Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced on Friday that the most powerful rocket ever built, Starship, currently under review by the US Fish & Wildlife Service, could be ready for the second launch as soon as mid-November. 

“The second flight test of a fully integrated Starship could launch as soon as mid-November, pending regulatory approval,” SpaceX wrote in a statement on its website. 

The second flight test of a fully integrated Starship could launch as soon as mid-November, pending regulatory approval → https://t.co/pxgvgUeIFF pic.twitter.com/P40vOCaFaZ

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 3, 2023

This comes several days after the Federal Aviation Administration concluded a safety review focused on potential impacts on public health and property. The FAA’s report is part of a more comprehensive assessment required before the next launch. Currently, the Fish & Wildlife Service is still conducting an Endangered Species Act of 1973 review of the launch and has upwards of 135 days to issue an opinion. 

“The consultation is still underway, so we don’t have any timeline updates,” Aubry Buzek, public affairs for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Texas, told Bloomberg via email. 

There have been mounting concerns the US government under the Biden administration has weaponized federal agencies against the billionaire for his ‘free speech’ social media platform X. 

Musk recently described the apparent ‘beef’ that the Biden administration has with him. In September, he told All-In Podcast host entrepreneur David Sacks:

“…there does seem to be some significant increase in the weaponization of government and really sort of misuse of prosecutorial discretion in many areas… I think this is really a dangerous thing for there to be partisan politics with government agencies.”

Musk continued:

 “I don’t think the whole administration has it out for me,” he added.

 “But I think there’s probably aspects of the administration… or aspects of interests aligned with President Biden who probably do not wish good things for me.”

On Sept. 5, Musk said Starship was ready for launch. 

“Starship is ready to launch, awaiting FAA license approval,” Musk wrote on X, sharing a video of world’s largest rocket at the SpaceX Starbase launch facility in south Texas. 

Musk was somewhat optimistic in a recent interview where he said, “We think it will work, but we aren’t sure if it will work.” 

Authored by Matthew Boose via American Greatness,

The Atlantic, one of the most prestigious and reliably liberal publications in America, has a new article semi-frankly acknowledging the downsides of the last half century of unrestricted immigration.

Author David Leonhardt, a regular columnist for the New York Times, confronts – or rather, politely circumambulates – the “unintended” consequences of the landmark 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which fundamentally remade America’s immigration process by opening the floodgates to the Third World.

Leonhardt focuses chiefly on the economic impact of mass immigration on working class wages and rising inequality between the poor and the middle class. There is nothing groundbreaking here, as any disciple of Patrick Buchanan (or anyone with a working understanding of supply and demand) could tell you. But it is always a little surprising to see common sense in the pages of a magazine like The Atlantic, even if it comes in the usual milquetoast packaging. Leonhardt even takes apart the quietly elitist “jobs Americans won’t do” talking point that liberals love: “Immigrants typically work in jobs that native-born Americans do not want at the wages that employers are offering. One reason that employers can offer such wages….is the availability of so many immigrant workers.”

But one can only expect a respectable liberal writer to take things so far. Leonhardt tempers “the hard truth about immigration” with the usual sentimental mush about its intangible benefits. To quote Mary Poppins, a “spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”

According to Leonhardt, the 1965 Act was flawed but nevertheless a “monumental achievement.” For who? For millions of newcomers, it undoubtedly changed life for the better.

What about the American people? For them, it was a swindle of historic proportions.

The 1965 immigration revolution was sold to the American people as a modest shift, as Leonhardt points out. But he omits a striking quote from famous liberal Ted Kennedy, who pledged the bill “will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.”

In the end, the reform was a strike at the heart of democracy. The people were misled on the most political of questions – who gets to be part of our community? America entered the late 20th century as a prospering, majority-white country. In the span of a few generations, whites would become an untouchable minority. They now face the prospect of spending the remainder of their natural lives under hostile, one-party rule. The majority party, the Democrats, grows stronger, and more hostile to the nation’s historic majority, with each wave of foreigners. Under President Biden, this process of demographic replacement and marginalization has accelerated like never before.

It was Kennedy’s brother John Kennedy who stamped the nation’s conscience with pablum about America being a “nation of immigrants.” President Johnson made that sappy vision into a reality. If the America of 1965 could see the effects that mass immigration would have in the ensuing decades, it is doubtful Johnson’s reform would have passed at all. At the time, a bare majority favored scrapping country quotas, and only 7 percent wanted immigration to increase, a preference that remains to this day (not that it appears to have influenced policymakers).

Many Americans who grew up during the Kennedy years look back on the post-war boom as an idyllic dream. Their yearnings can’t be written off as mere nostalgia bias. Compared to the present, the early ‘60s must have been like paradise: the single breadwinner was the standard, the country had a real sense of identity, and people trusted their neighbors enough to leave doors unlocked. That’s all gone now. As a result of the monumental demographic change unleashed over the past half century, America is more divided than it has ever been since its greatest crisis in 1865. The country is Balkanizing, and politics have become radical and violent.

