Authored by Eric Felten via RealClear Wire,

If the government had had its way, Eric Munchel and his mother, Lisa Eisenhart, would already have been in jail for two years. Arrested in February 2021 for participating in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, they finally are scheduled to go on trial next week in the Washington courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth.

It won’t be the first time Munchel and Eisenhart will find themselves before Lamberth. He is the judge who declared two years ago that they were far too dangerous to be allowed outside prison walls. Home confinement, enforced with ankle monitors and GPS tracking, Lamberth ruled, would not be sufficient to protect the public from the honky-tonk bartender and his traveling-nurse mother.

Their case, combined with hundreds of others in the Capitol breach, have led to an over-crowded docket, one groaning under the weight of what the Department of Justice has described as the largest criminal case in American history. And it’s only going to get more crowded. The courts may be prosecuting another 1,000 accused of crimes related to the Capitol riot.

Munchel and Eisenhart are an odd pair to be prominent players in the Capitol Hill action-dramedy. Munchel wore his iPhone as a body cam, documenting his actions. Aside from some shouting and some trespass, Eisenhart and Munchel didn’t seem to do much in the way of rioting. Mother and son entered the Capitol through an open door and strolled past police who didn’t tell them to get out. Mother and son wandered the halls of the Congress. They entered the abandoned Senate chamber where Munchel spied the body’s ceremonial gavel. “I want that f—ing gavel!” Munchel declared. But he did nothing to touch, let alone take, the Senate heirloom. The one thing Munchel did take were some white zip-ties that seemed to have been abandoned on a table.

They might be among the thousand yet to be prosecuted if it hadn’t been for a particular behavior that called attention to them and made them among the earliest targets for arrest. And that wasn’t their time spent in the Capitol, but their time spent talking to a reporter for the Sunday Times (of London). They were featured in the newspaper’s story about the fracas under the headline “Trump’s militias say they are armed and ready to defend their freedoms.” The sub-hed read, “Further violence, and even civil war, is threatened.”

The paper had a photo of Munchel leaping over a railing in the Senate chamber, a fistful of white zip-ties in his hand. Though there was no evidence that Munchel tied or assaulted anyone, the Times suggested the zip-ties showed just how dangerous he was: “These are the restraints typically used by police to detain individuals.” The Sunday Times didn’t claim to know what he was going to do with them, but also didn’t hesitate to imagine the worst: “The photograph led to speculation that the rioters were potentially planning to take hostages.”

Munchel and his mother, Eisenhart, didn’t do themselves any favors indulging in big talk and bravado. When asked by the British newspaper what they hoped to accomplish, Munchel bragged, “It was a kind of flexing of muscles. The point of getting inside the building is to show them that we can and will.”

“This country was founded on revolution,” Eisenhart declared to the reporter. “They’re going to take every legitimate means from us, and we can’t even express ourselves on the internet, we won’t even be able to speak freely, what is America for?” Eisenhart got herself worked up: “I’d rather die as a 57-year-old woman than live under oppression. I’d rather die and would rather fight.” Judge Lamberth would later call that statement “chilling,” and would use it to justify an order putting Eisenhart behind bars indefinitely while she awaited trial.

Munchel and Eisenhart left Washington the day after the riot and made their ways home – Munchel to Tennessee, Eisenhart to Georgia. With the help of the Sunday Times’ coverage and social media, it didn’t take long for them to realize they were prime targets of the massive investigation. In a gesture of cooperation, Eisenhart contacted the FBI and checked to see if police wanted her to surrender.

In February, Munchel and Eisenhart were arrested and brought before a federal magistrate judge in Nashville, Jeffery “Chip” Frensley. He was unpersuaded by the Department of Justice portrayal of mother-and-son rioters as an ongoing insurrectionist threat to the nation. It wasn’t clear to him what their motives and intent were. “The proof on these issues is inconsistent.”

