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The National Anthem, The Bible And The Christian Faith Are All Considered To Be Highly Offensive In Amerika Now

June 2, 2023June 2, 2023 by Michael

We live in an upside down society with completely upside down values. In this sort of an environment, literally anything that you say could get you into serious trouble. Theoretically, our Constitution is supposed to guarantee the right of free speech for us, but the truth is that free speech has been dead for quite some time now. Those that are in the process of fundamentally transforming our society have made policing speech one of their highest priorities, and their hordes of brainwashed minions are always ready to step in and crack down whenever a potential violation has been detected.

At this point, things have gotten so bad that even children singing the National Anthem is considered to be “offensive”…

An unbelievable case of censorship took place when the esteemed Rushingbrook Children’s Choir was silenced by Capitol Police in the middle of singing the National Anthem at the United States Capitol. Despite having prior approval from Congress members, the police deemed their performance as a form of protest, sparking outrage and concern among citizens and lawmakers.

The Rushingbrook Children’s Choir had been granted permission to perform in Statuary Hall by South Carolina Representatives Russell Fry, Joe Wilson, and William Timmons, during their well-planned trip to Washington, D.C. The audience and the young singers were bewildered as their rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner was abruptly halted for seemingly baseless reasons. According to the police, singing the national anthem could be considered offensive or provoke conflict.

Are you kidding me?

We can’t have little children singing the National Anthem because it “could be considered offensive or provoke conflict”?

What in the world has happened to this country?

Rushingbrook Children’s Choir were singing the National Anthem in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol when they were interrupted by Capitol police.

A representative from the choir was told that “certain Capitol police said it might offend someone/cause issues.” pic.twitter.com/3J8BSBsBSu

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 2, 2023

It turns out that the Bible is now considered to be offensive as well.

In fact, the King James Version of the Bible was just banned at the elementary school level and the middle school level by a school district in Utah…

The King James Version of the Bible has been removed from many Davis School District schools after a committee found it contained “vulgarity and violence.”

A district review committee recently decided to pull the Bible from all schools other than at the high school level. According to a district spokesperson, the committee actually determined the book “does not contain sensitive material as defined by Utah Code,” but still pulled it from certain schools because of age appropriateness.

Utah is supposedly one of the most conservative states in the entire country.

If the Bible is going to get banned there, it is just a matter of time before it is banned in school districts from coast to coast.

But this shouldn’t surprise any of us. The Christian faith stands in direct opposition to the new culture that the elite are relentlessly trying to impose on all of us, and so the Christian faith must be suppressed.

Just recently, Billy Hallowell of CBN News posted “Jesus died so you could live” on Facebook, and he was informed by Facebook that his statement violated “our community standards on hate speech”…

“You know, it’s interesting because you would assume when you get this alert pop up that says you’ve violated hate speech paradigms, that you’ve said something horrible,” Hallowell told Charisma News’ John Matarazzo in a recent interview. “So, here’s what I wrote, and I wrote this on April 2. I think that’s important because it was a 40-day period that elapsed from the time that I get this alert. I wrote, ‘Jesus died so you could live.’

“That is the message that I wrote. There’s no link. It was just ‘Jesus died so you could live.’ And that is what prompted this response from Facebook. And that response, just so you understand, I’m on my phone, I see it on my phone, I see it on the desktop. At first, I thought maybe it was a mistake. It was a joke. I’m like, ‘What is this?’ I got this alert. It said your post goes against our community standards on hate speech.”

There must have been some mistake, right?

That is what Hallowell thought, and so he asked Facebook for a review.

Unfortunately, even after the review Hallowell’s statement was still deemed to be hate speech…

It only took a couple of hours for Facebook to review the post, and it was immediately removed from Hallowell’s page.

“I laugh because it’s so ridiculous,” Hallowell said. “So I get another alert, which says we have removed your post from Facebook. So, this is a new alert now. Then it says, and this is the best part about this, they remove it even from the preview. So, you no longer see the message that was a problem. It says posts unavailable and that they’re unable to show the content.

“Then there’s a little section on this alert that says what happened. It says your appeal was reviewed and your post does not follow our community standards for hate speech. So, we’re back to the hate speech again.”

If I cannot even tell you that Jesus died so that you could live, what sort of society are we becoming?

