Authored by Allen Mendenhall via The Mises Institute,

“It’s an important part of society whether you like it or not,” lexicologist Tony Thorne, referring to “wokeness,” told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in January. That’s an understatement.

Wokeness is poisoning the Western workplace and constraining small and family businesses, midsized banks, and entrepreneurs while enriching powerful corporations and billionaires. It’s eating away at the capitalist ethos and killing the bottom-up modes of economic ordering and exchange that propelled the United States of America to prosperity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s infecting Gen Z and millennials, who, suffering high depression rates and prone to “quiet quitting,” are not as well off as their parents and grandparents, and who feel isolated and alone even as they enjoy a technological connectivity that’s unprecedented in human history.

What, exactly, is wokeness, and how does it impact business and the wider society?

The term as it’s widely used today differs from earlier significations. “Woke,” which plays on African American vernacular, once meant “awake to” or “aware of” social and racial injustices. The term expanded to encompass a wider array of causes from climate change, gun control, and LGTBQ rights to domestic violence, sexual harassment, and abortion.

Now, wielded by its opponents, it’s chiefly a pejorative dismissing the person or party it modifies. It’s the successor to “political correctness,” a catchall idiom that ridicules a broad range of leftist hobbyhorses. Carl Rhodes submits, in Woke Capitalism, that “woke transmuted from being a political call for self-awareness through solidarity in the face of massive racial injustice, to being an identity marker for self-righteousness.”

John McWhorter’s Woke Racism argues that wokeness is religious in character, unintentionally and intrinsically racist, and deleterious to black people. McWhorter, a black linguist, asserts that “white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species.” Books like Stephen R. Soukup’s The Dictatorship of Woke Capital and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc. highlight the nefarious side of the wokeism adopted by large companies, in particular in the field of asset management, investment, and financial services.

Wokeism, in both the affirming and derogatory sense, is predicated on a belief in systemic or structural forces that condition culture and behavior. The phrases “structural racism” or “systemic racism” suggest that rational agents are nevertheless embedded in a network of interacting and interconnected rules, norms, and values that perpetuate white supremacy or marginalize people of color and groups without privilege.

Breaking entirely free from these inherited constraints is not possible, according to the woke, because we cannot operate outside the discursive frames established by long use and entrenched power. Nevertheless, the argument runs, we can decenter the power relations bolstering this system and subvert the techniques employed, wittingly or unwittingly, to preserve extant hierarchies. That requires, however, new structures and power relations.

Corporate executives and boards of directors are unsuspectingly and inadvertently—though sometimes deliberately—caught up in these ideas. They’re immersed in an ideological paradigm arising principally from Western universities. It’s difficult to identify the causative origin of this complex, disparate movement to undo the self-extending power structures that supposedly enable hegemony. Yet businesses, which, of course, are made up of people, including disaffected Gen Zs and millennials, develop alongside this sustained effort to dismantle structures and introduce novel organizing principles for society.

The problem is, rather than neutralizing power, the “woke” pursue and claim power for their own ends. Criticizing systems and structures, they erect systems and structures in which they occupy the center, seeking to dominate and subjugate the people or groups they allege to have subjugated or dominated throughout history. They replace one hegemony with another. 

The old systems had problems, of course. They were imperfect. But they retained elements of classical liberalism that protected hard-won principles like private property, due process of law, rule of law, free speech, and equality under the law. Wokeism dispenses with these. It’s about strength and control. And it has produced a corporate-government nexus that rigidifies power in the hands of an elite few.

Consider the extravagant spectacle in Davos, the beautiful resort town that combined luxury and activism at the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, perhaps the largest gathering of self-selected, influential lobbyists and “c suiters” across countries and cultures. This annual event occasions cartoonish portrayals of evil, conspiratorial overlords—the soi-disant saviors paternalistically preaching about planetary improvement, glorifying their chosen burden to shape global affairs. The World Economic Forum has become a symbol of sanctimony and lavish inauthenticity, silly in its ostentation.

The near-ubiquitous celebration of lofty Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategies at the World Economic Forum reveals a seemingly uniform commitment among prominent leaders to harness government to pull companies—and, alas, everyone else—to the left.

ESG is, of course, an acronym for the nonfinancial standards and metrics that asset managers, bankers, and investors factor while allocating capital or assessing risk. A growing consortium of governments, central banks, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), asset management firms, finance ministries, financial institutions, and institutional investors advocates ESG as the top-down, long-term solution to purported social and climate risks. Even if these risks are real, is ESG the proper remedy?

