Hometown Newspaper For The Free World
A new report shows that global container shipping rates have jumped some 29%, as of the end of April, 2024. While the Pentagon is confident that military actions against the Iran-back Houthi terrorists in Yemen are succeeding in tamping down attacks on shipping, the mess of port congestion around the world is also seriously impacting the shipping world, which will inevitably cause significant price increases on all imported goods.
Read more here, or watch here.
Dollar Tree has announced unexpected plans to close a total of 1000 stores over the next few years starting with the closing of 600 Family Dollar stores in the first half of this year. All of the closings are coming to its U.S. stores, none of its Canadian stores are included in the closing. The closings have been attributed to Family Dollar’s acquisition of Dollar Tree in 2015, which experts say has never panned out.
In 2019, a Virginia Jury awarded record companies $1 billion after finding Cox Communications’ customers guilty of committing 10,000 copyright violations. The ruling was overturned by the 4th Circuit Federal Appeals Court, which said the award was excessive and warranted a new trial to determine what the right amount should be.
Cox Communications wins order overturning $1 billion US copyright verdict – Reuters
Excerpt:
Cox Communications, the cable television and internet service provider, convinced a U.S. appeals court to throw out a $1 billion jury verdict in favor of several major record labels that had accused it of failing to curb user piracy, setting the stage for a new trial on the matter.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, ruled on Tuesday that the amount of damages was not justified and that a federal district court should hold a new trial to determine the appropriate amount.
Minutes from the Federal Reserve’s latest monetary policy committee meeting reveal there are no plans to cut interest rates in the near future.
Jerome Powell, in the meeting, suggested “We will need to see continuing evidence to build confidence that inflation is moving down sustainably to our goal.” The current Fed Rate at 5.25% -5.5% is the highest it’s been in 23 years, a rate that has remained unchanged since July of 2023.
Fed minutes confirm that no rate cuts are imminent | Economy and Business – english.elpais.com
Excerpt:
The minutes of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy committee meetings are always revealed late. And when the economy is, as it is now, at a turning point, a three-week drag can be a long time. With that caveat, the minutes from its January 30-31 meeting confirm the message already delivered by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell: rates have peaked, their next move will be down, but that is not imminent. Add to each of these statements the adverb “foreseeably”.
Powell usually gives a good summary of the meetings, but their minutes add valuable nuance. On this occasion, most of the Fed’s message sounds familiar, but the minutes include an explicit warning against rushing too quickly into rate cuts: “Some participants noted the risk that progress toward price stability could stall, particularly if aggregate demand strengthened or supply side healing slowed more than expected. Participants highlighted the uncertainty associated with how long a restrictive monetary policy stance would need to be maintained. Most participants noted the risks of moving too quickly to ease the stance of policy and emphasized the importance of carefully assessing incoming data in judging whether inflation is moving down sustainably to 2%. A couple of participants, however, pointed to downside risks to the economy associated with maintaining an overly restrictive stance for too long.”
The Internal Revenue Service is deploying AI tools to help it deal with complex tax prosecution cases it could previously not manage with the resources it had. It is allegedly using this expensive toy to target the wealthy but given its capture by DNC-CCP anti-American revolutionaries, one has little doubt it will be used to contrive prosecutable cases to target the enemies of the cultist party this department now represents.
From the NY Times report:
The announcement on Friday demonstrated how a more muscular I.R.S. is using some of the $80 billion allocated through last year’s Inflation Reduction Act to target the wealthiest Americans and tackle the kinds of cases that had become too complex and cumbersome for the beleaguered agency to handle. The agency’s new funding is intended to help the I.R.S. raise more federal revenue by cracking down on tax cheats and others who use sophisticated accounting maneuvers to avoid paying what they owe. But the allocation has been politically contentious, with Republicans claiming that the I.R.S. will use the funding to harass small businesses and middle-class taxpayers.
