Category Archives: Biden administration

Democrat Legislation is Remaking American using MMT

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Government Jobs for Everyone….consider this –>

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic framework that says monetarily sovereign countries like the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Canada, which spend, tax, and borrow in a fiat currency that they fully control, are not operationally constrained by revenues when it comes to federal government spending. MMT was pioneered by American economist and theorist Warren Mosler in 1992, along with Bill Mitchell, a university professor based in Australia and a key developer of the theory.

Modern Monetary Theory & Why Central Banks are lost in the ...

AIER: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) offers some unconventional policy recommendations based on the United States’ monetary sovereignty. MMT proponents also advocate government guaranteed jobs paying a living wage for all Americans. What would be the consequences of such a guarantee?

The Public Service Employment program detailed in a 2018 paper from the Levy Economics Institute would be funded by Washington and administered by states. It would offer full and part-time jobs paying $15 per hour plus benefits. The program’s spending would be mandatory, like other entitlement programs. The jobs would “provide public services in nonprofit community organizations, public schools, and state and local governments.”

The program could accomplish three distinct ends. The first is stabilizing aggregate demand during economic downturns. The second is instituting work-relief in place of cash assistance. The third is implementing a “living wage” for all Americans.

When the economy slips into recession, businesses lay off some workers and cut others’ wages. Reductions in these workers’ spending produce second-round (and third-round) effects: landlords, for example, cut back their spending after not receiving rent. Many economists support macroeconomic stabilization.

Stabilization works much better when automatic. Discretionary stabilization spending, like 2009’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, can take months to enact. Laid off workers can start a guaranteed government job immediately.

Today unemployed workers receive cash assistance. While I do not advocate government make-work jobs, work-relief has two advantages over cash assistance. First, work requirements effectively control fraud, as revealed by the 1990s welfare reforms. People working while on the welfare rolls never showed up for mandatory job training.

Work-relief also denies recipients the leisure of staying home. People will compare the full value of their options. Suppose a person values the freedom of not working at $30,000 a year. If they also receive $10,000, only a $20 per hour job matches the full value of the cash assistance.

The MMT jobs program also implements a living wage providing a “just” level of compensation. Economics shows how workers in a competitive labor market get paid the value they create for businesses. The “problem” of low wages is then inadequate job skills.

The living wage is redistribution disguised as work. Market wages and salaries are not charity; the prices customers willingly pay for goods and services cover workers’ pay. Market-based salaries come entirely from voluntary payment and workers earn their pay by helping produce goods and services.

Guaranteed jobs effectively set a minimum wage because few Americans will work for businesses offering worse compensation packages (wages and benefits). Government jobs would be far more effective in assisting low-wage workers because a minimum wage ends up pricing many out of the labor market altogether.

Government jobs paying $15 an hour plus benefits would likely cost $40,000 per job annually. MMT proponents project 15 million government jobs would be needed even when the economy is strong. MMT can advocate such a budget-busting program because in its view monetary sovereignty renders Federal spending costless under most circumstances.

The biggest potential problem with the jobs guarantee, even at a lower wage, is whether people will have to work. What exactly is a government “guaranteed job?” The term job suggests a person must work satisfactorily or be fired. The guarantee suggests anyone fired must then be given another position.

Government guaranteed no-show jobs would blow up the labor market. If you had a “job” paying $30,000 plus benefits not requiring work, how much would you need to be paid to take a real job? Guaranteed $15 per hour no-show jobs would effectively be a $30 or $40 per hour minimum wage.

The United States is prosperous because we produce goods and services people want in large quantities. Yet production requires real work, not government make-work jobs. By diverting millions out of productive private sector jobs, the MMT jobs guarantee seems guaranteed to impoverish America.

CIA Director in Moscow Did not Stop 90,000 Russian Troops at Ukraine Border

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Senator Marco Rubio appears to be the only person really concerned about a Russian invasion of Ukraine. While CIA Director Bill Burns took a delegation to Moscow for what is said to be high level meetings, it has proven to be ineffective in altering Russian operations versus Ukraine. Top Russian security chief met with CIA director Burns ...

As usual we have this –>The Ukrainian Defense Ministry sent a release saying that about 90,000 Russian troops are stationed close to the border in areas east of the country controlled by rebel forces. This comes two days after Ukraine denied that Russian military personnel were in the area.

Eastern Ukraine has been a contentious area for years. In 2014, Moscow annexed the Crimean Peninsula shortly after the Ukrainian Revolution. Over 14,000 people have died as a result of the conflict.