Leonhardt is more concerned with how diversity can be exploited by the right than its actual disintegrating effects on society. To liberals, immigration can only be conceived as a problem (if ever) when framed in terms of class. But immigration is not only an economic question, as current events have shown. With the war in Israel, reality has come crashing into the daydream of multiracial utopia. America’s rapidly browning youth is sympathetic to Hamas. It is likely that some Atlantic readers are having doubts about immigration for the first time in their lives. The issue can be avoided for a while longer, but not forever.

Former Trump Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows is being sued by his book publisher, after his testimony before Congress contradicted claims made in his 2021 book, “The Chief’s Chief” – which he attested were true at the time he wrote them.

“Meadows, the former White House Chief of Staff under President Donald J. Trump, promised and represented that ‘all statements contained in the Work are true and based on reasonable research for accuracy’ and that he ‘has not made any misrepresentations to the Publisher about the Work,’” alleged All Seasons Press in their suit against Meadows.

In his book, Meadows insisted that President Trump was the true winner of the 2020 Presidential Election – which he said was “stolen” and “rigged” with assistance from “allies in the liberal media” who ignored “actual evidence of fraud,” according to the lawsuit.

Meadows also says in the opening sentence to one chapter: “I KNEW HE DIDN’T LOSE.”

Yet, Meadows testified to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s grand jury that Trump was being “dishonest” with voters when he claimed victory on election night. According to ABC News, Meadows admitted that Trump lost the election when questioned by prosecutors.

“Meadows’ reported statements to the Special Prosecutor and/or his staff and his reported grand jury testimony squarely contradict the statements in his Book, one central theme of which is that President Trump was the true winner of the 2020 Presidential Election and that election was ‘stolen’ and ‘rigged’ with the help from ‘allies in the liberal media,’ who ignored ‘actual evidence of fraud,’” alleges All Seasons Press.

The publisher is seeking a $350,000 clawback of Meadows’ advance, $600,000 in out-of-pocket damages, and at least $1 million for reputational damage suffered by the company (plus another $1 million for loss of expected profits) on sales of the book, which they claim have plummeted given Meadows’ involvement in several Jan. 6 investigations.

The suit reveals a long and tense relationship between Meadows and his publisher, which has published a suite of books from conservative figures.

In December 2021, All Seasons Press sent a letter to Meadows saying it would withhold the final of three $116,666 advance payments over concerns his book may contain false information. The suit also notes it planned to continue with publication “pending an investigation.”

A few days later the company got a letter from attorney Blake Meadows, whom the suit says is Meadows’s son, demanding the final installment. –The Hill

“Mr. Meadows is aware of the specious allegations that were published regarding a portion of the book which was taken out of context, and which have already been addressed by both Mr. Meadows and former President Trump in multiple press releases,” wrote Meadows’ son, Blake, to the company (according to the complaint).

According to the publisher, they decided to move forward with the book “after conducting the appropriate due diligence and based upon repeated assurances from Meadows that facts in the Book were true,” and that “rumors circulated in the media” that Meadows might have flipped on Trump harmed their bottom line.

“As a result, public interest in the Book, the truth of which was increasingly in doubt, precipitously declined, and ASP sold only approximately 60,000 of the 200,000 first printing of the Book,” the suit states.

Authored by Leighton Woodhouse and Alex Gutentag via Public Substack,

This week California Governor Gavin Newsom blatantly lied about his record on Covid-19.

“I’m not consumed by what we did wrong,” Newsom said to Fox Los Angeles’ Elex Michaelson.

“I’m consumed a little bit more by what we did right… There’s no large state that outperformed California, one of the top performing states, in terms of health, wealth, and education.”

Newsom went on to say that California’s per capita Covid mortality was “substantially lower than places like Texas and Florida,” that the state’s economy fared better than that of other states, and that we saw less learning loss than Florida. All these statements are misleading at best. Newsom’s claims about California’s economy have already been debunked, and in age-adjusted Covid mortality, as many have pointed out, California and Florida fared about the same. What’s more, cumulative age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths have been higher in California than Florida since early 2020. 

As for why schools were closed for so long, Newsom said it was because he gave school districts “local control.” Evidently, Newsom wants to claim both that he is not responsible for his own school policies, and that these policies were effective. Yet both of these claims are completely untrue, and Newsom’s failure on schools is a scandal of colossal proportions. 

In 2020, Newsom’s Department of Health created color coded tiers that effectively prevented California schools from reopening. In 2021, statewide guidelines continued to shape restrictions. These guidelines were based on pseudoscience like a six foot rule that created a major barrier to reopening and was not proven to prevent Covid transmission. 

