President Trump has harshly criticized the Federal Reserve in recent weeks for inching up the standard interest rate to guard against rising inflation and threatening the four percent economic growth rate the billionaire likes to brag about.
Here’s another reason: The higher interest rates on your credit card balances and car loans also apply to the federal government’s borrowing.
That federal borrowing is huge, no, HUGE –about one million dollars every single minute of every single day.
By next Monday that adds up to about $955 billion this year. And another more than a trillion dollars each of the next two years, at least. Every time the Fed’s interest rate goes up a quarter-point, the government’s interest payments surge by millions.
Last year alone just the national debt’s interest costs of $263 billion consumed 6.6 percent of all government spending and 1.4 percent of the nation’s gross national product. That huge sum is actually below the historical average of recent decades.
But wait! There’s more. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the interest payments will surpass Medicaid costs within 18 months and that they will exceed all national defense spending by 2023.
By 2025, the CBO figures interest costs will surge past the combined totals of all non-defense discretionary programs together, including funding for national parks, scientific research, health care, education, the court system and infrastructure.
Between now and 2023 nearly three-quarters of the federal debt will mature and must be refinanced at whatever the presumably higher interest rates are in effect then.
Somebody needs credit counseling. And the outlook, sadly, is grim. Democrats take control of the House of Representatives next week. They have big spending plans, or at least big talk about big spending plans, for the 96-week-long propaganda run-up to the 2020 election.
Even if Donald Trump was a fiscal conservative, he might be tempted to sign some of those big spending ideas as bargaining sweeteners for Democrat agreement to his border wall and other political priorities. That’s another cost of the divided government Americans chose to elect last month.
Other than that, as you can see on the rapidly-spinning National Debt Clock here, everything seems completely under control.
Socialist Venezuela’s oil output continues to crash – except for China joint venture
UN prepares Venezuelan refugee crisis, the largest in modern Latin American history
Socialist Venezuela’s oil output continues to crash – except for China joint venture
Venezuelan migrants travel aboard a truck in Tumbes, Peru, near the Ecuador border, on 1 November (AFP)
Venezuela’s economy desperately needs to be able to sell oil in order to survive. But Venezuela’s socialist dictators Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro have done what many might consider an almost impossible feat – turned the country with the largest oil reserves in the world into a country that cannot produce oil. Other “socialist paradise” countries – including China, Russia, East Germany, Cuba, and Sweden – have partially or completely turned to private markets as their economies spiraled into disaster, but only two countries in the world have not: Venezuela and North Korea. And both are economic disasters as a result.
In Venezuela, Maduro has fulfilled his socialist dreams by turning the country’s nationalized oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), over to army generals and other political cronies to run, lest some dirty capitalist make a profit on Venezuela’s oil. Well, Maduro has made sure that nobody is making money on Venezuela’s oil, including Venezuela.
Oil accounts for about 98 percent of Venezuela’s export revenue and, in November 2017, Maduro put Major General Manuel Quevedo in charge of PDVSA, in the hope of stopping its collapse.
Quevedo is a Maduro crony but knows nothing about the oil industry. In July, Quevedo joined his wife, a Catholic priest, and a gathering of oil workers in prayer to ask God to boost oil output. Prayer is a great management technique, but unfortunately, God was not listening this time. The collapse has continued, and production has dropped 20 percent since Quevedo took over, and is now at the lowest level in nearly 70 years.
And now there are reports that Maduro is thinking of firing Quevedo and replacing him with another army general who has no oil industry expertise. Ironically, Quevedo is scheduled in January to assume the rotating presidency of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for one year.
There is one subsidiary of PDVSA that that has increased oil production this year. Sinovensa is jointly owned by PDVSA and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), and it accounts for about 10 percent of Venezuela’s oil output.
China has lent over $50 billion to Venezuela through oil-for-loan agreements over the past decade. China has not been producing enough oil to make the debt repayments, and so this year China took over additional control of Sinovensa, and now owns 49 percent of the joint venture. The result is that oil production from Sinovensa increased 46 percent since April. Reuters and S&P Global and Hellenic Shipping and OilPrice.com
UN prepares Venezuelan refugee crisis, the largest in modern Latin American history
The problem of refugees fleeing from Venezuela into neighboring countries has become so massive that the United Nations refugee agency has created a Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan (RMRP) involving 95 organizations in 16 countries to respond to the humanitarian needs of the refugees and migrants from Venezuela.