Attendees of the World Economic Forum would not champion ESG if they did not benefit from doing so. That plain fact doesn’t alone discredit ESG, but it raises questions about ulterior motives: What’s really going on? How will these titans of finance and government benefit from ESG?

One obvious answer involves the institutional investors that prioritize activism over purely financial objectives or returns on investment (for legal reasons, activist investors would not characterize their priorities as such). It has only been a century since buying and selling shares in publicly traded companies became commonplace among workers and households. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), created in response to the Great Depression, isn’t even 100 years old.

Until recently, most investors divested if they owned stock in a company that behaved contrary to their beliefs. They rarely voted their shares or voted only on major issues like mergers and acquisitions. In 2023, however, institutional investors such as hedge funds and asset management firms engage boards of directors, exercise proxy voting, and issue shareholder reports with the primary goal of politicizing companies. As intermediaries, they invest pension funds, mutual funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, 401(k)s and more on behalf of beneficiaries who may or may not know what political causes their invested assets support.

If a publicly traded company “goes woke,” consider which entities hold how much of its shares and whether unwanted shareholder pressure is to blame. Consider, too, the role of third-party proxy advisors in the company’s policies and practices.

Big companies go woke to eliminate competition. After all, they can afford the costs to comply with woke regulations whereas small companies cannot. Institutional investors warn of prospective risks of government regulation while lobbying for such regulation. In the United States, under the Biden Administration, woke federal regulations are, unsurprisingly, emerging. Perhaps publicly traded companies will privatize to avoid proposed SEC mandates regarding ESG disclosures, but regulation in other forms and through other agencies will come for private companies too.

The woke should question why they’re collaborating with their erstwhile corporate enemies. Have they abandoned concerns about poverty for the more lucrative industry of identity politics and environmentalism? Have they sold out, happily exploiting the uncouth masses, oppressing the already oppressed, and trading socioeconomic class struggle for the proliferating dogma of race, sexuality, and climate change? As wokeness becomes inextricably tied to ESG, we can no longer say, “Go woke, go broke.” Presently, wokeness is a vehicle to affluence, a status marker, the ticket to the center of the superstructure.

ESG helps the wealthiest to feel better about themselves while widening the gap between the rich and poor and disproportionately burdening economies in developing countries. It’s supplanting the classical liberal rules and institutions that leveled playing fields, engendered equality of opportunity, expanded the franchise, reduced undue discrimination, eliminated barriers to entry, facilitated entrepreneurship and innovation, and empowered individuals to realize their dreams and rise above their station at birth.

When politics is ubiquitous, wokeness breeds antiwokeness. The right caught on to institutional investing; counteroffensives are underway. The totalizing politicization of corporations is a zero-sum arms race in which the right captures some companies while the left captures others.

Soon there’ll be no escaping politics, no tranquil zones, and little space for emotional detachment, contemplative privacy, or principled neutrality; parallel economies will emerge for different political affiliations; noise, fighting, anger, distraction, and division will multiply; every quotidian act will signal a grand ideology. For the woke, “silence is violence”; there’s no middle ground; you must speak up; and increasingly for their opponents as well, you must choose sides.

Which will you choose in this corporatized dystopia? If the factions continue to concentrate and centralize power, classical liberals will have no good options. Coercion and compulsion will prevail over freedom and cooperation. And commerce and command will go hand in hand.

Amid the mounting speculation of a soft landing, and even chatter of a “no landing” (see here and here), one strategist is laughing at the market’s renewed sense of optimism and hope, which he counters simply by observing the latest economic and Fed developments and says that “a typical end-cycle environment is coming into place — mixed economic signals with a downward bias combining with a Fed laser-focused on corralling inflation by reducing labor demand.”

Yes, for TS Lombard economist Steven Blitz, there is no thesis drift (or rather elevation) and his big picture assessment refuses to budge: “recession will result.” Here’s why: “Forget the Fed stopping to wait and watch and hope that inflation bends towards 2% without a recession. That horse has left the barn. A key question is where the funds rate is when the Fed realizes recession is already underway.“

Blitz’s base case is “this summer” with the funds rate around 5.25%, or about 2 more hikes. That said, the TS Lombard analyst hedges and warns that if he is wrong, the funds rate can easily move up to 6.5%, which will make the coming recession that much more brutal.

Here a quick compare and contrast: according to Blitz, the policy tack in 2005-07 is the one the Fed are communicating: “get to a spot and stay there”, but of course the problem with 2007 was that “it was not the idealized recession” as everyone still remember what happened in 2008.