While allowing private and charter schools to open and sending his own kids to in-person private school, Newsom never challenged the California teacher’s union to push for full public reopening. Only in March 2021, when the state was facing a lawsuit, and after basically every other state had reopened, did Newsom call for public schools to resume limited in-person classes. 

To this day, Newsom insists that school closures and the state’s catastrophic learning loss were no big deal. Florida, he told Michaelson, “had more learning loss in every single category… These are facts.” But are they really?

Newsom appears to be relying on a single 2022 test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), to make this assertion, despite a mountain of evidence that contradicts it. Only a small sample of students in the country take the NAEP. In contrast, all students in grades 3 through 8 and 11 take California’s official state test, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). 

While the 2022 NAEP, which only about 4,000 kids in the state took, made it appear that California’s learning loss was not so bad, the dismally low SBAC scores from 2022 showed that school closures had likely wiped out years of educational progress. This disparity strongly suggests there may have been a significant sampling bias in the NAEP, which is probable given that California’s chronic absence rate tripled statewide in the 2021-2022 school year. 

Although the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) touted its supposed success on the NAEP, the district’s test results were essentially manipulated. In 2019, high-performing charter schools did not participate in LAUSD’s test, but in 2022 they did. Additionally, demographic changes between 2019 and 2022 may have been a factor, since the district’s enrollment fell by an alarming 10%. 

Newsom and other California officials are cherry-picking the data and intentionally neglecting to analyze and address the complete picture of student learning loss. To avoid political repercussions, they are deliberately ignoring the majority of testing results as well as the many studies which show that remote instruction had a severe impact on learning. 

Andrew Dean Ho, psychometrician and professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, reviewed California’s test results as an expert witness in an ongoing lawsuit against the state.

Wrote Ho in his testimony, “In my review of transcripts from depositions of state officials, I find numerous responses that indicate to me a lack of awareness of or interest in data that could enable accurate estimates of academic learning loss.”

The state has abandoned its duty to assess all relevant data and may be concealing it.

“Data currently exist in state repositories to answer questions about the magnitude of academic learning loss for jurisdictions and subgroups in the state of California, untapped,” wrote Ho. 

Ho’s revealing testimony is corroborated by the fact that the Department of Education threatened to muzzle and retaliate against California researchers who planned to testify against the state. 

As Newsom increasingly seems to be pursuing presidential ambitions, his Covid mistakes should come under greater scrutiny, especially as he remains intent on never admitting to them.

In Newsom’s view, the only reason he’s had any criticism at all is because hindsight is 20/20.

“We should acknowledge at the time we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” he told Michaelson.

“And we’re experts, we’re geniuses in hindsight.”

But California’s education failure is not just about 2020 and 2021 – it’s about the state’s refusal to examine the learning loss data to this day, and Newsom’s clear choice to prioritize his own political ambitions over his accountability to the children and families of his state. 

Subscribers can read the full substack here…

Shocking footage is widely circulating showing what appears to be massive airstrikes on Al Azhar University in Gaza, which was first opened in 1991, and is among a handful of Palestinian campuses of high learning.

Videos circulating show multiple large airstrikes utterly demolishing multiple university buildings, and it’s unclear if the buildings were occupied at the time or if there are casualties. Some pro-Israel pundits have claimed that the presence of large secondary explosions suggests Hamas was hiding large ammunition stores there, hence the follow-up detonations. Watch:

lsraeli airstrikes destroy al-Azhar University in Gaza Strip. pic.twitter.com/Q6Ie1HIkK4

— TIMES OF GAZA (@Timesofgaza) November 4, 2023

But it’s also very evident that Israel’s warplanes are targeting Gaza’s large buildings and infrastructure as part of scorched earth tactics. 

On Friday, Israel admitted to targeting ambulances near the Strip’s largest hospital, claiming that the ambulances were actually used by Hamas. The UN and other international bodies have condemned the attack as the death toll mounts and grisly images were widely shared online of bodies piled up in the aftermant.

Politico describes of the attack:

The Israeli army bombed a convoy of ambulances near the largest hospital in Gaza on Friday, an attack that “horrified” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The facility — Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City — is overcrowded with patients and serves as a refuge for some 20,000 displaced people, according to local health authorities.

The attack resulted in 15 deaths and at least 60 wounded civilians, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). In a statement, the PRCS said the convoy of five ambulances tried to transport casualties toward the Rafah border crossing, but was returning to the hospital because the road was blocked with rubble when it was targeted by two missiles.

Meanwhile, a new report in Axios utilizing satellite imagery and data says in total 25% of all buildings in northern Gaza have been severely damaged or destroyed after nearly a month of airstrikes and fighting. 

