Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Colorado mom Lydia Lerma feels punched when she hears the trendy new term “minor-attracted person.” Just thinking of the damage a pedophile inflicted upon her son, who was six at the time, causes pain.

Creating a polite-sounding term for someone sexually attracted to children enrages her.

Any push to normalize pedophilia or designate it as another sexual orientation to be tolerated is “unconscionable,” Lerma told The Epoch Times.

“That’s a bunch of [expletive]!” she said of academics pushing acceptance of pedophilia.

“They are going to face the greatest resistance that they have ever seen. Society is not going to let that happen.”

But in academic circles, some have begun to argue that pedophilia should be considered just another sexual orientation, not a mental disorder.

And a therapist who treats pedophiles told The Epoch Times that he believes pedophilia is on its way to becoming normalized.

‘Like Any Other Sexual Orientation’

In 2018, medical student Mirjam Heine, who said she had a background in psychology, gave a presentation called “Pedophilia is a Natural Sexual Orientation” during a TEDx event at the University of Würtzberg in Germany. A program guide for TEDx said she was mainly guided by the works of Prof. Dr. Klaus Michael Beier, the head of the institute for sexology and sexual medicine at the University Hospital Berlin, and the prevention network “Kein Täter Werden.”

In her remarks, Heine said pedophilia is an “unchangeable sexual orientation,” just like heterosexuality.

“No one chooses to be a pedophile; no one can cease being one,” Heine argued during her talk. “The difference between pedophilia and other sexual orientations is that living out this sexual orientation will end in a disaster.”

Most countries in the world, including the United States, outlaw adults having sexual contact or intercourse with children in most situations.

The term minor-attracted person grabbed headlines after professor Allyn Walker used it during a discussion on pedophiles in November 2021. Walker, a woman who transitioned to live as a man, was discussing her book: “A Long Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity.

In the interview with the Prostasia Foundation—a San Francisco organization focused on child sexual abuse—Walker said it’s less stigmatizing to use the term minor-attracted person than pedophile when referring to people “who don’t act on their urges to have sex with children.”

The interview drew fiery criticism. Within weeks, Walker resigned from her job as an assistant sociology and criminal justice professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia.

After stepping down, Walker said in a prepared statement that her research was “mischaracterized” by some in the media. Walker blamed the public outcry on intolerance for her transgender identity and said the research aimed to prevent child sexual abuse.

Later, Johns Hopkins University hired Walker to work at the Moore Center for Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse in Baltimore. She did not immediately respond to an Epoch Times email through the Moore Center requesting comment.

Two former colleagues at Old Dominion defended Walker in the journal of the American Society of Criminology.

“Our friend and colleague, Dr. Allyn Walker, was the victim of a trolling attack on their research and their person that resulted in the loss of their position at Old Dominion University (ODU),” wrote Ruth Triplett and Mona Danner.

The attacks, they wrote, were “centering around misinformation and links to Dr. Walker’s identity as non-binary, transgender, and Jewish.”

Growing Cultural Acceptance

The fashion house Balenciaga faced backlash recently after running an ad campaign depicting little girls holding a Teddy bear wearing bondage gear. One ad shows pages from a child pornography court ruling. Balenciaga later apologized for the advert.

A November headline from a Washington Post theater review read: “‘Downstate’ is a play about pedophiles. It’s also brilliant.” The off-Broadway play characterizes pedophiles as complicated and troubled victims of harsh punishment.

Jon Uhler is a 30-year veteran counselor who has worked with sex offenders in the Pennsylvania and South Carolina prison systems. Throughout his career, he has assessed hundreds of pedophiles.

Uhler, a member of the Association for Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA), said he’s afraid pedophilia is on the road to normalization.

Sex offender treatment specialists are now trained to view sex offenders as victims of trauma, he said.

The idea is that pedophiles are reenacting their trauma by choosing a victim of the age they were when abused, Uhler said. But that’s not accurate, he added.

Researchers are taking information from interviews with pedophiles and considering it to be true,  instead of realizing they’re dealing with the “world’s greatest deceivers,” Uhler said.

Even so, Walker’s ideas have permeated sex offender treatment circles, he said. Walker spoke at this year’s ATSA conference.

Creating a Protected Class

Normalizing pedophilia ultimately could lead to a major cultural change—elevating pedophilia to a protected class.

“They are going to push to have it recognized as a sexual orientation, which would grant it civil rights status,” Uhler said.

