Authored by Pete McGinnis via RealClear Wire,

The federal legislative process is messy, slow, and littered with stumbling blocks – exactly as the Founders intended. Compromise and half-loaves are built into the system. The public can learn what legislation is up for vote, and members can slow down the process as they represent their constituents and work on their policy priorities. The sluggish pace frustrates activist government whether on the left and the right, so the executive branch finds workarounds: agencies promulgate regulations, the president issues executive orders, and so on.

Yet sometimes, in order to get what it wants, the government just changes how things are defined. The simple manipulation of language or the meaning of a word can often remove obstacles and give federal agencies what they couldn’t get through legislation.

For example, the National Academy of Sciences has proposed a new definition of poverty. Ostensibly, it wants to do this because “An accurate measure of poverty is necessary to fully understand how the economy is performing across all segments of the population and to assess the effects of government policies on communities and families.”

That’s reasonable. What’s not reasonable is the new definition’s practical impact: making millions more people eligible for welfare benefits. The U.S. could get a massive backdoor extension of the welfare state – at least $124 billion over 10 years, by one estimate – because NAS arbitrarily wants a new definition.

With Congress closely divided, this kind of spending could be nearly impossible to pass. But if the Census Bureau adopts NAS’s proposed new definition, the administration doesn’t need Congress.

And NAS’s proposal is not arbitrary. Twelve of the 13 authors of the paper proposing the change “have contributed to Democratic causes or worked for Democratic administrations.” So, inside of government, shielded from oversight and public awareness, partisans want to implement a partisan scheme – and they can do it by changing a few works or numbers.

It’s a common tactic. In the first two quarters of 2022, the United States experienced negative economic growth. That had long been one of the definitions of an economy in recession. Not anymore: with midterm elections looming, the Biden administration refused to acknowledge the recession. “When you’re creating almost 400,000 jobs a month, that is not a recession, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said.

But job creation has not been a measure of what constitutes a recession – at least, not until it became convenient for the White House. Yellen was adamant. “This is not an economy that’s in a recession. A recession is broad-based weakness in the economy. We’re not seeing that now,” she said.

Truth may be the first casualty of war, but it’s no safer during a pandemic. This became apparent in September 2021, when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) quietly redefined the words “vaccine” and “vaccination” on its website. As the Miami Herald explained:

Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.”

The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”

Why did the CDC make these changes? Because the COVID-19 “vaccines” weren’t vaccines at all. Whatever their benefits, the shots developed and distributed in response to the pandemic did not “stimulate a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Yet they were hyped as vaccines. When it became apparent that the shots weren’t doing the job of vaccines, the government decided to change the definition of what a vaccine is.

A CDC spokesperson’s attempt to explain it was singularly ineffectual: “Slight changes in wording over time … haven’t impacted the overall definition.” Except in this case. As the Herald explained, the spokesperson then went after a strawman:

The previous definitions could have been “interpreted to mean that vaccines were 100% effective, which has never been the case for any vaccine, so the current definition is more transparent, and also describes the ways in which vaccines can be administered,” the spokesperson said.

Nobody ever thought that vaccines were 100 percent effective, and even if they did, the responsible course would have been to call the COVID-19 drugs what they were and explain the difference to the public. Instead, government called them vaccines at a time when the public was desperate for the sort of reassurance the word “vaccine” had always carried.

In each of these cases, smart government insiders are using semantic sleight of hand to achieve their objectives or to justify them after the fact. “Control the language, control the masses” is a cliché, but only truths become clichés. Representative democracy is supposed to guarantee the people a voice in governance and ensure transparency in government’s workings. Unelected bureaucrats altering definitions to suit their needs betrays both goals.

Pete McGinnis is director of communications at the Functional Government Initiative.

Authored by Mary Hong via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

China released its May national housing price data on June 15. Beijing and Shanghai had the largest fall in second-hand home prices among 70 large and medium-sized cities.

The price of second-hand homes in Shanghai fell by 0.8 percent compared with the previous month, the largest drop among cities surveyed, and Beijing fell by 0.6 percent.

Experts believe the fall in prices in the two megacities is a sign of a bad economy.

U.S.-based economist Davy J. Wong explained that the majority of Chinese investors have been limited to real estate because of limited investment channels under the current ruling regime.

He said that Chinese people in general believed real estate provides a better cushion against inflation and depreciation.

In China, local governments and developers who set the new housing market price have the real estate market fairly monopolized; “but the second-hand market is fairly free for maneuver, and thus reflects the true market in China,” he said.

