Authored by Eric Utter via American Thinker,

History professor Robert S. McElvaine recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times in which he stated that journalists are “failing Americans” by insisting on treating both political parties equally.  Yes, as we know, there is nothing more dangerous to a representative republic than a free and objective press.

McElvaine claimed that the United States is in “the final stages of the most critical election for the survival of the American experiment since 1864” and added that journalists bear responsibility for protecting America’s future from “right-wing” extremists.

He wrote: “America’s future hangs on the defeat of the right-wing extremist authoritarians who have seized the name of Lincoln’s party.  If we lose, news corporations and journalists with a misplaced sense of ‘balance,’ ‘neutrality’ and ‘nonpartisanship’ will bear a considerable share of the blame.”  Down with balance, neutrality, and nonpartisanship!  Screw objectivity!  To hell with equal treatment, justice, fairness, equality, and equity when it comes to “journalists'” duty to the people!  The people don’t know how to think, so the media must tell them what to think…or democracy is doomed!  Mass indoctrination is the last, best hope for democracy!

McElvaine further ostracized reporters for not adequately attacking conservatives for pushing ideas that are “increasingly reminiscent” of Hitler’s rise to power.  Um, “professor,” if anyone is implicitly threatening to round political opponents up and send them to prison or concentration/labor/re-education camps, it’s far left Democrats.  In fact, they’ve already done that.

Yet the Nutty Professor soldiered on, saying: “In the final days of this election season, Americans must recognize that the existential struggle we are engaged in now is not just a game.  If the enemies of democracy prevail and take control of either house of Congress in the midterms, there will be no ‘wait till next year.’  They would probably refuse to accept the election of a Democratic president in 2024.  The game would be over, if not permanently, at least for many years.”  Projection!  Democrats refused to accept the election of a Republican president in 2000 and in 2016.

Bizarrely, McElvaine’s op-ed appeared shortly after a study by the Media Research Center found that Republicans overwhelmingly received more negative coverage from the press than Democrat candidates did in the months leading up to the midterm elections.

Democrats have spent much of the past few weeks telling us all that democracy will die unless we vote as they tell us to.  

Oddly, they suddenly now believe there are objective truths.  Two of them, in fact.  One, that MAGA Republicans are evil.  And two, that the rest of us are too stupid to realize this if the news media’s reports are unbiased.

We get to pick “our truth” when it comes to, say, what sex or gender we claim to be.  But not if we believe it’s problematic to allow an experimental mRNA vaccine/gene therapy into our body — or if we believe that voting for Republicans is in the best interest of ourselves and our nation.  I mean, the “my truth” thing can go only so far, right? 

Anybody else see a problem with this?  McElvaine’s op-ed is advocating for outright discrimination against one of the two major political parties — including its adherents, who constitute nearly half of the electorate — in the interest of democracy!

The vast majority of so-called journalists, like the vast majority of so-called professors, are “failing Americans” by trying to convince them that they give a rat’s rear end about democracy…when all they really care about is their own primacy.

North Korea last week fired a missile that crossed over the south’s disputed maritime border for the first time since the division of the Korean peninsula in 1948. On Monday the south’s navy announced it has  “recovered what is presumed to be the debris of the North’s short-range ballistic missile.”

Also unprecedented is that the missile landed a mere 50 miles from the South Korean coastal city of Ulsa, Yonhap said, coming amid a record number of missile launches within a 24-hour timeframe last Wednesday.

Pyongyang was reacting to a week of the largest-ever joint US-South Korean military drills, which had a large aerial component of over 200 combined aircraft. The exercises ended on Saturday, and also came as Seoul as well as Washington intelligence officials have been warning allies to expect Kim Jong-Un to conduct a nuclear test at any time.

On Monday North Korea itself explained the ramped up launches for the first time, directing its rhetoric in the form of new threat aimed at the United States. Pyongyang says the military was “simulating the attack” on US and South Korean targets as a result of the provocative six days of drills. 

“As part of the countermeasures to smash the continued frenzy of war provocations of the enemy, our army launched to the east sea the super-large multiple launch rocket system, five tactical ballistic missiles of different kinds and 46 long-range missiles of multiple launch rocket system,” state-run KCNA news agency reported of the North Korean military statement.

Pyongyang further claimed it launched a “special functional warhead paralyzing the operation command system of the enemy” along with the “mobilization of 500 fighters” – in reference to fighter jets. Pentagon officials remain skeptical of this claim of the north deploying 500 jet fighters. 

US and South Korean officials say they haven’t seen evidence of this “special” warhead that the KCNA statement referenced. The north has vowed to keep up the pressure…

“The recent corresponding military operations by the Korean People’s Army are a clear answer of (North Korea) that the more persistently the enemies’ provocative military moves continue, the more thoroughly and mercilessly the KPA will counter them,” the General Staff of North Korea’s military said in a statement carried by state media.