Almost 3.3 million Venezuelans have fled into neighboring countries and beyond. This exodus is already the largest in the modern history of Latin America and the Caribbean and involves both refugees and migrants from Venezuela. UNHCR expects that another two million Venezuelans will flee in 2019, with the result that about 5.4 million Venezuelans, or 17 percent of the country’s total population, will be living abroad by the end of 2019.
The RMRP organizations are also asking for $738 million in financing in hopes of providing assistance to 2.2 million Venezuelans and 500,000 people in the host communities. The United States has earmarked more than $95 million in aid to Colombia, Brazil, and other host nations to deal with the Venezuelan crisis since fiscal year 2017.
It is interesting to compare Venezuela and North Korea. Both have devastated economies and enormous poverty. Both of them are supported by Russia and China. Both are international pariahs. There are some differences. Unlike North Korea, Venezuela does not have nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and people are permitted to leave the country without getting shot to death. Miami Herald and UNHCR and Refugee and Migrant Response Plan (RMRP, PDF)
Related articles:
KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, Manuel Quevedo, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., PDVSA, Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, Russia, North Korea, China, Sinovensa, China National Petroleum Corporation, CNPC, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan, RMRP Permanent web link to this article Receive daily World View columns by e-mail
A United States Army soldier told President Trump during his visit on Christmas evening to the Al Asad Airbase in Iraq that he returned to the military because of him.
“And I am here because of you,” Trump replied.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders captured the moment. She tweeted after the visit:
“Powerful moment – Member of United States Army told the President he came back into the military because of him. And President Trump responded, ‘And I am here because of you.’ I met him after and he gave me the patch from his arm. Incredible. #TrumpTroopsVisit”:
Powerful moment – Member of United States Army told the President he came back into the military because of him. And President Trump responded, “And I am here because of you.” I met him after and he gave me the patch from his arm. Incredible. #TrumpTroopsVisitpic.twitter.com/WmQf3b2K8X
The soldier is unidentified, but according to the patch he gave Sanders, he serves with the 3rd Cavalry “Brave Rifles” Regiment from Fort Hood, Texas.
Trump’s visit to Al Asad was the first to a combat zone during his tenure. The first lady, Melania, visited the base with the president.
Troops greeted Trump with other expressions of appreciation. When he stepped on stage to address several hundreds of them, they broke out in applause, cheered, and chanted “USA!”
Trump next visited Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. There, some troops brought red “Make America Great Again” hats for the president to sign. One female service member brought a “Trump” banner to greet the president with, according to pictures that the White House press pool, who traveled with the president to both bases, shared on Twitter:
Just returned from visiting our troops in Iraq and Germany. One thing is certain, we have incredible people representing our Country – people that know how to win!
In virtually any given week in 2018, you could expect at least one of the following: the media would run a negative story about the president, a Democrat would complain about Russia, and a tech platform would censor a prominent conservative.
Democrats, still determined to cast the President’s election as illegitimate two years after the fact, still harp on about Russia, even as more evidence reveals how minuscule and meaningless Putin’s election “influence operation” really was. Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently told Congress that his company discovered just $4,700 in ad spending from Russia-linked accounts in 2016.
Those same Democrats ridicule conservative complaints of tech censorship as a conspiracy theory, even when leaks from the tech companies themselves prove that it’s happening. “The Good Censor,” an internal Google briefing leaked to me earlier this year admits point-blank that the tech giants “shifted towards censorship” after 2016. It seems Google’s own researchers disagree with the Democrats’ defense of the company. That’s to be expected — Google pays its researchers to tell it the truth. It pays Congressional Democrats for other reasons.
You don’t need leaks to discern Silicon Valley’s bias, though. You can just look at the tech platform’s actions. In the past year alone, we saw the following blacklistings, representing only the most prominent of those to feel Silicon Valley’s wrath.:
Islam critic Tommy Robinson was banned by Twitter and PayPal.
Conservative activist Laura Loomer was banned by Twitter.
Republican consultant R.C. Maxwell was banned by Twitter.
Centrist YouTuber Carl Benjamin (a.k.a. “Sargon of Akkad”) was banned by Patreon.
