Washington has now taken its war against Russia's state funded English language broadcaster RT to a global level, and isurging all nations to block its broadcasts and close down offices.
Already back in 2022 after being officially branded a foreign agent by the US government which resulted in major platforms dropping its programing, RT America's offices in the US were shuttered and it was effectively booted from the country. But on Friday the Biden administration unveiled a new effort which seeks to expose RT as part of "malign global intelligence and influence operations".
The State Department claims to possess US intelligence reports that suggest Russian intelligence is deeply embedded in RT around the world. "Thanks to new information, much of which originates from RT employees, we know that RT possessed cyber capabilities and engaged in covert information and influence operations and military procurement," Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Friday.
US officials allege that Russian intelligence efforts utilized RT to the point of crowdfunding for military gear. "Under the cover of RT, information produced through this unit flows to Russian intelligence services, Russian media outlets, Russian mercenary groups, and other state and proxy arms of the Russian government," Blinken said.
The alleged crowdfunding activity on behalf of the government allowed "sniper rifles, suppressors, body armor, night vision equipment, drones, radio equipment, personal weapon sights, diesel generators" to be sent to Russian units fighting in Ukraine.
Biden officials say that want to put a dent in RT's operations globally and hope to convince allies and nations from Latin America to Europe to Asia that it is a 'threat' to democracy.
CNN, which was the first to report on the new State Department initiative, included the following hilarious line in its reporting:
Asked for comment by CNN, RT responded with a mocking email that read in part: "We’ve been broadcasting straight out of the KGB headquarters all this time."
The timing of the public rollout of this major anti-RT initiative is interesting and curious to say the least, given the US is getting closer to the November election, and admin officials and the Democratic party are busy resurrecting the old 'Russiagate' talking points against Trump. There are also the usual same election 'foreign interference' warnings being loudly sounded from US officials. This has also included talk of China and Iran as supposedly meddling in significant ways.
Is it a coincidence that the administration is talking about RT as if it's 2016? We think not.
It’s been just over two years since my July 2022 article entitled “The Catastrophic Covid Convergence,” in which I attempted to explain the seemingly inexplicable cascade of events known as the Covid pandemic response (in this article shortened simply to “Covid”) that began in early 2020.
I’ve spent the interim researching and writingextensively about this topic. The Covid story is so much more complicated than I initially understood. It is not about a single public health event run by a few misguided or ill-intentioned individuals. It is not confined to any one government, and it is not a consequence of any one country’s internal politics. It is, I now believe, a precautionary chapter in a much larger global saga.
The important questions to ask about Covid, given this understanding, are also very different from the ones I was asking two years ago, such as: Was the virus an engineered bioweapon? Was it intentionally released? What were the names and motives of the people who ran the response?
Although these continue to be the focus of much public outcry and heated debate, they are actually secondary to the Covid story I will tell in this two-part article.
In Part 1,I will explain the convergence of global developments that led to Covid being predictable, if not inevitable.
In Part 2, I will look at how the globally uniform response to Covid was achieved.
In contrast to all my previous articles, this time I will include as few quotes and references as possible, because I want to tell a story based on my current knowledge and understanding, without a lot of distractions. The bibliography at the end includes key books and articles that tell different parts of this story with hundreds of pages of references, for those who are interested.
Part 1: The Lead-Up to Covid
In this telling, Covid is a predictable – if not inevitable – outcome of the evolution of the US national security state and its convergence with global public-private partnerships, in the period since the end of the Cold War.
Concomitant Rise of War on Bioterror and Unchecked Global Corporatism
When the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, it was quickly replaced by the “War on Terror” as the income-generating, self-perpetuating-and-expanding mechanism for the US military-industrial complex.
The war on terror generated decent returns for the national security apparatus when the 9/11 attacks were used as a pretext for Middle Eastern “regime changes,” and when the terror threat was parlayed into the creation of DHS (Department of Homeland Security) – the US Government’s designated overseer of perpetual states of emergency and wrap-around internal surveillance.
