on Monday following a summons and subsequently referred to Bahrain’s public prosecution, which ordered that he be kept in detention for seven days pending an investigation over “social media posts that allegedly incite hatred against the regime,” according to Sharif’s lawyer and family.

If officially charged, the opposition activist could be imprisoned under Article 165 of the Bahrain Penal Code, which states that “A prison sentence shall be passed against any person who expressly incites others to develop hatred or hostility towards the system of government.” Farida Ghulam, Sharif’s wife, confirmed his arrest and the reasons for his detention in a social media post. 

Middle East Eye asked McLaren if it condoned the arrest and detention of an activist for criticizing its ownership. The company has not yet responded.

In the first of his contentious social media posts, on March 23 Sharif quoted Karl Marx’s line about history repeating itself first as tragedy, and then as farce. He referenced Bahrain’s prior purchase of Gulf Air, before writing: “With McLaren, we have moved from tragedy to farce. We have completed another cycle of owning failed companies with bottomless losses.”

McLaren recorded a pre-tax loss of $349m in the first nine months of 2023

The next day, Sharif contrasted Bahrain’s housing projects budget for 2023 (approximately $239m, according to official documentation displayed in the tweet) with the $564m put into McLaren by the sovereign wealth fund. 

In a follow-up post, Sharif wrote that “Denial is an official policy, and the narrative of ‘a happy people’ is promoted by superficial media outlets.” And further:

“Do we believe what officials repeat and find resonance in complicit media, or do we believe what our eyes see, our ears hear, and our feelings sense about citizens living in miserable poverty, chronic unemployment, marginalization, class disparities, and housing waiting lists that extend until the end of their days?

What the state spent on McLaren Racing last year is multiples of what it spent on housing projects. Do people die… in their overcrowded homes because you prioritize your hobbies and games over the interests of the poor?

It was after this last post that Sharif was summoned for an interview by Bahraini police. Commenting on the charges, Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, advocacy director at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (Bird), said: “These accusations are absurd. No one should be arrested for freely expressing their views or questioning how the government is spending public funds. McLaren’s leadership must speak out on his arrest or else their brand will be stained by Bahrain’s abuses.”

In 2004, Bahrain hosted its inaugural Grand Prix – the first one to take place in the Middle East. While the 20th anniversary of this event was celebrated at the 2024 Bahrain Grand Prix earlier this month, activists told MEE it marked “20 years of sportswashing”

The deal to take F1 to Bahrain was struck by the motorsport’s then-supremo, Bernie Ecclestone, and the island kingdom’s crown prince, Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa. 

Over the 20 years it has hosted the Grand Prix, Bahrain has looked to control this publicity, with political protests broken up so as not to disturb the spectacle around the motorsport, and activists harassed, detained and jailed for speaking out.

“The Grand Prix helps them, it helps them do this,” Moosa Satrawi, a Bahraini activist who told MEE he had been detained, abused and tortured for protesting unemployment in the island kingdom, said of Bahrain’s clampdown on human rights.  

Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/28/2024 – 18:20

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Russia Announces ‘Substantiated Evidence’ Of Ukraine Link To Crocus Hall Terrorists

Russia Announces ‘Substantiated Evidence’ Of Ukraine Link To Crocus Hall Terrorists

Russian authorities say they have found a firm link between the suspects in last week’s terror attack on the Crocus City Hall complex and “Ukrainian nationalists” – according to a Thursday announcement. 

The Russian Investigative Committee has unveiled preliminary findings, stating that the perpetrators who last Friday killed 140 people and wounded many more had received “significant sums of money” from Ukraine.

Putin has acknowledged that Islamic extremists were behind the attack, but still maintains accusations of a “Ukraine direction”.

Investigators claim to have in their possession “substantiated evidence” that the attackers received payments from Ukraine in the form of cryptocurrency. 

President Putin had starting Saturday asserted that the terrorists were apprehended just before trying to cross the Ukrainian border. He alleged that the Ukrainians might have been preparing a “window” for them to cross. There were four gunmen who rampaged through the mall and concert venue on Friday, randomly shooting innocent bystanders, but in total eleven were initially arrested, followed by several more arrests of alleged conspirators.

Days following Putin’s speech the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Aleksandr Bortnikov, told a press briefing that the Kremlin considers that the US, UK and Ukraine may have been involved.

