Authored by Carly Mayberry via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Since condemning the recent inclusivity changes made to the Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), veteran actor Richard Dreyfuss hasn’t back-peddled on his comments nor has there been notable pressure for him to do so.

That’s while other entertainment industry experts are also critical, if not skeptical, of the changes when looking to the future and the legacy of filmmaking.

“They were put in a situation where they had to do something to quiet the activists,” Sasha Stone, founder and editor of the film/awards discussion website Awards Daily, told The Epoch Times about the changes first laid down in 2020 by AMPAS. “The Academy gave productions ample time to prepare. In that time, however, as everyone knows, Hollywood went through the ‘Great Awokening,’ and suddenly inclusivity and diversity was everywhere.”

It was earlier this month that media outlets reported the Oscars organization was clamping down on its new regulations after controversies during this year’s leadup to the awards ceremony. Those involved outreach surrounding Best Actress nominee Andrea Riseborough, Best Actress winner Michelle Yeoh’s controversial social media activity, and what appeared to be an endorsement of Yeoh through a tweet by Academy President Janet Yang.

But it was The Academy’s new diversity and inclusion standards first announced three years ago and to be enacted for the 2024 Academy Awards that raised the ire of Dreyfuss.

Inclusivity Requirements

Centered on best picture nominees and representation requirements, films must meet at least two of four new standards that require both onscreen and behind-the-scenes roles to be filled by those from underrepresented groups. They include either having at least one lead character or a significant supporting character from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group, having at least 30 percent of secondary roles from two underrepresented groups or having the main storyline, narrative, or theme centered on such a group. The Academy has deemed “underrepresented groups” to include women, people of color, those who identify as LGBT, and people with disabilities.

Dreyfuss during a May 5 interview on the PBS series Firing Line told host Margaret Hoover that such directives “make me vomit.”

“It’s an art. And no one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give into the latest, most current idea of what morality is,” said Dreyfuss. Later during the interview he noted actor Laurence Oliver’s work in 1965’s Othello in which he played the role in blackface.

“He played a black man brilliantly. Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play The Merchant of Venice? Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art?” he added.

The Epoch Times reached out to Dreyfuss, who until Adrien Brody won for The Pianist in 2002, was the youngest best actor winner at age 30 when he took the award for his role in 1977’s The Goodbye Girl. The actor’s other credits include 1975’s Jaws, 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1985’s Mr. Holland’s Opus.

“I think what he meant was that art should not be dogma—it shouldn’t be propaganda for a specific political ideology, otherwise it loses its value,” said Stone about Dreyfuss’s comments, while noting the audience’s need for authentic storytelling.

She described the actor as part of a rare breed in Hollywood who could be attacked and ultimately exiled for his statements.

However, Christian Toto, film critic and host of The Hollywood in Toto Podcast, said that Dreyfuss “nailed it” with his comments.

“Yes movies are an amalgam of art and commerce, but making Best Picture hopefuls adhere to any set of criteria smacks of interrupting the creative process,” said Toto. “The subset of rules dictating what kinds of stories are being told is the very worst part of the new rules.”

UCLA associate professor and author Gabriel Rossman said Dreyfuss’s view about artistic freedom isn’t new.

“For instance, the recent dispute over the best actress nominations was (at least facially) about an excessive role for social capital,” Rossman told The Epoch Times, noting author James English’s book Economy of Prestige. The book discusses prizes as often contests of different forms of capital and that many prize controversies are about disputing what type of capital should dominate.

“So Dreyfuss’s comment that the award should prioritize artistic achievement over other considerations fits in a long tradition of prize disputes,” said Rossman.

For their part, both film viewers and movie aficionados also chimed in when The Academy announced the changes.

“You ruined the Oscars. It’s no longer about a cinema as a genre of art. Now it’s totally about politics,” read one comment on AMPAS’ website while renowned film producer Axel Kuschevatzky felt differently.

“I fully support @TheAcademy’s new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars eligibility,” tweeted Kuschevatzky, noting their importance.

The Epoch Times reached out to representatives at both The Academy and the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists for comment.

In a statement announcing the new rules, Academy President David Rubin and Academy CEO Dawn Hudson said “the aperture must widen to reflect out diverse global population in both the creation of motion pictures and in the audiences who connect with them.”

“We believe these inclusion standards will be a catalyst for long-lasting, essential change in our industry,” they wrote.

That’s while still others note past Oscar-winning films that would never have won under the new rules.

Those include films like 2013’s Argo, which did not have enough female actors in the cast to meet the 30 percent mark or 2007’s The Departed, which also had a predominantly male cast. That film finally earned director Martin Scorsese his first Oscar.

“We turn to storytelling to deepen our understanding of the human condition and to reflect back at lessons or characters we can be moved by,” said Stone. “Any film in the pre-woke era will have the audience in mind more so than anything else. That is no longer true. They’re serving the people at the top, the aristocracy, who value how they look in a culture of judgmental new puritans.”

Toto said Hollywood could better commit to diversity by hiring the best and brightest talents, period.

“That will ensure people from all walks of life get a chance to take part in the grand movie-making process,” said Toto. “If Hollywood wants to increase diversity measures by funding programs for young people from so-called under-represented groups, that’s perfectly fine and a far better path forward.”