The region has been put on edge over the rapidly increased numbers of tests, especially US-ally Japan: 

You will find more infographics at Statista

Meanwhile, a joint US-South Korea military statement last week warned as follows in response to Pyongyang’s posturing and rhetroic: “Any nuclear attack against the United States or its allies and partners, including the use of non-strategic nuclear weapons, is unacceptable and will result in the end of the Kim regime.”

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

After calling Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “Ron DeSanctimonious” on Saturday night, former President Donald Trump called on his Miami supporters to vote for the Florida GOP governor during the 2022 midterms.

“With thousands of proud, hard-working American patriots, incredible people–just two days from now, the people of Florida are going to reelect the wonderful, the great, a friend of mine, Marco Rubio to the United States Senate, and you’re going to reelect Ron DeSantis as your governor of the state,” he said at an event while stumping for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). 

“And you’re going to elect an incredible slate of true MAGA warriors to Congress.”

Trump drew headlines when he made the quip about DeSantis at a rally for Dr. Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano, Republicans who are campaigning for Pennsylvania’s Senate and gubernatorial seats, respectively. DeSantis and his campaign have not responded to Trump’s comment on Saturday.

DeSantis is facing off against former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, a Democrat, and Rubio, meanwhile, faces Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.).  Recent polls have shown DeSantis is ahead of Crist and have shown that Rubio leads Demings.

Trump and DeSantis are both widely considered to be the top contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, although DeSantis has not made any indication on whether he intends to run during the 2024 contest. When asked about running for president, DeSantis has consistently said he’s campaigning to keep his position as Florida’s governor.

His comments Saturday came as he was talking about polling for possible 2024 GOP candidates, which have shown Trump with a significant lead.

“We’re winning big in the Republican Party for the nomination like nobody’s ever seen before. There it is, Trump at 71 percent, Ron DeSanctimonious at 10 percent,” Trump said in Pennsylvania. “Mike Pence at seven, oh, Mike is doing better than I thought. Liz Cheney there’s no way she’s at 4 percent. There’s no way. There’s no way. But we’re at 71 to 10 to 7 to 4.”

Read more here…

Workers at a Philadelphia Home Depot store on Saturday night overwhelmingly shot down a drive to unionize the location. It would have become the first fully-unionized Home Depot store. 

No votes outnumbered yes votes by more than a three-to-one margin. The final tally came in at 165 to 51, according to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which supervised the vote. 

“We’re happy that the associates at this store voted to continue working directly with the company,” Home Depot spokeswoman Margaret Smith told WHYY. “That connection is important to our culture, and we will continue listening to our associates and making The Home Depot a great place to work and grow.”

The vote was initiated by a September petition that had 106 signatures out of 266 employees at the Roosevelt Boulevard Home Depot in Northeast Philly. Organizers have filed a complaint with the NLRB alleging that Home Depot managers interfered with their efforts. 

The Philly Home Depot union push is part of a broader union-organizing surge: Over the first half of 2022, 1,411 American workplaces filed union-organizing petitions with the National Labor Relations Board—the highest mark since 2015. 

However, the blowout loss is the latest splash of cold water on union activists who’ve been targeting big-chain retailers across the country with mixed success. Last month, employees at an upstate New York Amazon warehouse killed an Amazon Labor Union (ALU) drive by a 2-to-1 margin.

In April, the ALU scored a headline-making victory, when workers at a Staten Island Amazon processing facility voted to unionize, in a vote where yes votes prevailed 2,654 to 2,131. More than 8,300 were eligible to vote.

Amazon filed an objection to the vote, alleging that the NLRB’s Brooklyn office violated labor law by appearing to support the unionization push. In September, the NLRB declared that Amazon “had not met its burden” of establishing that the NLRB had engaged in “objectionable conduct.”  

The labor skirmishes are getting spicy: Earlier this month, Apple decided to withhold an increase in benefits from employees at its sole unionized store, which is in Towson, Maryland.

Starbucks has fired similar benefit-withholding shots across the bow of unionization forces, triggering NLRB accusations of unlawful practices. The coffee seller has been perhaps the most visible target of successful retail-unionization attempts, with some 250 stores voting to unionize over the past year.  

Meanwhile, back in Philly, Politico reports the Home Depot story has a strange-bedfellow angle: 

One top Home Depot executive who works on employment practices at the company is Derek Bottoms, the husband of Keisha Lance Bottoms, director of the Office of Public Engagement in the White House and the former Atlanta mayor, Daniel Lippman reports. 