At this stage, we are not too far behind communist China where Christians are literally thrown in prison for what they believe…

The US government on Monday accused Beijing of jailing as many as 10,000 or more people in 2022 in a widening campaign of repression against religious belief meant to bring all theological activity under the Chinese Communist Party’s control.

The estimate of those imprisoned in the country ranging “from the low thousands to over 10,000” is one of many accusations contained in the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report, which has been published annually since 1999 and covers nearly 200 countries.

The report’s section on China draws on reports by human rights advocacy groups including Freedom House and religious groups like the Church of Almighty God (CAG), as well as public information from the Chinese government.

We have reached a time in history when control over what you say and what you believe is going to become increasingly restrictive.

Our society is rapidly becoming the exact opposite of what our founders intended, and previous generations of Americans would vomit all over the place if they could see what we have done to the nation that they sacrificed so much to give us.

America is being transformed into “Amerika” right in front of our eyes, and none of our lives will ever be the same again.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “End Times” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written six other books that are available on Amazon.com including “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, 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 copies as gifts 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 also started a brand new Substack newsletter, and I encourage you to subscribe so that you won’t miss any of my articles. 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 definitely 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 invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.

The Storm Before The Storm

June 1, 2023 by Michael

I really don’t know anyone that would argue that the U.S. economy is in great shape right now. Inflation is out of control, large companies are conducting mass layoffs all over the nation, the housing bubble is starting to implode, and more homeless encampments are constantly popping up in our major cities as poverty spreads like wildfire. But this isn’t the main event. I am calling this “the storm before the storm”, because the truth is that this new economic crisis is still only in the very early chapters. Unfortunately, much more suffering is on the way, and our country is not going to be able to handle it.

Perhaps you don’t agree with me.

And that is okay.

Nobody agrees with me 100 percent about everything.

But hopefully we can all agree that things are clearly trending in the wrong direction. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the number of job cuts that employers announced in May 2023 was 287 percent higher than the number of job cuts that employers announced in May 2022…

U.S.-based employers announced 80,089 cuts in May, a 20% increase from the 66,995 cuts announced one month prior. It is 287% higher than the 20,712 cuts announced in the same month in 2022, according to a report released Thursday from global outplacement and business and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

It would be one thing if the month of May was some sort of a statistical anomaly, but it wasn’t.

In fact, for the first five months of 2023 the number of job cuts is up a whopping 315 percent compared to the same five months last year.

Take a few moments to reflect on that number.

Other than during the lockdowns of 2020, we haven’t seen anything like this since 2009.

And those that are at the top of the economic food chain are leading the way.

For example, we just learned that Goldman Sachs is planning to conduct a third round of mass layoffs…

Goldman Sachs plans to make another round of job cuts — its third in less than a year — as dealmaking profits continue to tank, sources told The Post on Tuesday.

The David Solomon-led investment bank will cull an additional 250 workers on the heels of 3,200 being fired in January in what staff had dubbed “David’s Demolition Day,” an insider said.

Economic activity is really slowing down all over the nation, and this is beginning to show up in corporate earnings reports.

On Thursday, Macy’s announced that same-store sales actually fell 8.7 percent during the most recent quarter…

In an earnings report on Thursday, Macy’s said same-store sales sank 8.7 percent last quarter, forcing the New York-based department store to cut prices on clothes and other discretionary items.

Macy’s results concluded the retail industry’s earnings season, which showed how stubbornly high inflation, particularly in food, is forcing shoppers to further cut back on discretionary items like clothing to afford their soaring grocery bills.

Dollar General announced very disappointing results as well, and that resulted in a wild sell off of Dollar General stock…

Meanwhile, Dollar General, which caters to low-income shoppers and is the fastest-growing US retail chain by store locations, also cut its annual sales and profit outlook on Thursday, sending the company’s stock down 19.55 percent for the day.

A 20 percent decline in one day is a big deal.

So why is Dollar General performing below expectations?

Well, the CEO says that their core customers are very financially stressed right now. In fact, he says that many of them are “having to rely more on food banks”…

“Unfortunately, our customers are saying they’re having to rely more on food banks, savings, credit cards,” CEO Jeff Owen said on a call with analysts Thursday.

The company says its “core customer” makes less than $40,000 a year. Owen also said he believes customers were caught off-guard by reduced tax refunds and reduced SNAP benefits, “which exacerbated the inflationary pressures they were already experiencing.”

Dollar General’s results echo those of rival Dollar Tree, which also came in below investors’ expectations last week and cut its profit outlook for the year.

