Exclusive — Ship of Fools: 62 Percent of Biden Officials Who Handle Economic Policy Have Zero Years Business Experience Per Report
GOLDMAN SACHS RUNS AMERICA.... INTO THE GROUND!
Chris Hedges | America's Next Financial Collapse
THE LOOTING OF AMERICA
KAMALA HARRIS AND HER GOLDMAN SACHS BANKSTER STEVEN MNUCHIN
A tidy corrupt partnership
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-looting-of-america-kamala-harris.html
She also declined to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500 to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated $2,000 to her Senatecampaign in 2016.)
Boots on the Ground...July 15th...Shortages not getting better.
Bidenflation: More than 1 in 5 Americans forced to use food banks or skip meals -TIPP
Less than a year ago, Joe Biden dismissed inflation with "I don't know anybody" who is "worried about inflation." He declared that "no serious economist" is, dismissing the warnings of heavyweight monetary experts, trade organizations, and even establishment Democrat economists.
“There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation is on the way. No serious economist,” President Joe Biden said on Monday, in a Breitbart News story dated July 19, 2021.
Inflation, which clocked in at 9.1% this past Friday in the CPI, in fact, has been building for months, following a series of five gargantuan Democrat-led congressional stimulus bills premised on COVID relief mostly. The last of these passed in March 2021 as Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan Act, pumping $1.9 trillion into the economy. When the Federal Reserve prints up cash to pay for these ventures, the money doesn't have enough actual economy to absorb the newly minted dollar bills, which is what turns that cash into inflation. It's comparable to the way the human body converts excess carbs and calories it can't use into fat. And sure enough, we have a fathead president who's still denying everything he sees on the economic scale, claiming that Big Meat, greedy gas station owners and Vladimir Putin did it.
But it's no joke to Americans who are now going hungry as a result of this Bidenflation. As in hungry, thin, starving...
One out of five are reduced to using food banks for sustanance now, according to a new report. Another one out of five are skipping meals in this land of plenty to keep food costs down.
A huge new survey from the respected pollster TIPP Insights conducted between July 6 and July 9 has found the shocking reality as to what Americans are going through as Joe lets the money roll in and out:
American families are spending 15% more than last year on food expenses. How are they coping with the cost increases?
The shocking finding is from the latest the Golden/TIPP Poll of 1,643 Americans completed past Friday.
The poll asked Americans how they were dealing with the higher food costs. While 88% of the survey respondents replied they were making changes, 10% said they had not made changes to their food budgets.
Given an option to choose all that applied, the survey found -
- 50% Buying store brands more often
- 47% Cutting down on high-ticket items (i.e., meats)
- 36% Shopping at bargain stores
- 34% Eating less (portion sizes)
- 23% Skipping meals
- 21% Go to food banks to supplement groceries
- 20% Applied and got federal or state assistance such as SNAP/WIC
- 17% Growing my vegetables
- 2% Other
It's quite incredible that in the Land of Plenty, we are now going the way of the third world as a result of Joe Biden's Argentina-like government spending impulses. A lot more than 21% of Americans are cutting back as a result of Bidenflation -- including reducing their portion sizes, cutting meat, buying cheaper brands, seeking federal handouts, anything to escape at least some of the effects of the ongoing miasma of inflation that hits everything priced in dollars. A whopping 17% of Americans are growing their own vegetables, in a labor-intensive victory-garden wish for something better.
Things like food inflation hit every American where it hurts, and it's no surprise that other pollsters, such as Rasmussen, have found that inflation is the number one issue preoccupying voters, something the press is failing to cover.
Mollie Hemingway has an important observation about the political implications of this, featured on RealClearPolitics:
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: This isn't a Joe Biden Problem, this is a problem shared by every voting member of the Democratic Party. The policies that made inflation so bad include spending packages supported by 100% of the Democrats in Congress. It's not really Biden economy as much as it is a Democrat economy.
It is almost a third term of the modern Democrat Party economy ushered in by Barack Obama.
The political issue is it is really in contrast with the Trump economy. Pre-Covid you had real wage growth, real wage gains for middle-class families and working-class families, and that does speak to why these people are moving to the Republican Party and away from the Democratic Party as the Democrats get more focused on pleasing their wealthy interests.
As rightly it should be a focus.
Democrats are not only out to a very expensive lunch as to what causes inflation -- which is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman put it -- they are still gobbling at the trough while one in five Americans is literally going hungry and reduced to begging for help.