The Northeast Philly Home Depot workers clearly saw that unionization has downsides. That’s clear on a macro scale too: Since the start of the pandemic, right-to-work states have added 1.3 million jobs, while union-friendly, non-right-to-work states have lost 1.1 million. 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

On the eve of the midterm elections with Pennsylvania’s Senate race viewed as a dead heat, Democratic candidate John Fetterman declared “I run on Roe v. Wade. I celebrate the demise of Roe v. Wade.” It was obviously a jarring moment for his pro-choice crowd particularly after calling for the codification of Roe. It was an all-too-familiar moment for the candidate who suffered a serious stroke that has impaired his communication and processing skills. However, as we previously discussed, many on the left have swatted back questions concerning Fetterman’s fitness as “ableism.” Now, the Washington Post has run a long column from University of Delaware Professor Jaipreet Virdi declaring that it is not just embracing ableism but eugenics to question Fetterman’s fitness.

Professor Virdi is an associate professor at the University of Delaware who describes herself as “Deaf & forever a radical.”  She is a prominent and influential voice against discrimination against the deaf.

There were parts of her column that I thought raised valuable and probative insights, including Virdi’s observation that “disabled people are the ‘original life hackers,’ people who adapt to their circumstances and find their way through the disabled world, by creating new objects and paths that allow them full participation.” She is also right that we need to reevaluate how our expectations might be barriers to those with disabilities. However, she engages in her own sweeping generalizations of those who raise these concerns and tells them that they must “jettison[] eugenics-influenced ideas about disability.”

Virdi frames her analysis by insisting that Fetterman is just given to “verbal stumbles and pauses.”  The problem is that we do not know if there is more serious cognitive damage. Fetterman has refused to release his medical records despite requests from the media, including newspapers that support him.

Moreover, Fetterman had this stroke before the primary vote but he and his staff kept the serious impact of the stroke a secret. After he received the nomination, they then largely prevented the media or voters from questioning him and sharply limited his public appearances. They would only agree to one debate and insisted that it occur relatively late in the election after hundreds of thousands voted.

In other words, we still do not know the extent to which Fetterman can process information and communicate. His sole debate was widely viewed as alarming.

However, it is the escalation of the rhetoric that is most notable about the Washington Post column. Professor Virdi explains that the doubts raised over Fetterman are reflective of our history with eugenics and view that certain groups are “socially deficient.”

“As far as eugenicists were concerned, science said that “moral” flaws were hereditary and threatened the health of the nation. This meant that the solution to social problems such as crime, promiscuity and poverty aimed at the institutionalization and sterilization of the “morally degenerate”. As [Sir Francis ] Galton envisioned, human improvement was only possible through consistent, scientific intervention brought about by eugenics: ‘What nature does blindly, slowly, and recklessly, man can do proactively, swiftly, and kindly.’”

Professor Virdi ties such doubts over the fitness of disabled people to past efforts of sterilization and the view that “controlling human reproduction through better breeding was a must.” She warns the such “at its core, eugenics simply applied a scientific gloss to existing racial, class, and gender prejudices. Immigrants, people with disabilities, and racial and ethnic minorities were among those identified as socially ‘disabled.’”

As I wrote in the earlier column, there is no reason why a senator cannot be fully effective despite a disability, including the use of such devices as readers.  The problem in Pennsylvania is that the Fetterman campaign has actively prevented efforts to determine if there are more serious cognitive difficulties for Fetterman in processing information.

In the end, the Fetterman strategy worked in sheltering the candidate from further questioning or debates. The best way to dispel such questions would have been greater interaction with the candidate to show that this was limited, as Professor Virdi suggests, to mere “verbal stumbles and pauses.”  As it stands, voters will largely vote without such information and any doubts are the result of the concerted effort to leave these questions answered.

We hear a lot these days from the political left about conservative and liberty minded ideals being a “threat to democracy,” and it’s important to understand that leftists use the word “democracy” very deliberately and with specific intent.  America has never been a pure democracy, and for good reason.  Democracy is rule by the mob; it is 51% of society lording over the other 49%.  It is tyranny of the majority.  

The founders of our nation described America as a Constitutional Republic.  Not once in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill Of Rights or the Constitution is the word “democracy” used.  Not once.  America is not a democracy because our system was intended to protect individual rights regardless of majority opinion. Majority rule was never the plan of the founders, and since they risked their lives centuries ago to create this country their viewpoints are far more important than those of woke activists in 2022 who have never done anything of value.    

Leftists continue to use the word to describe our nation in bad faith, and they do this because it’s what they want America to become.  They don’t care what America is or what it was meant to be, and this has been made clear in their reactions to various measures to bring balance and free speech back to the US after years of cancel culture controlled by far left extremists and their partnerships with Big Tech social media.

When it comes to Twitter, many conservatives will suggest that they really never cared about the platform and that it never affected their view of the world.  However, it cannot be denied that for at least the past six years Twitter has been a launch pad for malicious leftist organization and large scale attacks on individuals in order to silence those who dare disagree with their ideology.  They have used Twitter as a weapon to strike fear into people before the even think of speaking out.  

This organization has included collusion between journalists, activists, corporate CEOs and governments, and while these people represent a minority within our society they wield enough money and power to manufacture an artificial consensus.  They have had the power to silence opposition and make it appear as if the leftist narrative is the only narrative.  Twitter has been the bane of American life for far too long.  