The policy approach in this cycle has been quite different because the Fed started so late, and the economy’s underlying dynamics are very different from 04-07, so too the Fed’s balance sheet policy. At this stage, they keep hiking until recession begins – even though they continue to advertise that getting to spot and sticking is the intention.

Looking at Chart 2, the TSL strategist says that it was good to read in the latest Fed Minutes that the FOMC sees the funds rate only now “moving toward a sufficiently restrictive stance of monetary policy”. As Blitz has repeatedly argued, rates have just gotten to the starting gate in terms of restricting activity. He also notes that in his view, the economic slowdown to date has little to do with Fed policy (though they took their bows), it had to with the economy naturally slowing from the unsustainable 6% pace in 2021– created by fiscal transfer, reopening, and Fed underwriting. Chart 1 above also suggests “why the Fed thinks they have a much longer road of hikes ahead before inflation bends back to 2%, but they are probably wrong on this too.”

With this 2005-2007 idealized tack (which, again, ended in disaster) as the Fed’s focus, it makes allowing financial conditions to ease by slowing the pace of hikes an incredibly counterproductive move, according to Blitz: “they seem to now understand that — “[a] number of participants observed that financial conditions had eased in recent months, which some noted could necessitate a tighter stance of monetary policy”, and in the strategist’s view, “if they had to do it again, especially given the run of data after the meeting, they would’ve hiked rates 50BP, as some wanted to.” Although, as Mester noted last week, after going 25, they are now pretty much stuck with that, unless they feel like risking another major communications disaster.

Additionally, in the latest FOMC minutes, we also read that “Participants observed that a restrictive policy stance would need to be maintained until the incoming data provided confidence that inflation was on a sustained downward path to 2 percent, which was likely to take some time.” And “stressed that substantially more evidence of progress across a broader range of prices would be required to be confident that inflation was on a sustained downward path.” To that point, “as long as the labour market remained very tight, wage growth in excess of 2 percent inflation and trend productivity growth would likely continue to put upward pressure on some prices in this component. A couple of participants observed that changes in wages tend to lag changes in prices, which can complicate the assessment of inflation pressures.”

Taking all this in, Blitz concludes that the Fed may well hike 50BP in March (overriding Fed concerns about reversing to a 25bps cadence) if there is a large enough upside surprise to February employment (that said, Blitz agrees with us that the January number was a grotesque outlier and that “the employment surprise will be weakness”). Otherwise, we get a 25BP hike and the data watch begins for May, although according to TS Lombard, “the Fed keeps hiking until unemployment hits 4.5%, at least. As for when that occurs, it depends on one’s start date for recession. I still believe there is a 55% probability of a mid-year recession, so they stop in Q3.”

But what if the “no landing” narrative ends up being right, and how high for the funds rate if there is no recession?

According to Blitz, very dovish inputs in a Taylor Rule model produce a 6.5% rate. Somewhat less dovish inputs deliver a 7.2% rate, and more traditional inputs (including 2% neutral real rate) produce a 9.7% rate. In other words, the longer it takes to weaken employment, the higher the rate, which means that if the unemployment rate has been artificially sustained lower as per Biden admin instructions we may see a Fed Funds rate on the edge of double digits, which would presage a great depression.

One final point brought up by Blitz who notes that the latest FOMC Minutes had a brief discussion of QT which noted the potential for private money-market rates to “experience some temporary pressures as reserves declined if use of the Federal Reserve’s ON RRP facility continued to remain high.” This facility is about 25% of the Fed balance sheet – up from zero two years ago.

The Fed has repeatedly assumed that these pressures on RRP work themselves out as wide spreads pull MMMF monies from ON RRP and move them into CP, CDs, etc. The Fed would love this result because banks have pretty much hit their desired bottom for reserve/asset ratios – banks began reducing reserves on their own in mid-2021 and flipped them into loans. Going forward, the balance sheet shrinks with ON RRP dropping, something the Fed can do arbitrarily, but they appear unlikely to “just say no”.

With rising real returns on cash, and increased recession risk, banks are buying T-bills along with the Fed and MMMFs may not rescue private money market disruptions (i.e., lower usage of the Reverse Repo facility) as the Fed hopes. According to Blitz, “disruption, or even a credible threat, plus sharply rising marginal funding costs for banks, will eventually curtail credit extensions and, in turn, bring forward recession’s start date” who notes that “this dynamic alone makes unlikely the idealized policy tack of getting the funds to a spot and staying there for an extended period.”

