The House of Representatives continues efforts to elect a Speaker of the House. Republican candidate Kevin McCarthy failed in his first-round effort on the floor in dramatic fashion. A group of conservatives blocked his path amid one of the smallest GOP House majorities in history. Democrat Hakeem Jeffries had the highest overall number of votes, but still not enough to become speaker.
As noted by Politico, “In a stunning moment of chaos on the first day of the new Congress, McCarthy and his allies will now attempt to quell the revolt, preparing members to take repeated votes as pressure mounts from their colleagues. It will mark only the second time since the Civil War that a party will need multiple attempts to choose its leader on the House floor — with all business in the chamber, even the swearing-in of members, halted until a speaker is chosen.”
Voting continues, video below. UPDATE After Three Failed Votes, the House is adjourned until noon tomorrow:
The Republican battle for Speaker of the House of Representatives continues with multiple factions competing for influence. The sausage making inside the GOPe conference is doing what that sausage makers in the GOPe conference always do. There’s a lot of opposition to Kevin McCarthy and the vast majority of it is well deserved.
Yes, the swamp is doing swampy things, and yes, it’s a hot mess. But that’s also what happens in a two-party congress within a constitutional republic where members from very different states end up arguing for position based on an ideology that varies wildly. Notice that if you get rid of the two-party system, all of this stuff seemingly evaporates. Funny how the people who construct the two-party system don’t want us to notice that.
In this video, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a representative who supports the MAGA agenda and Kevin McCarthy for speaker, calls out some of the well-known voices in the GOPe apparatus who are doing swampy things. WATCH:
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I would suggest not getting emotionally invested in any of this internecine arguing. If you have let your congressional representative know your expectation, the only thing we can do is watch it play out.
After successfully settling a $105 million lawsuit against the estate of Jeffrey Epstein in early December, U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise N. George then filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase saying the “bank knowingly provided and pulled the levers through which recruiters and victims were paid.”
(US Virgin Islands) – Attorney General Denise George was terminated on Saturday after serving four years with the Bryan administration, the Consortium can confirm.
The decision by Governor Albert Bryan to fire the A.G. came just days after Bloomberg News revealed that Ms. George in her capacity as V.I. attorney general had filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase — the largest bank in the United States and the world’s largest bank by market capitalization — without first informing Governor Bryan of such a major action, said a person with knowledge of the matter.
The lawsuit claims JPMorgan Chase facilitated convicted felon Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of women and girls, alleging that the bank should have known about Epstein’s illegal activity and as part of its anti-money laundering procedures, should have reported their client to authorities.
George accused the bank of turning a blind eye to the sex trafficking operations that went on on Epstein’s private island in the USVI, Little St. James. (read more)
AG George is fired from her position as USVI AG after filing a lawsuit against JPMorgan. Where did Joe Biden go on vacation? The U.S. Virgin Islands.
The New Year brings a look of forward-looking economic perspectives from major financial institutions. Unfortunately, if the perspective of Bank of America Chief Economist Michael Gapen is reflective of the larger institutional analysis, the financial pretending is anticipated to continue.
[Side Note: Notice how they will all start talking about ‘deglobalization’ in 2023. There’s a reason for that that I will touch on in the IMF interview to follow]
Appearing on Face the Nation Gapen accurately indicates the U.S. housing market is already in a steep economic recession, housing prices falling rapidly with a considerable amount of distance to go (-30% range), and the overall housing market will likely be in this situation for around two years. On a macro level the Bank of America indicators line up with the general housing trajectory. From a lending standpoint, Gapen would have specific insight.
Beyond the housing sector, Mr. Gapen starts to get sketchy. He anticipates inflation taking 24 to 36 months to lower to the norm 2% range. That is generally in line with CTH expectations; however, nowhere in the analysis does Gapen even mention energy costs and the overall impact to the economy from energy policy. You will note this absence will be present in almost all financial punditries. Mentioning “energy policy’ as a cause of economic pain is a third rail amid his peer group; it is simply not permitted.
Astute readers will note the great financial and economic pretending that surrounds the Build Back Better and Green New Deal climate change agenda will not be discussed by anyone, ever. The massive price impacts, the supply side inflation pressures, are baked into the western global economic outlooks. It is strictly verboten to talk about climate change policy being stopped, modified, reversed or even, well, gasp, removed. WATCH:
[TRANSCRIPT] – […] BANK OF AMERICA CHIEF ECONOMIST MICHAEL GAPEN: Happy New Year as well. Thank you for having me on.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You know, a majority of voters polled by The Wall Street Journal say that the economy is going to look and feel worse in 2023. What is your forecast?