In a 2019 report of the People’s Bank, 74.2 percent of tangible assets of urban households were housing, in a nationwide survey of 30,000 urban households; whereas real estate accounted for only around 30 percent of total household wealth in the United States, said the Chinese media report.

The weak economy has forced everyone to cut down their consumption, Wong analyzed. The three-year zero-COVID policy has ruined people’s confidence in the future. He believed many more people choose to sell their properties to ease financial stress, “It’s a risk management,” he said.

Wong said the falling second-hand housing prices in Beijing and Shanghai suggested the supply is too large for the transaction volume to keep up.

Read more here…

Just when you though the exodus from California to places like Florida and Texas may have slowed….you can guess again.

That’s because a recent poll called the California Community Poll, administered at the beginning of June, showed that roughly 43% of residents in California think the state is heading in the wrong direction. 

28% have mixed feelings about the direction and 28% think it is going in the right direction, a summary from Just the News/The Center Square reported this week. The survey interviewed 1,354 people. 

56% of respondents were “totally dissatisfied” with the state’s cost of healthcare and another 56% said they were dissatisfied with the cost of homes in the state. More than 50% of residents also were dissatisfied with safety in their local communities, the report says.

Californians also seem to be unhappy with the state’s economy, with 68% of those polled saying they were “totally dissatisfied” and a stunning 81% of respondents saying that the cost of everyday expenses was unsatisfactory. 

61% of those polled also said the cost of living is the key reason that they are considering leaving the state, with about 40% of respondents saying they are considering moving to another state, even with 68% of respondents saying California is “part of how they identify themselves”. 

Also focused on the economy, 46% of residents surveyed said they can’t pay for an unexpected expense and don’t have the ability to save. 

The report was quick to note that, despite the stunning response from the more than 1,300 people surveyed, many residents were “by and large” still happy to live in the state because it “brings people together around new ideas and vibrant communities.”

So, we’ll see you in Texas and Florida then, right?

Authored by Alice Giordano via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A group of 300 A-list Hollywood celebrities—including Ben Stiller, “Hunger Games” Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Liam Neeson, Kevin Bacon, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus—is threatening to take industrial action if their demands on key issues are not met.

They include better protection against artificial intelligence (AI) celebrity cloning, a “seismic realignment” in minimum pay, an increase in media residuals, and better health and pension terms.

The celebrities submitted a letter on June 28 to the Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) stating their claims. 

“As regards [to] artificial intelligence, we do not believe that SAG-AFTRA members can afford to make halfway gains in anticipation that more will be coming in three years, and we think it is absolutely vital that this negotiation protects not just our likenesses, but makes sure we are well compensated when any of our work is used to train AI,” the actors wrote.

The letter, which was provided to The Epoch Times by a union member, comes just days before the June 30 deadline for SAG-AFTRA to negotiate a new contract for the actors with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).

It also comes amid the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike against the alliance. Like the actors, the guild has also cited concerns about the infringement of artificial intelligence on the industry and consequently their pay. 

SAG-AFTRA—including its executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, and president Fran Drescher, famous for her role on the 1980’s sitcom “The Nanny”—did not respond to inquiries about the strikes from The Epoch Times.

Days before the actors submitted their letter to them, Crabtree-Ireland and Drescher released a video in which they assure actors that they were being properly represented in contract renewal talks.

“We’re not providing you with a lot of detailed reports tonight, because … it’s very confidential what’s going on in there,” said Drescher. “But I just want to assure you that we are having extremely productive negotiations that are laser-focused on all the crucial issues that you told us were most important to you.

“And we are standing strong and we are going to achieve a seminal deal.”

Crabtree-Ireland said he remained optimistic that the union negotiating team “will be able to bring the studios, networks, and streamers along to make a fair deal that respects union members and their “contribution to this industry.” 

In their letters, the actors said they felt otherwise. 

“A strike brings incredible hardships to so many, and no one wants it,” read the letter addressed to the union leadership and negotiating committee. “But we are prepared to strike if it comes to that. And we are concerned by the idea that SAG-AFTRA members may be ready to make sacrifices that leadership is not.”

Other well-known celebrities threatening to strike include Brendan Fraser, Maya Hawke, Lesley Ann Warren, Marisa Tomei,  Rosie O’Donnell, Neil Patrick Harris, Tea Leoni, Glenn Close, Jane Fonda, Minnie Driver, Tim Daly, Debra Messing, Eva Longoria, Quinta Brunson, Dave Franco, Noah Wyle, and J. Smith Cameron.

