SKYE’S LINKS 06/01/23
To Infinity and Beyond
This is the number one urban and young adult song on iTunes, with downloads displacing Tailor Swift. Swift is in the middle of a national concert tour and has some of the most devoted fans ever. By all rights, she should easily be in the top slot.
If leftists are losing blacks and young adults, they have a problem unseen in their history.
The Regulatory State
The Supreme Court issued a ruling that clarifies the meaning of “navigable waters of the United States.” To the surprise of enviros everywhere, they found that laws about navigable waters mean “waters that can be navigated.” Examples are rivers, oceans, and lakes.
The EPA defined navigable waters as surface water except swimming pools for years. According to the EPA, examples are puddles, creeks, and marshes on private property. The EPA claimed dominion over the smallest of water puddles in their effort to stop private development.
If the EPA chiefs that pursued the blatantly false definition had been in the private sector, they would have been fired for misconduct long ago.
Vivek was censored and banned from Linkedin, requiring an executive override to return his account. He complained about Biden and China and the consequences of ESG regulations. It’s presidential candidate censorship and shadowbanning season again. It seems like only yesterday…
The IRS has joined the FBI in crossing the Rubicon. This refers to Julius Ceaser marching his army across the river in Northern Italy and on to Rome. This practice was against the political convention during the Roman Republic, and the Republic was lost shortly after that.
The FBI admitted to building a permanent staff to interfere with presidential elections. FBI administrators now openly use every tool a massive government can muster, including instigating riots and planting explosives. They have the identity of the Northern Virginia man that transported two pipe bombs through the D.C. Metro system to the Capital and Republican headquarters but refused to release the name of one of their own. Later it was determined that the pipe bombs were dummies meant to be planted and “found” on live TV.
We have a severe problem, which is not all that different from the abovementioned problem during Ancient Rome. When a government, people, or company demands 100% compliance, 100% of the time to arbitrary and intentionally contradictory rules, there is tyranny—the days of the self-correcting Republic died when the agencies became enforcement zealots. They now create crimes where non actually existed, such as driving through a water puddle on private land, planting fake pipe bombs, or hiring mentally incompetent people to drive rental vans into the White House barricades while weirdly transporting an old Nazi flag.
SCOTUS issues huge victories for freedom and the property rights of landowners!
Supreme Court Reins EPA Power in Sackett Homeowner Case
More on this crucial case:
Here is another property rights case rooted in the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause that SCOTUS has just decided justly:
Big Tech censors Ramaswamy for climate change and crooked Xiden blasphemy:
GOP Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy Says LinkedIn ‘Locked’ His Account
The IRS is out of control, threatening Taibbi, the Twitter Files guy:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/taibbi-my-crazy-irs-case
Indeed, the FBI has crossed the Rubicon:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-has-crossed-rubicon
And it sure looks like the FBI was involved in the J6 fake pipe bombs incidents:
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Election Season
The dems are heading into 2024 with a stronger position than expected. They now control many publicly traded companies and the rest of the institutions, whether public or private. Universities are informing students and graduates that the three-year student loan hiatus will end in September, and time is running out for loan forgiveness.
A.I. It will be a big player this election as facts, figures, interviews, photographs, and everything else are now created with a few mouse clicks. The extent of propaganda being unleashed is unlike anything in the past. You can bet your life that the propaganda will be towards compliance with the daily narrative and against freedom and rational thinking.
Election integrity is still the gorilla in the room, and little has been done to control cheating. All the research into how elections are stolen improved the ability to commit fraud.
The objective is control over the federal budget. This is so much money concentrated into such few hands that they will do anything to win. CPAs have been detecting fraud for centuries, yet CPAs are prevented from building auditable election validation systems.
What the GOP and Republican politicians need to know and do, starting right now, if they want a chance of winning in 2024:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/lot-has-change-quickly-republicans-have-chance-2024
CPAs can help to true elections:
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Transgender Entitlements
The newly supreme transgender victim class has already crushed merit-based education and scoring and is plowing through banking and free markets. At every point, the assault is upon the English Common Law’s values that form the basis of American Law. Migrants are encouraged from deeply socialist and communist nations, while those from free republics are turned away.
Identity politics are in full swing as the transvestites even smash the less militant gays in the quest for the most deserving victim status. Regardless of which letter becomes the queen of the hill, it’s all about group identity and not individuals.
Boycotts of woke brands seem to work because they are genuinely decentralized, and people have had enough.