🇮🇱-🇵🇸
Satellite analysis shows widespread destruction in #Gaza.
Source-https://t.co/TXGOeSnMIW#Israel #Gaza_Now #GazaGenocide #HamasISIS #HamasTerrorrists #HamasisISIS #Hamas #Palestine #Lebanon #Nasrallah pic.twitter.com/TnfD2WIK7T

— ConflictLive 🌐 (@conflict_live) November 4, 2023

At this point more than 9,200 Palestinians have been killed, with an estimated half of these being women and children. 

Israel has come under condemnation from several countries, especially of Arab states, for appearing to target fleeing civilian convoys even after urging people to flee to southern Gaza. Axios writes, “This analysis also confirms that Israel continues to strike southern Gaza, including areas along the main evacuation routes, even after urging civilians from the north to relocate there.”

Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness,

Anew report provides fresh evidence that infamous January 6 provocateur Ray Epps may have been an FBI plant.

In the first of a two-part series, “Truth in Media” host Lara Logan spoke with Anthime Gionet, also known as “Baked Alaska,” a right-wing influencer formerly associated with the “alt right.” Video footage from January 5, 2021 and earlier indicate that Epps appeared to be particularly interested in Gionet, who was later sentenced to two months in prison for his participation in the riot at the US Capitol.

Gionet (Baked Alaska) was one of several people who filmed Epps on the evening of January 5, 2021 outside BLM Plaza as he told Trump supporters “we need to go into the Capitol!”  At first, Gionet said he was amused by Epps’ exhortation to breach the Capitol, and yelled ‘let’s go!’ in response, but after he saw him repeat the line several times to different groups that night, he became convinced the “boomer” was an FBI plant and was up to no good.

Gionet is the one who started the “Fed! Fed! Fed!” chant that went viral on social media.

“I’m someone who creates funny content so I just like to agree with everyone and if someone’s saying something crazy, a lot of times, I’ll just agree—say yeah, yeah,” Gionet said, explaining that he does it to encourage a subject  to keep talking.

But the activist said he felt “weirded out” by Epps and quickly moved on to another group.

“I’m like, I’m getting away from this creep, he’s weirding me out,” Gionet said.

“I’m getting weird vibes—something’s off.”

Gionet told Logan that everyone else who heard Epps talking about going into the Capitol were also taken aback.

“I go to another group way far away from him, he follows me, and that’s when he begins instructing the crowd,” Gionet said. That’s when Epps was caught on tape again saying “we need to go into the Capitol.”

“Right when he said that, something clicked in my head,” Gionet said.

“It was like, whoa! This is scripted because he said the same exact line word for word three times and that’s not natural.”

Gionet said that it seemed very odd that he kept going around to all the different little groups and instructing them on what to do on January 6.

“Maybe the first time, he’s being silly or saying something crazy, but when he said it the third time word for word, I knew there’s a strong possibility this guy’s a fed. I started that chant, and guess what? The whole crowd joined in with me—within seconds!”

Gionet told Logan that that viral moment felt spiritual to him at the time.

“That was the spirit moving. That was God saying ‘somethings up here. Watch out, there’s something going on.’ And that’s what I felt in my heart as a believer, truly,” he said.

Shortly before midnight, Epps took a conciliatory tone with Gionet, telling him they he also despises Black Lives Matter and antifa.

“I stood ’em down myself with three Army vets in Queen Creek, Arizona,” Epps said.

“That’s where I live!” Gionet exclaimed. “Are you my neighbor?!”

After more friendly banter, Epps said ”we’re not here to fight man. He then leaned in and whispered “we’re here to storm the Capitol,” and added: “I’m not kidding.”

Why was Ray Epps treated as victim by the same people who condemned almost everyone around him as a threat?

We try to answer some lingering questions about the one “election-denying-Donald Trump-supporter” the media and the government didn’t seem to hate. pic.twitter.com/1u5dXtSGLv

— Truth In Media (@Truth_InMedia) November 3, 2023

Logan noted that Epps’ words echoed the official narrative the next day—that Trump supporters “stormed the Capitol” before “it was broadcast across the nation.”

Gionet, aka Baked Alaska, said that because he had been banned from every social media platform, it was virtually impossible for him to tell his story, and so for the first year after J6, nobody heard a word about Epps.

“I thought it was a big story but I was banned off Twitter, I was banned off YouTube, I was banned off all social media so I couldn’t get the story out,” he explained.

He acknowledged that he had no proof that Epps was a “fed,” but remains convinced that he was.

Former Washington DC FBI Field Office chief Steven D’Antuono has acknowledged in sworn testimony that the Bureau had so many informants on the ground on January 6 that they lost track and had to order an audit to account for all of them.

Federal prosecutors  finally filed a criminal charge against  Epps in September.

The former Marine and Oath Keepers member was charged with a single misdemeanor count of disruptive or disorderly conduct in a restricted area in U.S. District Court in Washington in September, despite his lead role in orchestrating chaos on that day. The charge carries a maximum punishment of a year in prison.