GAPEN: So I think that’s probably true. I think we’re in a situation where the risk of recession is high, may not be a deep and prolonged one. But we’re in a situation where the economy has recovered very rapidly from- from COVID, and it’s come with a lot of inflation. And the Federal Reserve is trying to slow down the economy, to bring inflation down. And in the past, more often than not, that’s coincided with some sort of recession in the US economy and the U.S. labor market. It’s not baked in. It’s not for certain. We may be able to avoid it, but I would agree that the outlook by most people who sit in the position that I do think 2023 could be a difficult year for the U.S..
MARGARET BRENNAN: So we may be able to avoid recession?
During my trip to DC in the summer of 2020 there were a myriad of disconcerting datapoints assembled; revelations that made sense of the madness and disappointments found everywhere. However, one of the key notations for future reference was to watch the political evolution of Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) and spot the jump where the ideological outlook turns into specific government action.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), specifically created as an outcome of the post-911 Patriot Act, is the pivot point on the surveillance radar sweep.
Prior to the DNI the general Intelligence Community (IC) surveillance faced offshore and swept foreign adversaries. If any threat was picked up that included the potential for domestic terrorism, the identified contact transferred from the CIA, NSA, DoD into the DOJ and FBI. The DOJ then used the FISA Court to request transfer of targeting from foreign to domestic.
However, after 911 it was determined the national security surveillance radar needed to sweep a full 360° to include domestic surveillance. The ODNI was the office created to manage the pivot point. As a specific outcome of the Patriot Act, American citizens were now under the same surveillance as foreign adversaries. The new definition of American citizens being threats to the national security state is ultimately what led to our taking off shoes at TSA checkpoints in airports. TSA is a subsidiary agency of DHS.
According to recent media reports the $1.7 trillion omnibus budget and legislative bill was sent to the White House late Wednesday night. However, Joe Biden and his familial entourage had already departed DC for their holiday vacation in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
However, the continuing resolution/omnibus spending bill needed to be signed by December 30th in order to fund government without technical interruption, so the White House sent the bill all the way to St. Croix for signature via Spirit Airlines.
(Via Daily Mail) – The White House flew the federal budget to St Croix for President Joe Biden to sign into law ahead of the December 30 deadline, so the government didn’t shut down over New Year’s Eve.
The 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus package to fund the government through September 2023 arrived at the White House on Wednesday evening, after it completed the legislative enrollment process. On Thursday, it was flown to St Croix, where Biden is spending the holiday week in a luxury villa owned by a billionaire Democratic donor.
The bill arrived in the US Virgin Islands via Spirit Airlines on Thursday evening around 5:30 pm Eastern time. A little over an hour later, Biden’s POTUS Instagram account posted a picture of the president signing the bill.
The caption of the Instagram post read: ‘Today, I signed the bipartisan omnibus bill, ending a year of historic progress. It’ll invest in medical research, safety, veteran health care, disaster recovery, VAWA funding – and gets crucial assistance to Ukraine. Looking forward to more in 2023.’
As we’ve been saying for seven months, keep watching how the globalists respond to Mexico. AMLO doesn’t want to join the economic suicide pact known as Build Back Better, or the North American version “Green New Deal.” This puts him in a precarious place.
This sentence from a recent financial analysis article in Reuters is telling, “concerns about a U.S. recession and a trade spat Mexico is embroiled in with the United States and Canada over Lopez Obrador’s energy policy, which critics call nationalist, muddy the outlook for the peso.” A “nationalist energy policy”?
What exactly is a “nationalist energy policy,” and why would international financial people be having fits about it?
In the past year the Mexican peso has outperformed the U.S. dollar, in part because Mexico is not following the economic roadmap, a World Economic Forum inspired united inflationary malaise as an outcome of unified energy policy. [Side Note: The Brazilian currency was also outperforming the western bloc and dollar; but that situation has been rectified now, Bolsonaro removed, and the central bank will start contracting the economy.]
The global financial control mechanisms now start to look at the Mexican non-compliance:
(Reuters) – Mexico’s peso, which is ending 2022 with one of its strongest performances in a decade, could have its gains wiped out in 2023 after an expected end to the Bank of Mexico’s rate hikes cycle and a possible recession in top trade partner the United States.
We accept the named legislation “Inflation Reduction Act” (IRA) is a legislative misnomer intended to obfuscate the true construct of the bill. The IRA was factually the ‘green new deal’ program packaged under the guise of an ‘inflation reduction’ premise. However, in order to discuss the outcome of the content we have to play the game of pretending around the purpose of the legislation.
Within the IRA there was a $7,500 tax credit for American made Electric Vehicles. The intent of the legislation was to provide incentives for U.S. consumers to purchase ‘sustainable’ and environmentally friendly electric cars, trucks, SUV’s etc made in America.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scored the bill with this legislative intent in mind. However, the Treasury Department is now taking apart the granular details of the legislation in order to qualify foreign made vehicles for the $7,500 credit. The rules interpretation from the Treasury Dept essentially negates the CBO score, and the outcome is going to be much more expensive than initially stated.