In an article that I posted a few days ago, I discussed the extraordinary demand that we are starting to see at food banks around the country.

There is so much suffering out there right now, and it is only going to intensify as more Americans lose their jobs in the months ahead.

If the Federal Reserve had not raised interest rates so aggressively, that would have greatly helped matters.

But instead they have chosen to bring the hammer down on the U.S. economy, and now the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage is almost up to 7 percent…

The rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage rose to 6.79% this week from 6.57% a week ago. One year ago, it averaged 5.09%.

“Mortgage rates jumped this week, as a buoyant economy has prompted the market to price-in the likelihood of another Federal Reserve rate hike,” said Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist. “Although there has been a steady flow of purchase demand around rates in the low to mid six percent range, that demand is likely to weaken as rates approach seven percent.”

As the housing bubble steadily implodes, those that work in the industry are going to have such a hard time.

Of course the truth is that difficult times are ahead for all of us.

It has become clear that nobody in Washington is going to be coming riding to the rescue.

The debt-fueled years when “easy money” was flowing like wine have come to an end, and now a whole lot of pain is on the horizon.

Sadly, most Americans still do not understand that a great economic storm is rapidly approaching, and that is extremely unfortunate.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

It Isn’t Just The Economy That Is On The Verge Of Collapse…

May 31, 2023 by Michael

We are in far more trouble than most people realize. In recent months, our rapidly growing economic problems have gotten a lot of attention, and without a doubt our economy is heading into really hard times. The greatest debt bubble in the history of the world has started to implode, and the end of this “mega-cycle” is going to cause an immense amount of pain. But if every other element of our society was strong, we could survive that. It may surprise a lot of you to hear me say that, but it is true. If all that we were facing was an economic collapse, it would cause an enormous amount of turmoil in this country but we would make it through.

Unfortunately, we are not just facing an economic collapse.

I like to call what we are facing “the everything collapse”, because virtually every element of our society is steadily breaking down right in front of our eyes.

So once our economic and financial systems implode, it won’t just be a matter of patching them up and returning to “normal”, because “normal” doesn’t exist anymore.

Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. The president of Giant Food just admitted to the Washington Post that theft at his stores is completely out of control…

Giant Food president Ira Kress said that theft and violence have risen significantly over the past several years.

“To say [theft has] risen tenfold in the last five years would not be an understatement,” Kress noted, according to the Washington Post, which also reported that the man said that violence has “increased exponentially.”

Giant has more than 160 locations, with stores located in Maryland; Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and Delaware, according to its website.

When I was much younger, I would often shop at Giant Food.

In those days, I never witnessed a single shoplifting incident.

But now systematic looting is happening on an industrial scale all over the nation. In fact, I recently wrote an entire article about the fact that theft is now costing U.S. retailers about 100 billion dollars a year.

Meanwhile, other forms of crime are spiking as well. Sadly, violent crimes are increasingly being committed by kids that are extremely young…

As soon as he confronted the masked youth who seemed to be trying to rob him with a gun last week on Irving Street in Northwest Washington, Ryan Cummins knew the assailant was young.

“When I shoved him, he weighed nothing,” Cummins said in an interview…

Police said the youth they arrested on Saturday in Cummins’s case and two nearby robberies is even younger: 11. He is among the youngest arrested in the District this year in an armed robbery…

Did you catch that last part?

That kid was “among the youngest” arrested for armed robbery this year.

So how old was the youngest?

On the west coast, conditions are even worse.

The following is how one San Francisco resident named Seema Gokhale recently described what living in the heart of the city is like these days…

Speaking with Fox News Digital, Seema Gokhale who lives near the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood expressed, “It really feels post-apocalyptic. Something needs to be done. We have to make this a livable place. I describe it as a hellhole right now. If I wasn’t a homeowner and hadn’t grown up in the area and there wasn’t a strong job market in the area, I would leave.”

“I walk by people regularly and it feels horrible,” she said as drug addicts have “needle tracks all over their arms and legs and toes. I see people with rotting limbs because they’re living on the streets.”

“It honestly feels like I’m in a place that’s been in a zombie apocalypse. It’s like a dystopia. It really feels like a dystopian reality right now where I see boarded-up storefronts. I see people defecating on the streets,” Gokhale detailed.

Sadly, this is the direction that the entire country is going.

