Tag Archives: Business Insider

Overshadowed By The Trump Indictment

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On Tuesday, The National Review reported that America’s long-term foreign-currency-issuer default rating has been downgraded. You may have missed this news because the media was focused on the Trump indictment. However, this news will impact more Americans and needs to be heard.

The article reports:

Fitch Ratings on Tuesday downgraded America’s long-term foreign-currency-issuer default rating, citing ongoing and projected future fiscal instability, an increasingly long and disruptive governance process, and rising debt and deficits.

The tumultuous negotiations and gridlock between Republicans and Democrats in June over raising the debt ceiling were evidence that “there has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years,” Fitch, one of the “big three” U.S. credit-ratings agencies alongside S&P and Moody’s, said in a statement. That episode put the U.S. at risk of payment default and threatened to plunge it into a debt crisis. After weeks of back-and-forth, the parties agreed to suspend the debt limit for two years until January 2025, with a number of conditions and concessions made to both sides.

The government as of late has been operating under modern monetary theory.

Business Insider describes modern monetary theory as follows:

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is an economic theory that suggests that the government could simply create more money without consequence as it’s the issuer of the currency, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. As part of this theory, the thinking is that government deficits and national debt don’t matter nearly as much as we think they do. 

This is the equivalent of the person who says, “How can I be overdrawn–I still have checks?” It is an avoidance of responsible spending and has gotten us into the mess we are currently in. Excessive printing of money creates inflation and hurts most Americans.

The article at The National Review notes:

Among the others factors the agency said were making the U.S. less reliable to honor its obligations are the Federal Reserve tightening monetary conditions via interest-rate increases to combat inflation. The central bank also continues to shed its massive balance sheet of mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries, furthering fostering an environment of tighter credit, Fitch said. The economy, the agency noted, is expected to slip into a “mild recession” in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Hang on to your hats. We may be in for a rough ride.

Seventy-Eight Years Ago

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Seventy-eight years ago, some very nervous young (and not so young) men were boarding boats in England in preparation for an invasion of France. My father was one of the men who landed at Utah Beach.

A website called allthatsinteresting reports:

Brig. Gen. Teddy Roosevelt Jr. — the eldest son of President Theodore Roosevelt — landed with the first wave of soldiers at Utah Beach. After personally scouting the area, he determined that their location was better, as there were fewer German defenses.

“We’ll start the war from right here!” he stated, and he rerouted the rest of the landings to his location.

Roosevelt led the 8th Infantry despite using a cane – he had arthritis and a bad heart. Maj. Gen. Barton, the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, later recalled meeting Roosevelt on the beach:

While I was mentally framing [orders], Ted Roosevelt came up. He had landed with the first wave, had put my troops across the beach, and had a perfect picture (just as Roosevelt had earlier promised if allowed to go ashore with the first wave) of the entire situation. I loved Ted. When I finally agreed to his landing with the first wave, I felt sure he would be killed. When I had bade him goodbye, I never expected to see him alive. You can imagine then the emotion with which I greeted him when he came out to meet me [near La Grande Dune]. He was bursting with information.

That’s called courage and leadership.

A website called business insider posted the following in 2012:

On this day 68 years ago, nearly 3 million Allied troops readied themselves for one of the greatest military operations of world history.

D-Day. And the push that led to Hitler’s defeat.

At least 160,000 of those troops landed on the shores of Normandy, France. As they stormed the beaches, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s confident words summed up the incredible significance of their mission:

“You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you,” he wrote in a famous letter sent to troops before the assault. 

“We will accept nothing less than full victory! Good Luck!”

But there was another letter General Eisenhower wrote in case the operation failed:

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

Great leaders accept responsibility for their failures as well as their successes.

 

A Law Without Enforcement Isn’t Really A Law

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On Wednesday, Business Insider posted an article which might partially explain how people who enter Congress as middle-class Americans seem to become millionaires very quickly.

The article reports:

Congress and top Capitol Hill staff have violated the STOCK Act hundreds of times. But the consequences are minimal, inconsistent, and not recorded publicly.

So we have no idea who is doing insider trading.

The article continues:

Congress has a spotty and inconsistent method for collecting fines from members and top staffers who break a federal law designed to stop insider trading and conflicts of interest, an Insider investigation found. 

Insider’s investigation of financial disclosures found that 49 members of Congress and at least 182 of the highest-paid Capitol Hill staffers were late in filing their stock trades during 2020 and 2021.

Lawmakers and senior congressional staffers who blow past the deadlines established by the 2012 Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act are supposed to pay a late fee of $200 the first time. Increasingly higher fines follow if they continue to be late — potentially costing tens of thousands of dollars in extreme cases.