Candace Owens was suspended by Twitter
James Woods was suspended for 30 days by Twitter
I, Hypocrite, a page that highlights far-left hate speech, was banned by Facebook
Avi Yemini, a Jewish-Australian IDF veteran and conservative activist was banned by Facebook
Mohammed Tawhidi, an anti-extremist Australian imam was banned by Facebook
The Babylon Bee, a conservative satire site, was threatened with suspension by Facebook
Conservative activist Terrence K. Williams was suspended by Facebook
Gavin McInnes was banned by Twitter and Facebook
At the urging of the corporate media, Alex Jones and Infowars were banned by Facebook, Twitter, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Pinterest, and YouTube
Over 800 alternative news accounts were banned by Facebook just a few weeks before the midterms
An untold number of rank and file conservatives, who do not have the pull to shame the platforms into reinstating their accounts, also were silenced.
The censorship wasn’t contained to just activists, the alternative media, and influencers. Even mainstream politicians felt the heat — Facebook and Google refused to carry campaign ads for Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn, echoing a similar decision by Twitter a year earlier. Facebook also temporarily blocked an anti-communist ad by Republican congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng. Most egregious of all — the social network blocked a midterm ad by President Donald Trump just days before the November elections.
Midway through the year, top Republicans including GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and congressman Matt Gaetz also discovered that their account had been suppressed in Twitter’s search results. Axios reporter Jonathan Swan admitted that the revelation made him “rethink” his previously-held belief that tech censorship was just a “conspiracy theory.”
After 2018’s tidal wave of censorship, can anyone still believe that?
Veteran actor Dennis Quaid will sing in a new docudrama about freedom of speech and political censorship, just one month after he released his first-ever studio album with his rock band The Sharks.
The 64-year-old actor will have his song “Out of the Box” featured in the upcoming crowdfunded film No Safe Spaces, produced by comedian Adam Carolla and conservative talk show host Dennis Prager. The film dives deep into the suppression of free speech on college campuses and other key institutions.
“It’s not just Hollywood. Our whole culture has become intolerant,” Quaid told The New York Post, explaining that his song is mainly about “being open to other points of view and not mindlessly giving yourself over to an ‘ism.’”
“I don’t give myself to any party or ism,” Quaid said. “I don’t march lock step with anything or anybody except for God and the values my mom taught me back in Texas. So if a president does great things I can acknowledge that no matter his party. I’ve voted for candidates from both parties and I’m a registered independent.”
Earlier this month, Quaid weighed in on the debate surrounding the film “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” which some progressives denounced as promoting rape and sexual harassment.
“It’s kind of innocent, really,” Quaid said of the controversy. “It was written in the ’40s, and there’s nothing predatory about it. It’s sort of just the relationship between men and women, you know? That’s all.”
No Safe Spaces, which features commentary from the commentators including Van Jones, Alan Dershowitz, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Cornel West, and Tim Allen, will be released in Spring 2019.
Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com.
The Trump administration filed an amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief Wednesday urging the Supreme Court to protect a 93-year-old war memorial in Bladensburg, Maryland, that is shaped like a Latin cross.
The court will soon decide whether the cross-shaped World War I memorial violates the First Amendment’s ban on religious favoritism.
The Trump administration’s brief emphasizes the need for the high court to clarify its jurisprudence concerning religious displays in the public square. Since 2005 the justices applied two different tests for assessing the constitutionality of sectarian symbols in public settings.
Confusion has followed in lower federal courts as to which test should govern the so-called public display cases. That uncertainty, the government says, “encourages challenges to longstanding displays like the Memorial Cross, which in turn fosters the very religion-based divisiveness that the establishment clause seeks to avoid.”
“Cases like these cannot help but divide those with sincerely held beliefs on both sides,” the brief reads. “This case presents an opportunity for the Court to adopt a standard for establishment clause challenges to passive displays that will reduce factious litigation, provide clarity to lower courts, and promote consistency across cases.”
The administration then offers a solution to that problem: It urges the justices to resolve public display cases with reference to the practices of the Founding Fathers. The brief favorably cites the high court’s approach to a 2014 case called Town of Greece v. Galloway. In that case, a five-justice majority said the town board of Greece, New York, did not violate the Constitution by opening monthly public meetings with a prayer.
The case arose when several Maryland residents represented by the American Humanist Association filed a lawsuit seeking the memorial’s renovation or removal in 2014. A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found for the American Humanist Association in October 2017, concluding that the memorial was an unconstitutional government endorsement of Christianity.
“While the Latin cross may generally serve as a symbol of death and memorialization, it only holds value as a symbol of death and resurrection because of its affiliation with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ,” the decision reads.
