Free Republic

Price inflation is no coincidence. It is a policy. Governments, along with their so-called experts, attempt to persuade you that price inflation stems from anything other than the consistent, albeit slower, rise in aggregate prices year after year. Issuing more currency than the private sector demands, thus eroding its purchasing power and creating a constant annual transfer of wealth from real wages and deposit savings to the government. Oil prices are not a cause of inflation but a consequence. Prices increase as more units of the currency used to denominate the commodity shift to relatively scarce assets. Therefore, oil prices...

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) went after former President Trump on Friday, demanding in a letter that he return about $7.8 million Trump’s companies received from foreign governments while he was in office. House Oversight and Accountability Committee Democrats first made the allegation in a report last week, claiming Trump’s companies accepted money from foreign entities in 20 countries and alleging the payments violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. HOUSE Raskin demands Trump return $7.8M foreign governments paid his companies during presidency BY NICK ROBERTSON - 01/12/24 10:53 AM ET SHARE TWEET Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) Greg Nash Rep. Jamie...

They haven’t used them for many purposes that we’ve seen yet, but presumably they are planning to. January 6 was a big deal on this front, as we learned that it was possible and apparently legal for the government to demand location data and identify people as being in a place based on that location data.

As we've been warning about for a while, the machinations of the globalist elite cabal are squarely focused on depopulation and control. Concepts like the "Green New Deal" and "The Great Reset" have been pushed by the powers-that-be for some time. But there's a new hot topic that's dominating this year's secret Bilderberg Meetings, and it may be the key to everything else they have planned. Artificial Intelligence could be the linchpin that allows all of the globalists' moving parts to come together in a cohesive, destructive machine. There are challenges the powers-that-be face that can be solved by AI,...

Video at the link. Transcript from The Last Refuge (link in comments): [Transcript] – It is hard to think the unthinkable – but there comes a time when there’s nothing else for it. People raised to trust the powers that be – who have assumed, like I once did, that the State, regardless of its political flavour at any given moment, is essentially benevolent and well-meaning – will naturally try and keep that assumption of benevolence in mind when trying to make sense of what is going on around them. People like us, you and me, raised in the understanding...

They tend to collapse spectacularly and the "powers that be" almost-never survive politically -- and frequently physically. Sri Lanka is the latest example; they are literally bankrupt, having bought into the "green" thing and then... oops. The root causes were many, but chief among them were overspending and a commitment to "green" farming practices, which decimated crop yields, spiked prices and then of course here comes higher oil costs. The combination proved fatal to the economy. "The rich" are being literally chased down and slaughtered, with "rich" being defined as "has something, when we have nothing." The President fled the...

Western bureaucracies have spewed to the public the belief that the administrative state safeguards liberal democracies. Good-willed and law-abiding citizens who have traditionally viewed the state as a rather benign, albeit necessary evil, have accepted this belief. The state exists as a “social safety net,” we have been told for about eight decades now. That assertion began to turn sinister – indicative of things to come in democratic governments – after WWII, with the infiltration of Marxist fifth columnists into the governments of Western democracies. Westerners have taken comfort in the mistaken idea that the state creates social/political cohesion and...

This is a 2 minute 20 second video. A great "Reality Check" about "vaccination" programs... Listen to the end. https://rumble.com/vs9s2b-we-told-you-so........html

There’s a sickness emanating from America that seeks to contaminate all of Western civilization. In the words of French President Emmanuel Macron, “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States” are responsible for fomenting a wave of sentiments critical of the French Republic. It’s beyond dispute that many of these social science theories that Macron refers to were incubated by French academics, such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Subsequently, these toxic ideas were taken by American thinkers and developed into a new, malignant strain, primed to be reintroduced to Europe. A recent example of these social sciences...

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra argued that the federal government is entitled to know who in the United States has been vaccinated, responding to anger from GOP House members who say the Biden administration is infringing on personal liberty.“Perhaps we should point out that the federal government has had to spend trillions of dollars to try to keep Americans alive during this pandemic, so it is absolutely the government’s business. It is taxpayers' business if we have to continue to spend money to try to keep people from contracting COVID and helping reopen the economy,” Becerra said on...