Added Stone: “The best thing about right now is that there are more women and black filmmakers and all kinds of diverse and interesting voices making movies—more than ever before. In mandating their inclusion that robs them of a chance to achieve in their own right.”

Update: 

Bloomberg shared more details about stolen body parts from Harvard Medical School’s morgue. The report provides details on the buyers and their connections to private Facebook groups. 

“Just out of curiosity, would you know anyone in the market for a fully intact embalmed brain?” Little Rock, Arkansas, funeral home contractor Candace Chapman Scott asked accused dealer Jeremy Pauley in Pennsylvania on a Facebook Messenger note in 2021, federal prosecutors say.

Cedric Lodge, 55, the former manager of Harvard’s morgue, was charged with selling brains, hearts, skin, and other body parts to individuals who were part of an online underground human remains trafficking network. 

Seven people in five states, including Lodge, were charged with conspiracy and interstate transport of stolen goods by the US Attorney’s office in Scranton, Pennsylvania. So far, Pauley has agreed to plead guilty.

Charging documents said Scott and Pauley were members of several Facebook groups that were platforms for buying and selling “oddities.” 

Harvard fired Lodge in May for stealing and selling body parts from the morgue. At one point, he allowed Katrina MacLean and Joshua Taylor of Pennsylvania, an alleged trafficker, into the school’s morgue. 

Lodge’s wife was accused of selling body parts to MacLean and Taylor. Taylor appears to have made 39 PayPal payments to Lodge’s wife, totaling $37,000 between 2018 and 2021. In one payment to Lodge’s wife, he wrote in the memo “braiiiiiins.” Another payment was billed as “head number 7.” 

The indictment said MacLean and Taylor were accused of shipping body parts to Pauley, who MacLean asked to turn human skin into leather. 

*   *   * 

A former morgue manager at Harvard Medical School was indicted on federal charges for stealing body parts of donated cadavers and reselling them to individuals in a nationwide human-remains trafficking scheme. 

Cedric Lodge worked at the medical school’s morgue in Boston. He allowed buyers into the school’s morgue to create a shopping list of body parts, able to choose from skin, brains, heads, and bones, according to the five-count indictment filed Tuesday in US District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

Lodge “stole dissected portions of donated cadavers, including…heads, brains, skin, bones, and other human remains, without the knowledge or permission of (the school) and removed those remains from the morgue in Massachusetts and transported them to his residence in New Hampshire,” the indictment said. 

“Some crimes defy understanding,” United States Attorney Gerard M. Karam wrote in a statement. 

Karam continued: “The theft and trafficking of human remains strikes at the very essence of what makes us human. It is particularly egregious that so many of the victims here volunteered to allow their remains to be used to educate medical professionals and advance the interests of science and healing. For them and their families to be taken advantage of in the name of profit is appalling. With these charges, we are seeking to secure some measure of justice for all these victims.” 

The indictment alleges Lodge and his wife, Denise, sold body parts to others, including Katrina Maclean and Joshua Taylor. 

Maclean owns Kat’s Creepy Creations, a store in Peabody, Massachusetts, where the indictment says she sold the stolen body parts to others. 

Investigators claim Maclean asked Lodge for human skin so a mortuary and crematorium employee in Little Rock, Arkansas, could tan the skin to create leather.  

Harvard University officials said: 

“We are appalled to learn that something so disturbing could happen on our campus — a community dedicated to healing and serving others.” 

The medical school said they’re working with federal authorities “to attempt to identify victims and contact as many of the victims’ families affected by this case as possible.” 

Authored by Joe Gomez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Newly passed legislation that would ban ballot harvesting in Mississippi is being challenged in court by several civil rights organizations that claim it would harm minority voters and those with disabilities.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Mississippi Center for Justice, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ACLU-MS, and Disability Rights Mississippi (DRMS) filed a federal lawsuit challenging S.B. 2358, legislation which would prevent a third party from collecting an absentee ballot from a voter and delivering it to a polling place. It’s due to take effect on July 1.

“Across the country, we’ve seen how bad actors have used ballot harvesting to take advantage of elderly and vulnerable voters in other states—all so they can try to circumvent our democratic process and cut you out of it. But here in Mississippi, we’re just not going to let that happen. Here, we will make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. I was proud to sign Senate Bill 2358,” Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves told The Epoch Times.

The governor’s office describes ballot harvesting as a process where a political operative collects and handles massive amounts of absentee ballots and maintains the practice could take advantage of elderly and vulnerable voters.

“National Democrats are pushing for a federal takeover of elections and are advocating to push ballot harvesting on states all across the U.S. This is nothing more than a blatant political power grab, and we must continue standing up to them,” said Reeves.

Meanwhile, plaintiffs in the lawsuit argue the new law would do the opposite by disenfranchising and preventing minorities or those with disabilities from voting.

“Anti-voter politicians are trying to deny a fair voice in government to Mississippians with disabilities while criminalizing their friends and neighbors who want to help them deliver absentee ballots,” said Ahmed Soussi, staff attorney for voting rights with the SPLC. “This bill would diminish American democracy by punishing volunteers who facilitate voting for historically discriminated against communities.”

Voting rights activists have described the terms “ballot harvesting” or “voter harvesting” as essentially pejoratives for “voting.”