Wisdom from the Mises Institute on “transgender rights”:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trans-rights-means-trans-entitlements-and-end-civil-society
How boycotts work:
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Economics
The budget debate is less about how much will be spent but who will spend it. The budget show is mostly theater with proclamations and declarations of victory on both sides.
Some key points: The left is not complaining at all. The deficit continues to grow at an ever faster rate.
Whether the deficit is treated as just a number or real money, the ever-increasing federal expenditures keep adding dollars. New dollars are inflationary, requiring the government to increase taxation and the Federal Reserve to push higher interest rates to mitigate inflation.
The 87,000 new IRS agents Kevin McCarthy vowed to block are now in the budget. Look out; they are coming for you with their woke/hate whitey ideology. Tax auditing is going to be ugly.
For investors, good sense about the debt ceiling and default from the Mises Institute:
McMaken: Three Lies They’re Telling You About The Debt Ceiling
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ESG-The Cultural Revolution
JP Morgan and others are now buying lots of carbon credits. Not to be cynical, but this is a way to convert cash into new assets that lack voting rights.
Alaska is creating carbon credits for sale through thinning forests. Their argument is that managed forests prevent fire risk, allow more wood growth, and remove more carbon. They plan to sell these credits to the oil companies operating within Alaska.
JP Morgan treats the credits as an asset class, and Alaska treats them as taxation with a happy face.
British insurance giant Lloyds became the sixth major to leave the U.N. Net Zero alliance this week and the tenth overall. There were only thirty insurance companies in the U.N. Syndicate.
The insurance companies realize their presence in the syndicate exposes them to significant antitrust trouble. The ESG agenda has an antitrust problem significant enough to take down BlackRock. The exposure is well beyond Enron.
Shareholder lawsuits against Target and Anheuser Bush for abandoning fiduciary responsibility are beginning to emerge.
More for investors; JP Morgan Chase goes green – but not far or too fast; JPMC stockholders were not amused by the proposal to refrain from investing in fossil fuel production. Skip to the last two paragraphs in the link below.
JPMorgan Chase invests $200 mn on carbon removal – Breitbart
Alaska to sell carbon indulgences to the suckers who want to buy them (like JPMorgan Chase):
Lloyd’s of London quits net zero U.N. group:
Lloyd’s Becomes Latest Firm To Exit U.N.’s Net-Zero Alliance
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The Budget Agreement
This week’s debt ceiling deal increases the federal deficit by four trillion dollars over two years. It prevents making federal spending a central issue during the 2024 election and hands group-identity politics wins to the dems. It also increases tax enforcement and funding for regulatory agencies.
The federal government is 509% larger than in 2020 and growing like cancer. Exponential growth is good if the strategy feeds the leviathan to death, but this is not the strategy.
Explosive government debt is causing GDP and GDI (gross domestic income) data to diverge. The GDI indicates that we are solidly in a recession and have been all year. However, the enormous expenditures for Ukraine and entitlements for illegal immigrants are counted within the GDP.
Wokistan has erred by assuming that Middle America will continue consuming regardless of the woke parade. They will not and cannot.
The rage against the left continues to grow.
The current state of the debt ceiling deal would allow a $2 trillion per year increase in debt – NO!
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/gross-domestic-income-gdi-suggests-us-recession-right-now
More about McCarthy’s fake “spending limits” here:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/hard-pass-heres-whats-debt-ceiling-deal-republicans-are-about-nuke
The ugly reality of the debt limit deal; ‘Crats are crying crocodile tears about how they are not getting anything while ‘Crat leadership is whipping them to vote yes:
Total Farce: Real Spending Under Debt Ceiling Deal Goes Up Next Year
More reasons to oppose it – including a big one that nobody else has mentioned:
Federalie public debt has run away from both official inflation and GDP since the Great Financial Crisis. It has gone nearly vertical since the Fauci/CCP pandemic normalized trillion-dollar-plus deficits:
DeSantis on the debt deal; Florida has a large budget surplus and a debt equal to 1.4% of their GDP, whereas the U.S. has a huge budget deficit and a debt of over 100% of the GDP
More for investors; GDP + GDI (Gross Domestic Income) suggests we have been in a weird mild recession for the past six months. I think that the high employment with relatively low GDP to show for it represents a productivity loss that involves Boomers retiring and their replacement with low-diligence Millennials and Zers who have been taught that 2+2=5 is good enough:
Gross Domestic Income GDI Suggests the U.S. Is In Recession Right Now
But that recession is about to get worse by Sept. 1 when student loan repayments resume:
More from the Mises Institute, this time on the inevitable coming boom in bankruptcies: