Only this guy, who lasted 15 minutes in community college, understands the gravity of the debt situation.
Remember that guy who said "Only I can fix it" ?
Same guy.
These are the forerunners of Draco.
This guy has to be screenshot because he routinely deletes his tweets in order to not leave a trail.
Democrats lie every damn day, followed by the Republicans when they can get a word in edgewise.
The voters rejected Trump, end of story. 50 state legislatures, like it or not, certified their results saying so. Trump conceded all this by his actions, relinquishing power and flying away to Florida on January 20th.
The refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election is now all on one side.
The 2020 winners will rue the day they criminalized politics like this, when a real Draco comes and puts an end to "democracy".
Yes, he will be busy.
Here's Obama:
“With my successor coming in, I think he saw an opportunity because the U.S. president didn’t seem to care that much about a rules-based international system,” Obama said, the Daily Mail reported. "As a consequence, I think China’s attitude [is], 'Well, we can take advantage of what appears to be a vacuum internationally on a lot of these issues.'"
It was Obama who never cared about the rules, never challenged China's military expansion in the South China Sea under Xi, and telegraphed nothing but weakness to China.
Here's Xi Jinping as early as 2014:
Tabled by the popular ultranationalist blogger Zhou
Xiaoping, the plan would authorize the assassination of blacklisted
individuals—including Taiwan’s vice president, William Lai Ching-te—if
they do not reform their ways. Zhou later told the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao
that his proposal had been accepted by the conference and “relayed to
relevant authorities for evaluation and consideration.” Proposals like
Zhou’s do not come by accident. In 2014, Xi praised Zhou for the
“positive energy” of his jeremiads against Taiwan and the United States. ...
But the most telling moments of the two-sessions meetings, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved Xi himself. The Chinese leader gave four speeches in all—one to delegates of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, two to the National People’s Congress, and one to military and paramilitary leaders. In them, he described a bleak geopolitical landscape, singled out the United States as China’s adversary, exhorted private businesses to serve China’s military and strategic aims, and reiterated that he sees uniting Taiwan and the mainland as vital to the success of his signature policy to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese ethnos.”
In his first speech on March 6, Xi appeared to be girding China’s industrial base for struggle and conflict. “In the coming period, the risks and challenges we face will only increase and become more severe,” he warned. “Only when all the people think in one place, work hard in one place, help each other in the same boat, unite as one, dare to fight, and be good at fighting, can they continue to win new and greater victories.” To help the CCP achieve these “greater victories,” he vowed to “correctly guide” private businesses to invest in projects that the state has prioritized.
Xi also blasted the United States directly in his speech, breaking his practice of not naming Washington as an adversary except in historical contexts. He described the United States and its allies as leading causes of China’s current problems. “Western countries headed by the United States have implemented containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said. Whereas U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has emphasized “guardrails” and other means of slowing the deterioration of U.S.-China relations, Beijing is clearly preparing for a new, more confrontational era.
On March 5, Xi gave a second speech laying out a vision of Chinese self-sufficiency that went considerably further than any of his previous discussions of the topic, saying China’s march to modernization is contingent on breaking technological dependence on foreign economies—meaning the United States and other industrialized democracies. Xi also said that he wants China to end its reliance on imports of grain and manufactured goods. “In case we’re short of either, the international market will not protect us,” Xi declared. Li, the outgoing premier, emphasized the same point in his annual government “work report” on the same day, saying Beijing must “unremittingly keep the rice bowls of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people firmly in their own hands.” China currently depends on imports for more than a third of its net food consumption.
In his third speech, on March 8 to representatives from the PLA and the People’s Armed Police, Xi declared that China must focus its innovation efforts on bolstering national defense and establish a network of national reserve forces that could be tapped in wartime. Xi also called for a “National Defense Education” campaign to unite society behind the PLA, invoking as inspiration the Double Support Movement, a 1943 campaign by the Communists to militarize society in their base area of Yan’an.
In his fourth speech (and his first as a third-term president), on March 13, Xi announced that the “essence” of his great rejuvenation campaign was “the unification of the motherland.” Although he has hinted at the connection between absorbing Taiwan and his much-vaunted campaign to, essentially, make China great again, he has rarely if ever done so with such clarity.
One thing that is clear a decade into Xi’s rule is that it is important to take him seriously—something that many U.S. analysts regrettably do not do. When Xi launched a series of aggressive campaigns against corruption, private enterprise, financial institutions, and the property and tech sectors, many analysts predicted that these campaigns would be short-lived. But they endured. The same was true of Xi’s draconian “zero COVID” policy for three years—until he was uncharacteristically forced to reverse course in late 2022.
Xi is now intensifying a decade long campaign to break key economic and technological dependencies on the U.S.-led democratic world. He is doing so in anticipation of a new phase of ideological and geostrategic “struggle,” as he puts it. His messaging about war preparation and his equating of national rejuvenation with unification mark a new phase in his political warfare campaign to intimidate Taiwan. He is clearly willing to use force to take the island. What remains unclear is whether he thinks he can do so without risking uncontrolled escalation with the United States.
A 100 basis point rise, as in the story, would take it to 2.58, an increase of 63%, which is the draconian kind of thing Cathie Wood likes to dramatize.
But no one understands draconian. In a world of superlatives where everything is awesome, the smallest changes are blown all out of proportion.
Draconian would be raising the rate at least to the level of inflation, now 9.1% year over year (not seasonally adjusted).
Actual draconian is necessary.
But these are not serious people. None of them.
Paul Volcker was Fed Chair from 1979 to 1987.
His peak average Fed Funds Rate was north of 16% in 1981.
And as usual Biden is a follower, not a leader, still mulling over what he should do.
Austria, Hungary, France, Italy, Cyprus all have now signaled readiness to accept the draconian measure in order to cut off Russia's access to payment flows.
Germany could easily find itself without heat very shortly if it relents.
Meanwhile Ukrainians are bravely fighting off the Russians alone.
Draco will have to do better than that.