Importantly, the Kremlin has acknowledged the perpetrators to to be radical Islamic terrorists, and so have said there is some truth to the ‘ISIS-K’ narrative presented by the West; however, Russian officials have persistently raised the question of another entity, country, or intelligence service ultimately backing the attack. For example on Wednesday foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova had this to say:

Of course, the speed with which they were able to [come to such forthright conclusions] is astonishing. It took them only a few hours to get to a microphone, turn on the lights, summon the press, and draw a conclusion about who is to blame for this horribly bloody terrorist attack.”

Russian intelligence (FSB) has meanwhile claimed the terrorists would have been “welcomed as heroes” if they had made it to Ukraine. All four gunmen have since been identified as Tajik nationals – and none of those in detention are Russian citizens, according to Moscow authorities.

As for the new allegations that they had financial links to Ukraine, no evidence was presented publicly to back the statements. It also remains unclear whether these alleged funding links are connected to Ukrainian government entities or just individuals inside Ukraine.

The White House meanwhile is not buying any of this. In response, on Thursday the Biden administration rejected these new Russian claims as “nonsense” and said it was clear that the Islamic State was “solely responsible”. White House national security spokesperson John Kirby in a briefing also reiterated that Washington had passed info on to Moscow that a terror attack was imminent. Kirby described this as delivered in the form of a “written warning”. The US Embassy in Moscow also issued a public alert calling on Americans to avoid large public venues and gatherings.

“It is abundantly clear that ISIS (Islamic State) was solely responsible for the horrific attack in Moscow last week. In fact, the United States tried to help prevent this terrorist attack and the Kremlin knows this,” Kirby said.

A NY Times report says, however, that the US side did not share its full intelligence with Moscow. “The adversarial relationship between Washington and Moscow prevented US officials from sharing any information about the plot beyond what was necessary,” the Times wrote Thursday. The Americans purportedly did this “out of fear Russian authorities might learn their intelligence sources or methods.”

Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/28/2024 – 18:00

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DeSantis Signs Property Rights Bill In Florida That Ends “Squatting Scam”

DeSantis Signs Property Rights Bill In Florida That Ends “Squatting Scam”

Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness,

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation into law Wednesday that ends squatters’ rights in the Sunshine State, stating that “squatting” is a scam that violates private property rights.

After alarming stories about squatters commandeering homes and depriving the owners of their property rights made nationwide news in recent weeks, DeSantis took action.

“We are in the state of Florida are ending this squatters scam once and for all. And momentarily I’ll be signing HB 621, which will give the homeowner the ability to quickly and legally remove a squatter from a property and which will increase criminal penalties for squatting,” DeSantis said during a press conference on the signing at the Orange County State Attorney’s Office.

“You are not going to be able to commandeer somebody’s private property and expect to get away with it. We are in the state of Florida are ending this squatters scam once and for all, DeSantis added.

The common sense law allows property owners to file an affidavit to prove they legally own a property. Squatters will quickly face criminal charges once its proven that they illegally moved into a home.

If the suspect is unable to produce documents authorizing his residency, the property owner can call on the sheriff’s office to immediately remove the squatter from his home.

The law establishes harsher penalties for squatting crimes, including “a second-degree felony charge against squatters who damage a home, a first-degree felony charge against those who fraudulently sell or lease a property, and a misdemeanor charge against those who purposefully present a fraudulent lease.”

Previously, squatters in Florida, as well as other states, were considered tenants after a specific length of time and legal property owners often had to launch lengthy and expensive court battles to legally remove them from their homes.

“Now, we have not had the same type of issues here, as you’ve seen in California or New York. Nevertheless, our laws were really geared towards this not necessarily being a fad,” DeSantis said.

The governor said that unlike Democrat-led states that protect squatters, Florida will crackdown on the criminals.

“They’re siding with the squatters,” he said of the blue states.

“In fact, we have seen squatters move in and claim residence. This forces a massive, long, drawn-out judicial review before they can even be removed from the property. These are people that never had a right to be in the property to begin with. Earlier this month in New York, a woman returned to a property she inherited to find squatters living there. She changed the locks to get them out, and the state of New York arrested her instead of the squatters.”

During the signing ceremony in Orlando, Sheriff Dennis M. Lemma said the word “squatter” is too kind and the perpetrators should instead be referred to as “criminals and con artists.”

“I want to thank our legislative body, both our delegates here in central Florida and abroad, because this received unanimous support, and it’s been long too often where we’ve seen homeowners that have spent their entire life working and earning. Some have inherited homes of parents and to knock on the door and be met with squatters,” Lemma said.