The prosecutors’ intent was perfectly clear. They wanted Munchel and Eisenhart locked up indefinitely until they could be put on trial. The government argued there were no release conditions that would ensure Eisenhart and Munchel wouldn’t pose a danger to the community. Federal prosecutors insisted the two be placed in pretrial detention, which is to say, imprisoned before they were convicted. Nor would there be any limit to how long the defendants would be jailed as they waited for trial, the expectation of a speedy trial notwithstanding

Frensley was not nearly as breathless as the Justice Department’s team. The judge considered it sufficient for Munchel to wait at home for trial. The defendant would not be allowed to travel to Washington; would have to give up his guns, notwithstanding they were licensed; would be required to present himself once a week to “pre-trial services”; and would have an ankle monitor to enforce home detention.

And as for Eisenhart, the worst blot on her permanent record was a citation 20 years ago for driving with a suspended license. Frensley called for Eisenhart to be similarly confined, monitored, and surveilled at home until it was time for her trial. Frensley found that the government had failed to demonstrate either of the elements normally needed to justify holding defendants without bail. Prosecutors had proved neither that she was a threat to the community nor a flight risk.

Nor was Frensley ready to lock Munchel away. Though he had acted with “an absolute disrespect of law enforcement,” Frensley said the video from Munchel’s body cam also showed him “speaking with law enforcement in respectful ways.” The judge said he had “no reason to believe Mr. Munchel is part of an organized, collective action against the government.” In ruling that Munchel be released pending trial, Frensley concluded, “Mr. Munchel does not pose an obvious and clear danger to the safety of this community.”

The government’s lawyers warned that Munchel had become dangerously radicalized and that there was “no reason to think those views will diminish over time.” Indeed, they said, “they may get worse.” 

If it seems Judge Frensley was generous in his interpretation of Munchel and Eisenhart’s behavior, by contrast, the government sought at every turn to make the worst of the defendants’ actions. The video from Munchel’s iPhone shows him shouting at other rioters, “Don’t break sh-t,” and “No vandalizing sh-t …We ain’t no goddamn Antifa, motherf—ers.” He threatened his fellow rioters that he would “break” anyone who committed acts of vandalism.

Lamberth allowed that though Munchel’s threats to “break” any vandals may have been beneficial, “These were not peaceful acts.” According to Lamberth, Munchel’s willingness to threaten violence against vandals “evinces violent behavior.”

But what about those zip-ties with which Munchel and Eisenhart were going to take hostages? Prosecutors admitted, in their brief for Judge Lamberth, that neither mother nor son had brought the zip-ties. They had found them abandoned on a table in a Capitol hallway, and had picked them up.

Munchel’s actions at the Capitol riots were thoroughly documented – by his own smart phone. In his opinion remanding Munchel and Eisenhart to pretrial confinement, Lamberth allowed that the video camera footage showed there was “no evidence indicating that, while inside the Capitol, Munchel or Eisenhart vandalized any property or physically harmed any person.”

The hearing in Judge Frensley’s court was on a Friday. Prosecutors urged the judge to hold the pair over the weekend. The Department of Justice wanted time to have Frensley overruled by the Washington-based judges who had been unsparing in their treatment of accused rioters. Frensley acquiesced. Come Monday, just before Munchel and Eisenhart were to be released, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Beryl A. Howell stayed Judge Frensley’s order that Eisenhart and Munchel be released to home confinement. The case was assigned to Judge Royce Lamberth.

He found it particularly concerning that Eisenhart had used “language of insurrection.” By citing the American revolution, U.S. attorneys argued, Eisenhart had demonstrated “the danger she poses to the community if released.” Lamberth agreed: “As a self-avowed, would-be martyr, she poses a clear danger to our republic.” He took seriously that she was prepared to die for her cause, which made her a “danger to the community.” If she’s willing to die for the MAGA revolution,” Lamberth concluded, “the consequences for disobeying release conditions are unlikely to deter her.”

The judge made the extraordinary determination that there were “no release conditions” that could “ensure that Eisenhart would not pose a danger to the community.” Or at least it would have been extraordinary before it became the norm to keep behind bars those accused of charges related to Jan. 6.

That new norm led to overcrowding at the D.C. jail, where a COVID protocol was instituted in which social distancing was indistinguishable from solitary confinement.