If that happens, employers could no longer discriminate against pedophiles in areas such as employment, he said.

And if teens are given the legal right to decide if they want to have a sex-change operation or take hormones to try to appear as the other sex, that could help make it legal for pedophiles to act on their sexual urges, he predicted.

If children legally can decide what they can do with their bodies, then pedophiles could argue that they should be able to consent to a sexual relationship, he said.

“They’re jackals that are feeding off the carcasses of these kids,” he said. “The predator’s interest is ultimately lowering the age of consent.”

The general public doesn’t understand what is happening, he said. It’s one of the defining issues of our time, he added.

Scott Clark, a minister who teaches church history and historical theology at Westminster Seminary in California, has called the destigmatization of pedophilia the last stage of the “neo-pagan sexual revolution.”

Clark hosts the Heidelcast podcast and writes The Heidelblog. Both tackle religious and moral issues facing modern society.

“There’s a pretty obvious move to normalize pedophilia,” he said. “This invariable comes from adults. It’s not coming from children.”

Read more here…

By Eric Peters CIO of One River Asset Management

“Right now, people’s wages are being eaten up by inflation,” said Jay Powell. “So what you want to do is you want to have inflation stable and then have a very strong labor market where the biggest wage gains are going to the people at the bottom end of the spectrum,” continued the Fed Chairman.

No doubt that’s right. With the pendulum now retreating from peak inequality, there are two ways to narrow the divide. The fastest, of course, is through making the wealthy poor, or at least less rich in real terms, which started this year in earnest and has a very long way to go. The preferable way is to raise the poor.

To sustainably lift low earners requires our economy to become more productive, so laborers receive a higher share of the nation’s economic pie. An economy that is deglobalizing will become less productive, at least for some years. So the rebalance must come through a shift in the distribution of America’s economic pie from capital owners to laborers, which lifts inflation, shrinks corporate profit margins, and lowers multiples.

This week’s intervention by Democrats in Congress to limit our rail worker’s negotiation ability demonstrates that even our labor-friendly party does not have the stomach for the resurgence of union power.

“And we had that at the end of the very long expansion that ended with the pandemic. That’s not what we have now. Now, for most workers, wages are being eaten up by inflation,” explained Powell, nervous, without the tools to mediate this rising conflict.

“That’s not true at the bottom end, where wage increases are higher than inflation, a good thing. But if you want to have a sustainable, strong labor market where real wages are going up right across the wage spectrum, especially for people at the lower end, you’ve got to have price stability,” he explained, unsure how to achieve it given the arc of this pendulum. “And until we restore that, we can’t, we can’t get back to that place where we, where we kind of were for the two years before the pandemic hit.”

Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Congressional investigators are being denied access to 148 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed with the Department of the Treasury by banks concerning financial dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and brother, Jim, according to incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

“Most Americans have never heard the term ‘Suspicious Activity Reports.’ These are actual reports that financial institutions file with the Treasury Department when they see suspicious activity,” Jordan told Epoch TV’s Joshua Phillip in an interview for the “Newsmakers” program.

“Typically, it’s money laundering type of activity, so most Americans don’t get these. Or if they do, there is a good reason for it. But there are 150 of them on Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, the President’s brother, and that to me is a big concern,” Jordan said.

Only two of the 150 have been made public and the Biden administration through the Department of the Treasury is refusing to make the other 148 SARs available to congressional investigators, Jordan explained.

“It used to be before the Biden administration, if the committee wanted to see that information, whether it was Democrats on the committee or Republicans on the committee, they could have access to it … until the Biden administration,” Jordan told Phillip.

“So the Biden administration hasn’t complied with any of the correspondence, any of the letters and requests that came from [incoming House Committee on Oversight and Reform Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.)]. They have changed the policy on SARs for the ability of committees to review that information,” Jordan continued.

“So we’ll see if we get access. Maybe we’re going to have to go to the banks to get that information, and not through the Treasury Department,” he said.

A Treasury Department spokesman did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for an explanation of the Biden administration’s 2021 decision to end a long-standing process whereby SARs and other reports provided under the Bank Secrecy Act whenever requested by a congressional committee with appropriate jurisdiction.

Following the administration’s decision, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) introduced, and the House subsequently approved, H.R. 7734, the “Timely Delivery of Bank Secrecy Act Reports Act.”  The Waters bill was approved by the House July 26, 2022, on a 349-to-70 vote, with majorities of both parties supporting the measure.