Up in Portland, voters are completely and totally fed up with the rampant social decay that has been steadily growing all around them…

Months of stepping past sidewalk homeless camps and open-air drug markets have taken their toll on residents of Portland, Oregon.

Voters there have delivered a stunning rebuke to officials of the Democrat-run hipster city, with three quarters calling homelessness ‘an out-of-control disaster.’

The survey, commissioned by People for Portland, a conservative advocacy group, found that more than two thirds of voters wanted to clear the streets by forcing drug addicts into rehab.

But no matter what our politicians do, the social decay gets worse with each passing year.

And that is because our entire culture has been completely transformed. According to one recent survey, only 16 percent of Americans now attend church at least once per week…

The number of Americans who attend church once a week fell from 19 percent in 2019 to 16 percent last year, says the survey of some 6,600 adults across all 50 states.

This means that 84 percent of us do not attend church at least once per week at this point.

If we could go back and tell Americans from 100 years ago this, they would be absolutely floored.

Of course the truth is that we are a completely different country than we were 100 years ago.

Many of us like to think that we are superior to every generation that has come before us, but the reality of the matter is that just about every aspect of our society is rapidly getting worse.

If we are having this much difficulty keeping order now, what are things going to look like once our economic and financial systems have fully imploded and tens of millions of Americans are deeply suffering?

You might want to think about that, because “the everything collapse” is only going to pick up steam in the weeks and months ahead…

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

This Is The End Of A Mega-Cycle

May 30, 2023 by Michael

Have we finally reached the end of the road? When it comes to the economy, most of us focus on short-term cycles. In recent years there have been times when the economy has been growing and there have been times when the economy has been shrinking, but all of those short-term fluctuations have happened in the context of a long-term trend of debt-fueled “growth”. We have been relentlessly stealing from the future in order to make the present more pleasant, and most of us pretend that the piper will never have to be paid. But of course the truth is that a day of reckoning is fast approaching, and that day of reckoning is going to be immensely painful.

Earlier today, I came across a tweet by End Wokeness that really does a great job of pointing out the harsh reality of what we are facing…

US national debt, 1960: $286 billion
US national debt, 2023: $31.4 trillion

Are our roads better?
Are our streets safer?
How about healthcare?
Is it easier to raise a family?
Did we improve our schools?

If not, then what the hell did they do with that $31,124,000,000,000?

I can actually answer that last question.

They bought time.

By kicking the can down the road over and over again, they have been able to delay the severe economic consequences that myself and so many others have been warning about all these years.

About two-thirds of our national debt has been accumulated since Barack Obama first entered the White House.

Over the past 15 years, our politicians in Washington have been on an absolutely insane debt binge. Adding more than 20 trillion dollars to the national debt has allowed them to extend the party for a lot longer than many of us originally anticipated, but now the jig is up.

Our currency is rapidly losing value, inflation is wildly out of control, the Federal Reserve has been forced to dramatically hike interest rates, and economic conditions are steadily deteriorating all around us.

Thankfully, there are still some politicians in Washington that want to get federal borrowing under control, and they are going to try to block the debt ceiling agreement from getting through Congress.

And there are some that are even suggesting that Kevin McCarthy should be removed from his position…

On a House Freedom Caucus call Monday night, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., floated using the motion to vacate, a rule that would allow any member of Congress to force a vote to remove the speaker, two sources familiar with the call told NBC News. Buck, speaking toward the end of the call, referred to it as the “elephant in the room,” one source said.

After House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry, R-Pa., suggested it might be too early for such a drastic threat, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., proposed using the threat to force McCarthy to allow members to amend the bill on the House floor, under an “open rule” that could stall the bill’s passage. Perry responded that they would discuss the issue more when members return to Washington after the long weekend.

Ultimately, I don’t think they will be successful.

I think that there will be enough votes from the Democrats to pass the debt ceiling agreement, and I believe that Kevin McCarthy will remain the Speaker of the House.

But if I am wrong, things will get quite “interesting” very rapidly.

Of course it isn’t just the federal government that is drowning in debt.

State and local governments have taken on mountains of debt, corporate debt has surged to levels that we have never seen before, and U.S. consumers are currently more than 17 trillion dollars in debt.

High interest debt is particularly destructive, and it is being reported that Americans now owe more than a trillion dollars on their credit cards…

America’s credit card balance has passed $1 trillion, or it’s about to, depending on whom you ask.

The average interest rate on a new card is 24 percent, the highest figure since the Reaganomics era.