These new norms of hardcore pre-trial jailing also fell afoul of the bedrock principle that one is innocent until proven guilty.

A three-judge appeals court panel sprung Munchel and Eisenhart two years ago in March and sent them home to be monitored in the fashion Judge Frensley had ordered in the first place. Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins wrote the opinion overruling Lamberth’s opinion ordering the mother and son be jailed while awaiting trial. Wilkins made the case not just for avoiding pre-trial detention, but for protecting principles of justice, even those involving – perhaps especially those involving – defendants disliked by the government. Wilkins quoted a legal precedent from a case, U.S. v. Salerno, involving organized crime: “In our society liberty is the norm, and detention prior to trial or without trial is the carefully limited exception.”

In a concurring opinion, Judge Gregory Katsas assessed the threat posed by Munchel and Eisenhart: “Their misconduct was serious, but it hardly threatened to topple the Republic. Nor, for that matter, did it reveal an unmitigable propensity for future violence.

Munchel and Eisenhart will be back in Washington next week. Tuesday morning, jury selection begins. Presiding will be a judge who has already made clear his apocalyptic views of the defendants and the events they participated in.

Eric Felten is an investigative correspondent for RealClearInvestigations, reporting on government corruption. He is a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal and previously a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard University. Felten has been published in Washingtonian, People, National Geographic Traveler, The Weekly Standard, Daily Beast, National Review, Spectator USA, and Reader’s Digest.

Former ABC senior producer James Gordon Meek has been indicted on three counts of child pornography nearly one year after the FBI raided his Arlington, Virginia home.

If convicted, the Emmy-winning producer faces between five and 20 years in prison for transporting images of child pornography.

According to the NY Post, and noted by the Daily Mail, Meek’s alleged pedophilia was exposed after Dropbox dropped the dime on him – alerting authorities to child porn stored on his account in March 2021.

Several of Meek’s devices allegedly contained images depicting children engaged in sexually explicit conduct, and multiple chat conversations with users engaged in sexually explicit conversations where the participants expressed enthusiasm for the sexual abuse of children, according to the DOJ release.

In two of those conversations, a username allegedly associated with Meek received and distributed child sexual abuse materials through an internet-based messaging platform, as per the DOJ.  

Following the raid, the department obtained a search warrant for Meek’s iCloud account on November 14. They contained backups of two of his devices and included a screenshot of one of the explicit discussions.

They also uncovered an Apple laptop that contained ‘approximately 90 images and videos of child pornography.’ -Daily Mail

Meek, a divorced father of two, also allegedly had Snapchat and Instagram accounts that contained conversations and images of unidentified minor females.

Rolling Stone EIC covered for him

As we noted last month, after the FBI conducted a raid on a journalist last April, Rolling Stone framed it as an abuse of power – writing that it was “quite possibly, the first” carried out by the Biden administration on a reporter – in this case, former ABC national security reporter James Gordon Meek, who was previously an investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee.

The truth is that Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman edited the article to remove all mention that the raid was part of a federal investigation into child porn, according to NPR.

As edited by Rolling Stone Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman, however, the article omitted a key fact that Siegel initially intended to include: Siegel had learned from her sources that Meek had been raided as part of a federal investigation into images of child sex abuse, something not publicly revealed until last month.

Why did Rolling Stone suggest Meek was targeted for his coverage of national security, rather than something unrelated to his journalism?

NPR also reported, citing two anonymous sources, that Washington attorney Mark “I’ve gotten clearances for guys who had child porn issues and love hanging out at Disney World by myself” Zaid called Shachtman on Meek’s behalf while Siegel was writing up the story.

Zaid confirmed to NPR that he called Shachtman – and admitted that Meek was a longtime friend and client who he was representing on any potential prosecution or investigation of his potential possession of classified material.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel on Thursday provided details about plans to hire armed agents in the agency’s criminal investigations division, amid Republican concerns about a proliferation of gun-toting tax enforcers.

Werfel said in a call with reporters that the share of staff working in the IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) unit would not climb above the current level of around 2.6 percent of the IRS’s overall workforce.