The Waters measure would require the Treasury Department to provide copies of SARs to requesting congressional officials within 30 days and requires financial institutions to turn over requested copies upon receipt of a congressional subpoena.

The Waters bill was introduced in the Senate and referred to the Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), but no action has been taken on the bill since being referred to the Ohio Democrat’s panel.

Biden administration officials have offered several cumbersome alternative processes that would only allow congressional aides to go to reading rooms at the Treasury Department to view SARs, but they would not be allowed to make copies of the documents.

The bill report on the Waters measure explained why House officials rejected the Biden administration’s suggested alternatives.

“Unfortunately, Treasury and [Financial Crimes Enforcement Network] FinCEN have recently severely restricted congressional access to Suspicious Activity Reports by requiring congressional staff to review all material in a reading room at Treasury, prohibiting the copying of materials for purposes of highlighting, ongoing reference, or margin notation, and restricting information collection to note taking.

“As an alternative, Treasury and FinCEN have offered to bring the material to the requesting committee and then take the material back to Treasury when the review is completed.

“The restrictions that they have imposed upon congressional access to SARs and related materials are unworkable given the complexity and amount of information contained in such materials, and severely impairs Congress’ responsibility to carry on its oversight work in a timely and effective fashion.”

Despite the overwhelming House vote for the Waters measure that would have effectively restored congressional access on a par with what it was prior to President Joe Biden taking office, the Treasury Department continues to withhold access to SARs, except as decided on a case-by-case basis.

Read more here…

Stagflationary crisis events are relatively rare in modern history, and the average mainstream economist will have very little input to give on why they happen and how they can be solved.  Their knowledge is limited on the issue and their experience is non-existent.  

It has been argued by alternative analysts for several years now that the majority of banking executives, investors and economists entering the field in the past decade have never worked within a financial environment without direct monetary intervention by central banks.  They can’t even comprehend a world where the Federal Reserve does not artificially support equities, bonds and other elements of the system.  They have no concept of consequences.

This dynamic is finally being acknowledged by those in the mainstream. Alison Harding-Jones, vice chair of corporate and investment and head of M&A in EMEA at Citigroup, recently noted that the majority of junior bankers had never worked in an investment world without the existence of cheap money. These people are about to experience a rude awakening beyond anything they can imagine.   

It was the long term existence of central bank support that conditioned many economists into assuming the easy money party would never end.  The Fed will step in, they say, because the Fed has always stepped in and nothing will ever change.  But things always change, and the notion that the Fed cares about the longevity of the markets is naive.  The past year alone has debunked that little theory, with rates continuing to climb.

A cycle of cope has formed with a predictable set of reactions – The Fed suggests hikes will continue, the mainstream freaks out.  The Fed then suggests that “one day” the hikes might stop, maybe sooner maybe later.  The mainstream rejoices and interprets the comments to mean that the Fed is about to pivot, markets rocket higher.  Then, the Fed does not pivot, and they freak out again.

No one is asking the question that really matters here:  Why is it so important what the Fed says about rate hikes?  Why is the entire system dependent on their whims?  This is not how it should be.  

The US economy is addicted to cheap money like that money is heroin, and many elements of the system just can’t let it go.  People thought that the central bankers, our resident drug dealers, would never stop providing the fix.  They thought that there was incentive for the Fed to continue dealing that delicious fiat.  But the easy money drug has diminishing returns and the addict is acclimated.  The negative health effects are starting to set in, the addict is beginning to die, and the dealer wants to distance himself from the corpse.

Stagflation has arrived and now there is no reason for the central bank to continue providing easy money because there is nothing to be gained.  

The circumstances surrounding stagflation are chaotic.  Certain sectors of the economy will go into steep decline while others will appear to remain resilient.  For example, US jobs numbers came in far hotter than expected this month (some might suggest a little too hot for reality), inspiring the Biden White House to claim a victory in the midst of fiscal defeat.  At the same time, the US is facing an unprecedented manufacturing slowdown, a housing market sales implosion, a GDP sinking back into contraction, a rising poverty rate, an explosion in homelessness, etc. 

It might be confusing – Why is there better than expected employment numbers and in some cases retail numbers while there is also a major contraction across the board in multiple other areas of the economy?  That’s what happens when a central bank pumps over $8 trillion into the veins of the system in only two years, on top of tens of trillions of dollars over the past decade.  That money is circulating rapidly and wearing down the gears of the machine, some parts break while others still function.  