But accountability and transparency are decidedly lacking. 

No public records exist indicating whether these officials ever paid the fines. Congressional ethics staff wouldn’t confirm the existence of nonpublic ledgers tracking how many officials paid fines for violating the STOCK Act. And 19 lawmakers wouldn’t answer questions from Insider about whether they’d paid a penalty. Ten other lawmakers said they’d paid their fines, but they declined to provide proof, such as a receipt or canceled check. 

The article concludes:

“If you are a member of Congress, you have this duty to not take advantage of information you learned because of your job,” said Gellasch (Tyler Gellasch, a fellow at the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke University School of Law), who previously served as congressional staffer to former Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, of Michigan, and helped draft the STOCK Act.

Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said Congress’ laissez-faire approach to the STOCK Act “sends the message that they are held to a lesser standard than other government employees, and that they are above the law.”

Canter called lawmakers’ stock-trading habits “an accident waiting to happen.” Their difficulties complying with the transparency and accountability provisions in the STOCK Act underscored why members shouldn’t trade individual stocks, she added.

Spanberger agreed: “We have regulations, we have rules, we have standards for a reason. And not enforcing them or abiding by them creates fertile ground for people to behave improperly.”

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

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Townhall reported yesterday that the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two asylum-seeking brothers who blew up the Boston Marathon, has been overturned by a U.S. Appeals Court.

The article reports:

Dzhokhar’s lawyers argued that the terrorist himself was a victim of intense media coverage and an unfair jury trial. The attack on the 2013 Boston Marathon killed three people and wounded around 280 others. Many of the victims lost limbs and suffered other horrific injuries. 

“A core promise of our criminal-justice system is that even the very worst among us deserve to be fairly tried and lawfully punished,” reads the federal appeals court ruling vacating Dzhokhar’s death sentence. 

In 2015, a jury found Dzhokhar guilty on all 30 charges against him and sentenced the bomber to death. But because Dzhokhar had destroyed the lives of so many Bostonians, his defense attorneys have successfully argued that his death sentence was unfair because the trial should have been moved to a different city — presumably a city where Dzhokhar didn’t kill people. Dzhokhar told investigators that he and his brother’s next target was planned for New York City’s Times Square.

Dzhokhar will be given a new trial on the basis that his previous trial was unfair and should have been moved to a different city.

Let’s contrast that with the trial of General Michael Flynn. After a federal appeals court Wednesday ordered a trial judge to dismiss the case against President Trump’s first national security adviser, Micheal Flynn, the judge refused to dismiss the case.

On July 30th, The Business Insider reported:

A key federal appeals court in Washington DC agreed Thursday to reexamine the fight over whether former Trump national security adviswer Michael Flynn’s guilty plea can be summarily dismissed.

The new order from 10 members of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit comes a little over a month after a three-judge panel there ordered a lower federal district court judge who is overseeing the case against Flynn to dismiss the prosecution at the Justice Department’s request.

Recently declassified information on the Flynn case indicates that General Flynn was targeted as a way to tarnish the Trump administration (article here). There is enough information out there to prove that General Flynn’s guilty plea was coerced and that the charges against him should be dismissed.

Contrast the way our courts are treating someone who was caught after executing a terrorist act and a patriot who served our country for many years. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

Stuck On Stupid

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It is unfortunate that Nike chose to withdraw its patriotic sneakers from the market. The flag designed by Betsy Ross is not racist. At least it wasn’t during President Obama’s inauguration in 2013. This is a photo from that event:

It was an interesting marketing decision–someone is profiting greatly from it. This is a screenshot from The Business Insider:

You have to love the free market.

What Results Look Like

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During the final weeks of the mid-term election campaign, you will hear Democrats say, “The tax cuts were only for the rich–they didn’t help anyone else.” A misinformed friend of mine posted that on Facebook recently. So let’s look at the facts.

The Conservative Treehouse posted an article yesterday about the impact of the Trump Tax Cuts on average Americans.

The article quotes a Business Insider article that reports the following:

  • Walgreens Boots Alliance announced that it will make investments around $150 million to boost mainly its in-store wages in fiscal 2019 in the light of favorable tax reforms.
  • Walgreens CFO said Thursday that the increase in store wages was “in light of the favorable tax reforms in the US.”

…The pharmacy-chain owner Walgreens Boots Alliance announced Thursday that it will make investments of about $150 million to boost mainly its in-store wages in fiscal 2019 in wake of  President Donald Trump’s tax reforms.