The full 4th Circuit denied review on an eight to six vote, prompting several dissents, including one which warned that the panel decision imperils similar monuments in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
The American Legion erected the memorial, known locally as “Peace Cross,” to honor the World War I dead of Prince George’s County in 1925. A state commission has administered the site since 1961.
Oral arguments are scheduled at the Supreme Court for Feb. 27 and a decision is expected in June.
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Like the pro-abortion crowd which found a loophole to legalize the deadly institution via the Supreme Court, the so-called "Death with Dignity" advocates may have found a way to legalize assisted suicide in all 50 states thanks to a recent bill in New Mexico.
Former acting ICE Director Tom Homan on Wednesday blasted House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi for calling a border wall ineffective and accusing President Trump of “fear mongering” with the illegal immigration issue.
“Every place a wall or barrier has been built, it has resulted in decreased illegal immigration, decreased drug smuggling. One hundred percent of the time, it has proven effective,” Mr. Homan said on Fox News, where he is a contributor.
“Look at the rest of the data on the border, where arrests of MS-13 [gang] this year are up 118 percent, the seizures of guns — for God’s sake — are up almost 200 percent. There’s your data. Look at it. You can see why we need a wall,” he said.
Mr. Homan, a veteran of the Border Patrol agent and investigator for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Mr. Trump was “doing the right thing” in shutting down the government in a fight with Democrats over funding a wall or barrier on the border with Mexico.
The partial shutdown began Saturday, affecting about 25 percent of the federal government, including the Department of Homeland Security.
Mrs. Pelosi told USA Today that Mr. Trump was using the wall to “fear monger.”
“He talked about terrorists coming in over that particular border, which wasn’t so. He talked about people bringing in diseases and all the rest of that, which wasn’t so,” said Mrs. Pelosi, who is poised to become speaker when Democrats take control of the House next week. “He’s using scare tactics that are not evidence-based, and it’s wrong.”
Almost immediately, claims of troops being in violation of military rules were tossed around. They were wrong, but that didn’t seem to matter.
“But troops’ requests for the autographs could brush up against Department of Defense guidelines for political activities,” CNN admonished. “Those guidelines say that ‘active duty personnel may not engage in partisan political activities and all military personnel should avoid the inference that their political activities imply or appear to imply DoD sponsorship, approval, or endorsement of a political candidate, campaign, or cause.’”
Under the heading of “haters are gonna hate” is this insanity from @CNN – a blatant and near criminal misrepresentation of “The Hatch Act” – troops having and bringing out MAGA hats is completely legal (and kinda cool that they had them in Iraq BTW)https://t.co/mTnu7QPz9J
Were the troops wrong to bring out MAGA hats for the president to sign?
What CNN left out was the rest of the guidelines, which clearly state that “(a)ctive duty members may, however, express their personal opinions on political candidates and issues, make monetary contributions to a political campaign or organization, and attend political events as a spectator when not in uniform,” according to The Daily Wire.
Of course, CNN also made sure to throw some Trump-bashing in with their attack on the troops allegedly breaking the rules. The panel doing the smearing included White House correspondent Jim Acosta, who, perhaps surprisingly, somewhat came to Trump’s defense when it was implied that he might have provided the hats to the troops.
“(W)hat would the concern be if something like that is going on, do you think? Or is this just, you know, a soldier is there, he’s got a hat in his locker, and he runs over and says, ‘Hey, when am I going to have another chance for the president to sign one of these things?’” Acosta said, according to NewsBusters.
But the hate-fest was worse than just hate. It was hypocrisy, as well.
But let’s not a little thing like facts get in the way of the media pushing their Trump Derangement Syndrome onto whatever viewers they have left to keep the hate and division going. So what if the “fake news” label continues to be applied to them. They’ll just attribute that to Trump, too.
Using the brave men and women who risk all for us back home to push a hate-filled narrative is pathetic. Attempting to smear the sitting president by smearing them is not journalism and it is not OK.
The troops, the president — and for that matter, the American people — deserve better than that.
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
The New York Times published an interesting story on Christmas Eve about continuing fallout from the economic decisions made by former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. Correa is a socialist who served two terms between 2007 and 2017. His time in office was highlighted by a rejection of Ecuador’s debt (he defaulted) and American influence in the country. Instead, he invited China to come into the country and accepted $19 billion in loans for infrastructure projects in exchange for 90% of Ecuador’s oil production until the cost of the projects was paid off. The largest of the projects was the Coca Codo Sinclair dam. The dam was supposed to generate enough electricity to power a third or more of the country’s needs. But the reality has been something quite different.