These are the effects of stagflation, as well as the effects of a central bank which is now abandoning the inflation game and actively seeking to create a deflationary event.  Without the endless trillions in free money which kept the system on life support since 2008/2009, they will get what they want eventually, but it will take time.  

Meaning, the Fed is going to continue with rate hikes well into next year until there is a hard landing; there will be no “soft landing” and Jerome Powell knows this.  He openly warned about it back in the October Fed meeting of 2012, stating that the economy would not know how to function without stimulus measures because those measures had been active for so long.  That was 10 years ago; imagine how bad things are today.

Powell is all too aware of the effects of rate hikes into economic weakness and stagflationary crisis.  He knows what is about to happen, and Joe Biden’s economic advisers likely know as well.  

In the meantime, an important issue that the Fed and many mainstream economists don’t want to discuss is that prices continue to remain painful on most necessities no matter how high interest rates go.  Rent is high, food is high, energy prices fell due to Biden’s market manipulation but are still high, home prices are high, vehicle prices are high, everything is incessantly expensive for the average consumer.  This is not going to stop anytime soon.  

Once stagflation takes hold it hangs on like a bad rash.  When jobs numbers finally hit a wall (and they will, probably by the second quarter of next year), costs will still be suffocating the public’s savings.  If the goal is truly an engineered deflation event that reduces money velocity and drags down prices, we have to ask ourselves how long will that take to accomplish?  Two years?  Five years?  How high will rates have to go?  Maybe only 5%, maybe 10%, maybe more.  How much damage will be done to the middle class and the poor as this process unfolds?  

The Fed does not care.  Those hoping for an immediate pivot should understand that the rate hike beatings will continue until morale declines.  The quantitative tightening will stop when the contraction has fully pummeled the jobs market and the populace in general.  

Authored by Micaela Rocaforte via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

As finals week commences, students at the University of California–San Diego say they are feeling the impact of the largest academic worker strike in U.S. history, now in its third week.

After months of negotiating pay raises, 48,000 researchers and student employees across all 10 University of California (UC) campuses launched a strike Nov. 14, demanding pay raises due to cost-of-living increases.

This has left some classes without instructors and professors without teaching assistants to grade assignments ahead of end-of-semester exams.

Tarah Lachmandas, a third-year communications major at UC–San Diego, said that while faculty in her department supports the strike, they have adapted final exams to accommodate the absence of teaching assistants.

“Our assignments were not graded. They were just marked complete or incomplete,” Lachmandas told the Epoch Times. “And in another class, the professor removed essay questions from the final exam, so it’s just going to be all multiple choice.”

Tristan Fhaardo, a second-year chemical engineering major, said the structure of his classes were upset by the strike.

“Attendance in a lot of my lectures has gone down, since teaching assistants were the ones to [take] attendance,” Fhaardo said. “Assignments have been more lenient because [there’s no one to] grade them, and classes have felt a lot more jumbled and disorganized since the strike started.”

However, for Desi—a graduate student and neuroscience researcher on strike, who declined to provide his last name—that’s the goal.

“The whole point of the strike is to cause disruption,” Desi told The Epoch Times. “It takes a collective action to create change. … We’re not doing this because we don’t want to work … We’re doing this because we deserve to be able to pay our bills and rent.”

Other graduate students disagreed with the United Auto Workers’—the union representing the strikers—methods of negotiating higher wages.

Philip Zhu, a chemistry graduate student and teaching assistant who did not strike, told The Epoch Times he thought students still deserved to get the education they paid tuition for.

“Although the strike is intended to pressure the university, students are the direct victims,” Zhu said. “I believe if the bargaining team cares … there will be better strategies that don’t place all the power in ‘doing damage’ to force the other party to do what they demand.”

UC officials struck a tentative deal with postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers Nov. 29—though they say they will not return to work until the demands of the graduate students are met.

However, the union’s demands for graduate and student workers could prove to be a bit more complicated.

UC Provost Michael Brown said Nov. 14 that two of the group’s demands—tying compensation to housing costs and waiving nonresident tuition for out-of-state and international students—could cost the UC system up to several hundred million dollars per year and be unfair to resident students, since nonresident students would be given a larger compensation package for the same workload.