In conclusion, between the upcoming reserve crunch, and the continued Fed hikes, Blitz holds that the coming “asset crunch” will be enough to create a mild recession mid-year. And if it doesn’t, “steadily rising real funding costs deliver a “credit crunch” at some point. Recession is inevitable. And once it occurs, the cutting begins.”

Authored by Bret Swanson via The Brownstone Institute,

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter may have capped the opening chapter in the Information Wars, where free speech won a small but crucial battle.

Full spectrum combat across the digital landscape, however, will only intensify, as a new report from the Brookings Institution, a key player in the censorship industrial complex, demonstrates.

First, a review.

Reams of internal documents, known as the Twitter Files, show that social media censorship in recent years was far broader and more systematic than even we critics suspected. Worse, the files exposed deep cooperation – even operational integration – among Twitter and dozens of government agencies, including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, DOD, CIA, Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, and, of course, the White House. 

Government agencies also enlisted a host of academic and non-profit organizations to do their dirty work. The Global Engagement Center, housed in the State Department, for example, was originally launched to combat international terrorism but has now been repurposed to target Americans.

The US State Department also funded a UK outfit called the Global Disinformation Index, which blacklists American individuals and groups and convinces advertisers and potential vendors to avoid them. Homeland Security created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) – including the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, and the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab – which flagged for social suppression tens of millions of messages posted by American citizens.

Even former high government US officials got in on the act – appealing directly (and successfully) to Twitter to ban mischief-making truth-tellers. 

With the total credibility collapse of legacy media over the last 15 years, people around the world turned to social media for news and discussion. When social media then began censoring the most pressing topics, such as Covid-19, people increasingly turned to podcasts. Physicians and analysts who’d been suppressed on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and who were of course nowhere to be found in legacy media, delivered via podcasts much of the very best analysis on the broad array of pandemic science and policy. 

Which brings us to the new report from Brookings, which concludes that one of the most prolific sources of ‘misinformation’ is now – you guessed it – podcasts. And further, that the underregulation of podcasts is a grave danger.

In “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims,” Valerie Wirtschafter writes:

Due in large part to the say-whatever-you-want perceptions of the medium, podcasting offers a critical avenue through which unsubstantiated and false claims proliferate. As the terms are used in this report, the terms “false claims,” “misleading claims,” “unsubstantiated claims” or any combination thereof are evaluations by the research team of the underlying statements and assertions grounded in the methodology laid out below in the research design section and appendices. Such claims, evidence suggests, have played a vital role in shaping public opinion and political behavior. Despite these risks, the podcasting ecosystem and its role in political debates have received little attention for a variety of reasons, including the technical difficulties in analyzing multi-hour, audio-based content and misconceptions about the medium.

To analyze the millions of hours of audio content, Brookings used natural language processing to search for key words and phrases. It then relied on self-styled fact-checking sites Politifact and Snopes – pause for uproarious laughter…exhale – to determine the truth or falsity of these statements. Next, it deployed a ‘cosine similarity’ function to detect similar false statements in other podcasts. 

The result: “conservative podcasters were 11 times more likely than liberal podcasters to share claims fact-checked as false or unsubstantiated.”

One show Brookings misclassified as “conservative” is the Dark Horse science podcast hosted by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Over the past three years, they meticulously explored the complex world of Covid, delivering scintillating insights and humbly correcting their infrequent missteps. Brookings, however, determined 13.8 percent of their shows contained false information. 

What would the Brookings methodology, using a different set of fact checkers, spit out if applied to CNN, the Washington Post, the FDA, CDC, or hundreds of blogs, podcasts, TV doctors, and “science communicators,” who got nearly everything wrong? 

Speaking on journalist Matt Taibbi’s podcast, novelist Walter Kirn skewered the new AI fact-checking scheme. It pretends to turn censorship into a “mathematical, not Constitutional, concern” – or, as he calls it, “sciency, sciency, sciency bullshit.” 

The daisy chain of presumptuous omniscience, selection bias, and false precision employed to arrive at these supposedly quantitative conclusions about the vast, diverse, sometimes raucous, and often enlightening world of online audio is preposterous. 

And yet it is deadly serious. 

The collapse of support for free speech among Western pseudo-elites is the foundation of so many other problems, from medicine to war. Misinformation is the natural state of the world. Open science and vigorous debate are the tools we deploy to become less wrong over time. Individual and collective decision-making depend on them.

*  *  *

Reposted from the author’s Substack

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

Dark Forest

“Sorry to tell you, but there are no aliens,” said the intelligence analyst.

“The Tic Tac videos, balloons, UFOs – they’re not aliens,” he said. “We’re all alone here, it’s just us.”