There are “no plans to increase” the hiring rate at the IRS-CI unit, Werfel said on the call. “That will stay at its current rate.”

The IRS-CI examines potential criminal activity related to tax crimes and makes recommendations for prosecution to the tax division of the Department of Justice. Agents at the criminal investigations division are authorized to carry guns and use lethal force.

Dubbed “gun-toters,” the armed special agents in the unit are responsible for enforcing those parts of the tax code in which violations amount to crimes, according to former IRS Special Agent Robert Nordlander.

According to the IRS-CI’s annual report (pdf), there were roughly 2,077 special agents in the criminal investigations unit as of the 2022 budget year, which represents around 2.6 percent of the IRS’s entire workforce.

The IRS employed 80,006 full time staffers as of the 2022 budget year, according to the agency’s strategic operating plan released on April 6.

The plan indicates how the IRS plans to use the $80 billion in new funding provided by Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act. The new cash infusion would be used to hire thousands of new employees, improve tax enforcement and customer service, and audit wealthy taxpayers and corporations.

The plan indicates the agency intends to hire nearly 30,000 new full-time employees during the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years, including 8,782 hires in enforcement and 13,883 in taxpayer service.

Assuming no attrition owing to resignation and retirement, that would put the IRS’s total workforce by 2024 at roughly 110,000 employees.

In order to maintain the IRS-CI’s 2.6 percent share of the entire workforce, it would need to bring up the number of armed agents to roughly 2,860 from the current 2,077.

Carissa Cutrell, a public affairs officer at IRS-CI, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that the unit is hoping to hire between 300 and 350 special agents this year.

This means that, if the following year another 300–350 agents are hired, that would put the total number between 2,677 and 2,777. That’s roughly 2.4-2.5 percent of the IRS’s overall workforce.

In the mid-1990s, the criminal investigations unit had around 3,500 special agents and Cutrell said they lose between 150 and 175 agents each year owing to retirement and attrition.

The IRS’s strategic plan did not provide hiring estimates beyond 2024. The agency noted that its operating plan will be updated annually and it will adjust its hiring plan.

Republicans have warned that the IRS’s $80 billion cash infusion would be used to hire an “army of 87,000” tax enforcers.

The 87,000 figure comes from a 2021 Treasury Department report (pdf) that estimated that the IRS could hire 86,852 full-time employees over the course of a decade if it were to receive an $80 billion funding boost.

‘Army of 87,000’ Tax Enforcers?

The idea of an “army of 87,000” new tax enforcement agents surged into the spotlight and became an internet meme after Republicans warned that the $80 billion in new IRS funding under the Inflation Reduction Act would squeeze ordinary Americans for “every last penny.”

Read more here…

Thanks to higher interest rates, turmoil at regional banks, and slowing rent growth, sales of apartment buildings are falling at their fastest rate since the subprime-mortgage crisis, the Wall Street Journal reports.

In the first quarter of this year, investors purchased approximately $14 billion of apartment buildings – a decline in sales of 74% from the same quarter last year, according to preliminary data from CoStar Group. The drop could be the largest annual sales decline for any quarter going back to a 77% drop in Q1 2009.

The $14 billion in first-quarter sales was the lowest amount for any quarter since 2012, with the exception of the second quarter of 2020 when pandemic lockdowns effectively froze the market.

The recent drop in building sales follows a stretch of record-setting transactions that peaked in late 2021, when the multifamily sector was a top performer in commercial real estate. Cash-rich investors had a strong appetite for apartment buildings. Their top choices were in Sunbelt cities such as Dallas, Phoenix and Tampa, Fla., where rental housing is largely unregulated and rents were rising 20% or more annually until last year. -WSJ

The combination of factors noted above mean that the math for buying an apartment building doesn’t pencil out in many cases – as the cost to refinance purchases has jumped along with interest rates. In some major metro areas, rents are also flat or declining, after record increases.

The Journal also notes that thanks to an upheaval in banking, it’s become more difficult to finance buildings, according to investors and analysts, who say banks are either pulling back on lending or only doing so at very high rates.