The original management of Twitter, based out of San Francisco, has often held that there was no political bias inherent in the company and that everyone was treated fairly.  We have seen ample evidence that this was simply not the case, with the tech giant now exposed for working closely with the federal government (DHS) and the Biden Administration to actively erase the voices of people who opposed the unconstitutional covid mandates and vaccine passports (among other things). 

At the same time Twitter aggressively amplified the activities of leftist groups like BLM and Antifa, while consistently promoting the establishment narrative on almost every single domestic and geopolitical issue.  The value of the company to the political left cannot be overstated.  Twitter is their Mecca.  

Whether you like Elon Musk or distrust his intentions, the drama surrounding his takeover of the platform is quite revealing.  Musk has made very few announcements of intent as far as Twitter is concerned, with his primary goal being freedom of speech, or at least equal treatment of users regardless of their political background.  The response from leftists has been predictable but also somehow astonishing at the same time.  

We have seen the mainstream media froth in furious rage at the idea of Twitter becoming an open platform.  Many have argued that Musk’s takeover is a “threat to democracy” (there’s that word again).  Some have even insinuated that Musk is an authoritarian himself for trying to remove levels of censorship.  The accusations are bizarre and Orwellian – For leftists “freedom is slavery.”

Musk is noted for attempting to appease some demands from the left and has only met with further attacks as well as actions to frighten away the company’s advertisers.  If leftists can’t own the website they will seek to burn it down.  Musk recently complained:

“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up!  They are trying to destroy free speech in America.”

The billionaire has said in the past that if his actions were making people angry on the far-left and the far-right at the same time then he “must be doing something right.”  The problem with this sentiment is that only one side has been trying to deconstruct or destroy our constitutional rights.  Musk can opine about the virtues of riding the fence or standing in the middle of the road and not committing to any viewpoint completely, but there are moments in history when one side is completely and utterly wrong, and the political left is that screaching albatross today.

The new owner of Twitter is now learning an important lesson that conservatives have known for some time:  You cannot negotiate with terrorists.  You cannot appease or bargain with people who only want power and destruction.  

Many would define free speech in terms of social media as legal speech with context and nuance taken into consideration.  There are always rules to everything and always will be.  But for leftists free speech only applies to “correct” ideas that are vetted by them and the establishment.  No one asked them to do this, they have declares themselves the arbiters of good speech and bad speech.  

Free speech is a privilege relegated to only one group, one political movement.  Everyone else must earn the opportunity to speak by showing fealty and compliance, and even then your ability to voice your ideas might elude you much like a vaporous blue checkmark.    

For leftists, ideas are manifest.  Ideas are dangerous.  Facts and evidence that contradict their narratives are dangerous.  Free speech is dangerous because it creates a level playing field in which leftists cannot compete.  The ability to punish “incorrect speech” is a way to stop fair debate.  It’s the ability to control the world, and they know it.   

Open discussion on Twitter by itself could be treated as irrelevant to most people; who cares about a single platform.  But leftist opposition to free speech affects everyone and has poisoned the cultural well for years now.  Look at how they have reacted to losing a single media company to free speech, and consider how they might react should they lose the entire country.  

Authored by Gary Richard via The Mises Institute,

Kish, since you are wondering, is an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf famed for its tourist and shopping attractions. It is becoming a serious rival to other nearby vacation hubs in Doha and Dubai.

Along with pristine beaches and extensive malls, Kish is—or rather ought to be—known more widely for another feature and institution which the Iranian mullahs established there way back in 2003; namely, the Kish Bourse (i.e., Kish Stock Exchange). بورس کیش if you prefer the Farsi.

Think of it as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange of Iran, a country stacked with natural resources, a relatively well-educated and sophisticated population (the literacy rate is 97 percent among young adults, which, if you consider the deplorable state of secondary education in the United States, means that Iranian youth are most assuredly smarter than your average young American adult), and an economy burdened by mismanagement of their own Islamic theocracy and crippling, long-duration sanctions from the American secular theocracy.

That American secular theocracy has considered it a dogmatic rite of passage into the state and corporate media (their temples) that one must, at the very least, excuse the economic, cultural, and political warfare against Iran as necessary for a variety of spurious reasons. Who really has enough free time to investigate and then suggest otherwise? After all, Iran is plagued by terroristic Islamic fundamentalists who have pledged—like their former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—“to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.”

That hero of American warfare and empire and regime change and nation building, George W. Bush, declared Iran to be one of the hinges of the “axis of evil”; so, since George W. Bush is so much better than Donald J. Trump, well, all Iranians must be malevolent thugs. Iran deserved to have the United States aid Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, to have the United States provide Hussein chemical weapons (mostly made in Germany and the United Kingdom), and then have those chemical weapons unleashed on them.

