JPMorgan Chief: US Facing Worst Risks Since WWII
Jamie Dimon, the long serving chief executive of JPMorgan Chase has warned that the US is facing grave risks in the wake of rising global geopolitical tensions and the nation’s domestic political polarization. The banker […]
The post JPMorgan Chief: US Facing Worst Risks Since WWII appeared first on The People’s Voice.
Watch: Putin Reacts to Seeing Russian Fighter Jets Escorting His Plane
Video of Russian President Vladimir Putin reacting to the spectacle of fighter jets escorting his plane is going viral on social media.
Putin can be seen peering out the side window and smirking to the sight of a pair of Su-35 warplanes cruising alongside his presidential Ilyushin Il-96 aircraft.
Putin’s reaction to seeing Russian fighter jets escorting his plane pic.twitter.com/vaJRADuSsT
— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) April 8, 2024
The video was taken in 2017 during Putin’s first visit to Syria where he announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the region.
Alex Jones weighed in on the clip, saying: “Say what you want about Putin but he is not a puppet of BlackRock and the WEF like so called western leaders.”
Say what you want about Putin but he is not a puppet of BlackRock and the WEF like so called western leaders. https://t.co/fRZ9tZI8C9
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) April 8, 2024
FULL VIDEO: Entirety Of 2024 North American Total Solar Eclipse – LIVE & In HD
Infowars host Chase Geiser reports on-the-ground from Zilker Park in Austin, Texas, asking residents and visitors about their eclipse experience and possible ties to conspiracy theories.
Forget The Eclipse: Globalists Want To Dim The Sun Permanently
California’s Crony Capitalist Minimum Wage Law
On April 1, California raised the minimum wage for large fast food restaurant franchises to $20 an hour. This law will threaten seven hundred thousand jobs by destroying the state’s food franchising business; however, there is one notable fast food franchise exempted from this minimum wage hike: Panera.
Greg Flynn is the second-largest Panera franchisee in the world, but he is also known for his close relationship with California governor Gavin Newsom. This relationship stretches back to their high school years and presently takes the form of support and donations to Newsom’s political campaigns. With this close relationship well-documented, it is clear that there is more to this exception, as a recent article by Bloomberg speculates.
When pressed on this exemption by a number of California Republicans, the Newsom administration denied any crony dealings, labeling these accusations as “absurd.” The administration maintains that Panera will not be exempt from the law. To make matters worse, Flynn had met with Newsom’s staffers prior to the final passage of the bill and was allegedly surprised that the exemption made it into the final version of the bill. There is one thing that is not surprising about this ordeal and that is how much Newsom and Flynn are denying accusations of cronyism. They would deny collaboration under any circumstances no matter how obvious it may seem.
The bill provides that all fast food restaurants pay the new minimum wage, defining “fast food restaurant” as “a limited-service restaurant in the state that is part of a national fast food chain”:
“Fast food restaurant” shall not include an establishment that on September 15, 2023, operates a bakery that produces for sale on the establishment’s premises bread, as defined under Part 136 of Subchapter B of Chapter I of Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations, so long as it continues to operate such a bakery. This exemption applies only where the establishment produces for sale bread as a stand-alone menu item, and does not apply if the bread is available for sale solely as part of another menu item.
This certainly sounds like Panera, right? According to Panera’s own website, they do have a bakery that has numerous stand-alone bread items for sale. Additionally, some menu items—such as the French baguette—are described as “freshly baked,” implying that the so-called bakery produces the bread for sale on the premises.
The governor’s office states that the fact that Panera mixes dough off-site disqualifies Panera from being exempt. However, given these excerpts from the law, it is not clear that such a fact would disqualify Panera. This would further raise the question of who the exception is even for. The exception did not just appear in the law; it was deliberately inserted. The exception should not just be taken for granted as Newsom suggests us to. Newsom simply dismisses this exception as “part of the sausage making” legislative process—whatever that means.
What is more likely is that Flynn had this condition inserted into the bill and crossed his fingers that it would not garner much attention from the press or political opponents. Now that it is receiving a lot of attention, Flynn can maintain plausible deniability given that he, as far as we know, never personally met with Newsom about the bill. Flynn may raise his company’s minimum wage voluntarily to “prove” that he is not exempt and then, when the attention from the press subsides, loosen the wage requirement and begin hiring people below the state’s minimum wage. He has already announced an increase in the minimum wage, but will it remain? It solely depends on whether Flynn believes he can get away with lowering the wage or not.
How should this be analyzed?
As defenders of the free market, libertarians are against wage regulations. This law will, if followed, generate unrivaled labor surpluses, otherwise known as unemployment. Over seven hundred thousand jobs will be threatened, and the state’s food franchising system will be in dire straits.