Even the NY Times, one of the premier content marketing war machines of the DNC-CCP, knows in advance Americans (as opposed to progmericans, which are not Americans at all) will see right through this ruse and recognize it as the existential threat that it is. They couch Americanism under the brand Republican, a brand they were instrumental in polluting with the most egregious of sins for the woketarian, being racist and bigoted (though their term of racist just means “white people invented evil so they should be discriminated against,” and their term bigot just means “does not approve of the destruction of the family and human biological reality.”)
The resistance to the DNC-CCP’s efforts to dismantle the American republic and replace it with a systemic, pedo-enabling cult that bases its authority on the “lived experiences” of the approved classes of people is far broader than “Republicans,” or “conservatives.” The anti-woke “left” is just as fed up with this hateful ideology as the anti-woke “right” is, and many more who fall outside of those designations altogether are equally fed up.
A coalition of hope to combat the real hate, the DNC-CCP and its organs of terror, is forming, and it is only getting bigger with each human life the cult destroys.
That climate is not changing, and it is not ready to allow the IRS to continue to use such tools to destroy more American lives “for the good of the whole,” with the whole being the billionaire sponsors of the spread of this anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-human disease.
A Deputy Dean of the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, Shu Ning, finally said the quiet part out loud when addressing the dramatic rise of the Chinese economy over the past 50 years and the dilemma it now faces. Ning said, “The traditional way of stimulating the economy, through a credit boom and leveraging, has reached an end.” The collapse of China’s property sector and the fast-approaching bankruptcy of its local governments is the fruit of this fact, that China’s days of gaming the system is over.
China’s reputation as a Communist nation is belied by its unwillingness and even ability to afford to provide government social safety nets. It is as if they took the worst parts of communism, spreading the lie that the social is more real than the individual, and therefore the state has a right, a duty to force citizens to align with the state’s definition of the proper social, and coupled it with the worst of “capitalism,” to be driven towards short-term-gain profits over the health, safety, and well-being of the people.
Chairman Xi calls social spending “welfarism,” which he eschews, fearing it will make the Chinese worker soft. Sounds like a stereotypical robber baron to me. He said in a speech two years ago, “Even in the future, when we have reached a higher level of development and are equipped with more substantial financial resources, we still must not aim too high or go overboard with social security, and steer clear of the idleness-breeding trap of welfarism.”
The billionaire elites that are currently mostly “in charge” in America should be paying very close attention to the model they are seeking to drive America into, a “mixed” economy that has all the authoritarian controls of communism and all the ruthless profit-taking of capitalism without morality, corporatism.
They want to continue to exploit the poor and needy through profit-taking while controlling their thoughts through the idealism of communism, the false idealism that creates an upside down cross, where the innocent against their will are sacrificed for the “good of the whole,” the sins of the elites.
The rise in dissent at some of the highest levels (measured though it might be, as in the case of the myth of the free speech warrior, Elon Musk) is a sign to this writer that at least some of the billionaire elites have figured out the China model isn’t the promise it was once thought to be, that, perhaps, preserving some measure of free will for the people will, in the end, help their long-term bottom line.
The China model is a cycle of accounting tricks that eventually collapses the whole system. This is what appears to be happening in China. It’s happening in America as well, but not so profoundly, for we still preserve some semblance of republicanism that has allowed some measure of transparency and accountability to still remain in our system, though the DNC-CCP is working hard to stamp those parts out, still fundamentally sold on the China model for its elite billionaires that fund its operations, and for whom the benefit of said operation rests most richly with.
By a vote of 49-47 the U.S. Senate confirmed the openly man and woman denying and woketarian devotee Kalpana Kotagal to serve on the Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC), meaning the trans-racial ideologue will inject the anti-American ideology into the workplace by forcing businesses to follow the ungodly rules of the seditious left.