Never mind that Ahmadinejad never said that. Look away from the facts that one of the rare times in which Trump garnered any support from the deep state cathedral and corporate media cabal was when he tore up the Iran nuclear deal and when he assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. Orange man good when he’s killing brown peoples in distant lands—so conclude the powers that have been for way too long.

Why has Iran, then, incurred such wrath from the American military-industrial complex establishment?

The regime’s Sturm und Drang regarding Iran – and, for that matter, any state that even intimates that it will conduct trade in oil without the dollar, cf. Russia – is all about the petrodollar system.

Let’s define it with some historical context: When Richard Nixon removed the dollar from its peg to gold in 1971, chaos followed. It was not just the Yom Kippur War (1973) and resultant OPEC embargo that led oil prices to skyrocket in the United States. The dollar, as the new, floating, purely fiat global reserve currency had lost its allure when compared to other sovereign currencies and precious metals.

In order to stave off runaway, hyperinflation, Nixon empowered then secretary of the Treasury, William Simon, to go hat in hand to the Saudi monarchy, with a proposal. According to Andrea Wong in a Bloomberg article from 2016(!), Simon landed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to get King Faisal to agree “to finance America’s widening deficit with it’s newfound [oil] wealth.”

Said another way, the Americans promised to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, and in return, the Saudis would promise to denominate global purchases only in dollars. Washington would also go so far as to provide military aid and materiel to the Kingdom, which made Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, and Rand Corporation types happy. The tit for that tat came in the form of guarantees that the Saudis would “plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance [the inordinate, warfare-welfare] spending” of every US regime since.

It – incredibly – gets worse. King Faisal accepted the arrangement (one that was sure to make his desert-oil kleptocracy a major regional power and global player) on one condition: The rest of the world could not know the extent of the agreement. That is to say that Faisal knew that in the rest of the Islamic world, underwriting America’s drunken-sailor imperial spending, well, that would not play in Cairo, Damascus, and Kuala Lumpur.

Therefore, Simon allowed for the Saudis to “bypass the normal competitive bidding process for buying Treasuries by creating ‘add-ons.’ Those sales, which were excluded from the official auction totals, hid all traces of Saudi Arabia’s presence in the U.S. government debt market.”

Within just four years of the agreement, Saudi Arabia held about one-fifth of all Treasuries held abroad. It is further asserted that that number represents the bare minimum of the Saudi share of US debt. The Saudi regime launders and recycles its petrodollars though hedge funds and secretive arrangements with perhaps hundreds of quasi-private institutions, all done with the approval and oversight of the US regime.

Different parties. Different men. Different pronouncements. Different promises. But, the one thing they all have in common: They all bow low before the Saudis—one of them, literally!

The truth is that both American foreign policy and to a very large extent, American domestic policy, are both wrapped up in the petrodollar arrangement. For the past fifty years, the national government has attempted to do what a president not pictured above—Lyndon Baines Johnson—wanted to do in Vietnam; namely, apply the New Deal to Southeast Asia.

The subsequent regimes have doubled down on the insanity—they aspire to maintain American economic, imperial hegemony over the rest of the world while simultaneously engaging in domestic spending to infinity and beyond. Thus, the petrodollar system is the most grandiose of all monetary and money laundering schemes. The Fed and US Treasury create fiat out of thin air, the Saudis provide a semblance of supportive valuation for it, and then the Saudis conceal their ill-begotten gains by buying Treasuries and cleaning their dollars through ostensibly legitimate concerns.

As economist William Clark pointed out in 2005, nations that even appear to not be on board with this sinister arrangement are the ones that incur the most wrath from the State Department, Pentagon, NATO, presidential administrations, and all of the other aligned interests. In September 2000, Saddam Hussein announced that his Baathist government would no longer participate in the “Oil-for-Food” Program, and that, furthermore, oil deals would be denominated in euros.

From that point on, the writing (about Babylon this time) was on the walls of the state in DC. Just months after US forces invaded Iraq, in June 2003, Iraqi oil sales were converted back to petrodollars, which, owing to the euro’s strength against the dollar at the time, cost Iraqis a net 13 percent on their oil revenues and invalidated previously approved contracts with other nations.

Kish is a much greater offense to Washington than anything Saddam Hussein was able to accomplish. There, Iranian oil is bought and sold using euros, yuan, and (get ready for it) rubles. The Iranians have their own oil “marker” or means of certifying the purity and quality of the oil. Turns out, while the Biden administration and greater “liberal” Europe have expressed their collective outrage by spending other citizens’ money to support an oligarchy in Ukraine and have concurrently cut off those evil, boorish Russians with sanctions; business is brisk in Kish and Tehran. Volumes have increased on the export and import side.

Over just a four-month period, they went up 4 percent and a whopping 32 percent respectively. The Iranian consumer is holding up in spite of those onerous sanctions. Meanwhile, China has increased its purchase of Iranian oil. At present, 13 percent of China’s oil originates in Iran.