The anthrax letters following 9/11 launched a less-noticed, but equally lucrative and long-term, budget-expanding war – this one on bioterror.
Biodefense experts mustered support for the war on bioterror with the terrifying claim that advances in biotechnology could enable random nut jobs to create deadly bioweapons in their garages. Major cities were vulnerable to bioterror attacks through their subways, water systems, etc. Loss of life could reach millions. Potential economic loss: trillions. Preventing such calamities was worth almost any price.
This increasingly lucrative war on bioterror developed simultaneously with another snowballing trend after the fall of Communism: a global march toward unchecked corporatism.
When the Eastern Bloc fell, no military, geographic, or ideological pushback remained against global corporatist forces. Wealth increasingly accrued to individuals and companies operating not within specific nations, but in a supranational sphere of deal-making and influence peddling. International banks and investment funds came to own more debt, and hold more wealth, than any national governments.
In this environment, enormous global conglomerates arose – referred to as global public-private partnerships, or GPPPs – loosely formed around various areas of activity and interest. One such GPPP was the biodefense/pandemic preparedness industrial complex – a globe-spanning, “too-big-to-fail” entity that ran the Covid pandemic response.
Rise of the Biodefense/Pandemic Preparedness Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP)
To understand how the biodefense/pandemic preparedness GPPP coalesced, it is necessary to first look at the fields of biodefense and pandemic preparedness separately, and then at how they came to be yoked together into one rapidly metastasizing cartel – first as part of the US security state, and then as an arm of the global governance structure dedicated to “global health security.”
When Biodefense and Pandemic Preparedness Were Separate
Before the Anthrax attacks of 2001, the field of biodefense was mostly the purview of intelligence and military specialists. In secret labs, biowarfare scientists tried to concoct deadly bioweapons so they could then devise foolproof countermeasures against them. Intelligence agents tried to assess the biowarfare capabilities of enemy nations and rogue terrorists. They devised plans for how to quarantine a military base or a city in the case of an attack, and how to get countermeasures to soldiers/civilians as quickly as possible.
Because a bioterror attack would likely be localized to an area containing at most a few million people, the biodefense response of quarantine-until-countermeasure was a geographically, and temporally, limited plan. And because there were no bioweapons attacks on the US after 2001, these plans remained entirely theoretical.
Similarly, before biodefense started attracting so much attention, pandemic preparedness was a quiet backwater of the public health realm. Epidemiologists and public health experts had come up with time-tested, non-dramatic plans to contain disease outbreaks: identify clusters of patients with serious/life-threatening symptoms, treat their symptoms with available medicines, isolate them from others if necessary, increase healthcare capacity on a local level as necessary, and let everyone else go on with their lives.
This type of disease outbreak preparedness is almost never front-page news and does not garner large budgets or public visibility. Yet it worked remarkably well to limit the number of deaths from even very deadly pathogens, like Ebola, MERS, and H1N1 influenza, to an average of no more than about ten thousand a year worldwide between 2000 and 2020 [ref].
In summary, before the turn of the 21st century, both the biodefense and public health fields had relatively modest plans for dealing with deadly disease outbreaks – whether intentionally caused or naturally occurring. And neither type of outbreak ever happened on an unmanageable scale.
When Biodefense and Pandemic Preparedness Merged
The object of biodefense is to protect the military, and also civilian populations, from potential bioweapons attacks. But the pathogen/countermeasure research at the center of biodefense efforts can also be useful for pandemic preparedness, making it a “dual use” endeavor.
Dual use refers to efforts that may serve both military and civilian objectives. In the case of biodefense/pandemic preparedness, it’s easy to see: pathogens can be bioweapons, but they can also spread naturally and may cause destructive waves of disease; and countermeasures, including vaccines, can theoretically be used against both bioterror attacks and natural disease outbreaks.
In the decade after 9/11, as biodefense enjoyed an increasing portion of national security attention and spending, the field attracted many more scientists, academic institutions, and nonprofits to the study of pathogens and countermeasures. Naturally, many of these non-military entities came from fields including virology, immunology, and epidemiology, whose work is used – among other purposes – for pandemic preparedness. The civilian side of the research was mostly funded by public health agencies and mega-nonprofits interested primarily in vaccine development.