The Democratic Governors Association (DGA), which has been trying to prevent Reeves from being reelected, has also voiced their concern over the new law, using it as political ammunition in the group’s attempt to turn Mississippi blue by electing Democrat Brandon Presley to the governor’s office instead.

“Tate Reeves is trying to rip power away from everyday Mississippi voters because he’s scared of being held accountable for his failures and corruption,” DGA Communications Director Sam Newton told The Epoch Times. “In fact, a new poll this week showed that over 20 percent of Mississippi GOP voters are crossing party lines to support Brandon Presley, who is launching a ‘war on corruption’ and putting working people first with plans to axe the food tax, slash car tag fees in half and expand Medicaid to save rural hospitals.”

Reeves has denied any allegations of corruption or misconduct.

Ballot Harvesting Bans in Other States

Mississippi is not the only state to pass a law banning ballot harvesting.  

Over 30 other states have placed restrictions or bans on the practice of third-party ballot collections and some have even made it a jailable offense.

Read more here…

By Tony Pasquariello, head of hedge fund coverage at Goldman Sachs

The past month has featured an element of animal spirits that haven’t been present in the market in a while. The past week, specifically, has seen S&P blow through the top end of a long-held trading range and decisively take out the highs of last August. 

It hasn’t been subtle where all this torque has come from:

• The bright and shining example of the AI buzz has punched above $1tr in market cap (NVDA);
• Arguably the most powerful stock of the entire COVID era is up 14 of the past 16 days for a 41% cumulative rip (TSLA);
• And the biggest stock on planet Earth is on ATH and flirting with a market cap north of $3tr (AAPL)

These have been freight trains that leave the RSI of NDX approaching 80…

… and index momentum nearing a record high.

In the doing, AI has exposed the right tail of the market, while the left tail has eased some — the debt ceiling passed, the regional banking story has quieted, the labor market remains exceedingly resilient — driving NDX to its best start ever (data back to 1985).

To be sure, as someone who has been a true believer in the long-held range trade, I clearly underestimated what S&P is still capable of.

The lesson learned: should you ever find yourself bullish of high velocity assets like NDX and NKY, it probably doesn’t pay to bet that S&P will stay on the porch forever.

What follows from here is a full check-down of the market framework from several angles. 

///

1. flow-of-funds / positioning: 

I start here because market technicals have held genuine sway along this breakout. Looking across the GS franchise mosaic, it’s clear the trading community has been stopped into some incremental length over the past month.  

Start with a good teller of truth, Prime Brokerage data: on a 3-year lookback, net exposure has moved from sub-10th percentile just a few months ago to more like the 25th percentile today.

Alongside this, the systematic trading community is now significantly long of both S&P and NDX exposure.  

Furthermore, yesterday saw a very clear grab for upside — witness record volumes in S&P calls and the rarely seen spot up / vol up dynamic.

Where it continues to be very interesting: we came into this week with a near-record spec short in S&P futures; exchange data suggests only some of that has been covered.  

Short covering continues two weeks after net non-commercial emini specs hit a record short. pic.twitter.com/zk5m04KJ5m

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 16, 2023

All taken together, I think there’s a valid argument that many folks — not all, but many — are now as long as they’ve been all year.  

That is consistent with what you can observe in measures of investors sentiment: CNN fear/greed has gone into the extreme (link) and the GIR indicator hasn’t been this high since late 2021 (link).    

The final piece here is corporates, where buybacks are clipping along, while any incremental supply (mostly follow-ons) has been absorbed.  

My bottom line: positioning has been a very clear tailwind for the market over the past month; now the question becomes how much gas is left in these tanks.  

2. The money markets:

To address that last question, this is the obvious place to start. Since May, another $167bn has flowed into US money market funds, which takes the stockpile up to … $6.5tr.

Can you make the argument that some of this will make its way into the domestic stock market?  

It’s certainly possible — and, we’ve only very recently gotten to a place where the sure-fire bet on allocating to cash feels less brilliant, see chart 15 below — but, I don’t necessarily see a major switch.  

I say that given my memories of the 2009-2019 era: a very long and high quality bull market failed to truly captivate US households, despite money markets offering terrible returns.

Said another way: will investors genuinely pile into stocks now when the nominal yield on cash is as good as it’s been in over 16 years?

Here’s my point: while taking nothing away from certain parts of the equity market — more on NDX and NKY below — my guess is the trend of folks leaving most of their spare capital in the money markets will continue for a while longer.

3. The Fed:

Call it a pause, call it a skip, call it a shift to a newly presumed pace of hiking at every-other-meeting — all we know is the Fed held their fire, while flashing two more hikes (with four meetings to go) in 2023.  

In the end, given the stubbornness of core inflation, the Fed sees a higher terminal rate — with strong internal consensus around that view.  

That said, as Mike Cahill pointed out, the markets appear more convinced that inflation will fall than the committee does. The official GS view: “we have not made any changes to our forecast of one additional hike in July to a peak rate of 5.25-5.5%.  the combination of the hawkish surprise in the dots and the hint at an every-other-meeting pace strengthens our confidence that the FOMC will hike in July and makes a possible second hike more likely in November than September.”

Regarding CPI … while it’s a little bit funny to celebrate 5.3% core inflation … to the chart work below … the all-important guts of US inflation are trending clearly and considerably lower.