Republicans failed to grasp the full reality of a Senate that would confirm such a hateful bigot to such an impactful position in American culture, with Ted Cruz (R-TX) saying, “I’m incredibly concerned about Kalpana Kotagal’s record of support for radical transgender ideology.” He added, “The Equal Employment Opportunity Comission was created to combat racism and sexism in the workplace, but the woke Left is trying to use the EEOC to push its agenda on eomployers, and based on Kotagal’s record I think she will use her position to attack religious liberty and force her politics on Texas companies.”
The vote now gives the party sedition, the party of fear, the party of hate, the majority on the EEOC, meaning the perverse ideology this hateful woman holds is sure to be the new “standard” the now-fallen EEOC will adopt. Another American institution has fallen to the seditionists.
When will Republicans openly call the DNC the revolutionary party that seeks to destroy the American republic? When will Republicans represent America and defy openly the lawlessness of a political party that has gone totally rogue and is putting the entire country at risk of further destabilization from within and a weakening from without that is causing our enemies to lick their lips in anticipation of the feast the Democrats seem hellbent to deliver to them?
Again, this writer calls on GOP-controlled states to declare the Democratic party an anti-American revolutionary terrorist organization engaging in illegal activities that merit the seizure of DNC assets in their state, including DNC-controlled businesses, and the arrest of DNC leaders. The longer you wait, the more you assure the DNC will do to you what you still have the power to do to them.
Bob Iger allegedly wants to continue to be the CEO of Disney according to industry insiders. After Iger (the first Bob) handed over the reigns of Disney to Bob Chapek (the second Bob) during the Covid-19 plandemic, he returned a couple of years later ostensibly temporarily to attempt to shore up the failing Disney enterprise.
Upon taking the helm, the bleeding has continued with Disney, with the latest coming from mega budget films like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny failing to make their money back, let alone make a profit.
Apparently, after continuing to drive Disney into the ground through embracing the systemic pedophilic ideology of the DNC-CCP, Bob Iger now wants to stay indefinitely as the head of the world’s largest child grooming media empire.
Iger’s contract expires this December. He hopes to extend it for years beyond that deadline, insiders report.
NYC’s unconstitutional law forcing businesses to de facto hire the people the state wants them to hire goes into effect. New York City Local Law 144 forces companies to submit their hiring algorithms to DNC activists who will then dictate to them who they can actually hire as opposed to who they want to hire. Merit is no longer to be considered, rather, preferential treatment is to be given to people that do not fit into one of the following categories: white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, male, female, non-leftist.
Failure to submit to the de facto state trade union that is not unlike the kind created by mid-20th Century Germans will result in thousands of dollars of fines that will lead to imprisonment if you rightly refuse to pay a fine for an unconstitutional law.
In defense of the unconstitutional law, leftist activist Daniel Shwarz, a senior member of the of the Orwellian named ACLU (NY Chapter), said the law doesn’t go far enough in assuring only proper leftist-approved people get selected. He claimed, “The … proposed rules [must be strengthened to] ensure broad coverage of [hiring algorithms], expand the bias audit requirements and provide transparency and meaningful notice to affected people in order to ensure that [algorithms] don’t operate to digitally circumvent New York City’s laws against discrimination. Candidates and workers should not need to worry about being screened by a discriminatory algorithm.”
These are all dog whistles for the new fascism the left is currently forcing on the American people.
Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salmon stated that the continued voluntary oil production cuts, which amounted to 1 million barrels a day for the Saudis, would continue at least one more month, into August. More importantly, he also made it clear the efforts signal the Kingdom’s support for its Russian ally.
Prince Abdulaziz said: “In the last move this week, yes, we are all continuing with our voluntary cut, but again, part of what we have had done with our colleagues from Russia was also to mitigate the cynical side of spectators about what was going on with Saudi Arabia and Russia.”
The move continues to fray already-frayed U.S.-Saudi relations and seems to indicate the continued movement of the House of Saud away from the West and towards Russia and China as U.S. power in the region continues to diminish, along with its credibility, especially under the Biden regime.