It was not long before the two fields merged into one “dual use” entity – conveniently defined as a crucial aspect of national security – called simply “biodefense” or “health security.” In 2006, a new sub-agency was even created to cement the merger: ASPR – a military/intelligence-run entity within HHS – the umbrella civilian public health body. This symbiotic military/civilian enterprise could then attract a great deal more funding, and exert influence over a much vaster array of research institutions, nonprofits, and NGOs than either biodefense or pandemic preparedness could have done separately.
Another impetus for the merger of the two fields was their shared private partners: pharmaceutical companies, whose job it was to help design, research, and ultimately produce whatever countermeasures were deemed necessary for protection, either from bioweapons or naturally occurring pathogens. Ideally, the countermeasures for one type of disease outbreak would also work for the other.
This is why, in the decades after 2001, the biodefense field became obsessed with finding a “platform technology” that could provide protection from any conceivable bioweapon, while the public health/pandemic preparedness field pushed for a “universal flu vaccine” that could provide protection from any naturally occurring, respiratory-disease-causing virus. And, by 2019, both arms of the biodefense complex had invested a huge amount of funding and hype into a specific technology called “mRNA vaccine platforms” – thought to be the sought-after miracle countermeasure to all engineered viral bioweapons and all flu-causing viruses.
Biodefense/Pandemic Preparedness on a Global Scale
As discussed above, while all this merging of military and civilian research on bugs and drugs was happening on a national level, capital and political power were shifting away from nation-states and into global public-private partnerships, or GPPPs.
All of these gargantuan global entities share the following characteristics:
Their backbone is the global banking system, whose interests they represent.
Their agendas are usually aligned with the imperialist agenda of the United States – the world’s only superpower – and its allies.
Their power to impose their agendas on the world’s population comes largely from the US military-industrial complex and its partners and alliances (NATO, EU, Five Eyes, among others).
They seek to enforce their agendas through advanced surveillance technology and AI, with the ultimate goal of gathering identity, health, and behavioral information about the entire world’s population into centralized databases.
They use international governance and networking bodies (UN, WHO, Atlantic Council, WEF, among others) to coordinate and disseminate their agendas to national governments.
They use multinational consulting and management firms to help national governments implement their agendas.
They include multinational corporations run by multibillionaires, who attain astronomical profits through their GPPP activities.
They coalesce around various perceived existential crises, like climate change and “global health security” (another name for international biodefense/pandemic preparedness). These pursuits are marketed to the public not just as altruistic and life-saving, but as the only way to avoid complete global devastation.
Their ability to convince the world’s population to support their agendas derives from the global censorship and propaganda industrial complex – run through international intelligence alliances, partnering with marketing firms, academic institutions, and nonprofits – using “nudge” methods and the psychological warfare playbook (psychological operations, or psy-ops) originally designed for coups and counterinsurgencies.
With these characteristics in mind, we can list some of the main components of the biodefense/pandemic preparedness public-private partnership, to see just how enormous a complex it is. We can also see how the national biodefense complex scales up and merges with the global entity:
The Biodefense GPPP Prepares for an Inevitable Catastrophe
Along with the backing of the international banks and the support of the censorship and propaganda industrial complex (shortened in this article to “psy-op complex”) and multinational consulting firms, all of the components of the biodefense GPPP represent hundreds of billions of dollars in funding and financing, thousands of national and international companies, agencies, academic institutions, and NGOs in dozens of countries, and hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of jobs all over the world. Its sheer size and control over people and resources make this an entity that is “too big to fail.”
Yet without a viable threat of a bioweapons attack or a catastrophic pandemic, this behemoth cannot continue to sustain and grow itself.
For that reason, as it ballooned in the two decades before Covid, the biodefense GPPP had to keep the threat of a catastrophic bioterror attack or global pandemic front and center. And it had to prepare all of its components to respond to the threat when it predictably, if not inevitably, occurred.