The big picture: recent weeks have demonstrated that central banks are extending the global hiking cycle and have a bit more wood to chop — this likely includes the most important of them all — which leaves July FOMC in play and the onus on the coming data set.

4. US growth: 

As one takes stock of H1’23, I think you have to remember where investor psychology was at the outset.  

Which is to say: when we walked in the office on January 2nd, recall that recession fears were shot through both price action and market talk.  

When you flash forward to today, it appears the US economy is still grinding forward … perhaps nothing has been more significant that the creation of 1.6 million jobs YTD.

So, the health of the US labor market has been as central a story as any — especially when coupled with the fact that the Fed hasn’t needed to explicitly choke it off.  

Given that stocks live in the future, I’m inclined to think we’ve taken credit for all that and the big question for the next 18 months is this: from the starting point of full employment, where does the incremental growth impulse come from, particularly when there are a number of soft spots that have emerged?

5. The liquidity variable:

As one of the greats would say, every macro process begins with an assessment of liquidity. Following the debt ceiling, I’d characterize the current debate around the significance of a liquidity drain as intense and two-sided.  

This week brought our first real taste of how many Treasuries need to be consumed by the marketplace, and it was absorbed without major issues (while noting there’s plenty more coming from here to the end of the month).   

Now, you can’t tell me asset market liquidity is all that tight given the sudden inflows to equities — to say nothing of the retail fervor for short-dated call options on high volatility tech stocks.

So, I admit to being very ambivalent on what to think about all of this, and I’ll defer to Dominic Wilson … to my eye, this is also a two-sided conclusion that tilts slightly positive (link):

with debt ceiling risk behind us, we encounter considerable investor anxiety about the sharp drainage of reserve balances from the large pick-up in bill issuance and TGA replenishment ahead, alongside QT in the US and Europe.  We are generally skeptical both about the mechanical view of money flow between reserves and risk assets that these worries sometimes imply, and about the long-run stability of the relationship between liquidity measures and equity markets.  Still, the drainage of cash in the weeks ahead is likely to be unusually large and to continue the story of upward pressure on funding costs and on reserve-constrained banks.  We also see the risk of further deterioration in market liquidity from the shifts in net supply, though, as we saw in March, that can drive rates sharply lower, not just sharply higher. And the point at which the Fed bumps into reserve scarcity could be temporarily disruptive although it is not likely to be hit until early next year at the soonest.   

6. On the interplay between tech stocks and interest rates:  

If the central story of last year was a stock market held hostage by the Fed’s tightening campaign, it’s fair to ask why NDX has been flying higher despite the recent backup in rates (note Dec ’23 SOFR has sold off 125 bps since early May).  

I’m going to borrow the framework of a client on this one: “the rate relationship is still largely playing out in the unprofitable (i.e. long duration) part of tech.  People paint NDX with the same brush, but it’s wrong.  The big profitable stocks driving NDX higher have double digit growth (now) and high FCF margins (now) … I don’t think either of those fundamental factors are ‘long duration.’” 

That take is consistent with our formal work on the correlation regime: link.

Where I’m going with this: last year made painfully clear that higher rates matter hugely for stocks, but at this stage of the game, it’s not obvious that the mega cap names should be forever threatened by a modest backup in US rates.

7. Japan:

This week saw another blistering move higher in Japan, which puts NKY up ten weeks in a row (for a cumulative rip of 22%). The market has now seen 11 straight weeks of foreign demand, which is the longest streak since 2014.

Again, I suspect that we’ll need to hand that baton to global real money and domestic investors for the strength to extend, and that’s not happened yet.

I’m also very curious if US households begin to engage on the theme; note shares outstanding in EWJ and DXJ have hooked higher, but remain well off the fever peaks of 2015.

The BOJ remains status quo, with no hints this week on a break from YCC — which is to say, they’re sticking with a monetary policy that I’d argue is both (1) inappropriately dovish and (2) supportive of domestic equities.

Finally, the last three charts at the very bottom of this email are all Japanese thematics — and they are all breathtaking.

8. China:

In an ongoing and stark contrast to the prior point, Chinese asset markets have underperformed significantly.

This is a very good check-down of the core economic story: link (in a line: sequential growth has weakened meaningfully, such that we see downside risks to our Q2 GDP forecast, but some upside risks to Q3).

Regarding sponsorship, if global real money was reticent to commit before 2023 even began, given the recent opportunity set in the US and Japan, it’s hard to see that pattern suddenly inflecting.  

This FT story also paints a very tough picture for global demand: link. 

If there’s a contra-argument here, it centers on supportive policy (witness this week’s rate cuts) and genuinely dreadful sentiment … while noting that local assets have traded a bit better in recent weeks.