But there is one type of sale most everyone expects more of: forced sales. A number of investors bought buildings in recent years with short-term, floating-rate debt. Because of rising interest rates, those loans cost a lot more to pay down than they did when building owners first borrowed the money. 

The remaining balance of many floating-rate loans will come due this year, and borrowers whose buildings aren’t bringing in enough cash every month might have to sell their buildings to pay off their debts. -WSJ

“Nobody wants to take a loss when they don’t have to,” according to Graham Sowden, chief investment officer at RREAF Holdings, a real-estate investment firm based in Dallas.

The trend in apartment buildings follows a similar pullback in the broader residential housing market, where home prices fell year-over-year for the first time since 2012, with sales volume declining sharply as well, for the same basic reasons.

In February, the prices of multifamily buildings dropped 8.7% vs. the same month last year according to the MSCI Real Assets pricing index.

Green Street, which tracks publicly traded landlords, found a 20% drop in building values from their late 2021 highs.

Meanwhile, brokers and investors aren’t expecting building sales to pick up anytime soon – in part because of a  backlog of nearly 500,000 new units that are slated to be delivered this year, the most in almost 40 years.

According to Trevor Koskovich, president of multifamily at the Northmarq brokerage firm, “We’re in the very early stages” of floating-rate loans coming due this year, and various things hitting various fans.

Authored by Monica Showalter via AmericanThinker.com,

Something about the apparently random street murder of Silicon Valley tech executive Bob Lee seems to have overturned a crawly rock in San Francisco’s political scene, suggesting a brewing power struggle on the horizon.

On the one hand, we have a very vocally angry Silicon Valley tech community speaking out about the out-of-control crime situation in the city, with the valued and talented Lee’s untimely death from some night creature who crawled out from some sewer or encampment and stabbed him to death, quite possibly in a drug-addled haze.  That’s expected if you live in a place full of bums and criminals, but Lee didn’t live in a place full of bums and criminals.  He had actually fled the city for Florida based on its engulfing crime and come back only for a brief business trip.

On the other hand, we have a soggy, entrenched political establishment seeking to assure that there’s really no crime problem at all.  This is evident enough in the “crime is down” coverage seen in the political establishment’s house organ, the San Francisco Chronicle, and in the surreal statements of the city hall power establishment, which is rooted in special interests, particularly the most powerful one, the homeless industrial complex.  I wrote about that here.  San Francisco currently spends about as much on homeless “services” as it does on police, and by some studies such as the one cited below, actually more.

Not surprisingly, as per Thomas Sowell’s observation, you can have all the poverty you want to pay for, and San Francisco pays a lot.

The Hoover Institution’s Lee Ohanian has noted:

Spending $1.1 billion on homelessness is just the latest installment in San Francisco’s constant failure to sensibly and humanely deal with an issue that it chronically misdiagnoses and mismanages about as much as is humanly possible. Since fiscal year 2016–17, San Francisco has spent over $2.8 billion on homelessness, and the city’s politicians remain seemingly baffled, year after year, as the number of homeless in the city skyrocket, as opioid overdoses kill more than COVID-19, and as the city has become nearly the most dangerous in the country. https://www.hoover.org/research/why-san-francisco-nearly-most-crime-rid….

Since 2016, the number of homeless in San Francisco has increased from 12,249 to 19,086, which comes out to about $57,000 in spending per homeless person per year. With a total population of about 860,000, roughly 2.2 percent of San Francisco residents are homeless, which is over 12 times the national average. There is little doubt that as San Francisco spends more, homelessness and its impact on the city worsens.

Do the homeless get that $57,000 being spent on them?  Of course not.  The princelings of the NGO establishments got that money — for themselves.  That’s what’s made them politically powerful, enough to call the shots at city hall.