Tabletop Exercises
Preparations for the catastrophe included priming the world’s governments for the inevitability of such an event, accomplished through “tabletop exercises” – simulations of what would happen in the event of a deadly bioattack or pandemic.
Between 2001 and 2019, regularly scheduled “tabletop exercises” carried out by representatives of the biodefense GPPP effectively promoted the story of catastrophic global threats posed by bioterror/pandemic events. The content of each exercise was less important than the overarching message: naturally emerging and engineered pathogens posed an existential threat to humanity, and nothing less than a global response would be necessary to avoid armageddon.
Creating a New Business Model for Countermeasures
The most important component of a global response to such a catastrophe, in terms of accruing power and resources for the biodefense GPPP, is the manufacture and distribution of countermeasures to the entire global population, an effort spearheaded by pharmaceutical companies and their hundreds of subcontractors and subsidiaries.
But the traditional business model for private pharmaceutical companies does not lend itself to such a project. No private company can survive, let alone thrive, by devoting significant resources to building and maintaining manufacturing capacity for countermeasures against a hypothetical threat that might never happen. Furthermore, the oversight and regulation of medical products will almost inevitably delay the availability of novel countermeasures until after an attack or outbreak is over. And, finally, even if the countermeasures can be manufactured and approved quickly enough, what if they cause unexpected outcomes (e.g., injury or death) for which the companies could be held liable?
All of these obstacles were overcome by the biodefense GPPP through under-the-radar legislative and legal maneuverings and regulatory capture in the decades leading up to Covid:
Regulatory Barriers Lowered to Zero or Near-Zero
Over several decades, important loopholes in countermeasure regulation were introduced into the legal code, most notably Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). Internationally, defense treaties and biodefense agreements can lower regulatory barriers such that emergency authorization in one country could be applied to others. The WHO Emergency Use Listing (EUL) accomplishes this globally. EUL was first usedfor the Covid vaccines.
Liability Removed from Anyone Working on, Distributing, or Administering Countermeasures
The PREP Act was a necessary additional legal measure to ensure that anyone who did anything with EUA products would not be liable in case the unregulated countermeasures went awry. The liability shield is extended by governments and regulatory bodies internationally along with EUA.
The Novel Coronavirus Trigger
By 2019 all of these preparations for a catastrophic global pandemic were in place, but the civilization-ending pathogen/bioterror attack had not yet materialized.
Then, in late 2019 a propitious public health emergency in Wuhan, China ended the very long dry spell in biodefense disasters: Clusters of patients exhibited severe symptoms of a respiratory disease that could not be attributed to any known pathogen. Analysis of the body fluids of the patients was performed, and a novel coronavirus was identified.
There are many unanswered questions about exactly how and when the novel coronavirus, subsequently called SARS-CoV-2, entered the human population, and how it turned into “the Covid-19 pandemic:” Was the virus engineered? When did the virus begin to circulate? Was the virus intentionally or accidentally released? Was it just one mutating virus, or several different ones?
Regardless of the answers to these questions, the important point to remember is that if it had not been SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, it would have been a different triggering event somewhere else – and the global pandemic response would have been the same.
Debbie Lerman, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, has a degree in English from Harvard. She is a retired science writer and a practicing artist in Philadelphia
The rising cost of care, growing Medicare Advantage pain points, and frustrations over not receiving appropriate or timely payments from commercial insurers are key factors driving health systems to take atougher stancein contract renewal negotiations.
Many health systems reported record losses during the pandemic, and although average margins improved in recent months, they remain substantially lower than pre-pandemic levels. Hospitals continue to face rising operational costs due to inflation, workforce shortages and technology investments, making financial sustainability a top priority.
On the other side of the aisle, the country's largest commercial insurers saw record gains, posting billions in profits in 2023.
Contract negotiation disputes between payers and providers that were reported in the media jumped 69% between 2022 and 2023. This trend appears to be escalating this year: several large health systems — including Gainesville-based UF Health, Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare and Livonia, Mich.-based Trinity Health — have engaged in high-profile contract disputes with commercial insurers.