The inflation picture isn't actually going to go down, even with a small drop in oil prices, which Joe Biden cited a day ago as reason to be hopeful. The Federal Reserve, which is now contemplating hiking rates by 100 basis points, sure doesn't think the falling energy prices will fix things as Joe claims. Inflation in fact is all over and affects every good priced in dollars, and it hits particularly hard in low-margin food prices which have seen double-digit spikes in many products. That 21% now going to food banks can easily become 40% or more, given the impact on inflation in a nation that has never experienced it this way.
TIPP notes that Biden's claim that Putin did it isn't selling with the people it polled.
The problem is Biden, and his spendthrift Democrats. Every missed meal and absent chicken in the pot reminds the voters of that ugly reality.
Image: TIPP Insights, by permission
Chris Hedges | America's Devastation
Boots on the Ground...July 14th...Housing market starting to slow down in some areas.
America’s Summer Exodus: Thousands Flee The Cities Every Day Because They Don’t Feel Safe
Chris Hedges | American Parasites
The Fed is terrified: Kevin Hassett
“The cost of living is tearing us apart”—Inflation rate in US hits 9.1 percent
The rate of inflation in the United States hit 9.1 percent in June, with consumer prices rising at the fastest pace since November 1981, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released Wednesday. Across-the-board hikes in fuel, food, housing, medical care, clothing and other living expenses are squeezing household budgets. Everything is going up except workers’ paychecks.
The increase in the Consumer Price Index, which rose from an already four-decade high of 8.6 percent in May, continued to be driven chiefly by surging energy and food costs. Energy prices shot up 7.5 percent last month and are up 41.6 percent over the last 12 months. Gasoline rose 11.2 percent in June and is up 59.9 percent over the last year.
The current national average for a gallon of gas was $4.63 yesterday, according to the American Automobile Association, with prices in California at $6.02 a gallon. This means it takes $60 to fill up an average passenger car or $120 for a pickup truck or SUV. With an average manufacturing wage of $24.95 an hour before taxes, a factory worker now must labor anywhere from three to six hours just to pay for gas to go back and forth to work. Many now carpool to work, while lower-paid and part-time workers find it increasingly unaffordable to drive at all.
With electricity costs rising another 1.7 percent in June and 13.7 percent year-over-year, working class families and seniors on fixed incomes are shutting off lights and air conditioners despite the summer time heat wave. Natural gas rose 8.2 percent last month and 38.4 percent over the last year, leaving many wondering how they will heat their homes come the fall and winter.
Food costs also continued to jump, with prices rising 1.3 percent between May and June and 10.5 percent over the last year, the highest increase since 1981. Many common food items have risen even higher over the last year, with eggs and margarine up 36 percent, chicken parts up 23 percent and whole milk prices up 18.8 percent.
The anti-hunger Feeding America program reported in March that 65 percent of its 200 food pantries had seen increased demand compared to previous months. One of its affiliates, the Killeen Food Care Center in central Texas, reported that it served a record 8,830 people in June, including 1,600 seniors. “We have fed the highest amount of people in our 35-year history,” Raymond Cockrell, the center’s executive director, told the Killeen Daily Herald.
Housing costs continued to rise last month too, up 0.6 percent in June and 5.6 percent over the year, the largest rise since 1991. The average price of a home in June was $350,000, up from $318,000 in June 2019. Financial speculators have exploited and exacerbated the situation, with corporate investors buying a record 18.4 percent of the homes sold in the US in the final quarter of 2021, according to real estate brokerage firm Redfin.
Inflated housing prices, in addition to higher mortgage rates, have not only led adult children to postpone leaving their parents’ homes but also forced older adults to double and triple up to share costs.
The rising price of private homes is also driving up the cost of rentals, which increased 0.8 percent in June, the largest monthly jump since 1986. The ending of eviction moratoriums and the drying up of government subsidies is leading to an explosion in evictions. Evictions in the greater Phoenix area have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Landlords in Phoenix filed 5,792 evictions in June, compared with 5,669 in June 2019, before the pandemic began. On Tuesday night, the Democratic-controlled Tucson City Council said it would end a moratorium on evictions in city-owned housing by August 1. Biden’s Department of Housing and Urban Development is pressing public housing authorities across the nation to collect more rents to keep HUD subsidies, the city council members said.
After the release of the inflation figures, Biden and other White House officials feigned concern, continued to blame Russia for spiking prices and claimed the situation was improving. On his way to visit the blood-soaked Saudi king to request the release of more oil, Biden said at a press conference in Israel that the Consumer Price Index report was “out-of-date” because it did not include the recent decline in gas prices.