When it finally opened in late 2016, China’s president, Xi Jinping, flew to Ecuador to celebrate.
Yet only two days before the visit, the dam was in chaos.
Engineers had tried to generate the project’s full 1500 megawatts, but neither the facility nor Ecuador’s electrical grid could handle it. The equipment shuddered dangerously, and blackouts spread across the country, officials said.
Ecuadoreans were never told about the failure, and a full power test has not been attempted since.
Today, the dam typically runs at half capacity. Experts say that given its design — and the cycle of wet and dry seasons in Ecuador — it would be able to generate the full amount of electricity for only a few hours a day, six months out of the year.
And that’s really the best case scenario. There’s a much worse case in which the entire dam could fall apart as a result of shoddy Chinese workmanship:
As early as 2014, technicians noticed cracks in the Chinese-made stainless steel equipment. That December, 13 workers were killed when a tunnel flooded and collapsed.
A senior engineer sent records to Mr. Correa, the president, asking to brief him on the problems, according to documents viewed by The Times. The engineer was fired days later, according to former officials…
Now, 7,648 cracks have developed in the dam’s machinery, according to the government, because of substandard steel and inadequate welding by Sinohydro. Sand and silt are also big concerns because they can damage vital equipment.
The reason a dam had not been built here wasn’t simply the scale of the project it was also the dam’s proximity to an active volcano:
When Fernando Santos, an energy minister in the 1980s, found out that the Coca Codo Sinclair dam was actually being built, he could hardly believe it.
During his time in government, officials had rejected a much smaller version of the project. The whole idea was doomed, he said, because of the volcano nearby. A major earthquake had decimated oil infrastructure in the area in 1987.
“The volcano has been erupting since the time the Spanish came to Ecuador in the 16th century,” Mr. Santos said, adding that investing so much money “in such a risky location was nonsense.”
One reason authorities may have been so willing to take a risk on the project is that they were receiving bribes. The anti-corruption official who was in charge of the project was caught on tape discussing the existence of bribes from China. Multiple officials involved are currently in prison for taking bribes from a rival engineering company which was the main rival to the Chinese.
Correa’s time in office also included other highlights including his promotion of the Chevron shakedown lawsuit. Correa created a PR campaign which brought sympathetic Hollywood leftists like Mia Farrow to visit Ecuador to bring favorable publicity to that case. Like fellow socialist Hugo Chavez, Correa was also known for cracking down on press freedom. He sued El Universo newspaper over an opinion piece and won:
A judge in Ecuador ruled Wednesday that the directors and former opinion editor of El Universo newspaper must each serve three years in prison for an opinion article about President Rafael Correa, state media reported.
The judge also ruled that the accused must pay $30 million, and the newspaper must pay $10 million, to Correa, the state-run El Ciudadano government information website reported.
The case drew international attention from press-freedom advocates, who say Correa aims to crack down on critics by restricting the media.
After his second term in office ended, Correa left for Belgium where his wife is a citizen. The belief at the time was that his chosen successor would take his place for a few years and then Correa would make a triumphant return in time for the next election. Instead, Correa’s successor turned on him and helped support an initiative which created a 2-term limit for presidents. He also began prosecuting government officials involved in bribery.
This summer Raphael Correa requested asylum in Belgium to avoid facing charges of kidnapping back home. Just last month, Ecuador’s top court ordered Correa to stand trial in that case:
Correa was charged in September by prosecutors of orchestrating Fernando Balda’s kidnapping in Bogota after he fled to Colombia’s capital to escape what he considered persecution by Correa.
A supreme court justice decided that the accusations against Correa, his top intelligence chief and two others merited a trial. Judge Daniel Camacho also formally declared Correa a “fugitive” after he flouted for months an order to appear before the court every 15 days as part of the ongoing probe. For his defiance, Ecuadorean authorities had previously requested Correa’s arrest and extradition from Belgium, where he has been living since leaving office last year…
Balda was abducted but quickly escaped harm after nearby taxi drivers alerted police, who stopped the vehicle in which he was being taken away. Colombian authorities later determined that three intelligence agents with Ecuador’s police had contracted the kidnappers to abduct Balda.
Correa faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted, but that’s not likely to happen as he can only be convicted if he returns to his home country.
via Hot Air
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