For those of us who read Cixin Liu, China’s brilliant Sci-Fi author, the notion that we are alone is extremely comforting. Cixin turned me onto the Dark Forest hypothesis, which postulates that while there may be many alien civilizations out there, we see no sign of them because they are silent and paranoid, lest they alert others to their existence and invite invasion, annihilation. 

“What we see is our next generation military technology,” continued the intelligence analyst.

“We all see what the Ukrainians did to Russia’s military using battlefield technology that we would generally consider obsolete relative to our state of the art,” he said. “But America’s actual state of the art is one or two generations ahead of what the public sees today,” he said, which was simultaneously comforting and terrifying.

“It is not in our interest to show our adversaries how far advanced our capabilities have grown.”

“Look carefully at this chart,” said the technology investor.

It was the kind of curve I’ve seen often, an upward sloping trend that accelerates through time. On the vertical axis was the computing power used to train artificial intelligence systems. The horizontal axis was time, going back to the early 1950s. “I know you’re thinking you’ve seen this kind of chart before, it’s a classic hockey stick. But here’s the thing, it’s a logarithmic chart, it should not curve upward. This kind of growth is almost impossible for the human brain to comprehend.”

ChatGPT has had the steepest adoption of any technology in history. It hit 1mm users in five days. Within 2mths, it crossed 100mm users. It is estimated to have 1bln users by the end of the year. It is a remarkable technology, and while we can have no certainty about how it will change the world, there is no doubt that the arc of its influence is only just starting. Governments will lag far behind in regulating it. We don’t yet know what will happen when it gets connected to the internet. And ChatGPT is 2-3 generations behind state-of-the-art AI.

“Time is the one thing that can’t be stopped. Like a sharp blade, it silently cuts through hard and soft, constantly advancing. Nothing is capable of jolting it even the slightest bit, but it changes everything,” wrote Cixin Liu, in The Dark Forest. “Staying alive is not enough to guarantee survival. Development is the best way to ensure survival,” said Cixin. “Do you know what the greatest expression of regard for a race or civilization is? Annihilation. That’s the highest respect a civilization can receive. They would only feel threatened by a civilization they truly respect.”

A silly feature introduced with iOS 16.1 called “Clean Energy Charging” has upset some iPhone users as their devices will only charge when lower carbon-emission electricity on the grid is available. 

Some iPhone users reported when iOS 16.1 was installed — their devices were automatically selected for Clean Energy Charging. Charging when the grid is ‘green’ has its disadvantages for the user experience, who might incur slower charge times. 

Twitter is a buzz this morning with frustrated Apple users. Some complained about ‘slower iPhone charging’ and encouraged others to turn off the setting. 

If you noticed your iPhone is charging a little slower recently it may be due to a new setting Apple added in iOS 16.1 — Clean Energy Charging

With it turned on, iOS will only recharge the iPhone’s battery when the electrical grid uses cleaner energy sources like solar or wind… https://t.co/r35GkgivQl pic.twitter.com/ANW3GZwYSd

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) February 26, 2023

The Climate Change Cult at it again. No thank you. Just switched the Clean Energy Charging off.

— Company of Champions (@CompanyChampion) February 26, 2023

If you noticed your iPhone is charging a little slower, it may be due to the new update: Clean Energy Charging

You can disable it under Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging at which point you are lectured & asked if you’re sure pic.twitter.com/sIAFT6MnVm

— Matthew Gregoire (@BreakngNewsPhtg) February 26, 2023

If you noticed your iPhone is charging a little slower recently, it’s likely due to a new setting Apple added in iOS 16.1 update— Clean Energy Charging

When turned on, iOS will only recharge the iPhone’s battery when the electrical grid uses cleaner energy sources like solar or… https://t.co/QoDdBPeNTT pic.twitter.com/GKRjrhhxJU

— Adam Pokornicky ∞/21M (@callmethebear) February 26, 2023

While Apple is forcefully trying to reduce the carbon footprint of iPhone users to fight climate change, don’t bring up the sobering reality about all the carbon emissions it takes to mine lithium and other rare Earth metals for Apple products. Also, don’t bring up company execs, such as Tim Cook, who fly on private jets. 

What irks the average person is that corporate elites and governments impose life-altering climate change measures on the working poor while the rules don’t apply to the rich. Recall the Biden administration is trying to ban gas stoves. 

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Staffers at Project Veritas have released a new statement as whistleblowers say they support ousted founder James O’Keefe.

In a Feb. 24 video statement, Project Veritas staffers said they “are at a crossroads” due to the dispute between O’Keefe and the organization’s board of directors.