Providers have gone out-of-network with large payers in multiple markets this year.
Ultimately it's the patient who loses, having to deal with higher out-of-pocket costs, limited access to in-network providers and further delays in care.
In some cases, hospitals and insurers agree to new contracts that are retroactively applied to the date when the original contract expired, but this is not always guaranteed. And if no deal is reached, patients may be responsible for out-of-network costs incurred during that period.
For example, in May, 11 of CommonSpirit's Colorado hospitals went out-of-network with Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield for more than two weeks after the health system rejected various offers that "failed to offer terms that fairly reimburse" for services provided.
The strategy worked for CommonSpirt. On May 17, the health system and Anthem, part of Elevance Health, reached a five-year agreement, retroactive to May 1, when the previous contract expired. The agreement covered commercial, Medicare Advantage and individual plans. More than 40,000 CommonSpirit patients in Colorado have Anthem plans.
St. Louis-based Mercy is the latest health system to take a similar stance, telling Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield that it will go out-of-network with the insurer in Missouri if a new agreement is not reached by Jan. 1, 2025.
"The cost of providing actual care for patients has risen significantly due to inflation, but Anthem has not kept pace with those rising costs when it comes to reimbursing us for the care we provide to our communities," said Dave Thompson, Mercy's senior vice president of population health and president of contracted revenue. "It's unreasonable for the insurer to increase its premiums to patients and employers and increase its profits while expecting those of us providing health care directly to patients daily to bear the brunt of the higher cost for providing that care."
Anthem claims Mercy wants to raise the prices they charge members and employers by five times the current inflation rate, a spokesperson for the insurer told Becker's.
Medicare Advantage has been a particular pain point for health systems, but the program now provides coverage to 51% of the nation's seniors, almost 33 million people. Excessive prior authorization denial rates and slow payments from insurers are some of the well-documented challenges providers face with MA.
Duluth, Minn.-based Essentia Health and Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health are two of the most recent systems to announce that they will be dropping some commercial MA contracts in 2025.
Health plans argue that providers are not investing in the appropriate areas to effectively manage care in a full-risk MA environment. Providers push back against this claim, pointing to the fact that most MA carriers have faced allegations of billing fraud from the federal government and are being probed by lawmakers over their high denial rates.
"[Health systems] are getting paid to essentially do the same thing they might do in traditional Medicare. That's a real missed opportunity and why you're seeing so much ambivalence around MA," SCAN Group CEO Sachin Jain, MD, told Becker's. "MA works when health systems are operating in a full-risk environment and doing their level best to actually manage the care of patients — to invest in chronic disease management and hospital avoidance for ambulatory-sensitive conditions. These are the kinds of things that really make a difference between systems that perform well in MA and those that struggle."
Sens. Dick Durbin and Mike Braun have introduced legislation to crack down on deceptive online promotions of prescription drugs by telehealth firms and social media influencers.
The bill, the Protecting Patients from Deceptive Drugs Online Act, would give the FDA the authority to issue warnings and impose fines on individuals and companies posting false or incomplete information about medications, The Wall Street Journalreported Sept. 13.
Current FDA regulations require drug advertisements from pharmaceutical companies to disclose side effects, but no requirements apply to telehealth firms and influencers who are not directly connected to drugmakers.
Under the proposed bill, the FDA could fine influencers and telehealth companies up to $250,000 for the first violation and $500,000 for subsequent violations within a three-year period. The legislation also would require drugmakers to disclose payments made to influencers, the report said.
Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates is under investigation after allegations that it tried to pressure its personnel to retrieve organs from a hospital patient who was awake and later left the facility alive,The Wall Street Journalreported Sept. 11.
The allegations were presented during a House subcommittee hearing on the U.S. organ-transplant system by Nyckoletta Martin, a former employee of the group. She said workers were ordered by a supervisor to find another surgeon who would take out the organs, but declined. She later quit her job.