The chief concern of Biden is not the devastating social impact of inflation but the growing demands of workers for wage hikes to keep up with the surging cost of living. The White House is fully behind the moves by the US Federal Reserve, which is expected to raise interest rates by three-quarters of point at its next meeting on July 26-27, to drive up unemployment and even trigger a recession to beat back what Fed Chief Jerome Powell complained are the “highest wage increases in decades.” In reality, real income for workers, adjusted for inflation, fell another 1 percent in June and is down 3.6 percent from a year ago.
“The cost of living is tearing us apart,” a young worker in Detroit who works for General Motors subsidiary, GM Subsystems, told the World Socialist Web Site on Tuesday. “Gas, food and everything else is high, but we’re not making any money. I can barely cover my bills.” The new two-year contract just signed by the United Auto Workers raises starting wages from $15 an hour to $18.50 but leaves them earning half the pay for doing the same work previously done by GM workers.
“I’m still going to be bringing home around $700 a week. I’m a single parent. It takes two weeks for me to save enough to pay my $700 a month in rent. What is it like for people paying $1,200 a month or more for rent?” The worker said her grandparents worked at GM and Ford and that she was making less in real terms than they did 40 years ago. “It’s like everything else, we’re not moving forward,” she said.
“Inflation is hurting our bottom line all the time,” a worker at the Stellantis (Chrysler) Warren Truck Assembly Plant in Detroit said. “Food, gas and everything else is up. The oil companies are price-gouging, and I don’t understand why Biden isn’t stopping them. I guess it’s because government answers to big business, not us.”
He continued, “The stock market keeps going up, and the shareholders are making lots of profits. This is only widening the distance between us and the top 1 percent, who are making money hand over fist. A little more than 10 years ago, the government bailed out the banks. They did it again when the pandemic hit. Where did all that money go? It went for the big bonuses of the executives and shareholders. Biden is also finding billions for war. They could have bailed us out, but they didn’t.”
There were 153 strikes involving approximately 73,500 workers between January and May, compared to 78 strikes involving around 22,500 workers over the same time period in 2021. Over the last two weeks alone, tens of thousands of workers have voted to walk out or have struck chiefly over wage demands. This includes railroad workers, Michigan nursing home workers, St. Louis public transit workers, defense industry workers at a General Dynamics plant, AT&T telecom workers in Alaska and concessions workers at Dodgers Stadium ahead of next week’s All-Star game in Los Angeles.
The trade unions are working with the corporations and the Biden administration to keep a lid on this movement, which is part of a global upsurge of the working class against inflation, the profits-before-lives pandemic policy, and the efforts to force workers to pay the massive cost of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia. The high point of this movement is the revolutionary upheaval in Sri Lanka, where mass protests by workers and young people have forced the resignation of the president and prime minister.
Over the last several weeks, the AFL-CIO unions have blocked strikes by 115,000 railroad workers, 24,000 West Coast dockworkers, tens of thousands of nurses and other health care workers in Michigan, Minnesota, New York and California, and auto parts workers at Ventra and GM Subsystems.
But anger is reaching a breaking point, and workers are increasingly striving to break the stranglehold of the corporatist unions and fight to defend their living standards. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) was formed last year to unify workers across national boundaries to mount a counter-offensive against inequality, austerity and war.
Workers should form rank-and-file committees in every workplace to demand inflation-busting wage increases, cost-of-living protection, fully paid health care and pension benefits, a ban on evictions and home foreclosures and the immediate cancellation of exorbitant credit card, student loan, car payment and household debts.
Exclusive — Ship of Fools: 62 Percent of Biden Officials Who Handle Economic Policy Have Zero Years Business Experience Per Report
An explosive new analysis published by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity reveals that Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration has very few business-oriented officials in the administration and that the vast majority of people handling economic policy for the United States government under Biden have no business experience whatsoever.
The 15-page report, authored by economist Steve Moore and the Committee to Unleash Prosperity‘s executive director Jon Decker, was provided to Breitbart News exclusively ahead of its public release. The headline of the report is: “Not Ready for Prime Time Players: Majority of Biden Appointees have Zero Years of Business Experience.” The report analyzes the backgrounds of the “top 68 officials in the Biden administration, starting with the president himself, and including cabinet members, regulatory officials, and White House advisers.”
In the executive summary, the authors detail some key findings in the report. First and foremost, 62 percent of Biden’s top political appointees and staffers “who deal with economic policy, regulation, commerce, energy and finance have virtually no business experience.”
What’s more, only one out of eight Biden officials has what the authors deem “extensive business experience,” and the average level of business experience across the Biden administration is about 2.4 years. The median years of business experience among Biden’s top appointees is zero, since so few have any experience in the private sector, and the “vast majority of the Biden economic/commerce team members are professional politicians, lawyers, community organizers, lobbyists, or government employees.”