O’Keefe departed Project Veritas this week after being suspended and stripped of his authority. The board has said it uncovered signs of “financial malfeasance” but that it did not terminate O’Keefe. Staffers said Thursday that supporters should “give us a chance” as they work to continue O’Keefe’s mission.

“We want James back,” staffers said in the new video. “But we have a duty to our generous supporters, to all of you, and to our journalistic integrity to break record stories, which impact our culture, and most importantly, the future of our country.”

Staffers said they’re committed to continuing working to expose waste, fraud, and abuse, and that “no board or donor ever tells us what to report.

“We will never replace James O’Keefe. But for now, we see it as our job to hold the torch for him while keeping the door wide open for his return. We will keep the spirit of James’s mission alive for as long as we are able. We have investigations underway and stories to release. Our reporters are in the field,” they said. “As James has always told us, content is king. Our visionary may not be with us right now, but the Project Veritas mission is vital. We will produce stories and break news until a day may come when we can’t.”

The group acknowledged that many supporters are disenchanted with O’Keefe’s ouster.

“We don’t want to see a Project Veritas without James O’Keefe,” they said. “Due to decisions made outside of our control, it’s possible we may never earn back the trust of this audience. But we owe it to all of you to try.”

O’Keefe has said that, after board members rebuffed his request for them to resign, he could not return to the company. In a farewell message to staffers at the group’s headquarters, he said he was planning to “start anew” and that he hoped to see some of the staffers soon.

O’Keefe has since posted several times on Twitter, sharing a new email address for tips.

“Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do,” he said in his last update on Feb. 24.

Former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, joins Bloomberg to answer questions on persistent inflation indicators despite Federal Reserve tightening measures and rising interest rates.  Summers, with some carefully chosen words, essentially admits what alternative economists have been warning about all along – That short term positive indicators are misleading and that longer term indicators show impending recession and a sharp decline in the US. 

After $8 trillion+ in fiat helicopter money pumped into the economy during the pandemic lockdowns, an impressive spike in retail and service sector activity was the result, spurring a hiring blitz in mostly low wage jobs.  The lockdowns led to over 25 million job losses and the covid stimulus bought 12 million jobs back.  This heightened activity, however, has been fleeting.  Equally impressive has been the aggressive spike in stagflation.  High prices continue to hang on and the Fed has little choice but to roll forward on increased interest rates. 

The central bank has expressed steady hawkish sentiments in the past few weeks, which have run contrary to media and political claims of easing inflation and an inevitable “soft landing.” 

In a somewhat similar dynamic to the early-1980s under former Fed chairman Paul Volcker (inflation stats today are calculated far differently from the 80s in an attempt to hide true inflation), the mainstream economic media is starting to realize that interest rates will have to go much higher than they expected and a hard landing is an inevitable outcome. 

Summers then hints at what he thinks the solution will be, which of course involves global policy makers and global banking institutions like World Bank.  If we were to run Summer’s comments through a truth translator, here is what we would likely hear:

“A soft economic landing is not going to happen and the negative data is becoming too obvious to deny.  Inflation signals are not relenting and the Fed will continue hiking rates.  This will lead to a recessionary crash, so we’re going to admit to the issue now in order to avoid looking like complete fools later.  In the meantime, we’re going to use the ongoing crisis to promote more globalism, which was our intention all along.”

A message to Larry – You can’t hit the brakes on the car when you’ve already driven off a cliff.  

Authored by Robert A. Bishop via AmericanThinker.com,

The Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) gives cities a blank check for hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants. An astonishingly massive windfall for municipal budgets. Janet Yellen, U.S. Treasury Secretary, followed up by forming an Advisory Committee on Racial Equity (a.k.a. TACRE) to ensure cities channel those funds and future federal grants towards racial equity justice.  

The Committee’s mission is to “identify, monitor, and review aspects of the domestic economy that have directly and indirectly resulted in unfavorable conditions…for persons of color.”

The ulterior motive is to produce a permanent mechanism that is a data-driven approach forcing racial equity justice outcomes. Leftists refer to the concept as “democratizing data,” a contrary term that is an affirmative action contrivance.

At the TACRE launch, Ron Nirenberg, ultra-leftist Mayor of San Antonio, promoted (see this 45-second clip) the City’s first-of-its-kind working Equity Atlas model as the best practice for measuring and doling out resources based on equity. The City’s Equity Atlas is a workaround to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.   

