February 21, 2019
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson holds a press briefing to outline the level of fraud perpetrated by Empire actor Jussie Smollett.
UPDATE: Here’s the prosecutor proffer as outlined in the bond hearing:
Tag Archives: Marxism
Seeking the Death Penalty
Armstrong Economics Blog/Opinion
Re-Posted Feb 22, 2019 by Martin Armstrong
I have been asked whether I support the death penalty or if I am a liberal on that issue. The government acts as if it is NEVER wrong. It is EXCEPTIONALLY RARE for any prosecutor to admit they wrongly prosecuted someone. The number of people freed with DNA evidence is staggering. Most events do not end happily for so many are executed before they are exonerated. Sometimes, they are saved before they are killed. Prosecutions are personal for prosecutors, and they brag about them on their resume to get a real job after pretending to save society.
I have NEVER met a single prosecutor that you would EVER want to be friends with or certainly EVERallow them to marry your daughter. They are more often the people who enjoyed pulling wings off of flies or tormenting a cat or dog when they were young. It is extraordinarily rare to find one with a conscious. I have heard of some rare exceptions. However, they are extremely rare. It is like sending a soldier into battle who cannot kill someone because of his moral conscious. If you are a prosecutor, you are someone who typically can cheer someone’s death and go have dinner that night to party and celebrate.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Nikolas Cruz, 20-years-old, for slaughtering children at Stoneman Douglas school on Valentine’s day last year. He has pleaded not guilty, but his lawyers have said he would plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. Prosecutors always ask for the death penalty because people wrongly believe that is the worst punishment. They are VERY WRONG. To die is a peaceful end, but to live in prison for life is a lifetime of torture and that is a slow death. Someone who often commits some act like this is not accepted among prisoners. At the very least, he would be abused by fellow prisoners. If he were someone who molested children, he would likely be killed by other prisoners. Prisoners who are sentenced to life often pray for death.
Timothy J. McVeigh who was sentenced to death for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of a federal building asked the federal judge to have him executed within four months. The prosecutors cheered. They won. They got to kill someone. But McVeigh was someone who the guards would constantly harass and torture since he killed an FBI agent. Life in prison would have been far worse for McVeigh than death.
One problem in prison was that people would intentionally pick a fight with someone in hopes that they would kill them. That, of course, would never be an acceptable defense when the surviving prisoner would be charged. But in truth, that is far more common than people realize or want to realize because it is more convenient to picture everyone in prison as evil.
Then there were also “Rat Hunters” who would kill people who testified against others to save themselves. Rats were never trusted and killing a rat was also regarded as fair game.
I would opt for death over life in prison any day. It should be voluntary.
Categories: Opinion, Rule of Law
Chicago – Where More People are Retired than Paying into Government Pensions
Armstrong Economics Blog/Pension Crisis
Re-Posted Feb 22, 2019 by Martin Armstrong
Over 80% of government pension funds are completely funded by the government with no employees paying into the funds. This reflects why governments are coming after the people and extorting more taxes under the threat of seizing your home and throwing you in prison. For 169 governmental bodies in Chicago, the numbers reveal the crisis. In Chicago, there are thousands of more retired state employees collecting pensions than active workers who are paying into it the pension funds. As reported, in a small suburban district known as the Arlington Heights Park District, there are 432 retirees collecting from that district’s pension fund with only 103 active employees paying into it. These shortfalls are expected to be funded by taxpayers.
What is happening in Chicago is indicative of the crisis engulfing Western governments as a whole. These people always counted on an increasing supply of taxpayers. But the birthrate has dropped as well as the marriage rate. The Democrats handed students to the bankers, removing all their rights to bankruptcy, and universities kept raising prices because funding for students would always be there. With over 60% of students now unable to find employment with the degrees they paid so dearly for, the future looks very bleak. They cannot buy homes because of their chronic debts. Marriage is declining and the under-30 generation has a majority that is not interested in even having children. There is a huge rise in VEGANISM as well.
The number of babies born in the United States continues to fall dramatically. The birth rate made a new record low during 2017, dropping 7% in a single year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Preliminary numbers for 2018 show that the decline has continued. The 1950s were called the “Baby Boom” when women had an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. That has collapsed on a worldwide basis to 2.4 children per woman last year, and this decade is being called the great “Baby Bust.”
The global warming crowd should be ecstatic. They have reduced the human population growth by about 50%. The crisis now is there will be a shortage of taxpayers to fund their grand projects along with governments. Socialism cannot possibly survive when we exist to feed those in government who particularly never contributed to their own pensions
Jordan Peterson: A history lesson for political radicals
Published on Nov 21, 2016
Victor Davis Hanson : American in Free Fall
Survey Says: Taxes and Regulation Bleed Blue States, Pump Up Red
Bernie Sanders & AOC: The Young Turks of the DNC
Published on Feb 21, 2019
Why Jussie Smollett Faked His Own Racial, Homophobic Persecution
Published on Feb 20, 2019
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for President?