The announcement marks a 50% increase in company’s investment towards wages which was announced in March. At the time, Walgreens said it would invest around $100 million per annum to increase wages beginning later this calendar year.

“We will be making select incremental investments of around $150 million in fiscal 2019, mainly in store wages, but also to fuel our new community health care initiatives, and you can view these in light of the favorable tax reforms in the US,” Walgreens CFO James Kehoe said Thursday, on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. 

The article at Business Insider explains how the tax cuts have impacted the average worker:

In December 2017,  the Trump administration slashed the federal corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and allowed a one-time repatriation of overseas cash. The bill also allows companies to bring overseas profits back home to invest in domestic projects or repurchase of shares.

Kehoe said the investments will result in a headwind of approximately $0.12 a share, or two percentage points of earnings-per-share growth for the coming fiscal year. 

US retailers are scrambling to keep workers as they look for opportunities with higher pay and attractive benefits. The US unemployment rate fell to a 48-year low of 3.7% in September. According to the Bureau of Labour statistics, there were 757,000 retail-job openings across the United States in July, which is about 100,000 more than a year ago.

The surge in the number of retail jobs has allowed workers the opportunity to move around within the industry. As a result, companies are raising wages to try and retain workers. Earlier this month, Amazon hiked its minimum wage to $15 per hour, effective November 1. That followed wage hikes from places like Target and Costco. 

That is significant.

The Conservative Treehouse concludes:

Back in January 2017 Deutsche Bank began thinking about it, applying new models, trying to conceptualize and quantify MAGAnomics, and trying to walk out the potential ramifications.  They began talking about Trump doubling the U.S. GDP growth rate when all U.S. investment groups couldn’t yet fathom the possibility.

It’s like waking up on Christmas morning every day to see the pontificating Fed struggling to quantify analysis of their surrounding reality based on flawed assumptions. They simply have no understanding of what happens within the new dimension.

Monetary policy, Fed control over the economy, is disconnected and will stay that way for approximately another 12-14 months, until Main Street regains full operational strength –and– economic parity is achieved.

As we have continued to share, CTH believes the paycheck-to-paycheck working middle-class are going to see a considerable rise in wages and standard of living.  How high can wages rise?… that depends on the pressure; and right now the pressure is massive.  I’m not going to dismiss the possibility we could see double digit increases in year-over-year wage growth in multiple economic sectors in several regions of the U.S.

Remember, as wages and benefits increase – millions of people are coming back into the labor market to take advantage of the income opportunities.  The statistics on the invisible workforce varies, but there are millions of people taking on new jobs in this economy and the participation rate is growing.

Winnamins.  We’ll need lots of them…

Wow.

 

What Are We Teaching Our Children In School?

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According to Business Insider, the median age of an Apple employee is 31 years old. That really doesn’t tell us much except to imply that half of the employees are under 31 and half are over 31. A much more interesting number comes from an internal survey of Apple employees.

On September 1, InfoWars reported that 71.98% Of Apple Employees Say Repeal The First Amendment. It is ironic that the First Amendment protects their right to say that. I would venture to say that the number who also want to repeal the Second Amendment is probably comparable.

This is what happens when you do not teach history to American students. Our republic is always a generation away from disappearing. If we are to maintain our freedoms, we need to teach the value of those freedoms to our children. If they don’t value those freedoms, they will not preserve them.

This is a warning to young parents. If your children are not in a school that teaches the founding documents of America, the principles behind them, and why they are important, find another school. It’s that important.

Consequences Of Not Following The Rules

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On May 21, 2017, the Business Insider reported the following:

China killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 CIA sources from 2010 to 2012, hobbling U.S. spying operations in a massive intelligence breach whose origin has not been identified, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

Yesterday I posted an article that included the following:

  • A Chinese-owned company penetrated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server, according to sources briefed on the matter.
  • The company inserted code that forwarded copies of Clinton’s emails to the Chinese company in real time.
  • The Intelligence Community Inspector General warned of the problem, but the FBI subsequently failed to act, Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said during a July hearing.

The article at Business Insider stated:

By 2013, U.S. intelligence concluded China’s ability to identify its agents had been curtailed, the newspaper said, and the CIA has been trying to rebuild its spy network there.

Hillary Clinton set up her private server when she took office as Secretary of State in January 2009; she left that position on February 1, 2013.

The Business Insider further reported:

The Chinese killed at least a dozen people providing information to the CIA from 2010 through 2012, dismantling a network that was years in the making, the newspaper reported.

