The Windy City, under her ‘leadership,’ finished 2022 with another staggering pile of dead bodies, most of whom were victims of black-on-black homicide, as well as lawlessness on the city’s streets.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “Chicago will end the year with at least 723 people murdered, a 13% decrease from last year but still more than any other American city.”
What’s more, “Overall the number of reported crimes has risen by more than 12% from last year, unnerving residents, sending some businesses packing and complicating the city’s efforts to recover from the economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 outbreak.”
Oh, and carjackings were up 95 percent in 2022 when contrasted with motor vehicle theft in 2021, while theft was up 50 percent, burglary was up 10 percent, and robbery was up 10 percent.
So much for Lightfoot’s ‘successful’ crime initiative, “Our City Our Safety.” Obviously, feel-good slogans don’t protect people.
Lightfoot spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on “anti-violence efforts,” according to the paper, while also deploying more police officers to the city’s most violent beats. But nothing worked.
Why? Maybe it’s because criminals don’t really fear being caught in Chicago, given that Cook County prosecuting attorney Kim Foxx is a George Soros “soft on crime/criminal justice reform” plant who, like all other Soros plants, refuses to get tough even on career criminals because it’s “racist” (yes, she’s black).
The paper added:
Thefts, including those targeting vehicles, have spiked while burglaries and robberies have also climbed. Carjackings, which pushed police to launch a specialized task force, fell by 14% but are still being committed at a near-record clip after surging in 2020.
Federal money that has helped fund many of the city’s public safety initiatives is expected to dry up in the coming years. That means the winner of next year’s mayoral election will have some tough decisions to make: How to keep addressing the root causes of violence while also funding a police department that is facing serious staffing issues and costly court-ordered reforms.
“We have a much longer way to go,” Susan Lee, the former deputy mayor for public safety who was the architect of Lightfoot’s signature initiative, told the Sun-Times.
You think?
Incredibly, Lee implored Chicagoans to take what they get in terms of good news, saying that they should at least be thankful that gun homicides are trending downward. However, she had to admit that whatever progress had been made was quickly reversed as violence from historically troubled neighborhoods in Chicago’s south and west sides spread to other, traditionally calm and productive parts of the city, such as the Loop.
“[We] should not be patting ourselves on the back when the … absolute number of shootings and homicides is so high that people are afraid to do their daily functions,” said Lee, who now serves as the chief strategy and policy officer for the violence prevention group Chicago CRED. “We are still in a crisis.”
Other left-wing ‘experts’ were quick to credit Lightfoot despite the fact that more people were killed in her city last year than in some war zones around the world.
“It’s a decline, and it’s significant,” crime data analyst Jeff Asher, whose Datalytics website tracks homicide data from cities across the nation, told the Sun-Times. “Not every city saw declines. Not every city saw declines as big as Chicago, which still has a lot of murders and shootings.”
Translation: ‘Be glad that murders, as bad as they are in Chicago, didn’t get worse. Take what you get. Be happy with that.”
Lightfoot will leave behind a city in worse shape than when she inherited it. But because she is black, gay, and a Democrat, she’ll never be held accountable for failing by the political and media establishments.
Sources include:
]]>Business Insider reported U.S. stocks fell on the last day of trading, ending a “tough year.”
The S&P 500 was down 20% for the year, a result that hasn’t been that bad since the 2008 year. Meanwhile the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 9% in 2022, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq tumbled 33%.
The last trading day of the year ended “with a thud,” the report said, after consumers were confronted with high inflation, up to 9.1%, high interest rates, high costs for energy and fuel, and more. The report said the housing market “is still gloomy as ever as mortgage rates turned higher again, and Jeff Bezos’ fortune was overtaken by Warren Buffett’s.
At CNBC a report said stocks on Friday ended “a brutal 2022 with a whimper.”
It said, “Friday marked the final day of trading in what has been a painful year for stocks. All three of the major averages suffered their worst year since 2008 and snapped a three-year win streak. The Dow fared the best of the indexes in 2022, down about 8.8%. The S&P 500 sank 19.4%, and is more than 20% below its record high, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq tumbled 33.1%.”