“Squatters actually is a very, very kind term. These are criminals and con artists that need to be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” he continued.

Florida, similar to other states across the nation, has seen repeated incidents of squatters fraudulently moving into a home or property, including a squatter in September who moved into a multimillion-dollar home in Bonita Springs and was found wearing the homeowner’s clothing. Another homeowner in June, who was on vacation abroad before returning to his Ocala house, was forced to confront a squatter who trashed his property in his absence.

While residents in a neighborhood in Winter Park sounded off in September that squatters had turned the area into a “nightmare” because the police department was “handcuffed” from arresting the suspects as it was considered a civil matter.

DeSantis pointed out that in Florida, there are many seasonal residents who reside in the state for half the year and leave their houses unattended when they return to their home states in the north.

The governor said those people shouldn’t have to worry that “some rogue person moves in and tries to assert rights against the lawful property owner.”

DeSantis said that he believes Florida is the first state to decisively handle this problem.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/28/2024 – 17:40

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NYC Delinquent Property Taxes Approach $1 Billion After Expiration of Tax-Lien Punishment

NYC Delinquent Property Taxes Approach $1 Billion After Expiration of Tax-Lien Punishment

While New York City embarks on a program to hand out some $53 million in prepaid debit cards to illegals, the city has estimated that overdue property taxes are set to reach their highest level ever, jumping 30% to over $880 million at the end of the fiscal year in June, vs. three years ago. City officials attribute this to the expiration of a tax-lien sales program that would punished delinquencies by allowing the city to sell liens on single-family homes and condos after three years of nonpayment, according to a Tuesday offering document for a city general obligation bond sale cited by Bloomberg.

Under the program created by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1996, and which expired in March 2022, liens slapped on delinquent properties would be discounted and packaged into securities sold to a third-party trust, which borrows money from investors to pay the city upfront, and then assumes responsibility for collecting the outstanding property tax through debt servicing companies (plus fees and interest). After the investors are paid back, the city was entitled to collect additional revenue from fees and interest payments.

45% of New York’s tax revenue and 30% of overall funds for the current $114 billion budget come from property taxes – which is expected to top $32.7 billion in the current fiscal year.

“It’s not just the absolute dollar amount that I think should worry us all,” city Finance Commissioner Preston Niblack said at a March 4 City Council finance committee hearing, adding that people have realized “there are no consequences for not paying your property taxes.”

“That just can’t be allowed to continue,” he said.

To be sure, the rise in unpaid property taxes comes as New York’s office market continues to struggle. The overall vacancy rate for Manhattan office space stood at 22.5% in November, the highest on record, according to the city’s January financial plan.

Rent-regulated apartments are also facing stress after a 2019 law sharply reduced landlords’ ability to raise rents. -Bloomberg

The tax-lien program faced pushback from community activists and even state Attorney General Letitia James, who said in December 2020 that “additional fees can quickly turn a relatively small tax lien into an overwhelming financial burden, eventually pushing homeowners into foreclosure,” referring to a mandatory 5% surcharge, legal fees and a 9% or 18% interest rate that compounds daily.

Between 2018 and 2022, the city collected $260 million from the tax-lien program, according to the city’s bond offering document.

A better solution?

Bloomberg further reports that the city’s Department of Finance is working on legislation that would reauthorize tax-lien sales, ensuring that homeowners don’t face foreclosure or eviction.

“We look forward to working with the [City] Council on this important issue and look forward to a new, more equitable form of property tax enforcement,” said Department of Finance spokesman, Ryan Lavis.

The City Council, meanwhile, said in a statement that it’s working with the “Administration, advocates, impacted communities, and all stakeholders to advance policies that address outstanding charges while supporting the economic health of homeowners, our communities, and the City.”

The biggest offenders include a 16-unit Cobble Hill, Brooklyn rental building which owes $52.2 million of the $880 million estimated delinquency. There’s also a 49-unit Bronx apartment building which owes $24.7 million.

“We have to do something,” said City Council Member Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “People should pay their taxes.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/28/2024 – 17:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/0WMbv8c Tyler Durden

Piketty’s Inequality Con

Piketty’s Inequality Con

Via SchiffGold.com,

If you ask a liberal politician who their favorite economist is, there are three likely responses.

One response is a panicked change of topic.

From the slightly more sophisticated politicians who skim the New York Times, you might hear Paul Krugman.