Authored by Michael Washburn via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

As protests continue to rage throughout China over the regime’s harsh COVID-19 policies, and the police respond with notable force, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators has sent a sharply worded letter to Beijing’s ambassador to Washington, Qin Gang, warning of “grave consequences for the U.S.-China relationship” if the communist regime carries out a crackdown reminiscent of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

One of the lead signers, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), said in a statement accompanying the letter’s publication on Dec. 1 that the world’s response to Beijing’s efforts to quell the protests has been “tepid at best.” Hence Sullivan and the other signers saw a need to speak out and warn Beijing about what would happen if it failed to respect the right of citizens to signal their opposition to the severe COVID policies that have deprived millions of Chinese of freedom of movement.

The letter emphasizes the nonviolent character of the protests going on in China, implying that any abusive and violent conduct on the part of the regime’s forces will be illegal and unethical.

“We are following the current peaceful protests in China over your government’s policies very carefully. We are also closely watching the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) reaction to them,” the letter states.

The letter goes on to remind Ambassador Gang about the notorious events of June 1989, which drew worldwide condemnation and became a synonym for excessive force on the part of an authoritarian regime.

“In 1989, the Chinese Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army undertook a violent crackdown on peacefully protesting Chinese students, killing hundreds, if not thousands,” the letter states, before issuing a stark warning.

“We caution the CCP in the strongest possible terms not to once again undertake a violent crackdown on peaceful Chinese protestors who simply want more freedom. If that happens, we believe there will be grave consequences for the U.S.-China relationship, causing extraordinary damage to it,” the letter concludes.

Read more here…

Authored by Jannis Falenstern via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A rally organized to out activism that encourages children to question their gender identity and sexual orientation has inspired fury.

Now, threats of a rage-filled counter-protest have rally organizers requesting law enforcement officers to attend their planned gathering on Dec. 3 at a beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Conflict bubbled up after three very different groups organized the Protect the Children rally to display solidarity against policies aimed at sexualizing children, alienating them from their parents, and helping them pursue gender-transition treatment. They plan to gather at Fort Lauderdale Beach on the corner of Las Olas Boulevard at 11 a.m.

Local chapters of Moms for Liberty, Fathers for Freedom, and Gays Against Groomers wanted to come together to peacefully speak against “radicalized sexual curriculum, gender ideology, child grooming, parental alienation, and ‘gender-affirming care,’” said Eulalia Jimenez, president of the Moms for Liberty Miami chapter.

But when Antifa members heard of the gathering, they urged their peers in Twitter posts to “confront this hatred” and “protest against hate.” They referred to Protect the Children rally organizers as “fascists” proliferating “stochastic terrorism,” and spread fliers that read, “We can’t allow this kind of bigotry to go unchecked.”

The term “stochastic terrorism” refers to public demonization through so-called “hate speech,” which some say can be used to incite violence against a person or group.

A flier for the Antifa response urges, “Assert your right to exist! Counter protest against far-right bigotry and stand with the LGBTQ+ community. Bring masks, signs, and rage. Stand against those who aim to erase your existence.”

Jimenez isn’t surprised. Antifa members often disrupt Moms for Liberty gatherings and shout down parents speaking at local school board meetings, she said.

The Protect the Children rally was planned at the beach because it’s a place where people congregate, a “good spot to spread awareness, empower others, and create unity,” Jimenez said.

She hopes the event will be about peace, unity, “empowering others and informing parents and citizens,” she said. “We feel children should have the right to be children.”

The rally isn’t meant to be against other groups.

“It’s not about ugliness and nastiness,” Jimenez said. “And unfortunately, the other side, that’s the way they roll.”

Hijacking LGBT

Antifa’s rhetoric harms the gay community, said Anthony Raimondi, a board member of Gays Against Groomers (GAG).

“As an organization, we want to protect the LGBT community in the sense that the community has been hijacked,” Raimondi told The Epoch Times.

Years ago, gay people erroneously were assumed to be pedophiles, he said.

“We have come so far” in dispelling that assumption, he said. But in the current culture, as many gay people and others oppose efforts to block the sexualization of children, “it’s almost like we’ve been set back,” Raimondi said.

On social media, GAG founder Jaimee Michell has described her group as “a coalition of gays against the sexualization, indoctrination, and medicalization of children.”

Gays Against Groomers posted on its Twitter feed that the gay community has “fought for decades to dismantle binary gender stereotypes, just for radicals to build them up again, and butcher and sterilize children who don’t abide by them.”