All of this is to say that, just like the Federal Reserve system, the petrodollar cabal has to reign at or near the top of operative institutions that the vast majority of Americans have “kinda, sorta heard about” and yet possess no idea of the extent to which said things suppress American prosperity and prospects for the future. Most have no idea why or how the Saudis can fund everything from genocidal proxy wars against Iran to upstart professional golf tours.

Must be all of that oil money. Factual, but not exactly true.

End the petrodollar.

After claiming the 2016 election was ‘hacked’ and ‘stolen’ – then insisting that 2020 ‘election deniers’ are a threat to democracy, left-wing outlet Politico is now warning that surprise, election machines can be hacked!

“[T]here are real risks that hackers could tunnel into voting equipment and other election infrastructure to try to undermine Tuesday’s vote,” according to a Monday report.

The 2020 presidential election was rife with allegations of voting machine hacks that were later debunked.

Yet there are real risks that hackers could tunnel into voting equipment and other election infrastructure to try to undermine Tuesday’s vote.https://t.co/kDij1J08eU

— POLITICO (@politico) November 7, 2022

Politico is quick to hedge – suggesting that safeguards on voting equipment means “any actual hack would probably be localized, quickly detected and unlikely to affect final results,” but that “even an attempt to change votes – or the mere allegation of tampering – could undermine faith in the outcome.”

Meanwhile, US officials warn of threats from “multiple groups and countries.”

The U.S. officials charged with protecting election security say they’re watching for threats from multiple groups and countries. And in recent months, social media companies and cybersecurity researchers have identified Chinese influence operations aimed at the elections. -Politico

And there it is. ‘It’s not a red wave, it’s a red hack!’

“More attention to securing voting systems hasn’t eliminated critical technical and human threats to our elections,” Matthew Weil, executive director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Democracy Program, told the outlet. “And this cycle is practice for 2024.”

The Biden administration is on board with the narrative.

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly recently told reporters that “The current election threat environment is more complex than it has ever been,” citing threats ranging from cyberattacks to disinformation, to harassment of election officials.

Meanwhile, cybersecurity units from the National Guard will be on hand in 14 states to help ‘counter any threats to election officials’ networks ahead of, during, and following the Nov. 8 elections.’

The 14 include battleground states Arizona, Iowa, and Pennsylvania, as well as Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, North Carolina, New Mexico, New York, Washington, and West Virginia, Politico reported.

Brig. Gen. Gent Welsh, the commander of the Washington Air National Guard, said at a virtual media briefing on Nov. 4 that not every state is doing it, but states that are activating these units “have invested in cyber talent and cyber missions for years,” according to outlet Statescoop, which reports on technology-related news in government.

“If you don’t have a cyber unit in your state, you’re not in a good position to help them protect elections,” Welsh said. –Epoch Times

Here’s Politico‘s list of six election security threats to watch for.

Mis- and disinformation (like the Russia hoax?)

Lies and conspiracy theories about the security of election systems are what most worry election supervisors and federal cybersecurity and intelligence officials, because those falsehoods can inflame mistrust that discourages people from voting and provoke anger that spurs people to threaten violence against election administrators. -Politico

Crashing election office and campaign websites

Hackers have one relatively low-tech tool for knocking campaigns off balance and disrupting voters’ access to reliable election information: forcing websites to crash using automated tools that simulate massive floods of people visiting those sites.

Campaign social media account hijacking

Hackers could take over candidates’ or campaigns’ social media accounts on Election Day and make inflammatory comments designed to alienate voters or spread false information about how or when to vote. These impersonation schemes could fuel distrust of the election process and knock campaigns off balance in the home stretch of the contest.

Cyberattacks on voter registration databases

States have spent years upgrading the security of their voter registration databases, which form the bedrock of a well-functioning election system. But no technology is perfectly secure, and vulnerabilities likely remain in some states’ networks. Russian hackers breached Illinois’ voter database in 2016, and Iranian hackers penetrated a state database in 2020.

Targeted voter harassment

 This relatively novel threat represents an evolution in how foreign governments use hacking campaigns to meddle in U.S. elections. After stealing voter records from a state election database in 2020, Iranian operatives threatened those voters with unspecified consequences if they didn’t vote to reelect then-President Donald Trump. The messages, which contained false allegations of vulnerabilities in election technology, were designed to look like they came from the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group.

And lastly… Wireless modems enabling hacks of voting machines or vote tallies

At least seven states and Washington, D.C., use wireless modems to transmit unofficial election-night results to their central offices. These modems use telecommunications networks that are vulnerable to hackers, and malicious actors could exploit them to tamper with unofficial vote data, corrupt voting machines or compromise the computers used to tally official results.

“We now have to worry about anybody getting access to a communication network that is fundamentally open,” Matt Blaze, a Georgetown University computer science and law professor who studies voting systems, told POLITICO last month.