This really is a form of predatory lending, and most of the large financial institutions are doing it now.

Don’t fall into their trap.

Because once you get into a situation where you cannot pay off the balance every month, you can end up paying back far, far more than you originally borrowed…

A typical American household now carries $10,000 in credit card debt, by one estimate, another record.

If that doesn’t sound like a lot of debt, try paying it off. At $250 per month, with 24 percent interest, you’ll be making payments until 2030, and you’ll spend a total of $20,318, twice what you owed. And that assumes you never use the card again.

What we are facing is an entire society that is completely and utterly saturated with debt.

From the very top to the very bottom, we have pushed things just about as far as they can go, and now the wheels are starting to come off.

In order for the party to continue, our debt levels have to continue to expand, and the Uniparty in Washington understands this very well.

But this madness cannot go on forever.

We are like an addict that needs larger doses over time in order to achieve the same buzz.

That can work for a while, but eventually the addict overdoses and ends up dead.

Sadly, the end of our story is rapidly approaching as well. The debt mega-cycle that we are currently experiencing has reached a terminal phase, and there is going to be immense pain as the system implodes all around us.

I really do hope that the abominable debt ceiling agreement that they are trying to push through Congress right now does get defeated.

But no matter what happens in Washington, this debt mega-cycle is coming to an end, and that has very serious implications for each one of us.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

The Suffering Is Off The Charts

May 29, 2023 by Michael

Things have taken a turn for the worse. In recent months, economic activity has been dropping all over the nation, and that decline appears to be accelerating. We just learned that gross domestic income has now fallen for two quarters in a row, and the Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has now been plummeting for 13 consecutive months. Unfortunately, when economic conditions deteriorate it is the people at the low end of the economic pyramid that get hit the hardest.

Thanks to our rapidly rising cost of living, we are seeing a dramatic explosion in the number of “working homeless” that are living out of their vehicles on a daily basis even though they are currently employed.

In particular, the RV “communities” that are springing up from coast to coast are starting to get quite a bit of attention…

The owner of a party bus company, Rikers Island prison guards and an Amazon worker are just some of the eclectic bunch who have formed a community of ‘working homeless’ people living out of RVs in the Astoria section of Queens, New York.

Similar communities have formed across the US from New England to California where people have chosen a nomadic lifestyle amid a national cost of living crisis.

Most of these people get up and go to work in the morning.

In fact, the Daily Mail spoke to one man that actually “works for a New York City hospital”…

Resident Paul Reevers described himself as ‘working homeless.’ He said that he has a job but the rent went up too high and he could not longer to afford a an apartment.

Reevers, who works for a New York City hospital, said that he took out a loan and bought his RV.

If you work at a hospital, you should be able to afford a place to live.

But this is our country now.

We are absolutely destroying the middle class, and as a result we now have a massive homelessness crisis on our hands…

Insider Monkey, a finance website, revealed a list of the top 30 cities worldwide with the highest homeless population. Notably, a handful of the US cities on the list are governed by progressive leadership, which may not surprise readers. While it is evident that some unfortunate individuals are facing homelessness, a trend exacerbated by recent inflationary pressures and a drug addiction crisis, some liberal policies have enabled others to sustain their nomadic lifestyles with taxpayer funds.

Insider Monkey found New York City is number 5 on the list, with a homeless population of about 69,000. Next is Chicago, at number 7 with 65,611. Washington, DC, is number 8 with 57,416, Los Angeles number 13 with 41,980, and San Fransisco number 14 with 38,000.

No matter what you or I are facing right now, at least we aren’t sleeping in the streets.

So we should count our blessings.

Hunger is also rapidly growing all over America. Right now, record numbers of people are coming for help at one food bank in the Seattle area…

Since March, the food bank has broken its record three times for the highest number of people served in a day since 2019, when the organization started allowing three visits a month. More and more, people like Jones who haven’t been to the food bank in years, are showing up, Christian said.

“That’s hard on them; they felt they had moved above the poverty line, got some stability but, ‘Here it is 2023 and here I am back in the food line asking strangers for help,’” Christian said.

And in Boston, the line for food on one recent weekend morning “stretched the length of two football fields”…

The line outside Boston’s American Red Cross Food Pantry on a recent Saturday morning stretched the length of two football fields.

The number of people filing into the red-brick industrial-zone warehouse on some days now exceeds the worst periods of the pandemic economic crisis and in April it had the second highest monthly traffic since it opened in 1982, according to David Andre, the director.