Russian officials said the troops were present due to maneuvers. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “Russia maintains troops presence on its territory wherever it deems necessary.”

The ministry’s statement said specifically that units of the Russian 41st army have remained in Yelnya, about 260 kilometers (about 160 miles) north of the Ukrainian border.

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Andriy Taran submitted his resignation and Ukrainian lawmakers quickly approved it Wednesday. Davyd Arakhamia, the head of the parliamentary faction of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party, said Taran had health problems.

Ukrainian media reported however that Zelenskyy’s office was behind the resignation of Taran and four other ministers, who were also dismissed by parliament on Wednesday.

Russia has cast its weight behind a separatist insurgency in Ukraine’s east that erupted shortly after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

A massive buildup of Russian troops in Russia’s west have been fueling fears of an escalation of large-scale hostilities.

Russian officials said that the troops were deployed as part of measures to counter security threats posed by the deployment of NATO forces near Russian borders. Russia and the alliance also have blamed each other for conducting destabilizing military exercises near the borders.

****CIA director makes rare trip to Moscow for talks on Russia ...

The CIA and the delegation came back empty handed it seems.

THE DIRECTOR OF THE United States Central Intelligence Agency has returned to Washington from a surprise visit to Russia, where he led a high-level team of American officials in meetings with their Russian counterparts. The two-day visit was announced almost simultaneously by both the American and Russian governments, following the arrival of the CIA director, William Burns, to Moscow on Tuesday.

Little information has emerged about the participants in the meetings. A statement from the American embassy in Moscow said simply that Burns had traveled there at the request of President Joe Biden, and that other United States officials had traveled with him. It is believed that Karen Donfried, the State Department’s assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, traveled with Burns. According to the American embassy, the meetings were held on Tuesday and Wednesday and concerned “a range of issues in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia.

A minute-long video, which was posted on social media by the Russian TASS news agency on Tuesday, showed a group of five American officials meeting with five Russian officials. The latter appeared to include Nikolai Patrushev, a close political ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who heads the Security Council of Russia —a body that is roughly equivalent to the United States National Security Council. Prior to his current role, Patrushev served as director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).

It is worth noting that Burns speaks Russian and served twice as a diplomat in Russia, most recently as the American ambassador there. Some observers noted that Burns’ trip to Moscow is part of a broader pattern of increasingly frequent meetings between American and Russian officials in recent months. The last four months have seen at least four visits to Russia by senior officials in the Biden administration.

Microsoft Reveals Continued Hacks of Technology Companies

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The Russia-linked hackers behind last year’s compromise of a wide swath of the U.S. government and scores of private companies, including SolarWinds Corp. , have stepped up their attacks in recent months, breaking into technology companies in an effort to steal sensitive information, cybersecurity experts said.

In a campaign that dates back to May of this year, the hackers have targeted more than 140 technology companies including those that manage or resell cloud-computing services, according to new research from Microsoft Corp. The attack, which was successful with as many as 14 of these technology companies, involved unsophisticated techniques like phishing or simply guessing user passwords in hopes of gaining access to systems, Microsoft said.

***SolarWinds Hackers Accessed US Justice Department Email ...

Source: In a recent blog post to the company’s website, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of customer security and trust, Tom Burt, wrote that “state actor Nobelium has been attempting to replicate the approach it has used in past attacks by targeting organizations integral to the global IT supply chain.”

Nobelium is “attacking a different part of the supply chain: resellers and other technology service providers that customize, deploy and manage cloud services and other technologies on behalf of their customers,” according to the company.

Burt wrote that 609 Microsoft customers had been informed that they’d been attacked between July and October of this year close to 23,000 times “with a success rate in the low single digits.”

The attacks, according to the executive, were not aimed at a specific flaw in any of the systems, rather, they were “password spray and phishing” attacks, which are aimed at stealing credentials that grant the attackers access to privileged information.

The Russian state-backed hacking group is, according to Burt, “trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain, and establish a mechanism for surveilling – now or in the future – targets of interest to the Russian government.”

***

Over 600 Microsoft customers targeted since July

“Since May, we have notified more than 140 resellers and technology service providers that have been targeted by Nobelium,” said Tom Burt, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft.

“We continue to investigate, but to date we believe as many as 14 of these resellers and service providers have been compromised.”

As Burt added, in all, more than 600 Microsoft customers were attacked thousands of times, although with a very low rate of success between July and October.