The appendix of the report lists out each of the 68 officials analyzed, starting with both President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Both of them each have zero years of business experience. Attorney General Merrick Garland also has zero years of business experience, and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has zero years as well. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh, Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge, Ambassador for Climate Change John Kerry, Office of Management and Budget director Shalanda Young, Secretary of Eduction Miguel Cardona, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, and many, many more have zero years of business experience.
In Biden’s Cabinet and innermost circle, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain with 16 years, Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland with 11 years, and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo with 11 years, have the most business experience close to the president. Isabel Guzman, the administrator of the Small Business Administration, has the most business experience of those analyzed with 20 years experience.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has just four years of business experience. The report authors note his business experience has not much to do with his Department as “he has virtually no experience in transportation or logistics.”
As compared with former President Donald Trump’s cabinet during his last year in office, the lack of private sector business experience in the Biden administration is stark. Trump’s team, per the authors, had an average of 13 years of business experience with a median years of experience of eight.
This report comes as inflation numbers announced earlier on Wednesday hit their highest levels in 40 years, with an annual rate rise of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) much higher than expected at 9.1 percent per the Department of Labor.
“As the United States battles the highest inflation rate in four decades; a stock market sell-off that has liquidated some $10 trillion of wealth and retirement savings; and fast-declining consumer, small business, and investor confidence; and there is widespread concern that America is in a recession or teetering on the verge of recession. For the first half of 2022, the economic growth rate has been negative, according to the latest forecast from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Board,” the study says. “Americans are deeply divided on the Biden administration’s progressive economic policy priorities: the focus on redistribution of income, higher tax rates on the rich, more social welfare programs, pro-union policies, a heavier hand of regulation of business, government-directed investment, and climate change remedies aimed at a dramatic altering of America’s energy mix. But putting ideology and partisan leanings aside, a new concern of voters has emerged: Do the top decision makers in Congress and the Biden administration have the basic skill sets and business/ management experience and acumen to oversee a $6 trillion federal government and to regulate our multi-trillion dollar industries? Polls show Americans are generally unhappy with the economic direction of the country today.”
The report also notes that many of the officials who do have some business experience in some respect—like Buttigieg—are not working in a field they are familiar with.
“The list of Biden administration officials that we compile in this report starts at the top with the resumes of the President and the Vice President,” the report authors write. “We also examine 68 of the top political appointees of the Biden administration, including his cabinet officers (who deal with domestic policy issues), the commissioners of the major influential regulatory agencies, and other high-ranking White House policy-making personnel.”
On a key findings page, several more statistics are revealed. Across all 68 top Biden officials in total there are just 161 years of business experience, and 42 of them have “virtually no business experience whatsoever.”
What’s more, the primary field of most of these Biden officials is one of the following three categories: politics and government, law, or academia and policy. Twenty-one of the 68 come from politics and government, 20 of them come from law, and 12 of them come from academia. Three come from a category called “consulting/public relations,” five from “venture capital/investments,” four from “education/health,” two from “miscellaneous business,” and one from “labor.”
“What is the takeaway from these findings? Surely we want our political class to have a diversity of backgrounds,” the authors write. “We want lawyers, grassroots activists, those with political and policy experience, scientists, health experts, and academics with required specialties. But we also want people who have experience running large operations with hundreds and thousands of employees and who understand logistics. We want people who know how to cut costs, manage logistics, increase productivity, meet payroll, and make a profit (or in the case of the government, avoid large losses). We need people at the top rungs of government who have experience dealing with large-scale crises (as we experienced during COVID), and also at least some familiarity with the everyday struggles that businesses have with the government.”
But it seems, the report authors note, that Biden’s focus on making “diversity” a major hiring “goal of its administration,” the U.S. government is now falling short when it comes to actually having people who know what they are doing with the economy in charge of economic policy. The authors note that “the one area that is sorely missing in this diversity goal is in attracting talented and experienced men and women from the field of small business, commerce, and finance.”
“When it comes to the government: Ignorance is not bliss,” the authors write. “These skills are sorely lacking in the Biden administration. The cascade of policy and management mistakes that are piling up in the Biden government are at least in part a consequence of this lack of basic skills and competency. Biden should fix the problem by replacing those chosen for their ideology, not the skills and talents our government needs and taxpayers rightly demand.”
A NATION UNRAVELS!
Starbucks CEO Says Stores Are No Longer Safe in Democrat-Run Seattle, Portland, Philadelphia, L.A., D.C.
American cities “have abdicated their responsibility in fighting crime,” said Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who is a Democratic donor.