"What is clear to me from my time at KODA is that the [organ procurement organization] does not operate in patients' interests, and regularly engages in unethical activities for the sole purpose of trying to keep its lucrative government contract," Ms. Martin wrote in a letter to the committee.
A KODA spokesperson told Becker's that the organization "strictly adheres" to all laws and national guidelines set by regulatory bodies.
"Our commitment to ethical practices means that we follow rigorous protocols to ensure patient safety and integrity throughout the organ donation process," KODA said in a statement. "Organ donation only proceeds after a patient has been declared deceased by independent clinicians from the treating hospital, and we have clear procedures to follow if a patient's condition changes. We do not make determinations of death, nor do we compromise ethical standards for organ donation."
The Kentucky Attorney General's Office is investigating the allegations with law enforcement.
Ms. Martin was one of several who said procurement groups in various states have pushed surgeons to secure organs from living patients.
The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, which represents groups nationally, said they are recovering enough organs to prevent anyone from dying on the waitlist and it wasn't invited to offer testimony at the hearing. It criticized lawmakers for discussing "false, misleading and unsupported allegations.
There are about 56 nonprofit organ procurement organizations across the country. They are paid by Medicare and transplant centers to collect organs from deceased donors and provide them to recipients.
Whenever law enforcement releases information about the drugs in a school shooter’s system, and the media actually report that information, we learn that these children (usually boys) are on a cocktail of psychotropic drugs. A new study indicates that we can now add Adderall and other “treatments” for ADHD to the list of drugs fed into young people that make them go crazy. The problem isn’t guns. We have a prescription drug problem in our schools, one that’s required because our public schools are pointless and boring places for students, especially boys. (And don’t even get me started on the gender madness.)
People who take Adderall may be at a much greater risk of having a mental breakdown, a study suggests.
Those with a prescription for the ADHD drug or other stimulants were over 60 percent more likely to suffer psychosis or mania than people not using the meds.
Stronger doses raised the risk further - people who took the max dose recommended by the FDA were at a fivefold higher likelihood.
The research looked at two groups of people who had a history of depression, anxiety or other mental health issues that put them at risk of psychosis.
Study author Lauren Moran, a researcher at Mass General Brigham, said: ‘Our results show that it is clear that dose is a factor in psychosis risk and should be a chief consideration when prescribing stimulants.’
This is not an inconsequential problem. According to the same article, which relies on data from Symphony Health, since 2009, the number of Adderall prescriptions (both name brand and generic) in America has more than doubled from 15.5 million to 41 million annually. That is a staggering number of prescriptions, most of which are stuffed into school children. According to the Mass General Brigham study, one out of eight Americans are taking these prescriptions, allegedly to treat ADHD.
I’m quite certain that ADHD diagnoses are a way to hide the fact that America’s schools are truly horrible places, and that’s true not just for the “bad,” “broken” schools but for all schools, even the nice, shiny ones with pretty buildings and smiling teachers. My experience with my kids’ nice, shiny public schools was that most of the teachers (not all, but most) were nincompoops who were exactly like the teachers in the classicSimpsonsepisode that saw Lisa steal the teachers’ editions of textbooks:
(Of course, I exclude from this list of moronic teachers those conservatives—plus a handful of liberals, not leftists—who teach, not to indoctrinate students, but because they have a true passion for educating young minds in the best classical tradition.)
Even in my day, public school was dull (and I went through San Francisco public schools when they were introducing all the stupid modern ideas such as “new math”). However, the schools then had one very strong advantage that they lack today: They didnot hate boys. Recess was a place where boys could be truly rough and tumble, while the curriculum inside the classroom recognized boys’ need for lessons about heroes and action.