Read more here…

Is the flood of Russian oil finally tapering?

Following several months of record-busting flows, Eikon data showed on Wednesday that Russia’s seaborne oil exports from the ports of Primorsk, Ust-Luga and Novorossiisk will fall to 1.9 million barrels per day (bpd) in July from 2.3 million bpd in June as domestic refineries increase runs, and – perhaps – as Russia finally decides to comply with its self-imposed output cut.

On a daily basis oil loadings from Russia’s western sea outlets are set to decline 18% in July compared to June, Reuters calculations showed. Russia’s oil exports are curbed by higher oil processing by domestic refineries along with frozen oil production under OPEC+ agreement and additional cuts pledged by Russia.

Lower loadings expected in July have already supported Urals oil differentials in ports of India – the main buyer of the grade.

Urals and Kazakhstan’s transit oil (KEBCO) loadings from Baltic ports of Primorsk and Ust-Luga were set at 5.6 million tonnes, down from 6.5 million tonnes planned for June.

Urals, KEBCO and Siberian Light oil loadings from Black Sea’s Novorossiisk were planned at 2.4 million tonnes in July, down from 2.9 million tonnes in June.

Russian refineries cut runs during spring months allowing state exports to reach a 4-year record in May. After works ended in June exports started to slide.

The sharp drop in exports comes after Russian crude oil flows to international markets have largely continued to grow unabated, with no substantive sign of the output cuts that the Kremlin insists the country is making. Four-week total average seaborne shipments, which smooth out some of the volatility in weekly numbers, edged higher in the period to June 4, rising to 3.73 million barrels a day from a revised 3.68 million in the period to May 28, according to Bloomberg.

At the start of the month, flows to international markets were more than 1.4 million barrels a day higher than they were at the end of last year — more than can be accounted for by the diversion of pipeline flows or lower refinery runs. Shipments have also risen since February, the baseline month for the pledged production cut.

Following the recent OPEC+ decision to cut output, Moscow’s OPEC partners have sought clarity and transparency from Russia on the country’s crude production. They noted that Moscow has made a commitment to accept reassessment of February’s production level by OPEC’s secondary sources. The assessment by those seven companies currently stands at 9.83 million barrels a day.

However, there has been precious little evidence that the 500,000 barrels a day of Russian export cuts have been made. Moscow has cited the diversion of crude previously piped to Germany and Poland through the Druzhba pipeline as a reason for robust shipments; but that switch happened in January and February, before the output cut was due to come into effect. Flows of Russian crude through the pipeline, now limited to deliveries to Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, have been stable at about 240,000 barrels a day since February.

And while Russian refineries cut their crude processing in the first part of May, runs recovered in the final week of the month, rising by about 180,000 barrels a day from the previous seven days. Despite the dip in refinery runs there is no sign of a corresponding drop in overseas shipments of refined products.

Meanwhile, Russia’s revenues from oil are still being hit hard, despite robust overseas flows. May’s budget proceeds from oil taxes plunged 31% from a year ago to 426 billion rubles ($5.2 billion), according to Bloomberg calculations, largely the result of a sharply lower oil price.

Ironically, to boost oil-related revenues, Russia may have no choice but to sharply reduce its output if only to spook speculators and spark a short squeeze which lasts longer than the one in April. Then again, the moment Russia resumes exporting at full blast, the price will drop again until such time as Beijing finally admits that it needs to launch a massive fiscal stimulus which reboots the country’s economy. And with youth unemployment already at a record 20%, and potentially jeopardizing the one thing that Beijing cares about the most – social stability – that day isn’t too far away.

Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

International Man: For over 2,500 years, gold has been mankind’s most enduring money.

However, with the emergence of Bitcoin there is a new hard money option.

How do you see the two as governments worldwide continue to engage in rampant currency debasement and are rolling out central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)?

Nick Giambruno: First, I am all for free-market competition in money.

I say let the best money win.

Having a handle on the basics is crucial to understand what is happening here.

Money is a good, just like any other in an economy. And it isn’t a complex notion to grasp.

It doesn’t require you to understand convoluted math formulas and complicated theories—as the gatekeepers in academia, media, and government mislead many folks into believing.

Understanding money is intuitive and straightforward.

Money is simply something useful for storing and exchanging value. That’s it.

The way I see it, three primary monetary goods are competing against each other today: Bitcoin, gold, and fiat currency.

Fiat currency is currently the dominant form of money in the world.