“We’ve had everything from COVID problems in China to the invasion of Ukraine. They’ve all been very serious. But for investors, it is what the Fed is doing,” said Art Cashin, director of floor operations for UBS.
That organization has been exploding interest rates by advances of up to three quarters of a point monthly – in its attempt to bring Biden’s inflation under control. The CNBC report also warned it’s not over.
“As the calendar turns to a new year, some investors think the pain is far from over. They expect the bear market to persist until a recession hits or the Fed pivots. Some also project stocks will hit new lows before rebounding in the second half of 2023,” the report said.
Cashin pointed out, “I would love to tell you that it is going to be like the ‘Wizard of Oz’ and everything is going to be in glorious color in a moment or two. I think we may have a bumpy first quarter, and depending on the Fed it may last a little longer than that.”
Joe Biden’s administration, meanwhile, posted online a document boasting about how good things are.
“We end the year with clear evidence that President Biden’s economic strategy of growing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out is working…”
Biden, in fact, has orchestrated the spending of trillions of dollars that are being added to the national debt, even though his agenda has produced that high inflation, high interest, stagnant wages, mediocre job growth and more.
It brags about 10.5 million jobs added under Biden, without mentioning that many of those were restored following mandated shutdowns during the COVID pandemic. Even that analysis, while advising it will “take time” to reach desired results, conceded there will be “setbacks along the way.”
It boasted that gas prices are down more than $1.75 per gallon, but they still remain higher than when Biden took office when they exploded to levels as high as $5 and $6 a gallon in some states.
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]]>While I have done my best to celebrate the Christmas season and ignore the commie curmudgeons bah-humbug-ing all around, it has felt as if government-worshiping Krampus creatures have been let loose (or are they trans-Krampus, demon-worshiping leftists wearing antlers and spreading Marxist hate?). Consider the parade of horribles unleashed during just the last few weeks:
Congress passed a two-trillion-dollar spending monstrosity that looks like little more than a long list of bribes and IOUs come due. The same Uniparty Republicans that could never find spare change for President Trump’s border wall have seen fit to fund every leftist fever pitch imaginable. Scrutinizing the 4,155 pages of omnibus filth and its 3,213 Democrat earmarks, writer Deroy Murdock bluntly concludes that “Mitch McConnell transformed the Senate GOP into a wishing well for Democrats.”
Handicapping incoming House Republicans’ budgetary powers for the next year, the exercise in printing and burning U.S. dollars (and exacerbating inflation) protects the borders of foreign countries all over the world, while going out of its way to make sure America’s are left wide open. Manchurian McConnell defends sending another forty-five billion dollars to Ukraine as “morally right,” while Americans from coast to coast are struggling to survive unchecked inflation, unaffordable food and fuel prices, crumbling infrastructure (actual bridges and roads, not the “reparations” and “climate change” hooey leftists now define as “infrastructure”), unguarded borders, the further impoverishment of once-prosperous blue-collar towns, an emotionally-crippling rise in suicides and fentanyl-related overdoses, COVID-1984-initiated wealth destruction, and the prospect of a looming monster recession (which we entered months ago but must not acknowledge — silence, citizen!).
I nearly flew out of my chair when I heard the backstabbing Turtle (flanked by his Uniparty Republican Old Guard) tell reporters, “Providing assistance for the Ukrainians to defeat the Russians, that’s the number one priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans. That’s sort of how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment.” Which “Republicans” feel that way — the Democrat-supporting RINOs who hate actual Republican voters or the ones who have already been paid off with quid-pro-quo windfalls to their campaign war chests, family-run political action committees, and favorite self-serving “charities”? I am not surprised that McConnell is willfully blind to the real “challenges confronting the country”; I am surprised that his Uniparty corruption and disdain for normal Americans are so robust that he’d happily spill the beans to the whole world! McConnell and all who rally by his side sell out America for personal gain and will continue to “fundamentally transform” this nation into another failed totalitarian Marxist State.
Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” confirm that the platform is primarily a Deep State tool for psychologically manipulating and censoring public opinion. After President Trump’s 2016 victory shocked the cloistered “ruling class,” the FBI dedicated an 80-strong team of agents to monitor and influence Twitter (and who knows how many more interference agents to do the same elsewhere on social media), and the rest of the Intelligence Community got straight to work using the FBI censorship team as a weapon for mass psychological warfare (including blacklisting, deplatforming, and demonetizing any speakers adverse to government interests) against the American people.
To no one’s surprise, Twitter and bureaucratic agents of the State conspired to suppress COVID information and silence dissenting points of view that contradicted official U.S. government policy “narratives.” FBI Trump-Russia-collusion-hoaxer-turned-Twitter-executive Jim Baker argued that President Trump violated Twitter policy (thereby deserving suspension and language control) for tweeting just before the 2020 election that he felt better than ever after having recovered from COVID and urging Americans to be resilient and unafraid! (For Big Government control mechanisms to work, Americans must be kept in a permanent state of fear!)
Brit Hume has digested the tranche of “Twitter Files” thus far released and dispassionately concludes that the purpose of the secretive relationship between Twitter and the U.S. government is perfectly clear: censorship. Yet even amid the revelation of these grotesque violations of the First Amendment, V-un-IP V.P. Kamala Harris still demands that social media companies spread Democrats’ propaganda in the name of “protecting our democracy.” And while the U.S. government censors American citizens, it has been caught paying foreign reporters to push climate apocalypse doomsaying across the globe!
With the destruction of America’s territorial sovereignty almost complete and millions of illegal aliens streaming into the interior, the Department of Homeland Security (specializing in its opposite) has issued a “gag order” restricting agents from telling Americans the truth about just how lawless our lawless border has become.
The forced mRNA injections have caused so many injuries, miscarriages, and “sudden deaths” that now even once-prominent proponents of universal “vaccination” are ringing alarm bells (too little, too late) in their horror.
The recent midterms proved that U.S. elections are now just ballot pump-n-dumps in which Uniparty operatives simply print scores of ballots, fill them out, ignore signature verification requirements, and collect fraudulent “victories.”
As if official Washington didn’t have enough money-laundering operations already filling its coffers, the criminals running the government have also been nonchalantly accepting payoffs from a child crypto-king washing billions of dollars from investor accounts into PACs, Ukraine War kickbacks, non-governmental organizations, philanthropic shell companies, and anywhere else accounting trails disappear.
In but one example of education curricula across the country attempting to brainwash children into accepting their fate as automatons controlled by an all-knowing totalitarian government, climate science teachers in the state of Washington have been instructed to prioritize “emotion” over “rational thinking” in their lesson plans and to explore the roles of “sexism in science” and “abuse of power” — in other words, to scare children into believing their planet is dying in a few short years and to indoctrinate their tiny captives into rejecting scientific achievements made by white males.
Finally, the Biden administration lied about how many jobs have been created; blue-state hellholes are reimposing mask mandates; influential people are openly accusing the CIA of having participated in the assassination of President Kennedy; and Congress released its farcically unconstitutional J6 report attempting to keep Trump from office — signaling clearly how much D.C. fears his 2024 re-election.
For a look at what evil heads our way in the New Year, take a glance at the liberty-crushing goose-stepping of our Western allies:
The World Economic Forum’s subsidiary Dutch government has begun an unjust expropriation of thousands of farms under the unscientific pretense of fighting “climate change” as a means for taking more control of the world’s food supply and eventually squeezing desperately starving peasants into submission. The European Union has moved forward with new carbon regulations that will necessarily lead to the future imposition of a personal carbon credit system under which all citizen activity is tracked, recorded, and scrutinized.
New Zealand has released an official guide for turning in potential “terrorists” who dare to oppose government policies. And as further evidence that freedom of thought is under attack throughout the West, U.K. police officers arrested a woman around Christmas for silently praying outside an abortion facility.
I’m ready to put 2022 in the rearview mirror. Let’s gear up for the fights ahead.
]]>In recent days we have gotten more new numbers which seem to confirm that a major economic slowdown is upon us. The following are 14 signs that the U.S. economy is poised to crash really hard during the second half of 2022…
#1 One survey that was just released discovered that 35 percent of all small business owners in the U.S. “could not pay their rent in full or on time in June”.