Michell also has posted on Twitter, “There is no such thing as a trans kid.”

Jimenez understands the frustration. She’s not just the local leader of the conservative group Moms for Liberty. She’s also the mother of a gay daughter. So she values groups like Gays Against Groomers, she says, because they’ve “stood up and said, ‘No! You’re not going to use us.’”

Jimenez respects that they assert, “We choose [whom] to love, but we don’t push anything on the kids.”

She also has compassion for those participating in Antifa activities. Many, she said, are kids who are just being used.

“Many of them don’t even understand what is really going on,” Jimenez said. “They’re just so desperate for love and attention, and they’re going about it the wrong way.

“Others,” she continued, “are just plain—in my opinion—evil and they do not care who they hurt and what they have to do to get what they want.”

Antifa has the right to assemble, says Florida Fathers for Freedom organizer Elon Gerberg. He’s not worried about the group’s so-called “counter-protest,” calling it nothing more than a “distraction.”

The Protect the Children rally is “about coming together to bring attention to this attack on our children,” Gerberg told The Epoch Times. “In my opinion, they are our most precious commodities and our future leaders. If we can’t stand up for them, who can you stand up for?”

In signing the Parental Rights in Education bill in March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, “put his head on the chopping block for parents and the children of the state,” Gerberg said.

Before it was signed into law, the five-page legislation was debated around the country and was reviled by its opponents, who misleadingly referred to the measure as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill.”

Despite what opponents said, the bill doesn’t prohibit teachers or students from discussing a child’s questions about sexual orientation or gender identity, and it doesn’t keep them from talking about LGBT loved ones in class.

Read more here…

Rail works are furious after President Joe Biden on Friday signed bipartisan legislation into law to avert an industry strike that could have had grave economic fallout.

One rail worker, Justiun Schaaf, told AP that he had to choose between getting dental work or attending his son’s 7th birthday party.

“Ultimately I decided to take the day off for my kid’s birthday party,” he said, adding “Then when I am finally able to get into the dentist four, five, six months later, the tooth is too bad to repair at that point, so I have to get the tooth pulled out”

According to Schaff, if he had the option of taking a sick day, he “would have never been in that situation.”

In comments after he signed the legislation, Biden acknowledged that more work needs to be done, Fox News reports.

“Look, I know this bill doesn’t have paid sick leave, that these rail workers and, frankly, every worker in America deserves. But that fight isn’t over,” he said.

Roadway mechanic Reece Murtagh was more direct, telling CNN Friday that unionized workers’ collective bargaining rights have been “trampled on.”

“Their voice has not been heard, they voted against the contract,” Murtagh said. “We have a pro-labor president who loves to, you know, pat himself on the back for that, and when the going got tough, he turned his back on the people he’s supposed to be looking out for.” -Fox news

The deal struck by Congress, which is now law, would raise workers’ pay by 24% over five-years, between 2020 and 2024, which includes an immediate payout on average of $11,000 each once ratified. It was approved by eight of the 12 transportation unions involved in the negotiations – with the four dissenting unions arguing that it was unfair because it included insufficient paid-sick leave, of which they wanted seven. Congress nixed that demand from the bill despite efforts by mostly progressive lawmakers to amend the legislation.

“What was negotiated was so much better than anything they ever had,” Biden said during a news briefing alongside French President Emmanuel Macron.

The rail unions said they weren’t able to get more concessions out of the railroads because the big companies knew Congress would intervene and railroads refused to add paid sick days to the deal because they didn’t want to pay much more than a special board of arbitrators appointed by Biden recommended this summer. 

In addition, the railroads said that unions have agreed over the years to forego paid sick leave in favor of higher wages and strong short-term disability benefits. -Fox News

“ou hear when you hire out on the railroad you’re going to miss some things. But you’re not supposed to miss everything,” said retired engineer Jeff Kurtz, an active participant in the Railroad Workers United Coalition. “You shouldn’t miss your kids growing up. You shouldn’t miss the seminal moments in your family’s life.”

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

The top Republican on the House Oversight Committee said that Twitter staff involved in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential elections will face Congress and testify about their actions.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the GOP ranking member on the Committee, made the remarks in a Friday appearance on Fox News after Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk dropped part one of the so-called “Twitter Files,” an expose of the inner workings of Twitter’s censorship machine.

“Every employee at Twitter who was involved in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story will have an opportunity to come before Congress and explain their actions to the American people,” Comer told program host Sean Hannity.