But that status is fleeting as central banks are debasing their currencies at breathtaking speed.

CBDCs are a desperate, last-ditch effort to keep the fiat currency scam going—a Hail Mary.

To escape the collapsing fiat system and CBDC enslavement, many millions—soon billions—of people are turning to monetary alternatives like gold and Bitcoin.

Fiat currency is a fraud of historic proportions that causes incomprehensible damage. So I am rooting for both gold and Bitcoin in this three-way war for monetary supremacy.

International Man: Can you explain Bitcoin’s monetary qualities?

Nick Giambruno: Bitcoin shares many of gold’s monetary characteristics. They’re both durable, divisible, consistent, convenient, scarce, and most importantly, “hard assets.”

“Hardness” does not mean something that is necessarily tangible or physically hard, like metal. It means “hard to produce.” By contrast, “easy money” is easy to produce.

The best way to think of hardness is “resistance to debasement,” which helps make it a good store of value—an essential function of money.

The most important characteristic of a good money is that it is credibly “hard to produce.”

All other monetary characteristics are meaningless if the money is easy for someone to produce.

Like gold, Bitcoin does not have counterparty risk.

In other words, Bitcoin and gold are the only primarily monetary assets that aren’t simultaneously someone else’s liabilities.

Gold has established itself as money over thousands of years. Bitcoin is a new and emerging money.

Bitcoin is like hard money with a call option based on its further monetization, which is an excellent bet.

A lot more can be said on this topic, but this sums up the essential points.

International Man: What about CBDCs?

Nick Giambruno: Despite all the hype, CBDCs are nothing but the same fiat currency swindle on steroids.

It’s doubtful CBDCs can save otherwise fundamentally unsound currencies—as I believe all fiat currencies are.

If the current fiat system is not viable, then CBDCs are even less viable as they enable the government to engage in even more currency debasement.

Would a CBDC have saved the Zimbabwe dollar, the Venezuelan bolivar, the Argentine peso, the Lebanese lira, or the Nigerian naira?

I don’t think so. And a CBDC won’t save the US dollar or the euro from their fates either.

There are a lot of bad things that come with CBDCs. But there’s a silver lining…

CBDCs are going to introduce and familiarize people with using digital currencies. It’s then only then a matter of time before they discover Bitcoin.

CBDCs and Bitcoin share some characteristics.

For example, they are both digital and facilitate fast payments from a mobile phone. But that is where the similarities end.

The reality is that CBDCs and Bitcoin are entirely different in the most fundamental ways.

You need the government’s permission and blessing to use a CBDC, whereas Bitcoin is permissionless.

Governments can (and will) create as many CBDC currency units as they want. With Bitcoin, there can never be more than 21 million, and there is nothing anyone can do to inflate the supply more than the predetermined amount in the protocol.

CBDCs are centralized. Bitcoin is decentralized.

Governments can censor transactions and freeze, sanction, and confiscate CBDC units whenever they want. Bitcoin is censorship-resistant. No country’s sanctions or laws can affect the protocol.

There is no privacy with CBDCs. However, with Bitcoin, if you take specific steps, it is possible to maintain reasonable privacy.

CBDCs are government money that are easy to produce and give politicians a terrifying amount of control over people’s lives. On the other hand, Bitcoin is non-state hard money that helps liberate individuals from government control.

In short, CBDCs are a pathetic attempt to compete with Bitcoin.

CBDCs make an inferior form of money even worse, but at the same time, they are an excellent Trojan Horse for Bitcoin.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see that once governments inevitably inflate their CBDC units, censor transactions, freeze people’s accounts, and confiscate funds, it will push people to look for better digital alternatives, first and foremost Bitcoin.

That’s how, contrary to conventional wisdom, CBDCs could be an enormous catalyst for Bitcoin adoption.

International Man: Couldn’t governments simply ban Bitcoin?

Nick Giambruno: Bitcoin threatens a major source of the government’s power—the power to create fake money out of thin air and force everyone to use it. There’s no question they’ll try to protect this racket from Bitcoin. The question is whether they’ll be successful.

Remember, the powerful Chinese government has banned Bitcoin numerous times with little to no long-term effects as adoption grows.

That’s because it’s entirely impractical for governments to ban Bitcoin. They’re no match for the economic incentives that attract millions—soon billions—of people, and increasingly, corporations, and even nation states to a harder and superior form of money.

Further, all aspects of Bitcoin are genuinely decentralized and robust. The best that governments can do is play an endless game of global whack-a-mole.