In part two of Truth in Media’s report on Ray Epps, Logan interviewed a friend of Epps. The woman said that “something happened after he left the Oath Keepers until January 6. What, I don’t know but those are two different people.”

Part two, which will air next week,  also features a video clip of Epps photographing Gionet without his knowledge during a Trump rally in Phoenix.

With the world’s attention squarely fixed on the Israel-Gaza war — while baseless hope for a Ukrainian expulsion of the Russian army has evaporated — US and European officials have started quietly conferring with Ukraine on potential concessions that could bring the war to an end, NBC News was first to report Friday evening.  

These discussions aren’t about a new counteroffensive — they’re about what concessions Ukraine could live with pursuant to a peace agreement. Some of the conversations, which officials describe as delicate, happened during an October meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, an affiliation of more than 50 governments siding with Ukraine.   

In eyebrow-raising comments to the The Economist this week, Ukraine’s top commander admitted there will be no breakthrough and the battlefield situation is in a stalemate. The New York Times characterized his remarks as “the first time a top Ukrainian commander said the fighting had reached an impasse.”

In September, the Times itself splashed cold water on anyone who still believed Ukraine had any hope of pushing the Russian army out of eastern and southeastern Ukraine, much less Crimea. Its detailed analysis found that, in the wake of a Ukrainian counteroffensive, “Russia now controls nearly 200 square miles more territory in Ukraine compared with the start of the year.”  

Russia’s territorial gains are close to matching the goals President Vladimir Putin outlined at the start of what he calls a “special military operation.” He said Russia sought to secure Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (provinces), which he recognized as republics shortly before the invasion. Russian forces now control nearly all of those areas, which are together called the Donbas.

Russia also controls most of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts, giving Russia a land bridge to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014 after a Western-aided overthrow of a democratically elected president and the installation of an anti-Russia government in Kiev. Crimea and the eastern provinces of Ukraine have heavily ethnic-Russian populations. 

The front lines have moved little in recent months. In anticipation of Ukraine’s highly-hyped 2023 counteroffensive, Russia was content to install formidable defensive fortifications and allow the Ukrainian army to degrade itself and achieve nothing. 

In its match-up with a far larger country, Ukraine’s ability to refresh its military ranks is vanishing fast. “Manpower is at the top of the administration’s concerns right now,” an official told NBC. The West can keep sending them weapons, “but if they don’t have competent forces to use them it doesn’t do a lot of good.” Even the most optimistic western warmongers must acknowledge the coming winter guarantees Ukraine won’t accomplish anything for months. 

In the wake of Ukraine’s costly and futile counteroffensive, Washington’s proxy war with Russia is facing strong headwinds at home: 

• The war between Hamas and Israel has diverted public attention and sapped the war state’s ability to propagandize voters. Indeed, Biden’s Oval Office address appealing for aid for Ukraine and Israel was originally planned to focus solely on Ukraine, NBC reports. 
• The US public’s pro-Ukraine fervor has cooled: A new Gallup poll found 41% say the US is doing too much for Ukraine — a big leap from the 29% who said that in June. Many Americans think that money should be used to improve conditions at home. 
• A growing number of congressional Republicans have put away their rubber stamp for Ukraine aid, and have thus far thwarted Biden’s request for $61 billion in additional funding for the war. Biden’s ploy of a joint funding request that combines controversial Ukraine aid with Israel aid is in grave jeopardy, as House Republicans demand separate votes. 

Washington’s blank-check support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza is further straining an already Ukraine-sapped American arsenal. Tens of thousands of artillery shells that had been earmarked for Ukraine are being redirected to the IDF. Even before Hamas attacked Israel, an increasingly severe shortage of conventional shells for the artillery-heavy war in Ukraine led Biden to give Zelensky toxic, depleted uranium shells, stirring an international outcry.    

As for what it would take for Zelensky to surrender the international spotlight and agree to peace, we’re guessing a big deposit to a Swiss bank account would do just fine. However, officials are pondering some type of Western security guarantee that stops short of NATO membership. The specter of Ukraine become a NATO member played heavily in Moscow’s motivation for invading. The war has been a crisp illustration of Richard Sakwa’s brilliant assertion that “NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”

Just weeks after Russia’s 2022 invasion, Russia and Ukraine had reportedly tentatively agreed to a peace deal in which Russia would withdraw to an extent that it would still control portions of the Donbas, in exchange for Ukraine forswearing its NATO ambitions while having security deals with several states. Via a visit from then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the Western war machine, eager for a proxy war, seems to have pressured Zelensky to break off the talks. Months of misery ensued, with only the military-industrial complex and Ukraine’s aid-scraping bureaucrats better off for it. 

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

We’re enduring a stagflationary crisis – there’s no way around it.