Meanwhile, the tech barons keep the city afloat through their taxes paid, which in turn pay for the city’s homeless services — which fuels the homelessness.  The taxes they pay are the highest in the nation (which, naturally, the Chronicle claims doesn’t matter to the tech companies, but that is unlikely to be true).  We also know that they’re not happy now that the crime that coincides with the growth of the homeless-industrial complex has spiraled into their tech talent base.  It’s not just Lee’s murder, though that’s not small.  It’s that ordinary tech workers don’t want to return to the offices.  The tech firms have leases in those buildings and need to utilize that paid-for space.  The workers don’t want to return and many have fled to friendlier, less crime-infested climes in Texas, Washington State, and Florida.  That’s leaving San Francisco with a lot of empty office space — about a 30% vacancy rate, which is one of the country’s highest — and a 30% drop in tax revenues, given that the city finances itself by a huge margin through property taxes. 

The collision of political interests happened when one of the city’s criminals preyed on tech royalty Bob Lee.  Then we started seeing posts like this, from tech-baron-of-tech-barons Elon Musk:

If you become mayor, my companies will double their investment in San Francisco.

Such an incredible city has been used & abused by management for too long!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 7, 2023

And this not-so-disguised shot at the San Francisco Chronicle with all its bogus claims about crime being down based on misread statistics:

Only people who have never solved problems with data say things like “believe the data.”

No. Do not “believe” the data. Interrogate the data. Explore it. Ask how it was collected. Dig into methodologies.

The more surprising the data, the greater the need. https://t.co/w7q6KiP8Lf

— Lee Edwards (@terronk) April 7, 2023

And this simple, brutal one:

Also, believe your eyes as you walk around downtown SF. It’s insane.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 8, 2023

Those sound like shots across the bow.

And of course, Musk is a bugbear to the left, but he’s the biggest bear in the tech establishment

Over at city hall, the political establishment is knee-deep in the NGOs and depends on them to maintain their political power.  But they also depend on the tech barons for money to pay the NGOs. 

The tech barons are mad and, based on Musk’s tweets, now seem to be looking to get rid of them.  

They’re on the warpath.  

They were the moneybags behind the ouster of far-left district attorney Chesa Boudin last year.  Now based on this string of events, they may be getting ready to storm the deep blue fortress.

Lee’s death may have been the starting point, and Musk’s recent tweets may be the accelerator.

Health officials in South Florida have advised beachgoers to avoid a popular beach due to excessive amounts of fecal matter in the water. This comes as surrounding beaches are hit with a poisonous algae bloom and a massive blob of seaweed. 

Several water sampling tests in the northern part of Crandon Park, near Miami, failed to meet the state and federal water quality standards. The water is contaminated with enterococci bacteria, an indicator of fecal material. 

The latest test, on Tuesday, found “70.5 or greater Enterococcus sp per 100 mi of marine water,” according to the Florida Department of Health in Miami-Dade County. 

“The result of the sampling indicates that water contact may pose an increased risk of illness, particularly for susceptible individuals,” the health agency said. There was no mention of the fecal matter’s source. 

And compound this with poisonous algae bloom, commonly referred to as ‘red tide,’ has caused widespread death of marine wildlife. Also, a massive seaweed blob is causing havoc on beaches. 

Anyone planning a trip to visit South Florida beaches might want to hold off for now. 

Authored by Christian Milord via The Epoch Times,

A March 26 front page article in the Orange County Register bemoaned the fact that too few black and Latino males become teachers in the California public schools in proportion to Caucasian men and women. It didn’t mention Asian male teachers, but painted minority teachers as “people of color” as if Caucasians don’t come in many shades of skin tone. The article claimed that many minority males are hesitant to enter teaching as they think teaching in the K-12 public schools is primarily a female profession.

The column went on to mention that most public school teachers in California and the Southland are Caucasian men and women. Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond has discussed this issue before, while state and university initiatives have been drawn up to remedy this alleged “inequity.” The state aims to recruit, train, and retain greater numbers of minority group teachers. California State University–Fullerton is one of several universities taking on this proposal.

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with encouraging high school and university students to pursue education careers as well as STEM professions. However, if you dig deeper, you find that these initiatives have little to do with equality of opportunity, but rather are an attempt to check off boxes in order to attain government-driven “equity” quotas. Sometimes initial good intentions can end up with biased outcomes.