An article published by Reason summarizes the potential consequences of this bill. One potential consequence is that fast food restaurants across the state may enter the bakery business to escape having to pay a higher wage. This may not be difficult given the presence of many bread-related items on the menu at such places like McDonalds. If nothing else, further automation will occur, and at worst, franchises will be driven out of business, creating food deserts and giving the remaining restaurants artificial advantages—monopolies.
Given the immense cost of this law, it is understandable that Flynn might have pushed for this exemption, and libertarians should not blame him. In fact, libertarians should welcome such exemptions in laws. If someone can escape the aggression of the state by inserting an exemption for themselves into law, more power to him. Some may interpret such action as “unfair”; however, there is nothing fair about aggression. If some aggression can be eliminated without imposing additional aggression on another, it may seem unfair, but it would be a good, ethical act.
However, there is something else to consider. Should politicians have pushed for this exemption to be added to the law? That is not as obvious. The Bloomberg article that broke this story claims that if this exemption were not in the bill, Newsom would not have supported it. The article states that the exemption “was adopted as a means of winning the governor’s support for the legislation, said a person with knowledge of the discussions.”
In this case, the exemption sufficiently decreased the cost of passing the bill. Disallowing or avoiding such exemption granting from the onset would have eliminated the necessary condition for Newsom signing the bill into law. The result? The bill would not have passed, and California would be in a much better situation.
Therefore, exemption granting must be taken on a case-by-case basis. In this situation, the choice was never between a higher minimum wage and a higher minimum wage with some exemptions. The choice was between a minimum wage increase with exemptions and no minimum wage increase at all. This bill should not have been amended to include such an exemption.
The silver lining to all the attention this bill is receiving is that politicians are taking actions to ameliorate its negative consequences. For example, in light of the Panera controversy, the California state legislature is passing more exemptions to the minimum wage. Let’s hope that they continue passing these exemptions, but let us also not forget the controversy surrounding the bill.
Will this exemption pay off for Flynn in the long run? Perhaps. However, this kind of cronyism should not be surprising. Newsom and the California Democrats will continue to support laws that drive their political enemies out of the state in search of greener pastures. This law is no different. Their political control of the state will strengthen, and the people will be made worse off. California will unfortunately continue to be a cautionary tale of the consequences of interventionism.
Learn Why The Globalists Are Killing Their Own Monetary System
Democrats Cry Foul as Anti-Free Speech Allies Turn Against Them
Below is my column in The Hill on the recent disruptions of events featuring leading Democrats from President Joe Biden to Rep. Jamie Raskin. After years of supporting the censoring and blacklisting of others, these politicians are now being targeted by the very anti-free speech movement that they once fostered. Hillary Clinton last week became the latest Democrat targeted by protesters in a visit to her alma mater, Wellesley College.
Here is the column:
You are “killing people,” President Biden told social media companies a couple of years ago. He sought to shame executives into censoring more Americans. Biden has lashed out at disinformation by anti-vaxxers, “election deniers” and others. This month, those words were thrown back at Biden himself as a “genocide denier” by protesters who have labeled him “Genocide Joe” over his support for Israel.
After years of supporting censorship and blacklisting of people with opposing views, politicians and academics are finding themselves the subjects of the very anti-free speech tactics that they helped foster.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), for example, has been a leading figure in Congress opposing efforts to curtail massive censorship programs coordinated by the Biden administration. While opposing the investigation into past federal censorship efforts, Raskin continues to push social media companies to increase the censorship and silencing of Americans. Last December, Raskin sent a letter on behalf of other Democrats on the powerful House Oversight Committee demanding even more censorship, not only on election fraud, COVID or climate change, but also on abortion.
“We are troubled by the rapid spread of abortion misinformation and disinformation on your company’s social media platform,” he wrote, “and the threat this development poses to safe abortion access in the United States.”
When journalists and even other members testified in favor of free speech, Democrats attacked them as “Putin lovers” and fellow travelers supporting “insurrectionists.”
Last week, however, the left turned on Raskin. He was giving a lecture titled “Democracy, Autocracy and the Threat to Reason in the 21st Century.” According to the Maryland Reporter, the protesters accused Raskin of being “complicit in genocide.” After efforts to resume his remarks, University of Maryland President Darryll Pines finally ended the event early.
Pines then pulled a Raskin. While mildly criticizing the students for their lack of “civility,” he defended their disruption of Raskin’s remarks as if a heckler’s veto were free speech. “What you saw play out actually was democracy and free speech and academic freedom,” he said. “From our perspective as a university, these are the difficult conversations that we should be having.”