These attacks are much more difficult and time-consuming — and thus much less likely to occur — than spreading falsehoods on social media or temporarily taking down websites. And states that use paper ballots and post-election audits would likely catch and correct erroneous results.

Even so, temporarily incorrect information could fuel doubts about results, especially if the hackers bragged about their accomplishments. And if subsequent audits that correct digital tampering dramatically change vote tallies, bad-faith actors might seize on those changes to falsely allege fraud.

*  *  *

And there you have it, the election might be fraudulent – but you know, ‘it’s okay when we say it.’

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

The Federal Reserve – and central banks the world over – played a crucial role in making lockdowns possible and weaponizing the panic of politicians. As the lender of last resort and the provider of liquidity for the entire federal government, it removes normal fiscal restraint. It writes checks that cannot bounce to fuel governments in normal times but is always ready to make possible emergency spending too even if existing revenue and public consensus is otherwise absent. 

Starting with the $2.2 trillion CARES act of March 27, 2020, and continuing for a full year, Congress massively subsidized and hence funded and rewarded states that locked down, enabling stimulus payments to businesses and individuals amounting to some $10.4 trillion over two years. It was all funded by debt that the Federal Reserve added to its balance sheets, even while the Fed drove interest rates back to zero in the hope of avoiding economic collapse. 

In short, the lockdown was monetized with the printing press. Without a Fed, spending on that level would have destroyed the credit worthiness of the US. So yes, the Fed is wholly culpable in making the entire calamity possible and allowing for its continuation for two years and more. The results are as inevitable as the sunset: we now face the highest rates of inflation in forty years. Because central banks around the world collaborated in this operation, inflation is global too. 

There was no avoiding this fate. Early on, I joined many others in doubt that Fed chairman Jerome Powell was serious about stopping inflation. Initially, it seemed like his reversal from the zero-interest rate policy — the one that began back in 2008 and eventually unleashed this whole beast — was cosmetic. But he has kept it up. Six times this year he has bumped up the federal funds rate. And he promises there is more to come. 

Yes, there have been terrible consequences of this tightening for bubbly markets. Real estate is crashing hard. We would call it a buyers’ market if there were buyers. There seem only to be sellers but they are having little success because financing is too expensive. The curves in home sales are turning vertically downwards. In some ways, the results could be worse than in 2008 simply because the crazy boom was in such close calendar proximity to the bust. 

Then there’s devastation to the bond and stock markets, plus an emerging crisis in the tech sector that flew so high during lockdowns, with job losses and hiring freezes everywhere. Twitter’s firing of 50% of workers will likely be the norm in the tech sector in a matter of months. 

To top it off, high inflation isn’t going anywhere, and, in some sectors like utilities, is higher than ever (14%). Nothing Powell is doing now is going to fix that problem in the near and medium term. We are stuck with $6.5 trillion in newly printed dollars sloshing around the world today. And that is added to by the damage done by central banks the world over. All out of panic. 

And yes, it is Powell’s fault. Now he is trying to reverse the damage he caused by driving rates higher and higher, virtually guaranteeing the entrenchment of stagflation. 

Why is he doing this? One possible theory: he is mad as hell. I explain why in the scenario below which combines what we know with new research and fills in some gaps with my own informed speculations. 

Think back to the first and second quarters of 2019. Powell had already decided that he was done with zero-interest-rate policies. He started to tighten money by raising rates in the Spring and Summer. He was determined to patch up the Fed’s balance sheet and offload all the junk they had bought over the previous ten years. This was his policy and he was determined to push through. He flinched a bit in the Fall of 2019 but generally had every ambition to clean up the mess. 

Then February 2020 came along. As best we can tell from documents that we’ve pieced together and connections we’ve made, Powell was likely getting phone calls and office visits. They were not only from Anthony Fauci but also from the National Security Council and FEMA, which was then itching to take over pandemic planning. They eventually did. 

Powell was surely told that the virus was much worse than a regular flu bug. It was a result of a lab leak in Wuhan, China, the one funded in part by US taxpayers indirectly through a grant from the National Institutes of Health. But now this very lab has released a bioweapon. That meant that national security was at stake. 

We are at war, he was likely told, and he’d better get on board. He didn’t want to but, at the same time, it’s better when you are Fed chairman not to be accused of sedition in the midst of a major national security operation. 

And so, he decided to go along. The long march to profligate credit expansion began with lowered federal funds rates on March 5, 2020. This was before lockdowns had begun in the US and before Congress had allocated any money to states and the pandemic response. Following travel restrictions, the release of the HHS pandemic plan on March 13, and especially following the March 16 lockdowns, each step toward easy money was more extreme than the last. 

Powell was there, ready to buy any and all debt that Congress created. It kept going on and on, for more than $10 trillion by the time things settled down. Powell was good for $6.5 trillion of that, with the rate of money expansion reaching 27% at the height. 

