Making Trump Great Again

Trump has three options: fail, exit, or demolish. To be a great president, Trump would need to set aside the wars of words he relishes and instead become our demolition man.

by James Anthony for American Greatness

A president’s greatness comes down, in part, to how well he limited government abroad and at home. 

Abroad, Donald Trump didn’t lead the United States into a major war. 

At home, though, Trump signed off on swollen government budgets, didn’t force roll-call votes to fully repeal Obamacare, welcomed “Dreamers,” championed ill-conceived criminal justice “reform,” and greatly expanded public-health tyranny. 

Trump championed “15 days to flatten the curve,” which never was going to age well. He championed COVID money-printing that poured gas on a long-raging fire at the Federal Reserve. Trump championed genetic vaccines that, over time, are proving deadly and debilitating. Trump didn’t weigh in upfront to limit massive unconstitutional changes in ballot-handling that led to the certification of votes not credibly cast. 

Just as every essential idea of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was put into place by Herbert Hoover, every essential idea of Joe Biden’s COVID tyranny was prefaced by Trump’s decisions in 2020. 

Trump looks even worse when he’s compared to his contemporaries. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis quickly sought bona fide nongovernment experts, turned on a dime, and used substantial constitutional powers to limit government agencies and cronies from impinging on people’s liberties. Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) risked his career trying to block the COVID money-printing that bailed out Democratic politicians and amped up inflation. 

In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was weak on Obamacare because, as governor of Massachusetts, he had championed Romneycare. As things stand now, Trump is weak on Republican-affirmed Obamacare, criminal justice “reform,” health tyranny, and inflation. 

Inflation is going to remain hot even if Republicans regain control of the House and Senate. 

Ronald Reagan knew that inflation meant that more money was chasing the same products, and he took the political heat to take the necessary action to bring it to heel. 

Trump is smart enough to get this. Trump is agile enough to change course quickly. 

But Trump’s family members are not and will not. And Trump has always put his family members first, ahead of Americans writ large. 

Suppose that Trump’s momentum and marketing prowess dissuade and neutralize would-be Republican challengers. Trump would next face the hurdle that informed swing voters would need reasons to turn out to vote for him again. If Trump won’t give them reasons and loses the general election as a result, he would fall well short of great. 

If Trump does manage to win a second term, he will have to turn around and make his mark in only four more years. If he continues his first-term policies, he would also fall well short of great.  

One option, then, is simply to fail. 

Another option would be to exit. 

If Trump pivots to building his media empire and mercilessly pounding Democrats and the legacy media, he could successfully migrate his base’s enthusiasm over to fresh candidates who would eliminate Republican-affirmed Obamacare, end health tyranny, and slash spending to control inflation. 

Such an eventual nominee would be much better positioned to win a full eight years to make positive changes and, like Reagan, have voters reap the benefits and credit him. 

The nominee, and the voters choosing him, would have the benefit of all the recent hindsight that Trump’s presidency unearthed about existing departments and agencies. The right nominee would be ready from day one and would have surging support to be a demolition man par excellence. 

Or, Trump himself could become that demolition man. 

I can practically hear the warm-up theme song playing at his campaign rallies: “Don’t mess around with the demolition man.”

But greatness would demand action, not talk. 

A president has the executive power vested in him. Executives control organizational structures, layoffs and hiring, projects, and operations, including line-item budgets. 

Legislators constitutionally lack executive authority, just as they lack executive accountability. 

Admiral Hyman Rickover understood executive accountability:

Responsibility is a unique concept. . . . You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. . . . If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible. 

A president takes an oath to protect the Constitution. Protecting the Constitution requires that he be able to interpret the Constitution independently and not take any action that he himself regards as unconstitutional. 

When he considers anything in legislation or in judicial opinions unconstitutional, a president who takes his oath seriously won’t simply veto all new bills or refuse to execute all new judicial opinions. He also won’t, as a matter of course, simply execute existing statutes and existing opinions blindly. 

He won’t say he considers the Supreme Court’s abortion decisions unconstitutional but then still sign legislation to disburse funds to Planned Parenthood. 

He won’t say he opposes the State Department’s support for color-revolutionsand politically tilted investigations and prosecutions by the FBI and the Justice Department, but then allow those agencies to continue running amok. 