Armstrong Economics Blog/Politics
Re-Posted Feb 21, 2019 by Martin Armstrong
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being affectionately called “AOC” and is the youngest member of the House. She has been garnering media attention for months since knocking off a veteran Democratic lawmaker in the 2018 primary. There have been people proposing that she should run for president in 2024. The 29-year-old can’t run in 2020 since she is under 35. Interestingly, everyone criticizes Trump for his tweets, but all of the politicians are adopting what Trump began. Like Trump, AOC isn’t quiet on social media either. She sometimes posts on Twitter a dozen times in a single day. She has 3.1 million Twitter followers, which has exceeded those of Nancy Pelosi (2.3 million), and dwarfs the 807,000 who follow Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the social media site. Still, she is dwarfed by Trump who has 55 million followers on Twitter.
Vanity Fair called AOC a “Kingmaker” after being in office for just one week. I find it stunning that the media immediately says she is not a “fad,” but said the opposite for Trump. They fail to see the commonality that both are indeed not a fad, but both are part of a rising revolution against career politicians. They were elected NOT so much for what they said, but because people are tired of the same old lies. The number of elections that have promised change are endless. In the end nothing ever changes — government grows, taxes rise, and individual citizens are denied the basic human right to decide their own future.
The Pension Crisis is Starting to Explode
Armstrong Economics Blog/Pension Crisis
Re-Posted Feb 21, 2019 by Martin Armstrong
At the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, working 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, yields an annual income of only $15,080. This is below the annual poverty line. It also reflects something that most people are unaware of — in Illinois, there are more than 19,000 retired teachers who get OVER $100,000 per year in their pension. According to the latest data, nearly 1.5 in ten federal employees are eligible to retire RIGHT NOW, and in five years the number will hit three in 10 or about 30%. The Housing and Urban Development Department in the federal government has the highest rate of employees eligible to retire right now of any major agency in government, which stands at a shocking 24%.
Under U.S. law, there are two broad types of retirement plans: defined-benefit (DB) and defined-contribution (DC) plans. The Defined-benefit plan has been mostly abandoned in the private sector because they were rapidly revealing how they failed to work. The DB plan use to come with a gold watch and ensured you some level of benefit for the rest of your life. This was all part of how to prevent another Great Depression. Typically, your employer would invest part of your compensation in the plan based on some formula. In some cases, you, the worker, might have added more money to the pot. The employer was required to send your defined benefit each month or quarter to a fund. Typically, this was in the form of a fixed-dollar amount, sometimes with periodic cost-of-living adjustments. That scheme ran into trouble that set standards for private-sector pension plans and defined their tax benefits under federal law because government wanted a piece of the action due to income taxes.
Most state and local government employees, actually 87% of those working full time, participate in a defined benefit (DB) pension plan. They contribute nothing but are simply guaranteed a pension on top of what they earned. These plans typically provide pensions based on members’ years of service and average salary over a specified period before retirement. On top of that, most members also receive cost-of-living adjustments that help maintain the purchasing power of their benefits during retirement. In the private sector, where defined contribution (DC) or 401(k)-style plans dominate, only 19% of full-time workers belong to DB plans. This is the real PENSION CRISIS. Government workers generally contribute nothing and demand tax increases to fund their pensions.
The DC plans emerged when the DB plans were showing signs of economic stress. The handwriting was on the wall. As taxes rose, the standard of living declined and governments wanted to regulate pensions to prevent too much money going into tax-free vehicles. The 401K is a kind of defined-contribution plan (as are various types of IRAs/Keogh/SEP plans, etc.) which emerged under the DC plan structure. Government regulations govern who puts money into the plan and how much. Typically, it’s you and your employer. Your employer also has to give you some reasonable investment options, but it’s up to you to use them wisely. Good luck. Most people have discovered nothing but losses. The advice for the general public has been biased, subject to conflicts of interest, and fragmented. This is because we have fragmented agencies (i.e. SEC & CFTC). The CFTC is regarded as the unqualified regulator. The lawyers there are the people who generally are turned down by the SEC. But the real crisis is that the regulations under the SEC and CFTC are exactly opposite. If you managed money under one agency’s rules, you went to jail under the other. This resulted in the development of offshore hedge funds where you paid a manager to make all the decisions, whereas domestically, a manger in stocks could not also advise on commodities. This resulted in conflicts of interest and has seriously harmed average people in understanding how to manage their own 401K.
Therefore, regulations have prejudiced the private sector while the public sector is predominantly under DB plans where government workers have no decisions they confront. This stark difference is coming to a head. Before 2032, there will be more people on retirement from government than actual workers. Taxes have NOWHERE to go but up dramatically because nobody is willing to look at reform. The new Modern Economic Theory is their answer — just print.
Centinel2012 