9. Odds and ends:

• i. A punchy analog from colleague Mark Wilson: “[last] week Nasdaq 100 traded 20% above its 200 day moving average.  This has happened on 15 prior instances since 1983.  Looking back at those 15 prior instances, in 14 out of 15 occurrences the index return 12mths forward was positive, with an average 12mth gain of 35%.”
• ii. The latest demonstration of AI muscle, as pointed out by Pete Callahan: “ORCL delivered the goods, at least on narrative … the opening salvo for Oracle earnings call included this: “we remain committed to the fiscal year 2026 targets that we shared with you last fall at our financial analyst meeting, and our exploding AI demand leaves us significant upside.” Note ORCL stock has rallied 15% this week.  
• iii. A related take on the big theme: “I will say this about AI.  NVDA bottomed in October in the low 100s.  if this is a secular move, if this thing is real, you just don’t have ten-month moves. That’s not how it works. Even the Dot-com bubble lasted two or three years, and for many of the guts it lasted four years” (link).  I’d add to this that we’re not even seven months into the ChatGPT era.  
• iv. One last quote on AI, with an emphasis on the winner-take-all bit, from Bloomberg: “with Microsoft programs in use at almost every major institution on Earth, Nadella and Altman are in by far the best position to sell corporate AI services.  “the natural state of large software companies tends toward a winner-take-all approach,” says Scott Farquhar, co-CEO of software maker Atlassian Corp., which is both a Microsoft partner and a rival” (link).
• v. I read this in a note from Bobby Molavi and was struck by the magnitude of growth: from 2010 to 2022, the AUM of private equity grew from $1.7tr … to $7.6tr (link).
• vi. NYC office occupancy just crossed above 50% of pre-COVID levels, which I find to be staggeringly low (link).  
• vii. In a year where little has gone as planned, the drive higher in UK rates has been as consistent a trend as any, and it went into overdrive this week (witness GUKG2 on your Bloomberg).
• viii. Friay was quarterly derivatives expiry, which — as a reminder — have an occasional tendency to mark significant inflection points.
• ix. “Easier than falling in love” has no direct relevance to this email, but it’s the single best line from the greatest commercial of the 1990s tech boom, so I’m going with it: link.   

* * * * *

10. This is a powerful chart with emphasis on the horizontal line for the pre-COVID average.  As someone who has been more worried than the experts about the persistence of core inflation, it’s hard for me to deny this move on Mr. Powell’s preferred gauge (link):  

11. In a related spirit, this is an update on the realized volatility of US core CPI:

12. Brett Nelson in our Investment Strategy Group flagged this chart to me (they do excellent, big-picture work — and tend to resist “narrative volatility,” something I’m admittedly not always immune to). Speaking of inflation, this shows how S&P typically behaves before and after the peak in CPI — as noted last week by Dominic Wilson, the market is basically doing exactly what it should be doing (link): 

13. Some years it’s about earnings, some years it’s about the multiple; in recent history, it’s usually one or the other … as you can see, this year has almost entirely about the multiple:

14. Subject to your interpretation, an update on where the money has flowed in 2023:

15. A catchy chart and the case for secular growth to outperform.  From Lou Miller: the new technology basket (GSXUNEXT) consists of 28 secular growth names that should do well in the current environment, and excludes the mega cap incumbents on the view that breadth improves.  We like this theme on the long side and pairing it with a short in “expensive defensives,” such that you’re buying this chart (link):

16. This is where it gets fun – these last three charts all reveal what’s going on one level below the surface in Japan, and they all go back five years, starting with the GS Japan reflation basket:

17. You’ve seen this one before: Japanese semiconductors: 

18. Finally, the showstopper of the past month … Japanese transports:

More details in the full note available to professional subscribers.

Authored by Edward Ring via American Greatness,

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy, generating 44 percent of all business activity. Take them out of the equation, and the economy collapses. But that is exactly what’s happening. The cards are stacked against small businesses in America today, and nowhere is it worse than in the state of California. 

Here, the rules are rigged to make it more difficult for small, independent contractors and independent businesspeople to survive, much less thrive. Excessive regulations invariably favor large companies because the cost of complying is far easier for a company with a billion dollars in annual revenue than it is for a company with a million dollars in annual revenue.

This obvious fact is well understood by corporate monopolists whose rollup and consolidation of industry after industry in America has only accelerated in recent years. This excerpt from a January report by S&P Global, sums up the trend: “In 91 of 157 primary industries, the five largest U.S. companies by revenue combine for at least 80% of total revenue.”

The report goes on to explain how monopoly power is a double-edged sword. On one hand, “growing monopoly power stifles competition and productivity in the U.S. economy.” The counterargument is that “very, very productive firms end up dominating the industry.” From the perspective of the ordinary American worker, either as an employee of a monopolistic corporation, or as an independent proprietor trying to compete in markets getting swallowed up by the giants, both of these arguments are true, and both are bad news.

The fact that regulations actually benefit the largest corporations clearly doesn’t translate to a recognition by progressive voters that deregulation—or at the very least, a more judicious application of regulatory oversight—might help small business survive and might help consumers avoid new rounds of price gouging when a few giant companies capture entire markets. And California is ground zero for this cognitive dissonance.

A more subtle impact of excessive regulations is how it redirects productivity, rendering the value of enhanced productivity far more ambivalent than one might suppose. In California, for example, with costs for land, energy, and raw materials driven artificially high due to regulations, gains in productivity are offset by higher costs for these inputs and by higher costs to comply with regulations. Apart from wiping out the smaller competition—which is good for the monopolies—where is the benefit?

The Punishing Middle-Class Tax Burden

If a sole proprietor aspires to upward mobility by working harder, the cards are particularly stacked. The following chart shows just how demoralizing current tax laws are for people with taxable income between $90,000 and $160,000, particularly in California, where state taxes are especially onerous.