He won’t say he supports ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine but then still allow the operation of the Constitution-defying FDA, CDC, and NIH, or any Constitution-defying government-funded research. 

Instead, he will lay off every employee whose job or performance he considers unconstitutional. No reality-TV drama and suspense, just real-world action: “You’re fired!” 

He will recommend to Congress that it formally repeal statutes he considers to be unconstitutional. And in order to be able to do these things, he will have built a party to do them. 

A progressive president will hire and influence the permanent bureaucracy. Above all, a progressive president must sell its services to voters. He’s a government salesman. 

A president who protects the Constitution must instead veto unconstitutional spending bills, reorganize, lay people off, and urge Congress to repeal laws outside the scope of the Constitution. He also will market the Constitution to voters, but chiefly through his actions. 

In the wake of the progressives’ century, he would be a demolition man. 

To be a great president, Trump would need to set aside the wars of words he relishes. Instead, Trump will have to make his actions speak for him. 

And for us. 

X22, Devolution Power Hour, and more-March 29

 

Couple of news bits to get to before I post the podcasts:

1, Unfortunately, Chesapeake Shores won't be moving to GAC Family as I wanted. And instead, it'll air 1 more Season on Hallmark this summer. (Just hope it doesn't go woke.).

2, That NCIS crossover was pretty fun. Except for 2 giant errors:

1, The tech lady is now supposidly gay, so now I have to hope that was either a big fluke, or that she leaves soon because this was the only NCIS left that didn't bow down to the 'have a gay team member' crap. (Seriously, can this franchise frustrate me anymore then it already has??! This has a mostly conservative audience! And on top of that, the 2 agents who DID travel to Hawaii, never shared a scene together. So, what was really the point of this then other then to promote a dud show that will immediately be rejected when new viewers with an actual brain realize it's mostly a gay liberal political soap opera?? I swear, NCIS Sydney had better be good!

Here's tonight's news:

How the West Sowed the Seeds of War in Ukraine

Putin invaded Ukraine. But an alliance of bad actors, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and NGOs paved the road that made the present crisis inevitable.

by Pedro L. Gonzalez via substack

President Vladimir Putin is playing Russian roulette with the world. The invasion he launched on Feb. 24 has brought us closer to nuclear war than anything since the Cuban missile crisis. 

However, other culprits in the United States and Europe share his guilt. But they have so far managed to avoid notice and blame.

There would be no victory in stopping Russia without confronting what these groups and individuals have done. War does not begin in a vacuum, and this one has been a long time coming. Putin invaded Ukraine, but these liberal interventionists paved the road that made the present crisis inevitable.

First, it’s important to understand why Russia views Ukraine’s suing for NATO membership as an existential threat even though the alliance has integrated plenty of Warsaw Pact states and ex-Soviet republics since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As political scientist John Mearsheimer put it, Russia “swallowed” NATO’s major admissions of Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, and the Baltic states between 1999 and 2004.

But a line was drawn at Georgia and Ukraine. 

“Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia,” Mearsheimer wrote in Foreign Affairs. “Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it.” Essentially, it’s Russia’s Monroe Doctrine.

Putin would make this clear again four years after NATO integrated Romania and the Baltics. 

“No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine. That would be a hostile act toward Russia,” Putin warned then Undersecretary for Political Affairs William Burns, now director of the CIA, just before NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit. Nevertheless, George W. Bush’s administration supported integrating both Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance at the summit, while France and Germany remained adamantly opposed for fear of poking the Russian bear.

A compromise was reached. The alliance did not formally extend invitations to the two, but it did affirm, provocatively, and largely at the insistence of the Bush administration, “that these countries will become members of NATO.”

Putin called the summit’s statement a “direct threat” to Russian security. Then deputy foreign minister Alexander Grushko said that “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Even Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense in the administrations of Bush II and Barack Obama, confessed in his memoir that “trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching . . . that was an especially monumental provocation.”

The Bucharest summit concluded on April 4, 2008. Four months later, Putin demonstrated his seriousness to the West.

On August 1, 2008, the Russo-Georgian War began. In short, wrote Ted Galen Carpenter, a defense and foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute, “Moscow exploited a foolish provocation by Georgia’s pro‐​western government to launch a military offensive that brought Russian troops to the outskirts of the capital.” In the end, “Russia permanently detached two secessionist‐​minded Georgian regions and put them under effective Russian control.”