Governments in Argentina and Venezuela have laws restricting their citizens from accessing US dollars. However, these laws have little effect on their citizens’ desire and ability to use them. These actions just create a thriving black market, or, more accurately termed, a free market.

Similarly, governments have tried to ban cannabis for decades, which hasn’t worked out very well for them.

Bitcoin would be infinitely more challenging for governments to ban than US dollars or a plant.

I would like to see governments try to ban Bitcoin because they’ll fall flat on their faces.

It’s doubtful any government will be more successful in banning it than the Chinese government was.

A failed attempt to ban Bitcoin will reinforce its value proposition as a superior form of money nobody controls.

International Man: Where do you see the Bitcoin price going?

Nick Giambruno: What we have with Bitcoin is an entirely new asset that millions worldwide are adopting as money because of its superior monetary properties, namely its total resistance to debasement.

The monetization of the new monetary good is genuinely unlike anything anyone alive has ever seen.

It took gold centuries to achieve monetization. Bitcoin has a good chance of undergoing monetization in a much shorter period.

The market cap for Bitcoin today is around $600 billion.

The market cap for all the mined gold in the world, which took thousands of years to accumulate, is about $12.7 trillion.

That means Bitcoin has a market cap roughly equal to 5% of gold’s and is already well on its way to monetization.

Assuming gold stays flat and Bitcoin goes up 20x, it would have a market cap roughly equal to gold. At that point, a single Bitcoin would be worth over $620,000. I think that’s a real possibility in the next ten years, though it could happen much sooner.

If that sounds outrageous, consider this…

Ten years ago, the Bitcoin price was around $100. Today, it’s roughly 310x that.

Bitcoin has made numerous breathtaking moves to the upside in the past. I think it can do it again, especially as corporations, institutional investors, and even nation states start buying Bitcoin for the first time. Of course, it’s important to remember that past performance does not indicate future results for any investment.

Here’s the bottom line.

Few people are aware of what is really happening with Bitcoin.

And even fewer know how to prepare.

That’s why I’ve just released an urgent PDF report revealing three ways you can do that.

Check it out as soon as possible because it could soon be too late to take action. Click here to get it now.

A top Brazilian court has ruled that former president Jair Bolsonaro is barred from running for office for eight years.

The country’s highest electoral court says that the man once popularly dubbed “Brazil’s Donald Trump” cannot run for or hold any public office until 2030. This means he’ll have to sit out the 2026 election, after last year he lost to left-wing opponent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Five out of seven judges found him guilty, with two judges voting against – expressing their rationale that he has a right to free speech in contesting the fairness of the last election.

The charges are centered on attacking public confidence and allegedly stoking violent protests over what he and his supporters called ‘fraudulent’ elections and rigged voting machines. He was accused further of abuse of power, particularly over his summoning ambassadors to his residence last year to decry the election.

That controversial meeting in particular had been live-streamed. State-funded US media outlet NPR writes, “The case stems from a meeting Bolsonaro held with foreign ambassadors in July 2022, in which he spread false information about Brazil’s electoral system and brought its credibility into question ahead of last year’s fractious election. The meeting was livestreamed by official television channels and on YouTube.”

Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court later deemed the video as well as other social media content from the Bolsonaro campaign to constitute ‘misinformation’ and election interference, after which YouTube complied in removing the videos.

Subsequently an avalanche of Brazilian and American media reports compared the controversy to events surrounding Trump and the 2020 election, as well as January 6, especially when rioters clashed with police in Brasilia in early January, which included Bolsonaro supporters storming Congress, the Supreme Court and presidential palace.

🇧🇷 BREAKING: Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro declared INELIGIBLE to run for office until 2030 after judges concluded he abused his power by casting doubt on the country’s voting system

They did to Bolsonaro what they want to do to Trump. 🇧🇷🤝🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/fHACcIbya5

— Sameera Khan (@SameeraKhan) June 30, 2023

The former Brazilian president had been living in Florida, more or less in a kind of exile while Brazilian officials prepared multiple charges and investigations. When his visa was set to expire, he flew back to Brazil in March, after three months in the US.

During his stay in the US, multiple progressive Democratic lawmakers urged the Biden administration to cancel his visa, arguing that he was sowing election disinformation while living comfortably in a posh Florida home.

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClear Wire,

Just a few hours before President Biden tied his political fate to the economy, embracing the term “Bidenomics” in a Chicago speech Wednesday, he was still trying to dispel worries about a looming recession. A reporter asked Biden, before he boarded Marine One, whether he believed the worst of inflation was over.