In California, depending on where you live, it is difficult, if not impossible, to support a family on $90,000 per year. That income is the entry-level to the middle class. For the same reasons, in California, a taxable household income of $160,000 per year is by no means upper middle class. In many parts of the state, it still spells tight budgets and tough spending decisions for families.

But where is the incentive to work harder, beyond the pure necessity to survive? If a person is making $90,000 per year as an independent contractor (married filing jointly) and they forfeit nights or weekends to take on extra work, they will give 43 percent of their income to the government. That is, for every $100 they earn, they’ll only keep $57. If they are set to make $132,000 per year, and they take on an extra job, they’ll pay 47 percent of their earnings to the government. Forty-seven percent tax.

This is an appalling abuse of some of the hardest-working citizens in America. 

People who are barely able to make ends meet, who need to supplement their income by sacrificing whatever time they can spare after fulfilling their obligations to their family and to their primary clients, are forced to give nearly half of every dollar they earn to the government. 

And in a bizarre twist of logic, white collar law partners and consultants, who collect higher compensation as hired clerisy for monopolists and billionaires, end up paying less in marginal taxes. As soon as their taxable income exceeds $160,000 per year, their 12.4 percent Social Security assessment goes away, and their marginal tax burden drops from 47 percent to 34 percent. In America’s supposedly progressive tax environment, a 47 percent marginal tax burden is not reached again until income exceeds $400,000 per year.

Interesting, isn’t it? A guy who takes on extra work to pay rent for his home and tuition for his kids and scrapes together $130,000 per year is paying more taxes on that last dollar than a corporate litigator whose last billable hour topped out at $390,000 per year. Some might say there is a distinction between Social Security taxes and “taxes.” But when your biggest concern is having enough money left to cover your monthly bills, that’s mumbo jumbo. Money for the government is money for the government. It doesn’t matter where it’s going or what you call it.

The Cost-of-Living Burden

It’s not easy to draw the line between what regulations facilitate authentic capitalism, where companies have to use their productivity innovations in order to sell competitive products at competitive prices to customers with options, versus regulations that empower monopolies and throw up impassable barriers to smaller emerging would-be competitors. In California’s case, nobody has even tried to thread that needle. 

Instead, the state legislature has never considered a regulation it didn’t like. With accelerating frequency and intensity, and specifically with respect to “saving the planet,” California’s regulatory state has made it impossible to live a middle-class lifestyle.

Thanks to environmentalists pressuring the state to impose ridiculous “net zero” building codes, along with cordoning off cities to prevent the far less expensive option of building on open land, the average home in California costs over $728,000. That’s actually down slightly compared to a year ago, but payments are still way up. With a 30-year fixed mortgage now up to 7 percent, the average home in California will set you back $4,844 per month. 

But that’s not all: California’s much-vaunted low property taxes, at 1 percent, still pack a wallop on such a huge base. Add at least another $1,200 per month for the 1 percent property tax, the various local “fees” that get around the 1 percent cap, plus mortgage insurance, and homeowners insurance.

How far is that $90,000 per year going, now that you’ve spent $72,000 just to get your family under the average roof? Add to that the most expensive total costs for natural gas, electricity, gasoline, and water in the United States, and you’ll be lucky to have a dime left over for clothing, groceries, or health care. Want to keep your kids out of the public schools? Good luck. On average, that will cost another $16,000 per year per child in the Golden State. And it is not tax deductible.

All of these costs are elevated either indirectly or explicitly thanks to environmentalist regulatory excess. The state has plenty of land for homes, trees for lumber, abundant reserves of gas and oil, and amazingly productive farmland. But in every one of these areas—the foundations of prosperity—environmentalist-inspired rules have restricted supply and raised costs. The only economic interests that have benefited are monopolists.

What Kind of Government Is This?

How did it come to this? Californians pay ridiculously high taxes. If they are within that middle-class band of income between $90,000 and $160,000 per year, their marginal tax rate is more than people earning up to $400,000 per year. And for what? A government passing regulations that have made the state unaffordable? California’s government has declared war on its hardest-working citizens. It is engaging in what amounts to the economic expulsion of its middle-class citizens.

For California’s low-income communities, the situation is no better. How does it serve social justice to make the most basic necessities of life unaffordable? How does it serve environmental justice to cram millions of people into already crowded cities because a “greenbelt” has been stretched around every urbanized region of this vast, underpopulated state? How does it foster upward mobility for low-income families when the only thing achieving middle-class economic status brings is no more government subsidies and brand new, crippling rates of taxation in their place?

And then there is the entire spectrum of failed state phenomena—rampant drug addiction, decriminalized crime, a completely unregulated homeless population, and public schools where children are taught identity politics and climate crisis indoctrination, filling their heads with resentment and terror, instead of grammar and multiplication tables. 

Why should anyone work anymore? Why try? The government schools teach values that nurture irresponsibility—blame systemic racism and corporate greed for anything missing in your life—and at the same time, government regulations have created an economy where even a hard-working and responsible person cannot afford to live.

California’s only hope is for its voters to recognize what has happened and, in a multiethnic, nonpartisan seismic wave of populist rage, replace every one of their dysfunctional, wholly owned legislators. California’s voters must demand politicians and policies that strike a reasonable balance between the needs of the environment and the needs of civilization in order once again to enable an economy where small companies can compete with large companies, where consumers have choices, and a low cost of living appropriately reflects California’s abundant resources and innovative people.