Nowadays, lawsuits mean recesses are staid and boringly conflict-free, even though boys need to learn conflict, sometimes through the rough justice of the playground. Meanwhile, classroom content is all about feelings. This is true no matter the subject. It’s all feelings. I wasn’t thrilled about reading Call of the Wild when I was in 7th grade, but I can assure you that I tolerated it better than a boy would have if forced to read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
When you make content dull and then deny boys a physical outlet, they are restless and unhappy. And rather than address the problems in the schools that create this restlessness, the schools tell credulous parents to pump their boys full of drugs to sedate them (paradoxically, Adderall is a sedative in children and a stimulant in adults). [UPDATE: John Dale Dunn, M.D., has advised me that this class of drugs is a stimulant for all but that it makes people hyper-focused, a benefit for restless boys in school.] Alternatively, parents are told to give their children psychotropic drugs for depression that could be handled with fewer institutional insults about toxic masculinity, less computer time, and more physical activity.
We are killing our boys psychologically, and then we’re surprised when they come back and, in their drug-induced rage, start killing us physically.
Kamala claimed that the economic policies of the Biden-Harris White House have brought inflation down. I would ask a simple question: Which policies?
There are none. The reason the inflation increase is lower is because people couldn’t afford the compound price increases. It is really rich when a politician brags that 3% is “down” when inflation is still more than double the rate she inherited. But most of the media cheers as they campaign for Harris.
One major problem with the high inflation caused by Biden-Harris policies is that workers demand much higher wages because they can’t afford to pay for the things they need. When the workers receive higher wages, that increase and other costs cascade through the economy, and you get a disastrous cost-push inflation cycle.
The Democrat idiots in California pretended they would help workers by forcing restaurants to pay a $20 minimum wage. The higher wages obviously caused more inflation, but also destroyed jobs, which further compounded the problem. It sure seems that the goal of Democrats is not to give people opportunities, as Kamala says, but to make more people dependent on the government, which accelerates the doom loop. After all, Democrats have said their goal is to remake the greatest country that ever existed.
Here is a report about Boeing workers rejecting a 25% increase over four years, saying it isn’t enough:
Boeing workers vote to strike after contract negotiations rejected by members
IAM [Boeing’s largest union]] said 94.6% of union members rejected the contract offer from Boeing, which called the offer ‘historic’ and highlighted the 25% wage increase over four years as ‘the largest-ever general wage increase.’ About 96% of union members approved the strike, now unfolding at the planemaker’s Seattle factories that make the 737 Max.
Why are we building airplanes powered by jet fuel when Democrats say that oil is an existential threat to our survival?
Potential Port Strike Has Retailers, Manufacturers Scrambling
Retailers and manufacturers are seeking to mitigate a potentially multibillion-dollar hit if members of the International Longshoremen’s Association go on strike beginning Oct. 1 at 13 of the nation’s major East Coast and Gulf Coast ports.
But according to Biden, Harris, and other Democrats, inflation is caused by corporate greed. That is either pure ignorance or an intentional lie to deflect blame so they can get elected.
Open borders and flooding America with millions of illegals clearly compounds the inflation problem. It makes demand exceed supply.
When the government pretends that inflation has declined so rapidly, it allows them to screw poor and middle income people living on social security and disability into a lower cost-of-living-adjustment; next year, it’s only set to increase a miniscule 2.5%.
The TSCL Social Security cost of living adjustment (COLA) model predicts that the COLA for 2025 will be 2.5%, based on a decline from 2.9% to 2.5% in consumer price data.
…
While 2.5% is lower than the 3.2% received in 2024, that wouldn't be far from the historical norm.
…
By law, the annual inflation adjustment is based on the average inflation during July, August, and September as measured by the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). The Bureau of Labor Statistics averages the CPI-W for these three months and then compares it with the same time frame from the previous year.
And the Democrats’ solution for the destruction of the purchasing power of poor- and middle-income people, who they only pretend to care about, is the same as their solution has been for the last several decades:
Higher taxes.
More regulations.
More handouts to pretend they care.
Democrat policies have succeeded in making the Washington D.C. area very rich, even though they produce nothing but headaches for the rest of us.
Democrats claim some of their biggest goals are to reduce the wealth and income gaps, but it’s a zero-sum game, and their policies only make them and the rest of the D.C. area richer, greatly harming people seeking to move up.
In simple terms, Democrats like big government and less power, money, and freedom for the private sector. It never works, but results don’t matter. And most of the media cheers!