Russia successfully checked the ambitions of President Mikheil Saakashvili, who had been committed to gaining membership in NATO and the European Union for Georgia. But neither NATO, the EU, nor the United States would relent in their drive eastward.

In the wake of unrest fomented in Ukraine by the West in 2014, Putin launched the Russo-Ukrainian War, resulting in the annexation of Crimea. Along with the intervention in Georgia, this event is used today as concrete evidence of Russia’s dreams of global domination. “Putin’s behavior proves that it was wise to expand NATO eastward,” many would say. However, as Mearsheimer explained in a lecture at the University of Chicago, “there is no evidence that we thought Putin was aggressive before the crisis.” There is “no evidence that we were talking about expanding NATO because we had to contain the Russians.” 

“Because again, NATO expansion was driven by 21st century men and women—they believe balance of power politics is dead.”

By contrast, Mearsheimer added, “Putin is a 19th century man” who views the world through the lens of balance of power politics. “In the case of Europe, we were thinking like 21st century men and women and we thought we could just drive right up to his doorstep, and it wouldn’t matter.” His evidence that the foreign policy establishment did not consider Russia aggressive or bent on creating Greater Russia until recently is that “Obama and virtually all of Washington was caught with their pants down when this crisis broke out after February 22, because they did not see it coming.”

But they should have, considering that they toppled Ukraine’s democratically elected government that year. It was the work of an alliance between internal actors, the United States, and NGOs like the Clinton Foundation.

GOP Must Promise Inquisitions, Not Meaningless Task Forces

The January 6 committee has crossed a massive line in the sand with its attack on the Thomases; Republicans need to respond accordingly. Policy task forces won’t cut it.

by Julie Kelly for American Greatness

Using the pretext of the so-called insurrection on January 6, 2021, the long knives are out for Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Post-election text exchanges between Mrs. Thomas and Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief-of-staff, recently were leaked by the January 6 select committee to none other than the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, who darkly described the communications as proof that “Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election result.”

The small cache of texts—29 total—shows Thomas expressing frustration at the election’s outcome. There is nothing sinister, and certainly nothing criminal, about the messages.

But like everything related to the events of January 6, the truth doesn’t matter. Doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 election is considered a thoughtcrime and handled as such by Joe Biden’s Justice Department and Congress; CNN reported Monday afternoon that the January 6 select committee led by U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) now wants to interview Thomas. If she refuses—as she should—it’s highly likely the committee will issue a subpoena to compel her testimony, which it has done in numerous cases.

The poisonous tree of Thompson’s committee is yielding a bumper crop of political fruit for House Democrats and their useful idiots in the Republican Party such as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). With little else to run on and a White House in freefall, Democrats think they can sustain enough outrage over January 6 to stem major electoral losses in November.

Staffed with former federal prosecutors and a limitless budget, the select committee is unleashing a scorched-earth rampage against Trump and his allies; no one, including the wife of the longest-serving Supreme Court justice, is off-limits. For the first time in history, a sitting president repeatedly denied his predecessor executive privilege protections, allowing the committee to obtain an unprecedented tranche of presidential records years before what is typically allowed under the law.

Federal courts provide no oversight; to the contrary, judges sanction the illicit witch hunt with their legal imprimatur. 

In an unhinged ruling handed down Monday, Judge David O. Carter demanded that John Eastman, one of Trump’s election attorneys, immediately hand over more than 100 emails to the committee.

Carter, a Clinton appointee serving on a California district court, suggested Trump may have committed a crime—obstruction of an official proceeding, a felony that the Justice Department has slapped against more than 240 January 6 defendants—in his attempts to uncover election fraud. “Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,” Carter wrote. “Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower—it was a coup in search of a legal theory. The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process.” (No police officers died on January 6 or of anything related to that day.)

Given its unfettered mandate, the committee undoubtedly will accelerate its crusade in advance of the midterm elections.

So, how are Republicans planning to retaliate? Poised to take control of Congress in early 2023, GOP leaders are threatening to unload the most feared weapon on Capitol Hill, one the mere mention of which sends shivers down the spines of every credentialed congressional staffer and strikes panic in the heart of every vulnerable incumbent: the dreaded task force.