From the politicians who style themselves intellectuals of the left, you’d hear Thomas Piketty.

Thomas Piketty is a French economist who is a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, one of France’s most prestigious schools. In 2013, he released a book called Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It was a bestseller. In the book, Piketty argues that the rate of return on capital is greater than long-run economic growth. He projects that this relationship will continue and a small minority of capital owners will become richer, not just in absolute terms due to economic growth, but also in relative terms, as wages comprise a smaller and smaller share of the economy over time.

Piketty thinks this is bad for typical left-wing reasons and suggests that massive wealth taxes are an appropriate solution to what he sees as the otherwise inevitable concentration of wealth. The New Yorker has argued that Piketty’s work inspired Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for a wealth tax.

While Piketty’s claims about the desirability of egalitarianism and wealth taxes are to some extent subjective, his book and his reputation are premised on the claim that he carefully assembled data that showed an increasing return to capital over time.

He claims to have based his work on three centuries of data.

Unfortunately, for fans of Piketty and left-wing economists who prefer a more fact-based economics approach, it looks like Piketty’s data work is quite sloppy.

In 2015, Magness and Murphy pointed to a wide range of flaws or mistakes in the book writing that they found “evidence of pervasive errors of historical fact, opaque methodological choices, and the cherry-picking of sources to construct favorable patterns from ambiguous data. Additional evidence suggests that Piketty used a highly distortive data assumption from the Soviet Union to accentuate one of his main historical claims about global “capitalism” in the twentieth century.” According to Magness and Murphy, Piketty bases his measure of 150 years of the world economy on a sample size of just six individual years and just extrapolates the rest of the data! Yikes!

The critique was influential but perhaps as Alex Tabarrok suggests it was possible to dismiss because the criticism was published in a libertarian-leaning journal. However further work showed even more problems with the Piketty data.

In 2018, a report from the left-wing Urban Institute came out that showed that work by Piketty which showed extreme increases in economic inequality was an outlier in the field with other studies, even some by other left-wing economists, showing much smaller effects. This is consistent with Magness and Murphy’s concern that Piketty was cherry-picking results to conjure up an image of an inegalitarian dystopia. In 2023, another study tried to look at the same topic and pointed out what you accounted for the extremely progressive American income tax system and income transfers (welfare programs), there was “little change in after-tax top income shares.”

Inequality changes over time. Sometimes it rises. Sometimes it falls (as is happening right now).

Piketty didn’t discover a secret law of economics and now we have the data to show it.

That probably won’t stop some left-wing politicians from citing him- there are even people who cite Karl Marx unironically- but it might let us know who we don’t have to take seriously.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/28/2024 – 17:00

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Trump Overtakes Soros’ Net Worth

Trump Overtakes Soros’ Net Worth

Former President Donald Trump’s net worth topped $6.4 billion on Monday following the completion of a 29-month-long SPAC deal for his social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group (now trading under symbol $DJT).

According to Bloomberg‘s index of the world’s richest people, Trump is in 328th place, with a net worth of $7.81 billion. George Soros, the nemesis of Democracy, is sitting in 375th place with a net worth of $7.16 billion.

While that’s cute and all, dick-measuring doesn’t matter since the 93-year-old Hungarian investor uses his money as a weapon – and has directly affected both politics, crime, and demographics through financial support – and facilitation, of open-border policies and soft-on-crime elected officials.

Soros is perhaps best known as the man who ‘broke’ the Bank of England – when he made roughly $1 billion in profit shorting the British pound sterling during the UK’s 1992 Black Wednesday financial crisis.

In 1991, the Washington Post dubbed Soros an “overt operative” of US-backed regime change in Europe. More recently, as noted above, Soros has poured his resources into organizations that promote a Marxist agenda, including censoring free speech under the guise of combating “disinformation.”

As David Galland and Stephen McBride noted in 2016 – before Soros’s widespread support of US District Attorneys kicked into high gear:

What is this globalist agenda, and where does it come from?

The Humble Beginnings

The globalist seed was sowed for young George by his father, Tivadar, a Jewish lawyer who was a strong proponent of Esperanto. Esperanto is a language created in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof, a Polish eye doctor, for the purpose of “transcending national borders” and “overcoming the natural indifference of mankind.”

Tivadar taught young George Esperanto and forced him to speak it at home. In 1936, as Hitler was hosting the Olympics in Berlin, Tivadar changed the family name from Schwartz to Soros, an Esperanto word meaning “will soar.”