Moreover, the article assumed that minority teachers want to instruct students who look like them, and students want teachers who look like them. This takes for granted that these minorities have shared life experiences. What kind of objective research was carried out to arrive at this conclusion? Don’t most parents and students hope for teachers who are qualified and possess the temperament to educate their children regardless of ethnicity, gender, or race?

This reality came to the forefront during the pandemic when parents demanded more input into the curriculum content being taught. Most parents objected to the focus on critical race theory; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and transgender ideologies to the detriment of civics and other rigorous core courses. They also opposed the promotion of Marxist theories in the classroom.

A participant holds up a sign during a rally against critical race theory being taught in schools, at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Va., on June 12, 2021. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Some parents questioned the over-emphasis on district, site, and state tests that align with the factory model of education. Despite this emphasis, math and reading test scores are in the cellar in this state. Indeed, many families have left the public schools and opted for charter, home, or private schools due to the indoctrination churned out in many public schools.

As an educator and mentor, I’ve witnessed the gradual watering down of California’s public education system. The results have been troubling. Far too many upper-course university students have the writing skills of students at the junior high or early high school level. A fixation on electronic devices is partially to blame for this decline. Students aren’t reading enough to curate knowledge in order to develop writing skills in a variety of genres.

Students would benefit if the state and university schools of education placed greater focus on intellectual diversity and an emphasis on character and skills. Martin Luther King, Jr., wisely noted that folks ought to be assessed on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. In a nation where equality of opportunity is systemic, anyone can select their own career and be successful without bureaucratic tinkering in the local schools. Experience, guidance, research, and trial and error can assist individuals in their quest to forge their own occupational destinies.

Utilizing the equity of outcomes approach punishes those who earn rewards through hard work and study habits. Moreover, it’s a disservice to minorities who want to compete on merit and don’t wish to be handed special favors based on arbitrary standards.

If education officials would pivot from an obsession with color, gender, and race to an emphasis on character, merit, and rigor, the public schools could be transformed into wholesome environments for all students. People wouldn’t care what teachers look like as long as they possess a passion to educate students as individuals, regardless of their backgrounds.

Hopefully, teachers would recognize that all human beings are “people of color” so that this meaningless phrase could be relegated to the ash heap. They might also become aware that everyone is equal in the eyes of the Divine Creator.

This week, the fast-food giant McDonald’s Corp. initiated an organizational restructuring that involved layoffs, reshuffling employees, and the closure of some offices. The Wall Street Journal provided an in-depth view of the critical corporate changes as recession threats surge.  

We reported on Monday that McDonald’s told US employees and some international staff that they should work from home in the first half of the week so it could deliver staffing decisions virtually. 

“The restructuring this week is reaching company-wide, resulting in hundreds of layoffs and for some employees reductions in their compensation packages,” WSJ said, citing people familiar with the matter. 

Some employees were offered the opportunity to stay with the company but with reductions in their compensation packages, including changes to titles and benefits.

An internal company memo on Thursday showed the corporate restructuring unfolded in multiple waves this week. The memo said there were changes to positions and promotions for other employees, including ten corporate officers working across finance, operations, and marketing. 

The company announced plans to shut down its field offices by summer, citing underutilization and the need for a more efficient national structure. In another internal email, Joe Erlinger, president of McDonald’s USA, voiced concerns the fast-food chain’s complex structure needed to be streamlined. 

“While the McDonald’s Brand is in the strongest position it has been in years, we also recognize that our business has grown increasingly complex in recent years,” Erlinger said in an email. 

Advising McDonald’s on its restructuring efforts has been done by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. This isn’t the first time the fast-food chain has undertaken such an effort. In 2018, it was able to streamline operations that saved $500 million in administrative expenses. 

According to McDonald’s latest annual report, it has 150,000 employees across corporate and other offices and in company-owned and operated restaurants. Months ago, it said staffing levels would be readjusted.  

The job cuts are part of a broad restructuring as companies across many other industries reduce headcounts ahead of a possible recession. 

And already, McDonald’s revealed a slowdown in lower-income customers ordering fewer items.