Excavating some of the party’s best talking points from the 1980s, Republicans will “rein in spending and look to improve American energy independence,” GOP Conference Chairman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) vowed last week in an equally alarming “fact sheet.” Other areas of intense task force focus will include “Big Tech censorship and data; future of American freedoms; energy, climate and conservation; American security; healthy future; and competition with China,” Roll Call reported.

Now, in a normal political climate—say any time before the year 2016—perhaps sincere promises to wield the mighty “task force” would energize the Republican base. Campaign pledges to tackle any number of real crises caused by an inept president of the opposite party might be accepted as a forward-thinking approach.

But that’s not where we are, and we may never be there again if Republicans don’t find some spine. 

The Biden regime is using every lever of power to systematically destroy their political opponents including citizens merely exercising their constitutional rights on January 6. Nearly 800 Americans and counting have been arrested for their involvement in the Capitol protest that day; although most face petty charges, their lives are nonetheless destroyed—homes raided by armed FBI agents, families split apart and bankrupted as defendants are alienated by their communities, fired by their employers, and harassed by local and national news reporters. At least two men have committed suicide in the face of unrelenting torment by Biden’s Justice Department and judges on the D.C. District Court, who continue to refuse to hold the government responsible for repeated delays.

The January 6 committee voted Monday night to send criminal referrals to the House for Peter Navarro and Daniel Scavino, two Trump associates, for contempt of Congress. The hope is that Attorney General Merrick Garland will comply. All of this is to justify the committee asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to charge Trump with obstruction or conspiracy—or both—before November.

Talking about policy goals, no matter how important and pressing the issue, is a waste of time for Republicans right now. And it’s not what the base, fed up with empty promises and an infuriating double standard of justice, wants to hear. From now until Election Day, Republicans should do nothing but campaign on a long list of inquisitions that will begin the moment they take power. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) already promised to investigate at least seven scandals such as the deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan, the southern border, and the origins of COVID.

But that’s not enough. Public hearings on FBI corruption—from FISAgate to the alleged plot to “kidnap” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to the department’s role in the events of January 6—should be at the top of the list. 

The FBI has burned the trust of the American people; Republicans need to assume  responsibility for overhauling or dismantling the agency that now acts as the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party. Witnesses should include not just current and former officials but the journalists who do their dirty work—and the victims left in their wake.

Ditto for the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Who is responsible for so much bad advice during the pandemic? Who profited? Who suffered? And who will pay for their destructive, essentially unscientific approach to public health?

Republican lawmakers don’t want to touch the Hunter Biden scandal, but they have no choice. The collaborative effort to quash any coverage of Biden’s laptop in the fall of 2020 amounted to election interference; there are plenty of accomplices, including former intelligence officials and social media platforms. A full-scale investigation, complete with public, sworn testimony by Hunter Biden himself, is vital.

And speaking of the 2020 election, the airing of election fraud evidence in key states that was scheduled to happen during the joint session on January 6, 2021—an intentionally overlooked detail from that day—must resume. The overwhelming majority of Republicans still believe the election was stolen, and election integrity is a top issue for Republican voters. Fear of being labeled an “insurrectionist” has cowed many congressional Republicans; time to get over it.

Going after Ginni Thomas is a new low for House Democrats—they are attempting not just to destroy her but also the Right’s most dependable figure on the Supreme Court. The January 6 committee has crossed a massive line in the sand with its attack on the Thomases; Republicans need to respond and act accordingly. Policy task forces won’t cut it.

How the C-Suite Embraced Lockdowns and Economic War

How the C-Suite Embraced Lockdowns and Economic War

David Stockman - Brownstone.org.

A while back, corporate America was bending over backwards to appease the Virus Patrol with lockdowns, mandatory masking and threats to fire anyone who didn’t take the Jab.

This was supposedly owing to the “science,” but it has long been evident that the latter was a limpid cover story. Big Business complied because the business culture of the corporate elites has become deeply confused and even corrupt.

Their stocks being vastly overvalued owing to the Fed’s relentless and egregious monetary expansion, the C-suites have lost track of their #1 duty—profit maximization. The latter has been sacrificed to corporate virtue signaling, head pats from the politicians and invitations to White House soirees.

These corporate “statesmen” get all the above psychic rewards, plus mighty fat stock option enrichment, too, because the Fed won’t see it any other way. They are pleased to call it “wealth effects” policy, when the truth is it is market-wrecking and wealth-destroying policy.