San Antonio’s model assigns equity scores by census tracts and then aggregates them by districts. Census tracts can earn a favorable score based on the higher percentage of Spanish as a first language, high illiteracy, people of color, and below-median household income. Census tracts with the highest scores receive prioritized resource allocations—violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and Article 1 of the Texas Constitution. Shouldn’t the City focus on tracking spiking crime rates and street potholes instead?

Case Study

The City of San Antonio’s Equity Atlas is an ideal case study of how data-driven narratives are used for citywide equity goals and strategies. No surprise, the City is dedicating most of its $465.5 million in ARP grants for affordable housing, drug rehabilitation, violence prevention, small business equitable outcomes, and community benefit navigators. Like a spoiled trust-fund baby, the City foolishly spends on those progressive pet projects will likely result in fraud, waste, and abuse – bank on it. All the while ignoring over $6 billion in crumbling infrastructure.

Below is the City’s equity map using GIS technology. The darker the shade, the greater allocation of resources and opportunities. The lighter shade areas have the highest tax burdens and coincidentally contain the most significant share of the City’s 23% non-Hispanic white minority population. This is blatant and shameful redlining around the neighborhoods where the City will limit or not invest based on race and affluence.

I filed an Open Records Request for my census tract 1211.10, asking for the data sources and the calculation for race, income, education, language, and combined components.

The census tract has one of the lowest equity scores in the City, with two out of a possible ten. The low score means that the census tract and, indirectly, the district have the lowest priority for resources. Astonishingly, the City coughed up the citywide Equity Atlas database in an Excel workbook which can be downloaded HERE.

The calculations rely on problematic federal government estimates and census data with an unacceptably high statistical margin of error, as high as 16%. As a result, the data lacks precision and has an inherent bias invalidating the Equity Atlas. But, of course, the mandarins couldn’t care less as long as it advances their social justice agenda.

Mark Twain defines it best: “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.”

Deep-Pocketed Influencers

Large donations and government grants are pouring into nonprofits to promote the adoption of a data-driven system for social justice. One of the most militant and influential nonprofit organizations is PolicyLink, which advocates for wealth redistribution, reparations, and abolishing the police. PolicyLink is supported by overly generous grants from the usual suspects like Gates, Ford, Packard, and Johnson foundations.   

PolicyLink partnered with USC Equity Research Institute and created the National Equity Atlas. This platform provides starter dashboards and how-tos for municipalities to advance racial equity.

Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Philanthropies has initiatives called “Bloomberg City Network” and “C40,” focusing on social justice and climate change. The initiatives promote data-smart city solutions and provide training and grants to cities. Bloomberg, through Harvard University, also has funded Data-Smart City Solutions using what it calls civic engagement technology. Bloomberg, like other billionaires, supports radical nonprofits as ‘tribute’ to avoid criticism of his pursuit of wealth.

Cities like Portland, Austin, and Tacoma have created custom equity dashboards. Visit your municipal website, and you may discover the city is developing its own custom dashboard or an equity atlas.

So where is your city spending its windfall ARPA grant?     

Equity is not Equality

“Equity” is a Neo-Marxist euphemism for resource redistribution to favored racial and ethnic groups. Equity isn’t equality; its meaning and use are deliberately inverted to mislead the gullible and ignorant public. The term clashes with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights’ bedrock principle that the law must equally protect everyone.

Constitutionally protected personal and economic freedom can lead to inequitable consequences based on an individual’s abilities, intellect, deferred gratification, impulse control, and motivation. Yet, it creates a more dynamic and affluent society. On the other hand, equity is utopian socialism destroying personal responsibility and property rights, producing third-world living standards, conflict, and violence.

Authored by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner via Wirepoints.org,

Rising crime is the number one crisis facing Chicago today. More specifically, the city’s propensity for murder.

Chicago was the nation’s extreme outlier for homicides in 2022, with 697 deaths. More people were murdered here than anywhere else. 

What’s worse, Chicago has out-paced the entire nation in murders for 11 years in a row. It’s become an embedded, chronic wound for the city.

That’s not a surprising result given the failed policies of Chicago’s leadership in recent years, from a dramatic drop in arrests to ever-fewer prosecutions to reduced sentencing. The pursuit of “equity” and “social justice,” instead of actual justice, has only increased the protection of criminals, crushed police morale and increased the violence inflicted on ordinary Chicagoans.

That’s just one of the facts contained in Wirepoints’ latest Special Report: Chicago, New Orleans were the nation’s murder capitals in 2022: A Wirepoints survey of America’s 75 largest cities.

New Orleans is the nation’s other murder capital with more than 74 homicides per 100,000 residents. That’s the worst rate in the nation, by far. But Chicago still shares the crown due to the sheer amount of lives lost and its 11-year run at the top.