Musk and independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday unveiled a series of internal Twitter communications that give insight into steps taken by staff at the social media platform around suppressing the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.

Republicans have long accused Twitter—and some media outlets—of suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, which included reporting that bolstered claims that the president lied when he said he had no involvement in his son’s overseas business dealings.

‘Marking This as Unsafe’

In order to suppress the Hunter Biden report, Twitter executives marked it as “unsafe,” limiting its spread and even blocking it from being directly shared via the platform’s direct message function, Taibbi said in comments on the disclosures. He noted that such extreme restrictions were reserved for content such as child pornography.

Messages between executives in Twitter’s communications and policy departments, shared by Taibbi in screenshots, show some confusion about the actions taken, with a communications executive writing: “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe.”

The disclosures show that both Democrats and Republicans had access to Twitter’s censorship system and each side lodged various requests and complaints with the social media platform’s staff. But because of Twitter employees’ predominantly left-leaning political convictions, Democrats had more avenues to press their case, Taibbi said.

The Epoch Times has been unable to independently verify the content of the disclosures shared by Musk and detailed by Taibbi.

‘Just the Beginning’

Comer, in his interview on Fox News, said that the Twitter Files expose shows that the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop is “being vindicated.”

Read more here…

Apple has accelerated plans to shift some of its production outside of China, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing insiders.

The company has been reportedly telling suppliers to ‘actively’ plan on assembling Apple products elsewhere in Asia – primarily India and Vietnam, as the company looks to reduce dependence on Taiwanese assemblers spearheaded by Foxconn.

The company’s goal is to ship 40-45% of iPhones from India, vs the current single-digit percentage, according to TF International Securities analyst, Ming-chi Kuo. Vietnam is also expected to shoulder more of the manufacturing of other Apple products, such as AirPods, smartwatches and laptops.

The decision was sparked by turmoil at “iPhone City” inside Zhengzhou (a ‘city-within-a-city’), where as many as 300,000 workers assemble iPhones and other Apple products as a Foxconn-run factory, which produces roughly 85% of the iPhone Pro lineup, according to Counterpoint Research.

In November, violent protests hit the Zhengzhou factory – as workers upset over wages and Covid-19 restrictions began rioting and throwing things at the police. All of this poses a risk to Apple, which has relied on the factory as a stable manufacturing center.

“Apple no longer feels comfortable having so much of its business tied up in one place,” according to the report.

So no, Apple isn’t moving production out of concerns over human rights abuses, censorship, or other types of oppression.

“In the past, people didn’t pay attention to concentration risks,” said former US-based Foxconn executive, Alan Yeung. “Free trade was the norm and things were very predictable. Now we’ve entered a new world.”

One response, say the people involved in Apple’s supply chain, is to draw from a bigger pool of assemblers—even if those companies are themselves based in China. Two Chinese companies that are in line to get more Apple business, they say, are Luxshare Precision Industry Co. and Wingtech Technology Co. 

On calls with investors earlier this year, Luxshare executives said some consumer-electronics clients, which they didn’t name, were worried about Chinese supply-chain snafus caused by Covid-19 prevention measures, power shortages and other issues. They said these clients wanted Luxshare to help them do more work outside China. -WSJ

The concerns over production revolve around new product introduction (NPI), which requires teams to work with contractors to translate blueprints and prototypes into a detailed manufacturing plan. According to the report, Apple has put its manufacturing partners on notice to start trying to do more of this outside of China.

That said, unless places like Vietnam and India can excel at NPI as well, they will ‘remain stuck playing second fiddle’ according to supply chain specialists.

For now, consumers doing Christmas shopping are stuck with some of the longest wait times for high-end iPhones in the product’s 15-year history, stretching until after Christmas. Apple issued a rare midquarter warning in November that shipments of the Pro models would be hurt by Covid-19 restrictions at the Zhengzhou facility. -WSJ

The shift marks a massive change in the relationship between Apple and China – which for decades have been engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship.

According to Kup, the supply-chain analyst, iPhone shipments in the fourth quarter of this year were likely to reach between 70 and 75 million units – around 10 million fewer than market projections before the Zhengzhou riots.

“Apple is going to have to find multiple places to replace iPhone City,” said Dan Panzica, a former Foxconn executive who now advises companies on supply-chain issues. “They’re going to have to spread it around and make more villages instead of big cities.”