The utter economic waste and injustice to employees, shareholders, and various other stakeholders brought on by the new corporate virtue signaling is now starkly evident in the global data that prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the whole Virus Patrol-dictated anti-Covid regime was completely wrong from the very beginning.

Ironically, the smoking gun evidence comes from South Korea, which is a hot-house case of state-dominated capitalism, if there ever was one. The so-called Chaebols take their marching orders from the state in return for unfettered access to state fiscal subsidies and protectionist trade arrangements that shield them from the rigors of free market competition.

In any event, South Korean businesses complied rigorously with the government’s absurd efforts to stamp out the Covid with what amounted to a corporate-administered totalitarian regime that actually made the Fauci’s and Scarf Ladies of Washington drool with envy.

Accordingly, during 2020 and 2021, South Korea chased zero Covid with strict border controls, aggressive testing and tracing, and a vaccination campaign that reached nearly its entire adult population with mRNA (and some DNA) shots. In fact, the latest data show that 87% of the population is fully vaxxed and fully 60% have taken the booster.

Still, the country didn’t quite get to zero. Infections and deaths rose slowly last year. But it came close enough that the usual highly credentialed “public health experts” held it up as a beacon of light:

For instance, one seer argued,

Maximum suppression helped buy time for scientists to get to work, and therefore find a sustainable exit from the crisis… The pivot from maximum suppression to mass vaccination was a rational and logical shift to achieve a successful transition out of the pandemic.

Never have the so-called “experts” been so completely blindsided. Here is what has happened to the Covid-free nation of South Korea. Namely, the scoreboard suddenly went tilt:

• The South Korean case rate has soared to an off-the-charts 7,800 per million, which is 86X the current US rate of 91 per million;
• The current sky-high South Korean rate is 3.3X the all-time high experienced by the US at the Omicron peak in early 2022.

In short, the entire South Korean Covid dragnet was for naught. When Omicron came along, a population within minimal natural immunity (from Covid infection) and maximum vaccination rates turned out to be a sitting duck for new infections.

Of course, the Covid capitulation was just a warm-up for what the corporate world is doing with respect to the wartime frenzy loose in Washington and among the mainstream media.

Take the case of Pepsi, for instance. It was the pioneering US company which went to Russia during the peak of the Soviet brutality against its own citizens, but is now run by a virtue-signaling CEO, who happens to be a fellow traveler of the World Economic Forum where he chairs one of its major committees.

Back in the day when Pepsi first went to the Soviet Union—a place far more evil and barbaric than Putin’s Russia by a longshot—US companies had enough grit to fight back when Washington threatened to harm corporate interests and shareholder value.

No longer, however. Pepsi’s CEO, one Ramon Laguarta, rashly decided to stop selling Pepsi in Russia, even before Washington could get around to issuing mandatory sanctions.

So doing, Laguarta destroyed tens of billions of investment value that Pepsi had built up over five decades. And he did so, apparently, because the foolish CEO of McDonald’s closed its 850 stores in Russia first in order to get a pat on the head from the Biden administration.

The Wall Street Journal, in fact, chronicled Pepsi’s betrayal of its shareholders quite succinctly:

Pepsi in 1974 was among the first American brands to enter the Soviet Union, after a Cold War encounter in Moscow in 1959 when then-Vice President Richard Nixon offered a cup of the cola to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

By 2022, PepsiCo Inc. had 20,000 employees in Russia and it was the company’s third-largest market after the U.S. and Mexico. The company’s 24 plants and three R&D centers in Russia made soft drinks, potato chips, milk, yogurt, cheese, baby food and baby formula.

The company’s top officials discussed the geopolitical crisis nearly every day. They were reluctant to shut down the Russian operations, according to people familiar with the matter. The leaders wanted to do right by their employees and consumers, and they were under pressure to join other Western companies making moves to penalize Russia. They also had a responsibility to shareholders.

On the afternoon of March 8, McDonald’s said it was closing its restaurants in Russia. Then Coca-Cola said it was suspending its business there. Within half an hour, PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta sent a memo to staff. The company would stop selling Pepsi and 7UP in Russia, he told them, but it wasn’t pulling out.

Behind the scenes, the company’s leaders explored another action it could still take. PepsiCo could write down the value of its Russian business to zero, modeling the process it used for its Venezuelan operations in 2015.