It doesn’t matter how much oil Joe Biden dumps on the market from the Strategic Reserves.

It doesn’t matter how many jobs he is able to temporarily buy with $8 trillion-plus deficit spending.

It doesn’t matter how many times the mainstream media claims we are “in a recovery” or claim to see the “green shoots” of a “soft landing.”

In reality, most Americans are struggling to afford necessities – increasingly, they’re simply unable to participate in essential markets. The longer this goes on, the deeper the hole and the harder it will be for people to climb out.

This is how economic disasters work

For most people, it feels like they wake up one morning at the bottom of a pit, barely able to see the sun, wondering what happened. Everything was going just fine yesterday – how’d we end up here?

For those who pay attention, we can watch the pit get deeper, a shovelful at a time…
Granted, we have seen worse conditions in the U.S. in the past. Both the Great Depression and the stagflation crisis of the 1970s were truly severe.

The people who think conditions are bad now haven’t seen anything yet (interest rates eventually climbed to 20% in the early 1980s). That said, there is a growing potential for today’s crisis to become the biggest financial crisis in our nation’s history – given a little more time, and just a little more digging.

Part of this ongoing problem is the heavy inflation in housing prices, and make no mistake, this is one of the biggest threats facing middle-class America right now.

Let’s describe the problem, then solve it.

The current state of the housing market

Rental prices on the average American home have climbed to $2,047 per month. Depending on where you live, that might sound outrageous or it might sound like a bargain. Either way, compared to the average in 2019 was $1,465.

That’s a 30% increase in rental prices in the span of four years. Know anyone whose take-home pay has risen 30% in those four years?

For apartments, which are generally the lower-end rental option, the average cost today is $1,372 per month, compared to $1,078 per month back in 2019. That’s a 27% monthly price hike on the cheapest form of housing. Know anyone whose take-home pay has risen 27% in the last four years?

We know that no more than 30% of a family’s income should be spent on housing. If it costs more than 30% to keep a roof over your head, you’re considered “overburdened” by housing costs. Spending too much on shelter forces us to make tough choices, economizing where we can, cutting back on other categories of discretionary spending…

Well, the rent-to-income ratio in the U.S. is now 40% – meaning, on average, all households are overburdened.

What’s going on?

The price of the average home has soared. From $313,000 in 2019 to $431,000 today – an astonishing 38% increase. That puts a home far beyond the income of the majority of American households, pricing out more than 67% of the population.

It’s not just a price problem – there’s also declining availability across the nation.

Rentals in many areas (outside of crime ridden metro neighborhoods) are awash in applications, so much so that a new scam has developed among some property owners requiring up-front, non-refundable fees just to apply. These “screening fees” can climb into the hundreds of dollars for each applicant, and that’s the price to even be considered. You’re unlikely to get the rental, even if you cough up the fee – but you definitely won’t get the rental if you don’t.

Rentals are available, but it’s a seller’s market and new housing simply can’t keep up.

There are claims that this trend will soon reverse and that builders are set to flood the nation with affordable new properties, but I seriously doubt it given current conditions. When it costs about the same to build a luxury multi-million-dollar home or a low-rise multi-tenant building, and the profit on the former is several times the latter, what sane builder would opt for “affordable housing” construction?

Skyrocketing mortgage rates are pusing more and more middle-class families into the rental market – people who would’ve been homeowners a few years ago are now becoming renters. Which makes the supply and affordability problems worse.

So what can be done about this?

I’ll rephrase the question: What solutions can be pursued that will have fast results, rather than taking a decade or more with minimal effects? The truth is, the solutions are simple, but they require actions that some people would consider contrary to their political and/or business aims.

Certain interests would do everything in their power to prevent such solutions from being achieved and that’s the ultimate obstacle. It’s not only that inflation is rampant and prices are high and supply is low, the greatest obstacles are the political groups and corporate cabals that will try to stop basic reforms from happening to alleviate the crisis.

Let’s ignore those concerns for a moment, and focus on solving the problem.

A politically-incorrect guide to ending the housing crisis

First off, these solutions would have to be enforced at the state level, because there is no way under the current federal regime that such measures would ever become national law.

Step one is the most important and would probably get the most opposition…

Step 1: Deport all non-citizens

America is taking on a population explosion that it cannot compensate for while acting as a steam valve for foreign governments to pawn off their problems. You want to know why housing prices are exploding? Because foreigners are sapping the supply. And there’s an obvious solution.

No refugees.

No asylum.

No two-to-three-year period where illegal immigrants are parked in a holding pattern, living off the system. If they didn’t migrate here through the proper legal channels, they should be deported to their nation of origin.

If you want to know why rental housing in particular has skyrocketed in the past couple years, it’s not only because of inflation in the money supply. There have been more than 2.8 million illegal migrant encounters at the southern U.S. border in 2023 alone. At least 1.5 million of those migrants have been allowed to enter the U.S. by the Biden administration, and the rate of illegal crossings is only increasing with each passing year.