Construction crews are working around the clock to rebuild a portion of an Interstate 95 bridge in northeastern Philadelphia that collapsed about a week ago. 

On Saturday morning, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro tweeted that plans are underway to reopen the bridge could be as early as the “next two weeks.” 

Today, I can state with confidence: We will have I-95 open within the next two weeks. We are going to get traffic moving again — thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our incredible union trade workers and our all-hands-on-deck approach.

Today, I can state with confidence:

We will have I-95 open within the next two weeks.

We are going to get traffic moving again — thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our incredible union trade workers and our all hands on deck approach.

— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) June 17, 2023

Shapiro declared a disaster emergency shortly after a tanker hauling thousands of gallons of gasoline flipped over on an off-ramp and caught fire underneath the bridge last Sunday. His initial estimates were it could ‘take months’ to fix the damaged bridge. 

A live stream of the bridge shows construction crews are busy this morning. 

The livestream is here, Pennsylvania.

To chart our progress and give everyone a sense of timing, we’re launching our 24/7 livestream where you can watch I-95 get rebuilt.

Government is working for the good people of Pennsylvania. https://t.co/C10d2Z8SCt

— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) June 15, 2023

US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned earlier this week that the bridge’s closure was forcing 14,000 trucks to find alternative routes that could snarl East Coast supply chains and raise consumer prices. 

Buttigieg tweeted that this portion of I-95 “is an artery for people and goods,” and emergency relief funds are being deployed to fix the bridge. 

On Saturday morning, travel disruptions were seen around the closed-off section of I-95. 

One person on Twitter said, “Has to be a RECORD of when any roadwork gets done in PA. Funny what happens with a little effort.” 

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former President Donald Trump applauded a suburban New York prosecutor after she dropped a two-year criminal investigation into him and his company.

Westchester County District Attorney Mimi Rocah, a Democrat, said in a statement on June 15 that her office had closed the case against Trump after an investigation that was conducted “objectively, and independent of politics, party affiliation and personal or political beliefs.”

Her office did not file charges against Trump or the Trump Organization.

Trump applauded Rocah’s decision, writing on his Truth Social account that ending the investigation “WAS THE HONORABLE THING TO DO IN THAT I DID NOTHING WRONG.”

“BUT WHERE AND WHEN DO I GET MY REPUTATION BACK? WHEN WILL THE OTHER FAKE CASES AGAINST ME BE DROPPED?” Trump added. “ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!”

Rocah began investigating Trump in 2021, in an effort to decide whether the former president or his company had misled authorities about the value of the Trump National Golf Club Westchester to pay less on property taxes.

According to The New York Times, Rocah’s office subpoenaed records from the golf course and the town of Ossining in 2021. Ossining handles the course’s taxes.

Trump had previously called Rocah’s investigation a “witch hunt.”

“The Club’s request for a review of its tax assessments was amicably resolved earlier this year and signed off by the Town Board, the Town Assessor, Special Counsel for the Town (who determined the settlement to be both ‘appropriate and in the best interests of the Town of Ossining’), the Briarcliff Manor School District, the Office of the Westchester County Attorney and the Westchester County Supreme Court judge presiding over the matter,” a spokesperson for the Trump Organization told The Hill via email.

“Accordingly, the suggestion that anything was inappropriate is completely false and incredibly irresponsible. The witch hunt continues,” the statement added.

Meanwhile, Trump is facing a separate lawsuit in New York. In September 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil lawsuit against Trump, the Trump Organization, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump’s business associates over alleged fraud. The lawsuit claims that the Trump Organization deceived insurers, lenders, and tax officials by allegedly inflating the value of its assets.

The case is set to go to trial in October. However, James recently said her case could be delayed by the Department of Justice’s prosecution against the former president over his alleged mishandling of classified documents.

On June 13, at a federal court in Miami, Trump entered a not-guilty plea to 37 felony charges in the classified document case.

Rocah talked about her decision to close down her case against Trump in an interview with CBS on Thursday.

“I think it’s really important, more important than ever in our country, to make sure that people understand that we have independent prosecutors, we have a justice system that operates independent of politics,” Rocah told the outlet. “I can stand here and proudly say that I’m one of those prosecutors, and I look at every subject of any investigation, every organization that’s a subject of an investigation, the same way.”

Trump’s legal troubles have not negatively affected his popularity with GOP voters, according to the latest National Research Inc. survey commissioned by American Greatness.

The survey, which queried 500 likely New Hampshire voters from June 12 to 14, found Trump in the lead with 44 percent of support, up 5 percent from the outfit’s May survey.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is seen as Trump’s top rival, picked up 12 percent of support, dropping six percentage points from the previous survey.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) finished tied at third with 7 percent of support each, followed by former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (5 percent), biotechnology entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (3 percent), former Vice President Mike Pence (3 percent), and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (2 percent).

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Turns out masking wasn’t just totally ineffective during Covid, the remnants of “normalizing” the behavior are now coming back to bite U.S. cities, where the practice – which formerly was just for wintertime and committing crimes – is now being used effectively for the latter because of now normal is has become.