“Let me put it this way: I’ve been hearing every month there’s going to be a recession next month,” the president responded. “Two-thirds of economists and the major leaders in the banks think we’re not going to have a recession. I don’t think so either.”

The exchange underscores the fragile state of the economy that most Americans and independent analysts find concerning. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said he expects more interest-rate increases ahead as inflation remains “well above where it should be.” Meanwhile, only 24% of voters believe the country is on the right track, with 38.3% approving of Biden’s handling of the economy, according to RealClearPolitics’ poll average.

The White House this week put a far glossier spin on its inflation record, asserting that wages have gone up during Biden’s tenure and that the inflation rate has been cut in half from where it was a year ago – lower than any other wealthy Group of 7 nation, according to Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Republicans dismissed the claims as brazen gaslighting, pointing out that inflation spiked after Biden took office, rising from 1.4% in January 2021 to 5.4% by June 2021, and 7.5% right before Russia invaded Ukraine, peaking at 9.1% in June 2022 before demand slowly began to sink it to its current 4%.

While Democrats and Republicans spent the week debating whether Biden’s policies have helped or hurt the middle class, other economic signs were flashing red, warning of danger ahead. Biden has long blamed the spike in inflation on a temporary COVID hangover and bottlenecks that snarled supply lines, which he said have smoothed out over time as employees have returned to work.

Now several fights, led by the Teamsters Union’s aggressive new president, Sean O’Brien, could throw kinks into the nation’s shipping and trucking logistics in a matter of weeks. During his Wednesday remarks, Biden repeated his promise to be the most pro-union president in history and said that under his watch, Americans’ support for unions is at its strongest level in 60 years.

“We are making it easier to empower workers by making it easier to join the union,” he told the audience of about 200 supporters.

Earlier this month, the president held his first reelection rally in Philadelphia at an event hosted by the AFL-CIO and attended by 2,000 cheering union members. The massive AFL-CIO and 17 other unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, announced their early endorsements of Biden’s reelection.

While continuing his pro-union drumbeat, regularly sprinkling his speeches with pledges to protect “good-paying union jobs,” Biden is pointedly avoiding discussing several looming union threats to disrupt crucial supply chains and likely upend progress on inflation. The Teamsters ramped up their rhetoric this week after voting to authorize strikes at two of the nation’s largest trucking fleets if new labor deals are not struck by the end of next month.

Teamsters working for shipping giant UPS are threatening to strike on Aug. 1 if their demands for better pay and working conditions aren’t met. If the current negotiations break down, some 340,000 warehousing, transportation, and delivery workers could walk off the job in what would be the largest U.S. strike in 60 years. UPS brown vans deliver more than 19 million packages a day.

The workers want higher pay; the elimination of so-called two-tier wages, where newer workers are paid less than older employees for the same job; the removal of surveillance cameras from delivery trucks; and more full-time positions. The rhetoric between the two sides escalated this week when O’Brien demanded that UPS provide a tentative contract agreement that its leadership can support within the next week after UPS reportedly returned to the bargaining table Tuesday without an updated counteroffer to present to the union.

“When we say the current contract expires July 31, that means we want a new contract in place starting August 1,” O’Brien said in a statement this week. “Not in six months. Not next spring. We demand a historic new contract August 1 with more money in our pockets immediately.” Warning that a nationwide UPS strike is imminent, O’Brien added, “UPS has wasted enough time and hoarded these record profits. Our members want what they have earned.”

Just two weeks ago, Teamsters at TForce Freight, representing more than 7,000 truck drivers and delivery workers nationwide, voted to authorize a strike with the same July 31 deadline for negotiations. TForce Freight operates in the less-than-truckload, or LTL, shipping market, which handles smaller loads that can be broken down into units less than 150 pounds.

At the same time, the union is battling another large LTL trucking employer, Yellow Corp., over a restructuring plan to modernize its operations to compete in the U.S. $58 billion LTL market. Yellow, which has struggled financially for years, says it needs to re-engineer its business plans and consolidate terminals to compete in an industry dominated by non-union companies. The need is particularly urgent because the company must refinance $1.3 billion in debts from loans maturing next year or face bankruptcy.

Nick Vyas, director of the Center for Global Supply Chain Management at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, said allowing the strikes to take place and Yellow to fail could have a devastating impact on the economy, particularly because the boom in online shopping and home delivery, which began during the pandemic, is still going strong.