#2 A different survey found that 51 percent of all small businesses owners in the U.S. believe that rising prices could “force them to close their businesses within the next six months”.
#3 It is being reported that 45 percent of all small businesses in the U.S. have already decided to freeze the hiring of new workers.
#4 Sales of previously owned homes dropped 5.4 percent during the month of June. That is now the fifth month in a row that we have seen a decline.
#5 In three-fourths of the metro areas that Redfin tracks, at least 25 percent of home sellers reduced their asking price during the month of June.
#6 Blackstone has prepared a war chest of 50 billion dollars so that it can scoop up depressed real estate all over the country after housing prices have crashed in the months ahead.
#7 The number of Americans applying for jobless benefits has risen to the highest level in eight months.
#8 Employment postings for software development jobs have dropped off by more than 12 percent during the past four weeks.
#9 The Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has now fallen for four months in a row.
#10 The S&P Global Flash U.S. PMI Composite Output Index just went negative for the very first time since the last recession.
#11 The latest number for the Philadelphia Fed manufacturing index came in at -12.3, and that was much worse than what most experts were anticipating. Any reading below zero indicates contraction, and needless to say this reading was way below zero.
#12 Inflation continues to rage out of control even as economic activity in the U.S. significantly slows down. If you can believe it, the average price of a used vehicle in the United States has now risen to a whopping $33,341.
#13 The Atlanta Fed is now projecting that U.S. economic growth for the second quarter will come in at -1.6 percent. If it is ultimately confirmed that the U.S. economy has already been contracting for two quarters in a row, that would mean that we are officially in a recession right now.
#14 Thanks in part to the rapidly tanking economy, Joe Biden’s approval rating has plunged all the way down to 31 percent.
At this point, even the tech giants are extremely concerned about what is coming.
For years, nothing could seem to quash the relentless optimism of the big tech companies, and their stocks soared to absolutely absurd heights.
But now everything has changed as we head into the second half of this year. The following comes from the Washington Post…
Big Tech is bracing for an economic recession and an uncertain future. That, in turn, is triggering more economic angst.
The biggest tech firms, most of whom report quarterly earnings next week, have offered recent hints they are hunkering down. News of layoffs and hiring slowdowns have become commonplace across Silicon Valley. Start-ups are saying capital is drying up. Workers are being put on notice that businesses are changing.
I don’t remember ever seeing such pessimism from Silicon Valley.
Incredibly, even the Biden administration is admitting that the economy is slowing down, but Janet Yellen insists that what we are witnessing is quite “appropriate” for a “healthy economy”…
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen acknowledged Sunday that the U.S. is experiencing an economic “slowdown” but downplayed the potential for a recession, arguing that the country is in a period of “transition” following rapid economic growth.
“The economy is slowing down,” Yellen said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” adding that a correction is “appropriate” for a healthy economy.
You can believe her if you want.
But she also told us that inflation would be “transitory”, and we can all see how that prediction turned out.
Even though we are still only in the early stages of this new recession, lines are already getting really long at food banks all over the nation. The cost of living continues to soar to unprecedented heights, and this is hitting the poor harder than anyone.
In the months ahead, we should expect to see a tsunami of layoffs, stunning declines in housing prices, hordes of small businesses going under and a tremendous spike in the number of bankruptcies.
Needless to say, all of this will not be good for the financial markets either.
The stage is clearly set for the sort of historic economic meltdown that I have been warning about for a long time, and the pain that our society will experience will be extremely severe.
I hope that you are using this summer to get prepared for the difficult times that are ahead of us.
The remainder of 2022 is not going to be pleasant, and 2023 is going to be even worse.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.
I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to ask Jesus to be your Lord and Savior today.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
]]>Recently, I have been finding myself using the word “accelerate” a lot in my discussions with other people. Global events have certainly accelerated during the first half of this year, and I am convinced that they will accelerate even more during the second half.
In particular, I believe that things will really start getting crazy once summer is over.
Let me give you a few areas that I will be focusing on in the months ahead. The following are 5 trends to watch for during the second half of 2022…
#1 Economic Shaking
Obviously things have not gone well economically during the first half of this year. Inflation is raging all over the globe, and economic activity is slowing down everywhere that you look. Based on the latest reading from the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model, it appears that the U.S. economy has already plunged into a recession. I expect the U.S. economy to continue to deteriorate as we move toward the end of 2022, but I am actually far more concerned about economic conditions in Europe.