Why wantonly destroy shareholder value? Because the Fed-corrupted markets would ignore the writedowns, that’s why.

Never mind that tens of billions of cumulative investment would be destroyed by Pepsi’s virtue signaling C-suite, its stock options-glutted executives didn’t care because the Fed-fattened stock market didn’t care, either.

Needless to say, the so-called financial press has no compunction about cheerleading for this kind of destructive C-suite virtue-signaling. The above cited WSJ article was fulsome in its praise for companies acting on political, not economic, motives:

This time, companies were more prepared. The pandemic had given leaders a crisis playbook. Years of corporate activism on issues such as climate change and racial discrimination had trained them to respond to a range of issues. The invasion took many by surprise, but they reacted quickly to what was a potentially fatal threat to their employees and also a reputational threat to their businesses.

When President Vladimir Putin launched the attack on Feb. 24, and pressure from governments and employees began to build, as well as escalating sanctions on Russia, companies moved with unusual speed and a sense of collective action. The result was a corporate participation in geopolitics with little recent precedent.

Well, they got that right, but are clueless about the danger. Namely, that neither capitalism nor democracy can thrive when business becomes a subservient tool of the state and a vessel for the expression of political fashion and social conformity.

Moreover, the idea that these capitulatory actions were undertaken by the C-suites for the purpose of reputational protection is just flat-out nonsense. Nobody was going to stop buying Pepsi and Lay’s potato chips because the parent company had a 50-year old business in Russia.

Indeed, the sheer obsequiousness and hypocrisy of the C-suites defies credulity. For instance, the Volkswagen CEO shut down his Russian plants for the practical reason of lack of parts, but nevertheless explained his action with a phony bow:

Within days of the invasion, Mr. Diess shut down or curtailed production at some of his biggest factories in Europe because the plants couldn’t get wiring harnesses from suppliers in Ukraine. The company later closed down production at its car plants in Russia, citing its “great dismay and shock” over the invasion.

At the end of the day, this kind of corporate politicking is why the Fed has run rampant printing money and generating vast asset bubbles like never before in history. The politically correct C-suites of the Fortune 500, which should be on the warpath against the Fed’s rampant monetary debasement, have not said a peep about the Fed’s destructive digression into madcap money printing.

The fact is, any one paying half attention could see that the Eccles Building has been blind to the effects of is destructive Keynesian policies for years—at least reaching back to this gob-smacker from Ben Bernanke on the eve of the Great Financial Crisis:

Thus, the Fed’s minutes from January 2008 quoted Chairman Bernanke as reassuring that—

“The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.”

That’s right. By the official dating of the NBER (National Bureau Of Economic Research) the start of the official recession was December 2007!

That is to say, if Ben Bernanke still didn’t know a recession was underway one month after it started, why would anyone think the Fed has a clue about the state of the domestic and global economy nor the capability and wherewithal to micromanage its course into even the near-term future?

Nor was the 2008 recession a unique occurrence. The table below was put together by the astute Lance Roberts and it makes clear that the real (inflation-adjusted) economic growth rate even on the eve of recession does not always give a signal as to what is coming around the macroeconomic bend. As Roberts noted,

Each of the dates above shows the growth rate of the economy immediately prior to the onset of a recession. You will note in the table above that in 7 of the last 10 recessions, real GDP growth was running at 2% or above. In other words, according to the media, there was NO indication of a recession.

But the next month one began.

With respect to the current cycle, Roberts further noted that the 2-month 2020 recession never really ended, and that we may be on the cusp of a relapse, notwithstanding the false boom stimulated by Washington print-borrow-and spending bacchanalia last year:

While the NBER declared the 2020 recession the shortest in history, such does not preclude another recession from occurring sooner than later. All the excesses that existed before the last recession have worsened since then.

Given the dynamics for an economic recession remain, it will only require an unexpected, exogenous event to push the economy back into contraction.”

And also one to push the top 1% and 10% into a world of hurt. That’s because the latter account for 85% of financial assets and 75% of household net worth, respectively.

So when the great bubble collapse finally comes, the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the wealthy households —whose brokerage accounts have been fattened beyond sanity by the Fed’s egregious inflation of financial assets— will be excruciating.

Perhaps then the C-suites will be awakened from their slumbering compliance.