“I must say, in my view at the local, state and federal level, these governments across the country and leaders, mayors and governors, city councils have abdicated their responsibility in fighting crime and addressing mental health,” Schultz said in a video posted on Twitter.
Earlier in the week, Starbucks announced store closures in four Democrat-run states and the District of Columbia.
Breitbart News reported on the development:
The Starbucks Corporation announced … that it is closing 16 stores in the U.S. because of safety concerns for workers, including incidents of violence and drug use on the premises.
The coffee retailer will close permanently six stores in Seattle, Washington, and six more in the Los Angeles, California, region. Two stores will shutter in Portland, Oregon, and one store each in Philadelphia and Washington, DC.
Schultz spoke at an internal company gathering.
“We’re going to have to refine and transform and modernize many of the things we do to meet the needs of our customers in a very changing operating environment in which customer behavior is changing,” Schultz said.
Schultz said America is now “unsafe.”
“I don’t have to spend too much time on what’s going on in the country and how America has become unsafe,” Schultz said. “But you all read the press release last couple of days about the fact that we are beginning to close stores that are not unprofitable.”
“And then we heard the stories that go along with it about what happens in our bathrooms; the issue of mental illness, the issues of homelessness and the issues of crime,” Schultz said.
“Starbucks as a window into America, we have stores in every community and we are facing things in which the stores were not built for. And so we’re listening to our people and closing stores and this is just the beginning,” Schultz said.
“There are going to be many more,” he said.
Follow Penny Starr on Twitter
Starbucks Closing Unsafe Stores in Liberal-Run Cites after Bathrooms ‘Devolved into Dens of Debauchery’
By Craig Bannister | July 14, 2022 | 3:29pm EDT
Starbucks has announced it is closing 16 stores, coast-to-coast, in unsafe cities – and has dropped its mandate that every location nationwide make its store’s bathroom open to everyone, without requiring a purchase.
“Starbucks Corp. said Monday that it is closing 16 U.S. stores after workers reported incidents related to drug use and other disruptions in cafes,” The Wall Street Journal reports:
“The company said it received reports from workers about incidents that they said involved drug use by some customers and in some cases, members of the public, in certain locations. Starbucks said it would transfer employees to other locations when it permanently closes the stores.”
….
“Starbucks also said that it would give store managers leeway to close restrooms, limit seating or reduce operations in response to safety concerns. The moves are part of policies aimed at addressing workers’ concerns, including about their safety on the job, the company said.”
In a letter sent Monday, the company assured employees it reads every incident report they file, and that it is committed to ensuring the safety of its workers.
By the end of the month, Starbucks will permanently close:
- 6 Seattle stores
- 6 Los Angeles stores,
- 2 Portland (Oregon) stores,
- 1 Philadelphia store,
- 1 Washington, D.C. store
The bathrooms in many Starbucks stores have “devolved into dens of debauchery,” The Daily Mail reports:
“The reported disruptions include drug use by paying customers and, more often than not, members of the public - who often take advantage of the company's open bathroom policy, which allows nonpaying patrons to use their facilities.
“As a result, the lavatories have in large part devolved into dens of debauchery, regularly used by vagrants and homeless to do drugs and engage in other illicit behavior.”
“Reports of assaults were also commonplace in the cities set to see closures, which include the company's hometown of Seattle, as well as five other liberal-run municipalities,” The Daily Mail notes.
Crime is, indeed, surging the cities where Starbucks locations are closing, The Daily Wire explains:
“The cities of Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., have indeed witnessed surging crime over the past two years. As of last month, Los Angeles and Washington were on pace to surpass their homicide totals seen in 2021, according to crime data reviewed by Fox News.
“In recent months, more than a dozen convenience stores in Philadelphia have closed permanently as a result of rising retail crime.”
….
“On Monday, four separate 7-Eleven stores in southern California experienced shootings, leaving at least two dead and three injured.”
The new policy enabling Starbucks managers to limit, restrict and deny use of their store’s bathroom rescinds an open-to-all-regardless mandate issued by the company’s CEO in 2018, in reaction to an incident, in which a store manager called the police because two Black men refused to make a purchase, yet also refused to leave, when asked to do so.
As the Associated Press reports:
“The company also said restrooms at some stores might be closed if they become a safety hazard.
“That’s a reversal from 2018, when Starbucks issued a policy allowing anyone to use its restrooms even if they didn’t buy anything. That decision was made after a Starbucks employee called police to report two Black men who were denied the use of a restroom and asked to leave. The men, who were in Starbucks waiting for a business meeting, were arrested; they later reached a settlement with Starbucks.”
The backlash to the incident prompted Starbucks to apologize and institute an official policy declaring that “everyone is a customer,” The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment