This is made blatantly, nakedly clear by New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio. In his State of the City speech last week, he laid bare the premier goal of the Progressive-Democratic Party, even above doing away with ICE and with our borders generally. He said—and he meant every word of it:
Here’s the truth. Brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world. There’s plenty of money in this city. It’s just in the wrong hands.
The Trump administration had expanded rules allowing employers to opt out of being required to provide birth control coverage to their employees at no cost to the employees, so long as the opting out was convincingly based on religious or moral grounds. Federal District Judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California has issued an injunction blocking enforcement of the expansion while an underlying lawsuit against the expansion is underway.
Ordinarily, blocking an enforcement while the underlying case proceeds is no big deal, but this one is just plain wrong. Gilliam based his ruling in significant part on the premise that
‘Way last December, now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) revealed the depth of Progressive-Democrats’ opposition to anything Trump or Republican.
[Then-]House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi…rejected the idea of partially funding President Donald Trump’s border wall in exchange for amnesty for “Dreamers….”
Recall that in President Donald Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address, he laid out his four pillars of immigration policy:
Here come the Progressive-Democrats, and they’ve made their priorities clear in the House with the first things they want to get done. Here’s some of what’s in their HR1:
Newly sworn-in California governor Gavin Newsom (D) has a plan to expand on the State’s sanctuary “status” and draw even more illegal aliens into the State and into the country:
…an unprecedented new health care agenda for his state, aimed at offering dramatically more benefits to illegal immigrants….
As Newsom noted,
People’s lives, freedom, security, the water we drink, the air we breathe—they all hang in the balance
Teachers union style. The Los Angeles Unified School District is so close to out of money that, under California law, the LA county is obligated to take the district into functional receivership under its own control if money gets much shorter.
It’s about to, and they’re about to. The United Teachers Los Angeles union has said it will strike the school district, demanding more money—twice as much as it’s been offered—if it can’t get more money for its teachers and get rival, and educationally superior, charter schools capped on the State resources they receive.
Recall the year-old EU effort with PESCO (the EU’s carefully euphemistically named Permanent Structured Cooperation), the bloc’s effort to form an EU army that would represent and act in the (sovereign) name of the European Union in defending Europe from outside incursions. Oh, and be less dependent on us and our nuclear umbrella, our treasure, and our blood for their defense.
We’re seeing yet another example of the too-broad effort to unite all of Europe under one political flag, as this PESCO effort continues to lag. More importantly, we’re seeing the cost to the EU of Brexit. As Handelsblatt Today observed, the current situation is one of military failure:
Oh, the danger. At least what Peter Nicholas and Paul Kiernan worried about in their Friday Wall Street Journal piece. President Donald Trump might exert too much pressure on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.
[A] sit-down could pose serious risks to the perceived independence of the Fed, according to lawmakers, former Fed officials, and longtime central bank watchers.
Maybe even fire Powell, or threaten him with that.
Most of the ones making such claims are Progressive-Democrats manufacturing a beef for the sake of having something Trumpian about which to whine.
That’s what we can see made plain in the incoming Congress’ House of Representatives. Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman (D, NJ) had this on her Progressive-Democratic Party’s plans:
There are dozens of measures…that have been languishing with Republicans at the helm for years, and I expect to see many of them finally come to the floor under Democratic leadership[.]
Plans like rolling back the just enacted tax cuts and preventing the individual income tax cuts from becoming permanent. Because the Progressive-Democrats know more about how to spend our money than we do.
I’m not Alfred E Neuman, but I do have some history on my side. The current market situation seems ugly—and it is. Aside from my preferred stock portfolio, I’ve gone to cash equivalents for my investments. Here are some tables illustrating recoveries from past ugly market quarters, via Wall Street Journal‘s Market Watch column of, fittingly enough, Christmas Day.
Here we are without the Great Depression:
1932’s recovery isn’t here, but maybe that period was too high a price to pay for the recovery: 163%, 345%, these were from a severely lowered baseline.