Vyas worries that organized labor is focused on extracting short-sighted demands and resisting “transformative forces” while making their employers less competitive overall, even forcing some U.S. companies that have been in business for 50 or 100 years to fail or transition out of certain industries.

“The unionized companies that provide better wages, benefits, and a better lifestyle for their employers could disappear, and you will have a marketplace based on smaller non-unionized companies that will cater to consumer needs,” Vyas told RealClearPolitics. “At the end of the day, it’s like putting a rock in the middle of a stream of water. The water will find a way to go around … consumers are not going to slow down their demand for technological innovations and faster service.”

In 2020, Yellow received a $700 million pandemic relief loan in exchange for the federal government assuming a 30% equity stake in the company. A bankruptcy could leave American taxpayers with more financial burden from the company and a loss of 30,000 unionized trucking jobs.

The Teamsters have vigorously opposed Yellow’s plans to require some workers to take on additional dock work, loading and unloading freight, among other changes. After an eight-month impasse, Yellow filed suit against the Teamsters this week, arguing that it had the right under its labor contract to implement the restructuring plan. The carrier is seeking $137 million in damages for what it argues is a breach of contract. “Without these crucial reforms, which are standard practice in the industry today, Yellow will not survive,” the company said in a statement.

O’Brien fired back, accusing Yellow of filing a baseless allegation because its management has failed the company and can no longer live up to the contract terms it agreed to. “This lawsuit is a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save face,” said Teamsters General Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman.

The company argues it’s simply trying to stay afloat, repay its loans from the federal government and save the jobs of its 30,000 workers while continuing an undisrupted supply chain to hundreds of thousands of its customers across the country. “Driving Yellow out of business will badly damage the supply chain, lessen competition and raise the price of shipped goods and feed inflation,” the company said Tuesday in announcing the lawsuit.

“We do not take this action lightly, but the Union’s leadership has left us with no choice,” Yellow’s management said in a statement. “For many months, we have made good faith efforts to meet with the IBT to propose a path forward that works for all parties, but they refuse even to meet, let alone engage in honest talks.”

The complaint said the Teamsters had backed the company’s modernization effort for years and approved the first of the effort’s three phases. The union, however, reversed course when O’Brien became president and pledged to take a “militant approach” in blocking the restructuring. In the lawsuit, Yellow said it reached out to Biden to try to broker a deal, but O’Brien rejected the White House’s efforts. A White House spokesperson acknowledged engaging with both parties but declined to comment on the legal dispute.

“We are assessing any potential impact on supply chains and workers,” the spokesperson told RCP.

It’s a delicate situation for Biden, who would like to add the Teamsters to his roster of labor endorsements, but who rubbed some union members the wrong way for his role in brokering a deal to avert a disruptive rail strike just before Christmas last year. Some union members were disappointed by the negotiated terms and still hold Biden accountable.

While Biden wants strong union backing for his reelection, he’s also trying to lure more companies and manufacturing back to the U.S. after decades of businesses moving offshore for cheaper labor and less regulation.

“The president should tone down narratives about just being pro-labor,” Vyas argued. “Instead, he needs to show he’s doing the right thing to keep the country and its infrastructure and manufacturing base competitive.”

On Wednesday, Biden said his government investments in infrastructure, which most Republicans opposed, were already increasing manufacturing jobs here at home. Under his leadership, he said, U.S. products, such as semiconductors, and even whole industries that had moved offshore have started to return.

“We went from producing 40% of those chips down to 10%,” he told the crowd. “Not anymore. Bidenomics is going to grow those jobs and products right here at home. I mean it. It’s not a joke.”

In the coming weeks, as the Teamsters and trucking industry battles come to a head, Biden won’t so easily remain on the sidelines avoiding the political or economic fallout. The state of the economy often determines whether first-term presidents stick around for four more years. As it stands now, voters are skeptical, the economy is shaky, and the White House’s big “Bidenomics” embrace just tied the president even more closely to its trajectory.

Authored by Patricia Tolson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Over the past few years, the transgender movement has pushed its way into every nook and cranny of American culture, and major institutions and authorities have tried to force all people to go along with it.

But now, the tide is turning.

It started quietly, with biological science and objective reality being given a backseat to internal feelings and chosen identity. To become a member of the opposite sex, all one needs to do is declare it to be so and others will be forced to acknowledge it is so.

Next came the reengineering of language. The word “sex,” which defines a man or a woman, has been replaced by the word “gender,” which can be anything.

Then came the new terms and pronouns.