There was, of course, no real conversation because this was not the exercise but the denial of free speech. The protesters were engaging in “deplatforming,” which is common on our campuses, where students and faculty organize to prevent others from hearing opposing views.
So, after years of Raskin encouraging the censorship of others, the mob finally came for him. The yawning response of the university was not unlike his own past response to journalists, professors and dissents who have come before his committee.
The only “difficult” aspect of this conversation is for university figures like Pines who are called upon to defend the free speech rights of speakers or faculty. They need to show the courage and principle required to uphold the free speech commitment of higher education, even at the risk of being targeted themselves. That includes the sanctioning of students who prevent others from hearing opposing views in classrooms and event forums. These students have every right to protest outside such spaces, but higher education is premised on the free exchange of ideas. There is really no further “conversation” needed, just a letter of suspension or expulsion for those who deprive others of their rights.
Deplatforming is the rage on our campuses. Universities often use it to cancel events for conservatives or controversial speakers. Often officials will sit idly by, refusing to remove protesters or deter disruptions. And that can lead to self-help measures by others.
Last week, Walter Isaacson, former CEO of CNN and the Aspen Institute, was accused of assaulting a Tulane student protester, Rory MacDonald, during an event held off campus. Isaacson, 72, who teaches at Tulane, was attending the university-sponsored event and had had enough when MacDonald became the eighth protester to stop the event. He stood up and shoved MacDonald into the hall.
MacDonald insisted that he and his fellow protesters were merely “peacefully interrupting” the event to stop others from speaking. He displayed slight scratch marks and is quoted as expressing a fear of returning to campus after the incident. Protests have been held on campus to have Isaacson fired.
I have long criticized the growing anti-free speech movement in higher education. Yet these students have been taught for years that “speech is violence” and harmful. They have also been told by figures such as Pines that silencing others is an act of free speech. Academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or “disingenuous” speech. In one instance, former CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek insisted that disrupting a speech on free speech is itself free speech.
Even schools that purportedly forbid such interruptions rarely punish students who engage in them. For example, students disrupted a Northwestern class due to a guest speaker from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (after the class had heard from an undocumented immigrant). The university let the protesters into the room after they promised not to disrupt the class. They proceeded to stop the class and then gave interviews to the media proudly disclosing their names and celebrating the cancellation. Northwestern did nothing beyond express “disappointment.”
At Stanford, law students prevented a federal judge from speaking. When the judge asked for law school officials present to intervene, former Stanford DEI Dean Tirien Steinbach stepped forward and attacked the conservative judge for triggering the students by sharing his views. After a national outcry, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Law School Dean Jenny Martinez issued a joint apology that notably did not include punishment for a single student.
These schools are enablers of the anti-free speech movement as much as figures like Raskin.
For years, academics supported such mobs or remained silent as their colleagues were cancelled or fired. Now they are suddenly discovering the value of free speech as the mob comes for them.
Censorship and blacklisting create an insatiable appetite. While Democrats fostered such efforts to silence conservatives and dissenters on vaccines, climate change, abortion, transgenderism and other issues, they now find themselves pursued by the very mobs that they once led. Just two years ago, Biden was celebrated for denouncing social media executives as “killers” for allowing free speech. Now he, Raskin, and others are accused of killing others with “Zionist disinformation.”
It is an epiphany that often comes too late. During the French Revolution, journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan remarked that “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.
Learn Why The Globalists Are Killing Their Own Monetary System
Watch: Alarming Footage Shows Street Takeover Gang Smash Police Car with Female Officer Inside
Disturbing footage out of Fairfax County, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., shows the moment a street takeover mob attacked a police cruiser, terrifying a female officer who had responded to the event.
The Washington Examiner has the story behind the officer’s unnerving dash cam footage:
Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis shared the details of the attack that took place early Easter Sunday morning on the officer’s vehicle as she called in for help.
The unidentified officer spotted the group doing donuts in an industrial area parking lot in Springfield, Virginia. When she approached the crowd in her vehicle, the large crowd surrounded her, shaking the police cruiser and attempting to break into the doors.
“A huge crowd is hitting my car. I need units to expedite,” the police officer is heard saying in a video recording played at a Fairfax County police press conference on Wednesday.
Davis said that the videos show the perpetrators “trying to open her car doors” and were “a bunch of masked tough guy wannabe thugs.”
“I believe they fully intended to drag her out of that car, but thankfully, they didn’t get into the car and she escaped unharmed,” he said.
Davis added, “This is not going to happen again in Fairfax County.”
The attack comes as the nation’s capital has seen a rise in violent crime, including murders, carjackings and robberies, under the Biden administration.