We are witnessing so much suffering all over the country right now.

And there are so many more people that are living right on the edge of disaster.

According to one recent survey, approximately 38.5 percent of U.S. adults experienced “some form of difficulty in covering expenses between April 26 and May 8”…

A large swath of American consumers are facing financial hardship as they grapple with elevated living costs, record-high credit card use, and two years of negative real wage growth. This perfect storm could decimate financially fragile households in the next downturn.

As many as 89.1 million American adults (or about 38.5%) were found to experience some form of difficulty in covering expenses between April 26 and May 8, according to Bloomberg, citing new data from the Household Pulse Survey. This is up from 34.4% in 2022 and 26.7% during the same period in 2021.

Of course this is just the beginning.

As I keep warning my readers, things will eventually get much worse.

One thing to watch for this week is whether or not the debt ceiling deal is able to get through Congress.

Kevin McCarthy is confident that he has the votes that he needs to get the deal through the House, but some conservative Republicans are pledging to do all they can to stop it…

Elsewhere within his party, Rep. Chip Roy from Texas called the agreement a ‘turd-sandwich’ and said he had spoken to a number of his colleagues who were not intending to vote on the agreement.

Rep. Ralph Norman, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus from South Carolina, called the deal ‘insanity’ and said he was ‘not gonna vote to bankrupt our country’.

If the debt ceiling deal is defeated, I will be quite impressed.

But it would also throw our economy into a tremendous amount of short-term chaos.

It will be very interesting to watch and see what happens.

In any event, whatever happens in Washington is not going to fundamentally alter our long-term trajectory, and that means that much more suffering is coming in the days ahead.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

Theft Is Now Costing Retailers In The United States About 100 BILLION Dollars A Year

May 18, 2023 by Michael

If we don’t fix this, will the retail industry be able to survive? There has always been shoplifting, but in the old days it was at a level that made it only a minor nuisance to the big box retailers. Unfortunately, now everything has changed. Highly organized gangs have developed extremely sophisticated plans for how to rapidly loot our major retailers, and the best ones can be in and out in just minutes. Those goods are then resold online or in the streets, and the amounts that we are talking about are absolutely staggering. In fact, as you will see below, theft is now costing retailers in this country about 100 billion dollars a year.

This week, Target made headlines all over the nation when it publicly admitted that theft will cost it 500 million more dollars than it did last year…

Target said Wednesday that organized retail crime will fuel $500 million more in stolen and lost merchandise this year compared with a year ago.

Target’s inventory loss, called shrink, totaled about $763 million last fiscal year, based on calculations from the company’s financial filings. With the anticipated increase, shrink this year would surpass $1 billion.

Let’s do some math.

763 million from last year plus 500 million more this year equals 1.263 billion dollars.

Please keep in mind that this is just one chain.

As Target CEO Brian Cornell openly admitted earlier this week, organized retail crime has become a massive problem “across the entire retail industry”…

‘The unfortunate fact is violent incidents are increasing at our stores and across the entire retail industry. And when products are stolen, simply put they are no longer available for guests who depend on them.

‘Left unchecked, organized retail crime degrades the communities we call home. As we work to address this problem, the safety of our guests and our team members will always be our primary concern.

‘Beyond safety concerns, worsening shrink rates are putting significant pressure on our financial results,’ CEO Brian Cornell said on a call with reporters.

In the entire history of our nation, we have never seen anything quite like this.

Do you remember all the looting that we witnessed during the riots of a couple years ago?

Well, now the looting literally never stops, and it has become very sophisticated…

According to the NRF report, which conducted its latest assessment in partnership with global risk advisory firm K2 Integrity, these organized retail crime groups “primarily favor large national retailers and big-box retailers, and cargo shipments for booster operations.” They are also more likely to target everyday consumer goods rather than luxury products. Based on an analysis of 116 groups, 81% exclusively stole general consumer goods.

These groups have also been planning out their booster operations in advance by studying store layouts, camera and exit locations, understanding the types of anti-theft precautions and knowing the different store policies for stopping suspected thieves, the report said. Boosters are known as the individuals who are paid to commit theft on behalf of these groups.

