"Can an America that off-shored much of its manufacturing capacity to China, for short-term profit, afford the de-coupling?


     ~Alastair Crooke
Wrisley.com
Seeking Answers in an Upside Down World.
Established - 1994
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(Caveat Emptor)

News and opinion from all over the political universe. 

Much of it to be taken with several grains of salt.
 
 Email: Wrisley.com 		September 28th, 2021
Speaker Pelosi faces a difficult week.
    Item: WASHINGTON, Sept 28 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden's Democrats will seek on Tuesday to head off two looming dangers to the U.S. economy as they try to keep government operations funded beyond a Thursday deadline and avoid defaulting on its debt.

              Media have not had much to say about this, but Mrs. Pelosi may not find the dominoes falling into place as she planned this week. In which case Thursday, the last day of the U.S. government fiscal year, may be quite problematic.
'Since the start of 2001, the value of the one-dollar Federal Reserve Note has fallen 84%.'
~By Seth Lipsky, publisher of the New York Sun.
   In our book Mr. Lipsky is one of the nation's few editor-publishers who understands the danger of decades of currency inflation. Moreover, he's one of the few newspapermen (his term) who knows what to do about it. Restore the money mandate of the United States Constitution. (Pause - for laughter from mainstream media.)

    Lipsky's editorial is brief and worth reading. Find it here at N.Y. SUN.
"Corporate America has pushed the shrinkflation gimmick for years to mask the loss of purchasing power, but that gimmick is wearing thin. People are waking up and noticing there is 10% less in every package while the price jumps 10%--a real-world inflation rate of 20%."
~Charles Hugh Smith

    The keen-eyed Mr. Smith is among the observant Americans who have caught on to what's happening to grocery store packaging. We are not only paying more for many items but the content has declined. In the case of bulk packs of a popular brand of sausage patties, for instance, the number of patties has dropped  from 32 to 26.

    That's not the only problem the local grocery store is having. Suppliers are having trouble meeting the orders from individual stores, which accounts for the occasional empty shelves. Another economic condition to keep folks on edge.


 HAVE WE BENEFITED FROM THE THE TWO-PARTY POLITICAL SYSTEM? 
Twenty-seven years ago we wrote and posted the platform of the Radical Independent Party on the Internet.
We never organized it nor expected its ideology to catch on.  And it certainly has not. 

     "The Radical Independent Party (RIP) is founded on the fundamental  idea that government belongs in the background to secure the safety of citizens, not micromanage their affairs. Knowing that it's impossible for the governing class to follow the prescription laid out in the United States Constitution, the RIP believes Republicans and Democrats will remain in control of the nation until they run it into bankruptcy. At some point an awakened citizenry will throw them overboard and try something else.

      "RIP ideology is based on the quaint idea that if people are generally left alone to pursue happiness they will do a better job of it than if they are forced to run their lives according to ideas of a self-appointed elite."

THE RADICAL INDEPENDENT PARTY PLATFORM

     At the end of the above link is a quote: "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones!"  ~John Cage
    
     Supporters of the two-party political system will tell you it is scientifically impossible for the United States to survive with a multi-party system. We contend that the two-party system has demolished the Constituion. They can't even suppress ROBO PHONE CALLS! And as for "managing" the economy, consider this: The U.S. dollar of 1994 (already by then ruined by inflation) is now worth 54¢. A huge loss of purchasing power in only 27 years!

     The more we sit on our cans with hands out for the federal government dole the worse it will become. The challenge is, how do we convince the voting majority?

    "It’s pretty clear now that the vaccines work, with few side effects — although our public health experts would really do us a solid if they’d stop lying about there being no side effects. At a minimum, the vaccines prevent serious illness and death. They’re even more effective than the flu vaccine, and that’s pretty good." 

     The above is from a current opinion piece by conservative ANN COULTER

           She calls her piece "The Real Anti-Vaxxers".  Despite the fact we and the Missus are both in our 90s and a hard case of COVID would probably kill us, we have refused the popular inoculations.  So?  Once you have entered the last decade of life you know your date with the Grim Reaper is close at hand.  Why deny it? 
~Victor Davis Hanson
  
 Dr. Hanson has obviously given the matter some serious thought and has the skill to lay those thoughts out in a well constructed essay.  If his conclusions are correct and any parts of the U.S. Constution still remain in effect, why for Heaven's sake are we-the-people forsaking the last remnants of freedom and liberty for the socialist schemes of central government? 

FINANCIAL MARKETS CLAWING THEIR WAY BACK UP.
DOW futures up more than 300 points early Tuesday. 
   Unless something unseen raises its head today the Monday scare of a stock market price plunge is over. Still lurking in the immediate future is the Federal Reserve's comments on the future of price inflation. People suspect the prospects for high inflation may not be as "transitory" as Chariman Powell has persistently alleged. 

In a superb piece of curmudgeonry FRED REED mocks conspiracy theorists.
If you are a bona fide CT don't read. It'll upset you.

      "In my decades as galley slave in Washington’s journalistic sludge fleets, I occasionally encountered conspiracy theories, such as the Second Shooter who got JFK, and that FDR intentionally let the Japs blow up Pearl Harbor, and of many sightings of alien space ships. Various psychic oddities dwelling in the crevices of the Potomac Rome worried about fluoride in the water. Like most news weasels who had a living to make, I ignored them as being fringe notions and wackos, which they later proved to be, the stories if not always the people. In any event they seemed few.  Then came Nine Eleven and Covid."

              A Curmudgeon's view of Conspiracy Theory.
 
The mythical Social Security "trust fund".
     It is claimed the Social Security Administration has a trust fund that can backstop obligations until 2030 or so.  Not true. A legitimate Trust Fund existed decades ago when Social Security taxes did in fact go into an independent agency account. President Lyndon Johnson, however, decided that he needed all that 'free money' to pay for his misadventure in Vietnam, so the Social Security account was combined with the federal general fund and an accounting gimmick was created: a completely fake class of IOUs that were presented as a 'trust fund'.... IOUs with no marketable value at all.
ITEM:  The Social Security cost-of-living adjustment for 2022 could be 6% to 6.1%, according to an estimate.That is down from 6.2% projected last month, as new consumer price index data released Tuesday signals cooling inflation.
               Still, the prospective increase to monthly benefit checks next year could be the highest it has been since 1982                       
     Hold on a minute!  The Consumer Price Index (CPI) came in last month at 5.3 percent, annualized.  The CPI is popularly called the "inflation rate" but it does NOT fully reflect the rate at which the Federal Reserve is actually inflating the money supply.  It is merely a cherry-picked summary of a handful of prices by the Labor Department and is almost always on the low side at this time of year.  The reason is the Social Security COLA increase for 2022 is set on an average of three months' CPI data issued in the fall of 2021.  If current inflation is "lower" billions in COLA payments can be avoided.  The CPI reflects a realaitvely small market basket of prices selected by the Labor Department.  Money inflating is what the Federal does to the money supply and its full economic effect is generally ignored.