The war in Ukraine has hit European economies really hard, and now many of them are potentially facing very serious shortages of natural gas this winter. The EUR/USD is rapidly approaching parity, and this is something that I have been anticipating for years. Once the EUR/USD drops below parity, I think that the dominoes in Europe are going to start falling fairly rapidly.
Meanwhile, I expect inflation rates to remain elevated all over the planet, and this is going to continue to cause tremendous problems.
#2 Widespread Famines
The head of the UN has publicly warned us that we are moving into an “unprecedented global hunger crisis”, and people are already starting to drop dead from starvation in some parts of eastern Africa. Sadly, I believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Even before the war in Ukraine started, we were already headed into a major food crisis thanks to the soaring price of fertilizer and extremely bizarre global weather patterns. Now the war in Ukraine has reduced the flow of agricultural exports from one of the key breadbaskets in the world to just a trickle. At the same time, food production is going to come in well below expectations all over the planet due to a variety of factors that I have been documenting on my websites.
Food prices have already risen very aggressively, but the biggest problem will be the food that is not grown in the months ahead. There simply is not going to be enough food for everyone, and that is going to cause enormous societal stress all over the globe in late 2022 and beyond.
#3 More War
The conflict in Ukraine has become extremely bitter and extremely bloody. Unfortunately, it appears that it is not going to end any time soon. I would love to see a peaceful resolution to the war, because I think that is what would be best for everyone. But the president of Ukraine does not want to negotiate even though his government is losing more territory with each passing day.
So this horrible war will just keep going month after month, and the U.S. just keeps getting more deeply involved. Needless to say, at some point this proxy war between the U.S. and Russia could evolve into a shooting war between our two nations, and that is a scenario that we should be working very hard to avoid.
On the other side of the globe, I believe that China is planning on invading Taiwan while Joe Biden is still in office. They have seen how powerless he has been to stop the Russians, and I think that they are convinced that they have a window of opportunity to “reunify” with Taiwan by force. But I actually think that another major war will start first.
The IAEA is now telling us that Iran “possesses enough fissile material to construct a nuclear bomb”, and that is a threshold that Israel always said that they would never allow the Iranians to cross.
Israel and Iran are already engaged in a “shadow war”, but I am entirely convinced that it will soon escalate into a full-blown regional conflict. It may begin in a way that you might not expect, but one way or another it is going to happen. Hopefully it will not erupt during the second half of this year, but the clock is definitely ticking.
#4 Pestilences
We already have COVID. In fact, they are now telling us that the worst version of the disease that we have seen so far is now circulating widely in the United States.
We are also dealing with a nightmarish bird flu pandemic which has killed tens of millions of our chickens and our turkeys. On top of everything else, the number of monkeypox cases continues to rise at an exponential rate. But I believe that more outbreaks are on the way.
We have entered an era when mad scientists all over the globe are monkeying around with the deadliest bugs that mankind has ever known. And as time moves along, I believe that bad actors will increasingly use diseases that have been cooked up in labs as weapons.
#5 Geophysical Shaking
Let’s just call this one a hunch. Unlike the first four areas that I have discussed, geophysical events have not made a lot of headlines lately.
Yes, there have been unusual earthquakes in diverse places such as South Carolina, and the sun has been behaving strangely in recent days, but overall things have been relatively quiet. Unfortunately, I expect that to change.
If you disagree with me, that is perfectly fine. Let’s just watch and see how things play out. Two years ago I tried to give everyone a big picture overview of what was coming, and since that time so many of the things that I listed have either happened or have started to happen.
We really have entered a “perfect storm”, and those that are still waiting for life to go back to “normal” are going to be bitterly disappointed. If you always thought that it would be wonderful to live during one of the most important times in human history, you are about to get your wish.
What was once unthinkable will soon become reality, and nothing will ever be the same again.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.
I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to ask Jesus to be your Lord and Savior today.
Image by charlou3390 from Pixabay. Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
]]>