“These attacks have been a part of a larger wave of Nobelium activities this summer. In fact, between July 1 and October 19 this year, we informed 609 customers that they had been attacked 22,868 times by Nobelium, with a success rate in the low single digits,” Burt said.

“By comparison, prior to July 1, 2021, we had notified customers about attacks from all nation-state actors 20,500 times over the past three years.”

Nobelium MSP attacks
Nobelium MSP attacks (Microsoft)

This shows that Nobelium is still attempting to launch attacks similar to the one they pulled off after breaching SolarWinds’ systems to gain long-term access to the systems of targets of interest and establish espionage and exfiltration channels.

Microsoft also shared measures MSPs, cloud service providers, and other tech orgs can take to protect their networks and customers from these ongoing Nobelium attacks.

Nobelium’s high profile targets

Nobelium is the hacking division of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), also tracked as APT29, Cozy Bear, and The Dukes.

In April 2021, the U.S. government formally blamed the SVR division for coordinating the SolarWinds “broad-scope cyber espionage campaign” that led to the compromise of multiple U.S. government agencies.

At the end of July, the US Department of Justice was the last US govt entity to disclose that 27 US Attorneys’ offices were breached during the SolarWinds global hacking spree.

In May, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) also reported a phishing campaign targeting government agencies from 24 countries.

Earlier this year, Microsoft detailed three Nobelium malware strains used for maintaining persistence on compromised networks: a command-and-control backdoor dubbed ‘GoldMax,’ an HTTP tracer tool tracked as ‘GoldFinder,’ a persistence tool and malware dropper named ‘Sibot.’

Two months later, they revealed four more malware families Nobelium used in their attacks: a malware downloader known as ‘BoomBox,’ a shellcode downloader and launcher known as ‘VaporRage,’ a malicious HTML attachment dubbed ‘EnvyScout,’ and a loader named ‘NativeZone.’

Meet The White Coat Waste Project and Poor Harvey

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The poor Beagles….animal abuse and death…you’re paying for it too.

.White Coat Waste Project is a taxpayer watchdog group representing more than 2 million liberty-lovers and animal-lovers who all agree: taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay over $20 billion every year for wasteful and cruel experiments on dogs, cats, monkeys and other animals.

36 Beagles to Be Released From Michigan Animal Testing Lab .... There are even beagle puppy farms….

And it could be that other deadly disgusting nefarious testing is going on with the approval of our own government agencies….check this out —>

In part: According to the most recent reports, approximately 60,000 dogs are used in testing and research in the United States each year, with an additional 6,500 dogs reported as being held in laboratories but not yet used. The Michigan lab alone used thousands of beagles and hounds last year in testing for companies seeking federal approval for potentially poisonous products, like pharmaceuticals and pesticides (fungicides). Harvey and the other dogs who were at the lab during our investigation were bought from two major breeders, Marshall BioResources and Covance Research, which sell specifically to laboratories. Marshall had 22,000 dogs at its facility in New York at the time of a U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection in 2018. Beagles are most commonly used in research because of their docile nature.

The Charles River Laboratories now has 36 beagles in its facility for a pesticide test commissioned by Dow AgroSciences (now known as Corteva), and we need your help to get those beagles out.

The test, which involves force-feeding the dogs with various doses of a fungicide each day for a full year, has been universally deemed as unnecessary, including by Dow scientists. Dow itself has actively advocated for eliminating this test in numerous countries, and we have been grateful for Dow’s work in the past. When we reached out to the company, we were told the test is required in Brazil. The country has taken steps to remove the one-year dog test from its pesticide requirements, but the changes haven’t been formally adopted yet. When Humane Society International swiftly contacted Brazilian regulatory authorities, we received a response that they were readily granting waiver requests from companies to forego this test. Dow asked for a more formal assurance from Brazil to end the dog study already underway, which HSI obtained, but Dow’s regulatory affairs division now says they need additional confirmation that their specific pesticide product will be approved without the dog study results before ending the study.

Our discussions with Dow have hit an impasse and meanwhile, time is running out for the Dow beagles. Unless we act fast, these 36 dogs will likely die for a test that is not needed.

It is too late to help Harvey and the other dogs seen during our investigation. But with your help, we can make a difference for these 36 dogs still at Charles River. Please join us in asking Dow to immediately end the test and release the beagles to us. We will work on getting them placed into loving homes, even as we continue to work toward the day when invasive testing on dogs becomes a thing of the past.