Apologists claim that the city’s mass number of murders is just a typical big-city problem. But it’s easy to dispel that myth. If that were the case, New York City would be the nation’s homicide capital. 

But it’s not. 

Chicago’s murder rate of 25.8 per 100K people in 2022 was 5 times higher than New York’s 5.2. That’s a staggering difference. Chicago would have had just 140 homicides last year if it had had the same murder rate as the Big Apple’s.

Conversely, New York City would have suffered 2,150 murders – not it’s actual 438 – if it had had the same homicide rate as Chicago’s.

Despite Chicago’s horrific results, city and state leaders continue to downplay the city’s overall crime crisis. Gov. Pritzker recently told CNBC in Davos, Switzerland recently that “crime is coming down gradually in the city,” a statement that is patently false. See him say it here. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said last year “we’re making progress on crime.” That’s also grossly untrue. 

Though murders did drop 13 percent in 2022, overall major crimes in Chicago ended up 41% higher in 2022 vs. 2021. And in 2023 major crimes are already up 55% compared to the same period last year.

These are the facts that city leaders should be obsessed about changing:

• The average arrest rate for major crimes in Chicago fell to just 5% in 2022.

• There were no police available in 2021 for more than 400,000 high-priority 911 dispatches. That included 15,000 assaults in progress, 1,300 instances of people shot, 14,000 instances of domestic battery, and many more serious crimes.

• Cook County Chief Judge Tim Evans’ no bail, low-cash bail “reforms” of 2017 have, since then, resulted in an additional 15,000 new offenses for defendants already awaiting trial. 

• Every day there are about 1,000 more defendants accused of violent crimes on the street than there were in 2016 due to the expansion of electronic monitoring, Many of them are felons that end up committing more heinous crimes.

• The number of beat cops on the streets since Mayor Lightfoot took office is down by nearly 1,500, a drop of nearly 20%.

The city’s leadership, including Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, County President Preckwinkle, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Tim Evans have had years, some even more than a decade, to implement their equity-focused “reforms. They’ve had their chance and they’ve failed miserably. 

The crime data overwhelmingly tells us so. There can’t be any “equity” when blacks and Latinos, who make up 95% of all Chicago murder victims, are dying and being victimized in ever-higher numbers.

The chain of criminal justice is broken in Chicago. We are not arresting. We are not prosecuting and convicting. We are not sentencing. What few criminals are caught just go through a revolving door. And the SAFE-T Act, with the elimination of cash bail and the allowance of anonymous complaints against police, will only make things worse.

Chicago has already spent more than a decade as “The Murder Capital of the Nation.” At this rate the city will hold that title for two decades if nothing is done.

The obvious thing to do is to unwind these destructive policies that treat criminals like victims while the real victimization of ordinary residents continues to spike. The first target should be Los Angeles’ homicide rate of 9.9 per 100K – or 270 homicides a year for Chicago. And then go for New York’s, resulting in a murder total for Chicago of 140.

Still too many – but it would be progress – and it would free Chicago from the title of the nation’s murder capital.

Government authorities in El Salvador are circulating some surreal images in order to prove to the nation and the world that they are cleaning up crime in a country that’s currently under a state of emergency due to rampant murders and violent crime. 

President Nayib Bukele has recently declared a “war on crime” and his message to gangs came in the form of publicizing ‘shocking’ video footage showing some 2,000 suspected gang members being huddled into a newly opened large prison using military tactics. Tens of thousands more suspected criminals have reportedly been rounded up. Watch below: 

Video from the president of El Salvador.

Seems like “lock up all the guys with gang tattoos all over their bodies and throw away the key” was pretty low-hanging fruit?

It’s interesting how many countries can’t even manage that. The criminals make it easy pic.twitter.com/xUk2Cj1l3U

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) February 25, 2023

The footage has been met with some controversy, given there are allegations that innocent men may have been caught in the broad anti-gang dragnet. 

Additionally, the police appear to be utilizing military prison tactics not seen since post 9/11 Gitmo images. According to international reports: 

President Bukele tweeted that the first 2,000 people were transferred “at dawn, in a single operation” to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, which he says is the largest jail in the Americas.

“This will be their new house, where they will live for decades, all mixed, unable to do any further harm to the population.”

Once widely dubbed the “homicide capital of the world” – authorities in recent years thought they had it under control, but murders spiked over the past year. 

This caused President Nayib Bukele to declared a state of emergency eight months ago, and police went ‘gloves off’ in attempting to clear the streets of gangs.