There is an estimated 16.8 million illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. as of 2023, though the real numbers could be much higher. To put this in perspective, only 3 million Gen Z Americans have turned 18 since the year 2000 (and I think it’s safe to assume they’re going to want to live somewhere).

Removing illegal immigrants (who are not supposed to be here in the first place) would greatly relieve the rental market’s supply issues and leave ample options for young Americans. The increased supply would quickly bring down rent prices and perhaps even home purchase prices.

Fixing the problem at the state level would require stepping on the toes of the federal government and enacting immigration enforcement within state borders. Greg Abbot, the governor of Texas is partially doing this by busing migrants out of Texas to Democrat sanctuary cities. The crisis will not be fully averted until illegal migrants are bused out of the U.S. entirely, but booting them out of red states would help and blue states would probably be forced to follow as they suffer under their own foolish sanctuary policies.

Step 2: Stop foreign purchases of U.S. real estate

This is an action that some state governments are already pursuing. More so in the case of preventing the Chinese government and their corporate partners from buying up property, but this should apply to all foreign buyers. (China has already taken this step, along with 28 other nations.)

Just how big a solution would this be? Consider: Roughly 40 million acres of U.S. agricultural land is owned by foreign companies, and foreign buyers purchased over 84,900 homes in the U.S. just in the past year. Yes, higher interest rates are slowing these purchases, but not enough.

States can and should make it illegal for foreign nationals to buy property within their borders. I would suggest a moratorium passed on foreign buyers for at least a decade, if not forever.

I don’t think many in the public realize how open our property markets are to foreigners. Back in 1987, Joan Didion described the Miami skyline at night, noting the sheer quantities of dark windows in the high-rise condos – purchased as combination investment and sanctuary by Latin American elites who wanted an overseas bug-out location for the next coup. That was a long time ago, but even today, foreigners own more than 1 in 6 Miami homes.

Just one example of a challenge that ranges from $50-$150 billion per year. Now, in times of prosperity this might not matter as much to some, but in times of inflationary crisis the rules need to be changed to favor Americans first.

And it doesn’t even require another few trillion dollars in federal government spending.

Step 3: Moratorium on corporate home buying

According to data compiled by Pew, corporations owned nearly one quarter of all homes in the U.S. Many disguise themselves as smaller investment groups to muddy the water.

That’s 25% of the total housing market controlled by a handful of corporations who can leverage that housing supply shortage into higher profits for themselves nationwide – and, of course, higher rent costs for everyone.

Keep in mind, this is similar to what happened during the Great Depression when major banks bought up distressed property mortgages on the cheap as owners struggled to stay above water. In the end banks were snatching up homes for pennies on the dollar.

It’s unlikely that the current federal government would ever place restrictions on these companies, but state governments might, given the level of homelessness that is about to hit their economies in the next few years.

Again, if the primary danger in U.S. housing is lack of supply driving up prices, then we must create more supply to make housing affordable again.

We can’t compel the market to build more houses for cheaper, and we can’t compel home builders to take a loss. What we can do is free up the existing supply and take it out of the hands of people who shouldn’t own it in the first place, and restrict those groups who are attempting to corner the market.

As practical and sensible as my proposal is, I doubt it will ever happen. Certainly not nationwide, at best in an uncoordinated hodgepodge of state-level policies.

So what will happen instead?

Jerome Powell has a different plan

The Federal Reserve’s plan (at least the plan they openly admit to) is completely different – they are actively attempting to crash the economy and cause untold financial harm in order to drive inflation back down. The same way that zero interest rates and trillions in printed money drive prices up (not just prices of food and gas, but of assets like homes), raising interest rates and bleeding liquidity out of the economy makes prices fall.

See, once people lose their jobs, they can’t afford food or gas or rent. Remove demand and prices fall – problem solved!

Yes, it’s the financial equivalent of carpet-bombing which punishes the guilty and the innocent alike. Yes, it will work – by pushing the entire nation into a recession so brutal that the only solution is Federal Reserve intervention… Cue money-printing and interest rate cuts – which sets the stage for the next enormous surge in the cost of living.

Welcome to the modern economic cycle, where your economic well-being is managed by an unelected cabal of academics who’ve never had a real job in their lives. Unfortunately, there’s no way to opt out of this financial manipulation completely, although I think it’s smart to diversify some portion of your savings with tangible, inflation-resistant assets the Federal Reserve can’t control (physical gold and silver). They can’t be hacked or inflated away, and they’re a lot more liquid than other forms of tangible assets like farmland or livestock or fine art.

You may think my proposed cure is worse than the disease. I disagree – that’s fine. What’s more important to understand is the Federal Reserve’s “cure” is worse than the disease, and it isn’t even a real cure! More of a palliative, temporarily easing the pain of the economic decline.