The entire time, because he is not an idiot, he knew for sure what the results would be: inflation, pricing chaos, and financial disaster. But he went along because FEMA, the NSC, and the Department of Homeland Security told him that this was a better fate than mass death. And that’s what they believed or pretended to believe. 

Public health officials made every effort to make apocalyptic predictions come true. They distributed deeply flawed PCR tests, and subsidized hospitals provided they declare Covid deaths, and encouraged misclassified people all over the place. The National Security Council and FEMA, along with the CDC, set out to get Big Tech and the national media to join them in the holy crusade against the pathogen

But there was a problem. As time went on, it became ever more obvious that the pathogen behaved like a textbook respiratory virus. It was severe in the elderly with comorbidities but had only a 0.035% infection fatality rate for anyone under the age of 70. Meanwhile, the lockdowns that the Fed’s money pumping made possible killed more people than the virus, based on excess death data from 2021. And the vaccine that was supposed to solve all the problems didn’t work as advertised.

Meanwhile, we are stuck with terrible inflation results that have so harmed the economic well being of everyone. Powell is being blamed for it all. He came into office with the hope of going down in history as a great Fed chairman like Volcker but has been stuck with the results of policies that he quite possibly never wanted. 

Perhaps this is what accounts for his current anger and his dogged determination to strangle the inflationary beast one way or another. His powers are limited mostly to messing around with interest rates but that is what he is doing. He has come to believe that his best hope at this point is to get real interest rates into positive territory. 

What does this mean? It means that there are two or three increases of 75 basis points left in his arsenal. That will get the federal funds rate to 6%, still below the Fed’s favorite measure of inflation, personal consumption expenditures. But he might be betting that the damage is cooling off. At this point, and perhaps it will happen by the Spring of 2023, he will obtain a match of the PCE rate and the federal funds rate, if he is lucky.

Even if Powell is successful, there is a massive ocean of money out there that needs to wash through the global economy, like a virus that must become endemic. The velocity of money is increasing right now, and labor costs are rising too, which means that inflation is wholly embedded, as David Stockman has observed. Prices have not increased enough to make business growth viable for anyone but the largest companies. Meanwhile, savings are plummeting and credit card debt is rising. 

Based on what we are seeing now, we have another year of inflation ahead of us before it drops down to the Fed’s target of 2%. Meanwhile, there will be no going back to 2019 prices in any sector. 

Powell knows this. He hates it but he is determined not to be blamed for it. For his part, he believes the blame lies elsewhere: with the apocalyptics, the conspirators, a profligate Congress, a confused President, and the shadowy bunch in the national security state. With them, and under this scenario, he is not likely on speaking terms. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left with stagflation as far as the eye can see.

What’s important at this point is to avoid the crack-up boom that can sometimes follow these kinds of policy disasters. We should count ourselves lucky if we somehow avoid that plus dodge the bullet of a full-scale financial crisis. 

A very quiet day with no FedSpeak and no macro (consumer credit data ‘meh’) ended with stocks higher amid tumbling VIX (who fears the midterms?); bonds, bitcoin, bullion, and black gold all lower.

Futures continued to levitate overnight (despite a weaker open driven by AAPL production headlines). At the US cash open, stocks quickly puked back their gains with Small Caps, Nasdaq, and S&P all going red. Markets oscillated quietly ahead of the midterms, then at around 1345ET – with absolutely no headline catalyst – a wave of buying suddenly hit every US index, lifting everything comfortably green on the day…

The Dow managed to get back into the green from pre-FOMC statement (not pre-Powell puke)…

VIX was sold all day after gapping higher (who needs hedges ahead of elections and CPI)…

The sudden surge in stocks coincided with an aggressive squeeze in the most-shorted stocks…

Source: Bloomberg

And a big buy program flushed through cash equities…

Source: Bloomberg

Treasury yields were sold today but traders said the pressure more driven by a heavy corporate calendar than any macro insights. The long-end underperformed (+7bps)…

Source: Bloomberg

The 10Y Yield rose to test the post-Powell spike highs…

Source: Bloomberg

Rate trajectory expectations were basically unchanged on the day…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar tumbled for the second day in a row, finding support at one-month lows. This is the biggest 2-day drop since March 2020…

Source: Bloomberg

Brazil’s Real continued to give back its post-Lula-Election short-squeeze gains…

Source: Bloomberg

Friday’s crypto gains have begun to unwind amid FTX/Binance aggro. Bitcoin fell back below $21k…

Source: Bloomberg

Spot Gold went nowhere today despite USD weakness, unable to hold above $1680…

Source: Bloomberg

Oil prices ended lower as hopes of  China COVID restrictions easing faded…

Finally, there was one other asset that rallied, NatGas soared on cold weather fears (and pipeline anxiety)…

Winter is coming in the US and it’s going to be expensive (just don’t blame Biden).