Because the $7,500 comes in the form of a tax credit, the IRS (Treasury) is the institution making the determinations for qualification. Treasury is changing the qualifications to permit basically any EV to qualify, by parsing a difference between a leased vehicle and a purchased vehicle. Additionally, Treasury is changing the battery sourcing aspect by qualifying essentially any trade agreement as a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), saying the term Free Trade Agreement was undefined in the legislation.
As an outcome & simply cutting to the chase, EV batteries from just about anywhere, inside EV vehicles from basically anywhere, that are purchased as leases from just about any auto manufacturer, will qualify for the $7,500 credit. It’s all a shell game, with the Biden administration determining where the pea is located.
Dec 29 (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury Department said Thursday that electric vehicles leased by consumers starting Jan. 1 can qualify for up to $7,500 in commercial clean vehicle tax credits, a decision that makes those assembled outside North America eligible.
BlackRock, Inc. (together with its subsidiaries) is a massive publicly traded multinational investment firm with over $8.68 trillion in assets under management [December 31, 2020 financial statement] in more than 100 countries across the globe. To say that Blackrock is invested in globalism, climate change and leftist politics, would be a severe understatement {See Here}. Larry Fink is the CEO and people like Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s attorney of record, are on the board.
The Chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute, the guy who tells the $8.7 trillion investment firm BlackRock where to put their money, is Tom Donilon; President Obama’s former National Security Advisor (before Susan Rice), and a key advisor to Joe Biden throughout his career in politics; who was also recently put in charge of U.S-China policy by the State Dept. {link}
Tom Donilon’s brother, Mike Donilon is a Senior Advisor to Joe Biden {link} providing guidance on what policies should be implemented within the administration. Mike Donilon guides the focus of spending, budgets, regulation and white house policy from his position of Senior Advisor to the President. Tom Donilon’s wife, Catherine Russell, was the Biden White House Personnel Director {link}. In that position Donilon’s wife controlled every hire in the Office of the Presidency. Tom Donilon’s daughter, Sarah Donilon, who graduated college in 2019, now works on the White House National Security Council {link}
Yes, Blackrock, the world’s largest investment firm, is essentially in a private-public partnership with the Biden White House fraught with massive financial conflicts of interest. Tom Donilon is the bagman. The Donilon family coordinates the Biden foreign policy toward Ukraine, and the Donilon family positions Blackrock financially to benefit as a specific outcome of the relationship with the Biden family and the White House. Now this….
WASHINGTON DC – Zelensky and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink met virtually on Wednesday, the president’s website revealed, and discussed plans for the financial behemoth to play a prominent role in the postwar reconstruction of Ukraine, which has been subjected to massive Russian depredations for most of this year. Plans for BlackRock leaders to visit Ukraine in the new year were finalized at the meeting.
Twitter File release #11 hits on the long-anticipated information surrounding how the platform was instructed by various government agencies to remove content adverse to the expressed opinion of CDC, HHS, and DHS officials. [Release #11 Here]
The first installment of the Twitter COVID-19 files comes from David Zweig, a writer for New York Mag, New York Times, The Atlantic and other publications. Because the U.S. Government COVID-19 information control operation was so extensive, there will likely be several Twitter File releases related to the SARS-CoV2 pandemic issue. However, in this first release Zweig starts to build the story of how the CDC and HHS set the foundation for the echo-chamber that ended with Twitter executives running amok.
As Zweig begins his review he noted, “The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.” While the Trump administration was worried about information that would create panic, like runs on grocery stores, the Biden administration was more focused on content control to push the overall narrative about fearing COVID and the vaccination demand.
“When the Biden admin took over, one of their first meeting requests with Twitter executives was on Covid. The focus was on “anti-vaxxer accounts.” Especially Alex Berenson,” Zweig writes as he then begins to give examples of various medical professionals that were targeted by the White House and the platform.
The outcome of the HHS and CDC push circled around politics, which, when combined with the ideological perspectives of the Twitter executives, inevitably ended up making COVID-19 a political issue on the platform. Critics of COVID-19 policy were blocked, censored, removed and restricted. Advocates of government policy were enhanced, amplified, promoted and enlarged.
However, the continuing resolution/omnibus spending bill needed to be signed by December 30th in order to fund government without technical interruption, so the White House sent the bill all the way to St. Croix for signature via Spirit Airlines.
Within the IRA there was a $7,500 tax credit for American made Electric Vehicles. The intent of the legislation was to provide incentives for U.S. consumers to purchase ‘sustainable’ and environmentally friendly electric cars, trucks, SUV’s etc made in America.
