Dear Patriots,

There is no lack of opinions on the current situation with banking in America. One thing is sure, there is nothing good about it.

1- One has to wonder if this is all being done on purpose.

PJ Media

The Biden Economy Is Falling Apart, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

QUOTE: The Biden Economy — hailed Monday morning by Presidentish Joe Biden as “strong” — seems like it’s falling apart, everything, everywhere all at once. NYSE halted trading of Charles Schwab, whose shares fell by more than 20%, and even a few Etsy sellers have been impacted by the fallout of Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse.

Schwab’s fall was the firm’s “most ever on an intraday-basis,” even as company execs assured investors in a press release that “Schwab’s long-standing reputation as a safe port in a storm remains intact.”

Overall, trading of shares in over 30 banks was halted on Wall Street Monday morning, as the entire sector suddenly looks like a risk investors aren’t willing to take. Almost everything banking was down, down, down in pre-market trades, which MarketWatch described as “panic-like activity.”

“Among some of those that have already been halted at least twice,” MarketWatch reported, “shares of Western Alliance Bancorp WAL, -51.05% plummeted 78.2%, Regions Financial Corp. RF, -5.33% sank 15.6%, First Republic Bank FRC, -64.05% plunged 65.5%, Comerica Inc. CMA, -21.24% tumbled 39.4% and PacWest Bancorp. PACW, -25.18% took a 47.7% dive.”

Signature Bank, “a key financial institution for the cryptocurrency industry,” according to the New York Post, was shut down on Sunday over “similar systemic risk” to SVB.

SVB and Signature are the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, respectively, with combined assets in excess of $300 billion. Depositors will be made whole, even deposits greater than the $250,000 covered by FDIC insurance. “Federal Reserve also said it is creating a new Bank Term Funding Program aimed at safeguarding institutions affected by the market instability of the SVB failure,” according to CNBC.

What went wrong? In a word: Inflation. In a few more words: The higher interest rates needed to combat inflation smashed the cheap-money expectations that SVB’s bond portfolios required. Other sectors of the economy that have become addicted to historically low interest rates include high-tech, particularly startup firms, and the housing market.

“We’ve made strong economic progress in the past two years,” Biden said Monday. The RNC Twitter account responded with a few inconvenient truths: “When Biden took office, inflation was at 1.4% and gas was $2.39/gal. Today, inflation is at 6.4% and gas is $3.47/gal.”

2- There will be many, many more lawsuits coming.

Children’s Health Defense

Lawsuits Pile Up Alleging Remdesivir Killed COVID Patients

QUOTE: Despite research showing remdesivir is ineffective against COVID-19 and can cause high rates of organ failure, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the experimental antiviral drug for use against COVID-19 — and it’s still being used.

The antiviral drug remdesivir, brand name Veklury, is approved for use against COVID-19 despite research showing it lacks effectiveness and can cause high rates of organ failure.

John Beaudoin is calling for a criminal investigation into remdesivir, citing data that it may have killed 100,000 people in the U.S.

Beaudoin received all the death certificates in Massachusetts from 2015 to 2022, finding 1,840 excess deaths from acute renal failure from Jan. 1, 2021, to Nov. 30, 2022, which he believes may be due to remdesivir.

A study published in The Lancet found “no clinical benefit” from the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients.

The U.S. government pays hospitals a 20% upcharge on the entire hospital bill when remdesivir is used.

In California, lawsuits have been filed on behalf of at least 14 families against medical providers for prescribing remdesivir without providing necessary information about it, leading to the patients’ deaths.

Another wrongful death suit was filed in Nevada, after a patient died of kidney failure and respiratory failure a week after being given remdesivir.

3- It is deflating to read articles on this subject. Republicans must get ahead of this onslaught of cash poured into elections.

RealClearInvestigations

Leftist Groups Tapping $1 Billion to Vastly Expand the Private Financing of Public Elections

QUOTE: Democrats and their progressive allies are vastly expanding their unprecedented efforts, begun in 2020, to use private money to influence and run public elections.  

Supported by groups with more than $1 billion at their disposal, according to public records, these partisan groups are working with state and local boards to influence functions that have long been the domain of government or political parties.  

Registering and turning out voters – once handled primarily by political parties – and design of election office websites and mail-in ballots are being handed over to those same nonprofits, which are staffed by progressive activists that include former Democratic Party advocates, organized labor adherents and community organizers. 

Republicans have opposed such efforts, passing legislation in 24 states since 2020 curbing the private financing of elections. But the GOP does not have a comparable, boots-on-the-ground effort to influence election boards and workers, and the private-funding bans haven’t proved absolute in some states.  

“There is a cottage industry of 501c3s in public policy and in the political arena, trying to shape the future of immigration or education or any other topic,” said Kimberly Fiorello, a former Republican state representative in Connecticut. “Increasingly they are about elections, election administration, election technology, ballot design, and all with big funding. These groups seem innocuous, but they aren’t innocuous because they are funded by one political side.”  

Many of the progressive groups seeking to influence elections are connected to Arabella Advisors, a Washington-based, for-profit consulting company founded and led by Eric Kessler, a White House appointee during the Clinton administration.  

Arabella’s projects, which include the New Venture Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund and Secure Democracy USA, had combined revenues of $1.3 billion between 2020 and 2021, tax filings show.  Nonprofits supported by Arabella in 2020 gave out $529 million to “defend democracy.”  

That coincided with the rise of private-public election partnerships as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated an estimated $350 million to the progressive Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL) to support local efforts in the pandemic-challenged 2020 election.

4– Biden’s goal is not to reduce crime. He wants to take away this constitutional right to have more control over the citizens.

Townhall

Biden Fails to Explain How His ‘Plan to Reduce Gun Violence’ Will Stop Criminals

QUOTE: After the White House announced a new executive order focused on the president’s “plan to reduce gun violence” on Tuesday, Biden addressed his latest fiat from Monterey Park, California. As usual, Biden’s remarks had, at best, a tenuous connection to truth and reality.

Pledging that his latest executive order dealing with firearms will “accelerate and intensify” his administration’s supposed crackdown on illegal firearms, Biden said his order would keep firearms out of the hands of criminals by taking “every lawful action possible to move us as close as we can to universal background checks.”

Calling it “just common sense,” Biden did not explain how his executive order would keep firearms out of the hands of criminals who, unsurprisingly, don’t follow gun laws. Also notably absent from his executive order and remarks on Tuesday was any action to secure the U.S.-Mexico border and stop those capitalizing on the open border to traffic guns, among other contraband. 

In addition, Biden’s executive order directs the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and report on “how gun manufacturers market firearms to minors and how much manufacturers market firearms to all civilians, including through the use of military imagery.”

Biden, as usual, leaned into the typical falsehoods he trots out whenever making remarks about guns. First, Biden claimed that gun manufacturers are “the only outfit you can’t sue these days.”

Biden’s latest “plan” is largely an exercise in virtue signaling, and will mostly impact law-abiding gun owners while having little impact on violent outlaws.

What’s more, Biden’s declared commitment to cracking down on gun violence is fundamentally unserious given his silence about Democrat prosecutors’ soft-on-crime policies that fail to keep violent individuals behind bars. If Biden was serious about cracking down on violence, he would get serious with the prosecutors in his party who aren’t holding criminals to account under existing laws. His piecemeal attempt to deal with criminals hasn’t, doesn’t, and won’t work.

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