This year’s stay-at-home orders and lockdowns imposed by governments on their populations represent a watershed moment in the history of the modern state. Before March 2020, it is unlikely that many politicians - let alone many ordinary people - thought it would be feasible or likely for government officials to force hundreds of millions of human beings to “self-isolate.” But it turns out governments were indeed able to force a sizable portion of the population to abandon jobs, religious practices, extended families, and community life in the name of “flattening the curve.” Whether through fear manufactured by the news media...

They are already calling the current pandemic-induced economic crisis, “The Great Depression of 2020.” The paradigm is, of course, the Great Depression of 1929 that substantially changed the world’s model of development, signaling the onset of State intervention in the economy (the welfare state). Analysts are also calling it “The Great Jump Backwards,” because it will push the world back in time by canceling three decades of economic development. International agencies estimate the contraction in GNP worldwide at -5.2%. The Eurozone with be the hardest hit with -9.1%. “It is the worst economic recession since 1870, a devastating blow for...

The impeachment trial of President Trump rolls on, but back in the real world, signs of a different sort of trouble are growing. It now seems clear we are living in a new anti-Semitic moment. From American college campuses to the streets of New York, from the cities of Europe to the Arab countries of the Middle East, reports of anti-Semitism emerge on a daily basis. At Judicial Watch, we have been closely tracking developments. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton announced in May our legal action to shine a light on Arab government support for anti-Semitic activities at American universities....

Taiwan is one of at least seven countries across eastern Asia that have recently enacted or are considering laws to limit or gain access to information about internet reports that officials claim are false, speculative, exaggerated, or truthful yet hurtful. As does President Trump, they often lump such reports under a vague, and often misleading, heading: fake news. For nations with one-party rule, regulations squelching false or sensitive stories emanating from social media would result in an expansion of longstanding controls over the traditional mass media. Such efforts have been on the rise over about the last two years due...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in what started as a probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections and any potential collusion with the Trump campaign, is reportedly investigating former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn for an alleged plan to “forcibly remove” a Muslim cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania and send him back to Turkey.

Is fighting sprawl still a goal for those who decide the fate of transportation funding at the federal, state and local levels?Transportation planning is deeply connected to economic development, but there in any agreement about transportation funding among government leaders often ends.Parag Khanna, a senior public policy analyst in Singapore and author of “Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization,” summarized the political divide over transportation planning like this: “America is increasingly divided not between red states and blue states, but between connected hubs and disconnected backwaters.”But division that stymies transportation planning goes further. Government leaders have always been divided...

  President Obama is engaged in acts that may go against the Logan Act which prohibits Americans from committing treason by acting with other governments against the US. A summary of the Logan Act follows: The Logan Act (18 U.S.C.A. § 953 [1948]) is a single federal statute making it a crime for a citizen to confer with foreign governments against the interests of the United States. Specifically, it prohibits citizens from negotiating with other nations on behalf of the United States without authorization. Congress established the Logan Act in 1799, less than one year after passage of the Alien...

Disgusted with the subway? Well, chew on this: Since 2014, the city has forked over more to its pension funds than it has for building and repairing schools, parks, bridges and, yes, subways — combined. In fact, the city’s current predicament is the result of benefit increases that state lawmakers have showered on retired city workers. The pension sweeteners added just in 2000 alone cost the city $13 billion over the next 10 years. These two factors (over-optimistic assumptions and ever-greater benefits) are why the city’s yearly contribution to the funds has had to mushroom nearly sevenfold, from $1.4 billion...

On Tuesday U.S. officials, under the guise of anonymity, leaked the name of the suicide bomber responsible for the attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester before the British police had officially named him causing greater skepticism for allies sharing intelligence with the United States. There is something seriously wrong in the intelligence community and it borders on TREASON. American journalists published the name before the British journalists. The British police had not confirmed the identity of the attacker, Salman Abedi. Since it was an ongoing investigation, the British government had indicated it may not release the name at...

The impact of ever-higher pension costs on California’s local governments, particularly cities, has been evident for years. Pension burdens contributed to the recent bankruptcies of three cities and more are feeling the pinch.