One was shot and killed in front of a government building in China, three officials told the Times, saying that was designed as a message to others about working with Washington.

The breach was considered particularly damaging, with the number of assets lost rivaling those in the Soviet Union and Russia who perished after information passed to Moscow by spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, the report said. Ames was active as a spy in the 1980s and Hanssen from 1979 to 2001.

The CIA declined to comment when asked about the Times report on Saturday.

The Chinese activities began to emerge in 2010, when the American spy agency had been getting high quality information about the Chinese government from sources deep inside the bureaucracy, including Chinese upset by the Beijing government’s corruption, four former officials told the Times.

I think we need some accountability here.

The Cost Of The Wall

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One of the recent talking points used against those people who actually want to control our borders is the cost of building a wall. Obviously, Mexico will not directly pay for a wall–they enjoy having people come here illegally and send money back to Mexico. There is no incentive for them to put a stop to that behavior. So how do we pay for the wall?

Paul Sperry posted an article at The New York Post on Saturday that offers one possible solution.

The article reports:

Mexico won’t have to pay for the wall, after all. US taxpayers won’t have to pick up the tab, either. The controversial barrier, rather, will cover its own cost just by closing the border to illegal immigrants who tend to go on the federal dole.

That’s the finding of recent immigration studies showing the $18 billion wall President Trump plans to build along the southern border will pay for itself by curbing the importation of not only crime and drugs, but poverty.

“The wall could pay for itself even if it only modestly reduced illegal crossings and drug smuggling,” Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Post.

Federal data shows that a wall would work. A two-story corrugated metal fence in El Paso, Texas, first erected under the Bush administration has already curtailed illegal border crossings there by more than 89 percent over the five-year period during which it was built.

The problem is not only illegal immigrants–it’s drug smuggling. How much money and how many lives do the illegal drugs coming into America cost?

The article concludes:

While Democrats complain the $18 billion price tag for the Trump wall is too high, the “Dreamers” amnesty bill they want Trump and Republicans to pass in exchange for funding the wall (or ideally in spite of the wall) would cost US taxpayers even more than the construction of the border partition over 10 years.

“The cost of the DREAM Act has been estimated as very large — a $26 billion net cost in the first 10 years,” Camarota noted.

Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that 3 million DREAM Act recipients would receive an estimated $12 billion-plus in ObamaCare subsidies, more than $5.5 billion in Medicaid benefits, $5.5 billion in earned-income and child-tax credits and more than $2 billion in food stamps.

A bipartisan bill incorporating the deal was defeated in the Senate last month by a vote of 54-45. Trump rejected the proposal in favor of a tougher border bill introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), which limits the number of DACA beneficiaries to 1.8 million, curbs family visas, or so-called chain migration, and phases out the diversity visa lottery, while earmarking $25 billion in funding for the wall and other border security.

The problem is not the money–the problem is the spending priorities.

A Moment To Be Carefree

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To be carefree is a wonderful thing. It’s one of the first things cancer patients give up when they are diagnosed with the disease.  The Mimi Foundation decided that it would change that for some cancer patients. Please read the article at the Business Insider to understand the whole story and to see some wonderful pictures.

Meanwhile, YouTube posted the video:

Enjoy.

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There Is No Real News Value To This Story–It Is Simply Nostalgic !

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On Monday Business Insider posted a series of pictures taken inside the Intrepid–the parts where tourists are not allowed. Since my husband was in a Naval Air Squadron that was stationed on the Intrepid in the late 1960’s, I stopped to look at the pictures. Please follow the link above for the tour!

There are some lights on back here so it's easy to spot the odd items that make this feel like a time-warp — this type of soda was popular in the 1970s

This is one example of the time warp they discovered. When was the last time you saw a patio soda can?

The Navy brought us to New England and we stayed because we fell in love with the people and the scenery. I still have not gotten used to the climate!

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This Is Just Distressing

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Business Insider reported yesterday that Rham Emanuel sold up to $250,000 in Freddie Mac stock on February 21, 2003, days before it dropped by 10 percent and weeks before the announcement that it was under investigation. This is reported in Peter Schwiezer’s new book “Throw Them All Out.”

The article reports:

While by no means illegal; lawmakers are exempted from the insider trading laws they impose on private traders. But the timing of the trades is certainly suspect, especially given Emanuel’s service on the board during the time period for with the federal government was investigating the actions of Freddie Mac executives.

Why are lawmakers exempted from the insider trading laws they impose on private traders?

The beginning of cleaning up Washington, D. C., might be to make all lawmakers and office holders subject to the laws they pass. Wouldn’t that be a really good idea?

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