McDonald’s is preparing for some economic landing, which might be “hard.” 

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Some empire managers are so brash about wanting to rule the world that they’ll occasionally voice their position so directly it sounds like an anti-imperialist said it…

We saw just such an instance last Wednesday during a conversation between empire propagandist Sean Hannity and warmongering senator Marco Rubio on Fox News. So frenzied was Rubio in his vitriol about the rise of China on the world stage that he accidentally wound up providing a very good argument against the hegemony of the US dollar.

Rubio began with a rant about how the US is in a “conflict” with China in response to a question from Hannity about whether Xi Jinping is preparing for war with America.

“The bottom line is we’re in a conflict, and I think we have to start talking about it that way,” Rubio said. “I was very young, obviously, at the end of the Cold War, but it’s been about 30 years since there was another superpower on the earth that was in conflict with the United States. We are back in that place. We need to stop pretending like that’s not the case now.”

Hannity repeated the soundbite he’s been pushing for the last few weeks saying that China, Russia and Iran are a “new Axis of Evil,” then Rubio made a very revealing comment about a recent deal that was struck between China and Brazil.

“Just today, Brazil, the largest country in the Western Hemisphere, cut a trade deal with China,” said Rubio.

“They’re going to, from now on, do trade in their own currencies, get right around the dollar. They’re creating a secondary economy in the world totally independent of the United States. We won’t have to talk about sanctions in five years, because there’ll be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

Rubio is not the first US imperialist we’ve seen expressing concern about the US dollar losing its position as the dominant currency of the world, not just with regard to China and Brazil but between China and Russia, between China and Saudi Arabia, between China and India, and between India and Russia.

“The dollar is America’s superpower,” Fareed Zakaria writes for The Washington Post.

“It gives Washington unrivaled economic and political muscle. The United States can slap sanctions on countries unilaterally, freezing them out of large parts of the world economy. And when Washington spends freely, it can be certain that its debt, usually in the form of T-bills, will be bought up by the rest of the world.”

“Now an increasing number of nations are eager to find alternative financial systems to insulate themselves from Washington’s willingness to use sanctions as political leverage,” writes Jamie Seidel for the Murdoch-owned News.com.au, quoting an Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tanker as saying,

“Chinese authorities were shocked by the seizure of the Russian central bank’s foreign exchange reserves following the invasion of Ukraine. In the event of a Sino-American conflict, Chinese assets would similarly be vulnerable.”

The other day Pentagon insider and DC swamp monster Elbridge Colby spotlighted a concern on Twitter that the US might not be able to finance a war with China if the US dollar loses its status as the world’s reserve currency.

👇🚨 https://t.co/HETAVilL2V

— Elbridge Colby (@ElbridgeColby) March 27, 2023

The US has engaged in a tremendous amount of manipulation to secure the dollar’s position as the global reserve currency and all the power that comes with it, and has used it to fund a war machine of unprecedented might and to inflict starvation sanctions on disobedient nations around the world. It is a weapon, and US imperialists are bemoaning the looming loss of that weapon because they want to use it on many more people for the advancement of the interests of the empire.

Economic sanctions are somehow the only form of warfare where it’s considered acceptable to deliberately target civilian populations with deadly force, and the US empire makes liberal use of them. Starvation sanctions always hurt the weakest and most vulnerable members of a population by depriving them of access to medicine and adequate nutrition, and future generations (if there are future generations) will judge harshly those who used them.

It seems unlikely to me that the emergence of a multipolar world will in and of itself produce any kind of wonderful utopia, and as Professor Richard Wolff explains the dollar’s decline could potentially give rise to a lot of economic chaos and suffering. But at the very least the fall of US dollar hegemony would deprive one group of psychopaths a powerful weapon they should never have had, and could even end up impeding the empire’s ability to ramp up for a global conflict between major powers — a conflict which must never occur.

In any case humanity cannot continue along the trajectory it has been on, and any divergence from that trajectory opens up the possibility of real healthy change. Here’s hoping Marco Rubio is given a lot more to be upset about in the coming years.

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