George Soros, who was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, benefited greatly from his father’s decision.

Allegedly, in 1944, 14-year-old George Soros went to work for the invading Nazis. It is said that until the end of the war in 1945, he worked with a government official, helping him confiscate property from the local Jewish population.

In an 1998 interview with 60 Minutes, Soros described the year of German occupation as “the happiest time in my life.”

Soros’s Venture into Finance

When the war ended, Soros moved to London and in 1947 enrolled in the London School of Economics where he studied under Karl Popper, the Austrian-British philosopher who was one of the first proponents of an “Open Society.”

Soros then worked at several merchant banks in London before moving to New York in 1963. In 1970, he founded Soros Fund Management and in 1973 created the Quantum Fund in partnership with investor Jim Rogers.

The fund made annual returns of over 30%, cementing Soros’s reputation and putting him in a position of power—one he utilizes to this day to advance the agenda of his mentors.

The Currency Speculations That Threw Britain and Asia into Crisis

In the 1990s, Soros began a string of large bets against national currencies. The first was in 1992, when he sold short the pound sterling and made a $1 billion profit in a single day.

His next big currency speculation came in 1997. This time Soros singled out the Thai baht and, with heavy short-selling volume, destroyed the baht’s artificial peg to the US dollar, which started the Asian financial crisis.

“Humanitarian” Efforts

Today, Soros’s net worth stands at $23 billion. Since taking a back seat in his company, Soros Fund Management, in 2000, Soros has been focusing on his philanthropic efforts, which he carries out through the Open Society Foundations he founded in 1993.

So who does he donate to, and what causes does he support?

During the 1980s and 1990s, Soros used his extraordinary wealth to bankroll and fund revolutions in dozens of European nations, including Czechoslovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. He achieved this by funneling money to political opposition parties, publishing houses, and independent media in these nations.

If you wonder why Soros meddled in these nations’ affairs, part of the answer may lie in the fact that during and after the chaos, he invested heavily in assets in each of the respective countries.

He then used Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs to advise the fledgling governments to privatize all public assets immediately, thus allowing Soros to sell the assets he had acquired during the turmoil into newly formed open markets.

Having succeeded in advancing his agenda in Europe through regime change—and profiting in the process—he soon turned his attention to the big stage, the United States.

The Big Time

In 2004, Soros stated, “I deeply believe in the values of an open society. For the past 15 years I have been focusing my efforts abroad; now I am doing it in the United States.”

Since then, Soros has been funding groups such as:

  • The American Institute for Social Justice, whose aim is to “transform poor communities through lobbying for increased government spending on social programs”
  • The New America Foundation, whose aim is to “influence public opinion on such topics as environmentalism and global governance”
  • The Migration Policy Institute, whose aim is to “bring about an illegal immigrant resettlement policy and increase social welfare benefits for illegals”

Soros also uses his Open Society Foundations to funnel money to the progressive media outlet, Media Matters.

Soros funnels the money through a number of leftist groups, including the Tides Foundation, Center for American Progress, and the Democracy Alliance in order to circumvent the campaign finance laws he helped lobby for.

Why has Soros donated so much capital and effort to these organizations? For one simple reason: to buy political power.

Democratic politicians who go against the progressive narrative will see their funding cut and be attacked in media outlets such as Media Matters, which also directly contribute to mainstream sites such as NBC, Al Jazeera, and The New York Times.

Apart from the $5 billion Soros’s foundation has donated to groups like those cited above, he has also made huge contributions to the Democratic Party and its most prominent members, like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and of course Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Best Friends with the Clintons

Soros’s relationship with the Clintons goes back to 1993, around the time when OSF was founded. They have become close friends, and their enduring relationship goes well beyond donor status.

According to the book, The Shadow Party, by Horowitz and Poe, at a 2004 “Take Back America” conference where Soros was speaking, the former first lady introduced him saying, “[W]e need people like George Soros, who is fearless and willing to step up when it counts.”

Soros began supporting Hillary Clinton’s current presidential run in 2013, taking a senior role in the “Ready for Hillary” group. Since then, Soros has donated over $15 million to pro-Clinton groups and Super PACs.

More recently, Soros has given more than $33 million to the Black Lives Matter group, which has been involved in outbreaks of social unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015. Both of these incidents contributed to a worsening of race relations across America.

The same group heavily criticized Democratic contender Bernie Sanders for his alleged track record of supporting racial inequality, helping to undercut him as a competitive threat with one of Hillary Clinton’s most ardent constituencies.

This, of course, greatly enhances the clout Soros wields through the groups mentioned above. It is safe to assume that he is now able to drive Democratic policy, especially in an administration headed by Hillary Clinton.

Simply, what Soros wants, he gets. And it’s clear from his history that he wants to smudge away national borders and create the sort of globalist nightmare represented by the European Union.

In recent years, Soros has turned his attention back to Europe. Is it a coincidence that the continent is currently in economic and social disarray?

Another Home Run: the Ukrainian Conflict

There’s no doubt about Soros’s great influence on US foreign policy. In an October 1995 PBS interview with Charlie Rose, he said, “I do now have access [to US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott]. There is no question. We actually work together [on Eastern European policy].”

Soros’s meddling reared its ugly head again in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which began in early 2014.

In a May 2014 interview with CNN, Soros stated he was responsible for establishing a foundation in the Ukraine that ultimately led to the overthrow of the country’s elected leader and the installation of a junta handpicked by the US State Department, at the time headed by none other than Hillary Clinton:

CNN Host: First on Ukraine, one of the things that many people recognized about you was that you during the revolutions of 1989 funded a lot of dissident activities, civil society groups in Eastern Europe and Poland, the Czech Republic. Are you doing similar things in Ukraine?

Soros: Well, I set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became independent of Russia. And the foundation has been functioning ever since and played an important part in events now.

The war that ripped through the Ukrainian region of Donbass resulted in the deaths of over 10,000 people and the displacement of over 1.4 million people. As collateral damage, a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet was shot down, killing all 298 on board.

But once again Soros was there to profit from the chaos he helped create. His prize in Ukraine was the state-owned energy monopoly Naftogaz.

Soros again had his US cronies, Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew and US consulting company McKinsey, advise the puppet government of Ukraine to privatize Naftogaz.

Although Soros’s exact stake in Naftogaz has not been disclosed, in a 2014 memo he pledged to invest up to $1 billion in Ukrainian businesses, but no other Ukrainian holdings have since been reported.

His Latest Success: the European Refugee Crisis

Soros’s agenda is fundamentally about the destruction of national borders. This has recently been shown very clearly with his funding of the European refugee crisis.

The refugee crisis has been blamed on the civil war currently raging in Syria. But did you ever wonder how all these people suddenly knew Europe would open its gates and let them in?

The refugee crisis is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It coincided with OSF donating money to the US-based Migration Policy Institute and the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, both Soros-sponsored organizations. Both groups advocate the resettlement of third-world Muslims into Europe.

In 2015, a Sky News reporter found “Migrant Handbooks” on the Greek island of Lesbos. It was later revealed that the handbooks, which are written in Arabic, had been given to refugees before crossing the Mediterranean by a group called “Welcome to the EU.”

Welcome to the EU is funded by—you guessed it—the Open Society Foundations.

Soros has not only backed groups that advocate the resettlement of third-world migrants into Europe, he in fact is the architect of the “Merkel Plan.”

The Merkel Plan was created by the European Stability Initiative whose chairman Gerald Knaus is a senior fellow at none other than the Open Society Foundations.

The plan proposes that Germany should grant asylum to 500,000 Syrian refugees. It also states that Germany, along with other European nations, should agree to help Turkey, a country that’s 98% Muslim, gain visa-free travel within the EU starting in 2016.

Political Discourse

The refugee crisis has raised huge concern in European countries like Hungary.

In response to 7,000 migrants entering Hungarian territory per day in 2015, the Hungarian government reestablished border control in order to keep the hordes of refugees from entering the country.

Of course this did not go down well with Soros and his close allies, the Clintons.

Bill Clinton has since come out and accused both Poland and Hungary of thinking “democracy is too much trouble” and wanting to have a “Putin-like authoritarian dictatorship.”

Seeing through Clinton’s comments, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán responded by saying, “The remarks made about Hungary and Poland … have a political dimension. These are not accidental slips of the tongue. And these slips or remarks have been multiplying since we are living in the era of the migrant crisis. And we all know that behind the leaders of the Democratic Party, we have to see George Soros.”

He went on to say that “although the mouth belongs to Clinton, the voice belongs to Soros.”

Soros has since said of Orbán’s policy toward the migrants: “His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.”