At least that’s the case in Philadelphia, where the city council is now mulling a ski mask ban (as if that should even be necessary heading into the dead of winter). But the city has experienced such an increase in crime since Covid, the idea is getting traction. 

City Council Member Anthony Phillips has commented: “You cannot distinguish a misguided kid from a common criminal. We cannot ignore it because neighbors feel unsafe, we can’t ignore the police’s struggle to identify suspects. This is a public safety ad a quality of life issue.”

He introduced the legislation which would ban masks in public places like parks and schools last week, according to ABC 6.

The legislation would carry with it a $250 fine for anyone wearing a ski mask in rec centers, daycares, parks, and city-owned buildings and a $2,000 fine for anyone wearing one while committing a crime. 

The bill excludes “costumes, along with anyone engaging in religious holidays or wearing safety equipment for work”,  the report notes, meaning that Philadelphia may soon see an influx of “Halloween in July” parties, as well as religions that call for covering ones face. 

Philadelphia has already put in place a ban on facemasks on public transit, but the report notes that the new legislation isn’t likely to pass until the end of summer, if at all. 

Samia Glenn from West Philadelphia pushed back against the idea: “Some people just wear it (ski masks) for protection. Ski mask isn’t always defensive. Everybody doesn’t wear it just because they’re doing something bad.”

In the dead of summer? Sure, Samia…

Authored by Emma Suttle, D.Ac, AP via the Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

How often have you pondered your dad’s diabetes or the heart disease that runs in the family and thought, “Am I going to get that? Is it inevitable?”

With all we’ve learned about genetics, it seems reasonable to think that some of our health outcomes will be determined by those invisible forces buried deep in our DNA. But a new study has shown that how long we live has more to do with our behavior than with our genes, implying that our choices may have a much more profound impact on our longevity than we may have thought.

The Study

The authors of the study, published in the Human Kinetics Journal, sought to analyze the relationship between physical activity and sedentary behavior, and their associations with mortality based on a score that evaluated genetic risk factors. The study involved 5,446 post-menopausal women 63 years of age or older. The women were put into three groups based on their genetic risk factors. These risk factors were measured by a “small selection of single-nucleotide polymorphisms” that are well-known to affect longevity.

Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are variations in a genetic sequence that affects one of the sequence’s basic building blocks—adenine, thymine, cytosine, or guanine. SNPs help predict an individual’s response to certain drugs, his or her susceptibility to environmental factors such as toxins, pesticides, or industrial waste, and his or her risk of developing certain diseases.

The study authors conclusively found that, regardless of their genetic risk factors, participants who had a higher rate of physical activity showed a lower risk of mortality, and those who had a higher level of sedentary behavior increased their chances of dying during an average follow-up period of more than six years.

Ultimately, the findings support the importance of more physical activity and less sedentary behavior for reducing mortality risk in older women, regardless of their genetic predisposition for longevity.

Genes and Longevity

An article titled “Human Longevity: Genetics or Lifestyle? It Takes Two to Tango,” published in Immunity and Aging in 2016, found that a combination of genetic and non-genetic factors determines healthy aging and longevity in humans. It says that family studies found that about 25 percent of the variation in human longevity is due to genetic factors. Interestingly, the article also states that studies have indicated that caloric restriction, as well as epigenetic factors, genetics, and lifestyle, play a role in healthy aging.

Epigenetics is the study of how our behaviors and environment can change the way our genes function. Unlike genetic changes, these epigenetic changes are reversible because they don’t affect our DNA.

In contrast, a study published in 2018 in the journal Genetics analyzed a staggering 54.43 million family trees by collecting birth and death records for 406 million people born from the 19th century to the mid-20th century from the databases of Ancestry.com. The study found that a mere 7 percent of people’s lifespan can be attributed to genetics or heritability.

Heritability measures how the differences in human genes account for the differences in individuals’ particular characteristics or traits. These include eye color, height, hair color, intelligence, and disorders such as schizophrenia and autism.

Lifestyle and Longevity

Longevity, or the biology of aging, is an exciting field of study that is making important discoveries about the factors that affect how long we live.

Until very recently, life expectancy for humans was between 19 and 35 years, but over the past 150 years, significant improvements in sanitation and living conditions, agricultural practices, access to clean food and water, and medical treatment have dramatically increased lifespans. The average lifespan now is about 76 years of age (it has declined significantly in the United States since 2020 due to COVID-19). If we look at it this way, managing how we age is a relatively new concern.

With aging comes a whole host of age-related diseases, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, to name a few. And, as we get older, we are not only more likely to develop these conditions, but also to have several of them at the same time.

Scientists have been studying people who live to be over 100 years old (called centenarians) and those who live to be over 110 (called supercentenarians) in order to understand which factors contribute to their long lives. Scientists have discovered that these individuals have little in common with each other in regard to their education, profession, or income, but they tend to share similar lifestyles: They don’t smoke; they are not obese or overweight; and they cope well with stress. Also, most centenarians and supercentenarians are women.

In our elder years, eating a healthy diet, avoiding tobacco, limiting alcohol, and staying physically active can keep many of us healthy into old age. But in later life—at age 80 and beyond—genetics plays a prominent role in keeping people healthy and avoiding age-related diseases. Research suggests that many centenarians are able to live independently and avoid age-related diseases until the very last years of their lives.

Read more here…