To help people keep up with the growing list of terms and pronouns, Trans Student Educational Resources provides a tutorial, advising that “these are not the only pronouns” and that “there are an infinite number of pronouns as new ones emerge in our language.”

For those who struggle to differentiate and understand the new terms and pronouns, there’s an “LGBTQ+ Glossary” explaining all of the gender terms, acronyms, initialisms, and pronouns on their ever-evolving and expanding list.

Even the National Institutes of Health under the Department of Health and Human Services provides instruction and guidance on the proper use of “Gender Pronouns & Their Use in Workplace Communications,” warning that “intentional refusal to use someone’s correct pronouns is equivalent to harassment and a violation of one’s civil rights.”

Refusal to use a colleague’s preferred pronoun at work can result in punishment or termination.

Erasing Women

Then came the effort to erase womanhood itself.

Females are no longer “women.” Those promoting gender ideology cannot define the term “woman,” and women are instead referred to as “birthing people” or “people with uteruses.” There are also claims that “men can have periods” and “women have penises.”

Last year, a biological male named Brían Nguyen won the title of Miss Greater Derry in a local New Hampshire pageant that’s part of the Miss America organization, and another biological male, Dr. Rachel Levine, was named Woman of the Year by USA Today.

Sports Illustrated, a magazine known for featuring female models on the cover, recently included a transgender singer, who is a biological male, in its cover photos.

Men are also claiming titles, trophies, scholarships, and accolades in women’s sports.

Then there’s Fallon Fox, a man who identifies as a woman and became a mixed martial arts fighter. After knocking out two women in the ring and breaking one of their skulls, Fox boasted about how much Fox “enjoyed” it, calling it “bliss.” Fox was later named “the bravest athlete ever” and given the Pioneer Triumph Award by Out Sports.

A recent Gallup survey shows the vast majority of Americans believe transgender athletes “should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender.”

Targeting Youth

Then they came after children.

As previously reported by The Epoch Times, the progression of the trans movement began in 2015 with the introduction of drag queen story hour, which evolved into “family-friendly” drag shows where men scantily clad in a garish guise of womanhood perform sexually charged dances in front of children. They moved from pride parades to restaurants, amusement parks, theme parks, regular bars, gay bars, schools—and churches.

Laws were passed to facilitate the transitioning of children against the will of parents. Washington state passed a law (pdf) that would enable the staff at shelters where a runaway was seeking “gender-affirming care” to contact the state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families rather than the parents so the child can obtain that “care” without the parent’s knowledge or consent. California is pushing legislation to take children away from parents who refuse to enable their minor-aged children to obtain sex change operations.

Children are given puberty blockers and hormones. Young girls are having their breasts removed. Then there’s the “painful” truth about sex change surgery.

The Pushback

The backlash that followed transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney’s Bud Light endorsement was swift and costly, and the subsequent efforts by Anheuser-Busch to recover the extraordinary losses it continues to suffer have failed miserably.

The company’s first statement didn’t work. Neither did the second. The patriotic follow-up commercial was ripped as “pandering,” and the manly camo cans were “mocked.” As reported by The Epoch Times, the latest mea culpa commercial striving to reclaim the all-American image it once had is being met by responses that the company is now “trying too hard.”

The Epoch Times reported how two Los Angeles Dodgers pitchers spoke out after the team announced it would honor the drag queens who call themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence during a “pride night” event on June 16.

In the National Hockey League, the number of players who refused to play the “Pride Night” games grew to such an extent that the league’s board of governors ruled on June 22 that none of the players will wear special jerseys for pregame warmups during themed nights next season.

There’s been similar backlash to Target’s “Pride Month” displays and merchandise and to Mulvaney’s ads for Tampax and Nike women’s sports bras, prompting the “Burn Bra Challenge” online.

Now there’s a movement to reclaim “the rainbow.” Conservative rapper Bryson Gray released a new song called “Reclaim the Rainbow,” with thousands of views on YouTube.

‘Taking the Rainbow Back’

Rabbi Kirt Schneider, a self-described “Jewish believer in Jesus” and host of “Discovering the Jewish Jesus,” is the leader and founder of a new movement called “Taking the Rainbow Back.”

The objectives of his movement include “restoring the rainbow’s meaning to its original God-given purpose and message,” and removing “the stigma associated with the rainbow being exclusively an LGBTQ symbol.”

As described in Genesis 9:14-16, the first rainbow was set in the sky by God after the great flood as a reminder of the “everlasting covenant” between God and man “and every living creature.” The rainbow is God’s promise that “never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.”

Read more here…