It’s hard to imagine that he could be any clearer in his globalist intentions.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/28/2024 – 16:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/ET1vzBi Tyler Durden

You Can’t Fool All Of The People All Of The Time About Immigration

You Can’t Fool All Of The People All Of The Time About Immigration

Authored by Simon Hankinson via The Epoch Times,

There’s an old saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Three years into his presidency, Joe Biden has run into the last sentence of that aphorism as he attempts to fool all Americans into believing that either that he wants to fix the border crisis or that Republicans are to blame for it.

In his recent State of the Union address to Congress, President Biden was praised as “fiery” and “energetic” by friendly press outlets, but even they had to admit that the speech was more campaign stump speech than national status report. The right-leaning Federalist claimed Mr. Biden lied 30 times. And even Roll Call, which news website and media monitor AllSides calls “center”-leaning, fact-checked the speech and found it “included misleading claims on inflation, crime, clean energy investments, wages.”

Roll Call’s list of Biden’s false or misleading claims missed the biggest one of all: his attempt to blame Republicans in Congress for the disaster at the border that was actually caused by his executive actions.

Even so, what bothered the Left was that the president had gone off-script and called Jose Ibarra, the Venezuelan accused of killing college student Laken Riley, an “illegal.” Mr. Biden apologized for that faux pas in an interview with MSNBC two days later, saying, “I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal,’ it’s ‘undocumented.’”

But, in fact, Ibarra, while illegally in the United States, was indeed documented. Biden’s Department of Homeland Security documented him when it paroled him into the United States “temporarily” and on a “case-by-case” basis, as the law requires, allowing him to enter the country with no criminal background check in his native country. This was despite reports that Ibarra has tattoos indicating membership in a violent gang, which should have triggered further investigation.

“I am not going to treat any of these people with disrespect,” Mr. Biden told Jonathan Capehart in the interview. “They built this country.”

Presumably, by “these people,” Mr. Biden meant young men such as the Ibarra brothers. Mr. Biden would like Americans to ignore the distinction between congressionally authorized immigration (which did indeed help build this country) and the mass, illegal migration of unvetted aliens that he has facilitated during his three years in office.

“We have to control the border … and more orderly flow,” the president told Capehart.

By “orderly flow,” Mr. Biden means processing into the country as many inadmissible aliens as physically possible. This has been his policy from the very beginning of his administration, as this X compilation of Biden’s statements makes clear:

Despite the president’s falsehoods in his speech and protestations to Capeheart, however, a recent CBS poll showed 45 percent of Americans thought the “situation at the U.S.-Mexico border is a crisis.” That has the spin doctors working overtime.

Defending Biden’s border policy on CNN, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas again claimed, “This system has been broken for decades,” that the administration has been trying to fix it from Day One, and that there is a magical “bipartisan solution” in Congress that Republicans are refusing to pass.

“Legislation is the enduring solution,” said the man who has deliberately ignored existing legislation for three years. Mayorkas has refused to return asylum applicants to Mexico, detain or deport illegal aliens as he is legally required to do, and has made up programs to mass parole them into the United States, which the law does not authorize.

Raul Ortiz, the head of the 21,000-strong U.S. Border Patrol until summer 2023, recently said he had never once met with President Biden or “border czar” Kamala Harris. Ortiz said “most definitely” the White House has sent “mixed messages” to would-be illegal migrants.

Not so. The Biden message has been clear and consistent: Enter the United States illegally, and you have a better than even chance of being allowed to stay indefinitely. You’ll even get in ahead of those who try to lawfully navigate the immigration system and wait their turn in line. Cross without identification, and you can give yourself a new name, date of birth, and history that will never be verified.

The world heard Biden’s message, and they came. They are coming still, from a greater variety of countries, in greater numbers.

Keeping the borders open to please Biden’s radical base while blaming Republicans in Congress for the results appears to be the White House communications strategy. “Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends,” Mr. Biden claimed after a visit to the border at the end of February.

But as Roll Call columnist David Winston wrote, “Simply saying the same things more aggressively won’t convince voters.”

After three years, Mr. Biden has made his case. He wants billions more tax dollars to facilitate the “smooth flow” of essentially unlimited immigration by foreigners who have no right to enter the country other than what “rights” he confers through stretching executive powers beyond credibility. Mr. Biden owns the consequences and will have to defend this position, not use the smoke screen he attempted to conjure at the State of the Union to conceal it.

Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/28/2024 – 16:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/R6hTbDu Tyler Durden