The required dosage to mask the pain gets larger and larger, though – setting the stage for a more precipitous decline next time, guaranteeing more severe and widespread suffering…

It’s smart to insulate yourself and your family from this financial manic-depression as much as you can. We can’t entirely decouple ourselves from the Fed’s economic puppeteering, but we can sever a few of the strings. I think the best way to do that is to diversify with assets like gold and silver – real, tangible metal – whose intrinsic value offers a stable foundation for building a more predictable financial future.

*  *  *

The people in Washington are destroying your retirement account! Slowly but surely, the value of your 401(k) or IRA is being eaten away thanks to out-of-control inflation. And our elected officials in D.C. don’t care! In fact, they seem to be accelerating this trend with new legislation to print trillions of new dollars. And this is why I recommend Gold IRAs. To see how they work, Get this FREE info kit from Birch Gold Group about Gold IRAs. (Comes with NO obligation or strings attached.)

Climate change presents a significant global challenge. It (allegedly) causes severe weather patterns, crop damage, and rising sea levels. However, not everybody sees it as a threat.

For this graphic, Visual Capitalist’s Alan Kennedy and Sabrina Fortin partnered with Lloyd’s Register Foundation to explore one of their most recent reports, World Risk Poll 2021: A Changed World? And dig into the data to see why many people worldwide are unsure of climate change as a threat.

Are We United or Divided? 

As part of the World Risk Poll 2021, Lloyd’s Register Foundation partnered with Gallup and surveyed 125,911 people in 121 countries. 

They asked whether climate change will threaten, somewhat threaten, or not threaten their nation in the next 20 years. These nations were ranked by the total number of respondents who view climate change as a threat, somewhat or otherwise.  

90% of Northern and Western European respondents view climate change as a threat. So, it’s no surprise that many nations with the highest percentage of those who see climate change as a threat are European.

Meanwhile, the highest percentage of people viewing climate change as a non-threat live in developing or non-Western economies. Here are the bottom 10 countries covered by the report.

Teaching the World About Climate Change

Education is critical in shaping one’s sentiment toward climate change, not just nationality. The data indicates that as the level of education increases, so does the understanding of climate change as a threat.

A World of Risk

Despite 75% of the world viewing climate change as a threat to their nation in the next 20 years, nearly 2 billion people worldwide still don’t.

Lloyd’s Register Foundation created The World Risk Poll 2021 to give a better understanding of ordinary people’s risks and does not just cover climate change.

The World Risk Poll 2021 also offers insight into our sentiment toward AI, workplace safety, and financial resilience.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Governor Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 1 seeks a $6.4 billion tax on millionaires to fund 10,000 mental health beds…

Newsom Campaigns for Mental Health Proposition

Cal Matters reports Newsom Kicks Off Campaign for Mental Health Prop

California voters will decide only one measure in the March 5 primary — and that’s exactly what Gov. Gavin Newsom wanted. He championed bills to borrow $6.4 billion to pay for 10,000 new mental health treatment beds and to overhaul California’s 20-year-old law that funds mental health services with a tax on millionaires. They will be combined into one proposition — Prop. 1. 

The Legislature cooperated by clearing the March ballot of potentially competing bond measures for schools, colleges and housing — and of three constitutional amendments, which were put off until the Nov. 5 general election. 

And Thursday, Newsom officially launched his campaign for the ballot measure, with the slogan “Treatment not Tents” — a nod to both public concern about homelessness and his efforts to clear encampments. Politico reports that he’s putting $6 million into the campaign to start.

Treatment Not Tents

• $6.4 billion for 10,000 beds is $640,000 per bed.

• California has 161,548 homeless, most of which have mental health issues.

• The total bill tor Treatments Not Tents would be 161,548 * $640,000 = $103,390,720,000 ($103.4 billion).

The governor says 10,000 beds will serve 100,000 homeless. No, it won’t unless you put 10 people in one bed and keep them there.

Otherwise, it will be an endless cycle of people in and out of bed making the total off the street no more than 10,000 at a cost of $640,000 each.

There are about 6,000 existing beds now, and that has not made any dent in 161,000 homeless.

Leave California Now

To make way for the idiotic Proposition 1, the legislature postponed three other idiocies on schools, housing, and colleges. It’s a temporary reprieve. California will be after still more of your money in November of 2024.

And when adding 10,000 beds does nothing, California will seek another $6.4 billion for more beds.

The Great Migration From California to Texas

On June 18, I noted Millennials Lead the Way on the Great Migration From California to Texas

Millennials depart California over home prices, not the millionaire’s tax. California has the top 14 least affordable cities in the country to look for a starter home. 

There are many reasons to flee the state.

For discussion, please see The Starter Home Is No More, Even in Second Tier Markets