Or at least, we can hope.

How to Be an Historic First

Our rulers make it seem as if they have helped “overcome barriers” or “remove glass ceilings” when in fact they are merely fortifying their grip on society.

by Paul Gottfried for American Greatness

If a recent Gallup Poll is to be believed, 58 percent of Americans support the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. A majority of Americans also believe that presidential candidate Joe Biden was correct in promising to nominate a black woman to the nation’s highest court. This was presumably a wise decision even if Jackson seemed stumped during her hearing when asked to define a biological woman. Justice Brett Kavanaugh never reached even a 50 percent approval rating during his Senate confirmation process. Of course, Kavanaugh was subject to unsubstantiated personal attacks by Democratic senators and by the even more malicious press and then tormented by hissing feminists who invaded the Senate building. 

I’m not at all surprised that Jackson has generated such apparent enthusiasm, or that there is such a mass demand for having a specifically black female justice on the Court. This does however raise a question: How can one answer a pollster in the negative about the acceptability of a black female candidate for a high position without appearing to be a sexist and “white nationalist”? Answering pollsters honestly under the present dispensation may be too much emotionally for some respondents, even in what they are assured is a confidential poll. 

Unfortunately, the verbiage that the Biden Administration gives us about reaching out to minorities reeks with insincerity. Our leftist establishment is not exactly elevating the downtrodden when it bestows honors on affluent blacks and women of privilege. It is merely assisting woke enablers of the ruling class, who look physically different from Joe Biden or Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). Our rulers hide the obvious by rhapsodizing about diversity. They make it seem as if they have helped “overcome barriers” or “remove glass ceilings” when in fact they are merely fortifying their grip on society. 

Much of this became obvious to me when Barack Obama became president in 2009. Somehow this Ivy League darling who moved in limousine liberal circles was “authentically” black, while Clarence Thomas was not—although Thomas is not half-white like Obama is, and rose out of extreme poverty in the rural South. Yet Thomas is a legal traditionalist and traditional Christian, which to the Left made him counterfactually “less black” than Obama. 

Since the political establishment delights in handing out such labels as “first black” and “first woman,” I might point out that in 2006 there were two black Republicans running as their party’s candidates in gubernatorial races, one in Pennsylvania and the other in Ohio. Both candidates, Lynn Swann and Ken Blackwell, went down to defeat at the hands of white liberal Democrats, who enjoyed overwhelming mainstream media support. 

In my own state of Pennsylvania, Swann, the black Republican candidate, commanded widespread name recognition as a star football player for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Despite his early lead, his Democratic opponent Ed Rendell won by 20 points. Swann was wiped out, thanks to massive out-of-state funding from the usual leftist sources and thanks to the ringing endorsement of Swann’s white adversary in the major state newspapers. For the establishment, this black Republican and devout Evangelical Christian was unsuited to become Pennsylvania’s first black governor, just as another black Republican, Blackwell, was unfit to hold that office in Ohio. 

Being the “first black” or “first female” occupant of a political or judicial office depends on whether our hegemonic class sees that person swearing fealty to the Democratic Party and on holding standard left-of-center views. Last summer in California, the media decided that the black conservative Larry Elder was unfit to become the “first black governor” of the Golden State. The Los Angeles Times published a column on August 20 characterizing Elder as “the black face of white supremacy.” CNN aired the same ludicrous charge in September. Since the public may not have noticed how candidates are blocked from becoming the “first” if they have the wrong party or ideological affiliation, it may be necessary to point this out. 

CNN has reported almost breathlessly about the historic significance of Jackson’s nomination to the Court as the first black woman. This firstness has supposedly raised the confirmation proceedings to an almost sacred rite, disturbed only by the irreverent questioning of a few Republican senators. But the current nominee is not the first black woman nominated to a federal judgeship. As a senator, Biden filibustered the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown for a judicial appointment to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Although Brown is black and the daughter of a poor Alabama sharecropper, she also carried the stigma of being a Republican nominee. 

Therefore, the current promoter of the “first black woman” worked mightily to keep Brown from the federal bench, which he succeeded in doing from 2005 until 2007. Mind you, that occurred while Biden was still a Democratic Party hack and not yet a tool of the woke Left. Fortunately for him, the media didn’t care about his nasty behavior in the Senate, since only Democrats can be regarded as “firsts.”