In 2020, theft cost U.S. retailers 90.8 billion dollars, and that number increased to 94.5 billion dollars in 2021…

Last year, a survey from the National Retail Federation, an industry group, found that so-called “shrink” — or losses attributed to theft, fraud or employee error — amounted to $94.5 billion in losses in 2021. That was up from $90.8 billion in 2020. And the survey found that retailers reported a 26.5% increase in organized retail crime, on average.

The final number for 2022 is expected to be somewhere around 100 billion dollars, and the final number for 2023 is expected to be way above 100 billion dollars.

For a while, major retailers tried to weather the storm because they had invested so much money in these stores.

But now retailer after retailer is shutting down locations in the cities where organized retail crime is the worst. In fact, even Walmart is now shutting down stores in the most troubled areas…

Walmart decided to shut 17 of its stores across nine states after CEO Doug McMillon warned in December that theft was the highest it’s ever been around the country and if it did not slow down, stores would have to close.

And the company announced on Tuesday it would be shutting half its Chicago stores, mostly located on the crime-ridden city’s south and west sides, because they are losing tens of millions each year.

So where do we go from here?

That is a very good question, because conditions in many of our major cities just continue to get worse and worse.

For example, an 83-year-old Vietnam veteran says that he actually felt safer walking the streets of Saigon than he does walking the streets of Portland…

‘I felt safer when I was walking around in downtown Saigon when I was in Vietnam than I do here in Portland,’ 83-year-old Vietnam veteran Armand Martens told Fox 12 Oregon about a homeless camp where people were using drugs and setting fire to properties.

Martens told how his neighbors have been terrorized by squatters who set up camp next door to their home and even set their property on fire.

So far, more than 2,600 businesses have left downtown Portland.

We aren’t just talking about a handful of businesses that have decided that it is time to look for greener pastures.

What we are witnessing is literally a “mass exodus”, and that is because Portland now resembles a Mad Max movie…

Real estate developer Dustin Michael Miller told ‘Fox & Friends First’ that he’s moving his company out of Portland after his office was targeted in a rain of bullets in an incident he described as ‘absolute madness’.

‘It’s not uncommon to see homeless people running around the city with axes and machetes, and it’s just a common thing that nobody does anything,’ Miller said. ‘You call the police, and it’s very rare that they show up.’

Of course the exact same thing could be said about many other large cities.

Happy Days star Scott Baio has admitted that he has decided to sell his home and leave Los Angeles for good because the city has literally become “unlivable”…

The actor said he has been ‘forced out’ of his $3.85million home in Woodland Hills, LA, because the city has become ‘unlivable’, citing the homeless doing drugs on the sidewalk in the middle of the day, crime being ‘out of control’, and ‘graffiti on everything’.

‘Between the homeless defecating on the sidewalk, doing drugs on the sidewalk in the middle of the day, illegal aliens all over the place, law means nothing, crime is out of control, graffiti on everything… all of my tax dollars, I don’t know what they go for,’ Baoi said.

This is our country now.

We have been eagerly embracing evil for decades, and as a result we now have evil all around us.

I wish that I could tell you that things will be much better a couple years from now.

But I can’t do that, because it isn’t true.

In fact, as economic conditions deteriorate it is likely that the looting will go to an entirely new level.

Decades of very bad decisions have brought us to this point, and now we are paying a very great price for our foolishness.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Destroyed

May 16, 2023May 16, 2023 by Michael

If you wanted to destroy the middle class, one way that you could accomplish that goal would be to flood the system with money. Of course that is precisely what we have witnessed over the past few years. Our leaders have pumped trillions of new dollars into the system, and the wealthy have gotten much, much wealthier. But meanwhile, the rest of us have seen the cost of living rise much faster than our paychecks have. As a result, we are getting poorer and the middle class is shrinking.

Over time, our capitalist economy has steadily evolved into a system where almost all of the wealth and almost all of the power are concentrated in the hands of giant institutions.

Collectively, big government and big corporations run virtually everything, and this system of “corporate socialism” funnels tremendous amount of wealth into the pockets of a very small minority of the population.

If you are in that club, life is good.

But if you are not in that club, life can be a struggle.

The gap between the rich and the poor has steadily grown, and now it is larger than it has ever been before. Even U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders acknowledges that we have a massive problem on our hands…

Today, half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, 500,000 of the very poorest among us are homeless, millions are worried about evictions, 92 million are uninsured or underinsured, and families all across the country are worried about how they are going to feed their kids. Today, an entire generation of young people carry an outrageous level of student debt and face the reality that their standard of living will be lower than their parents’. And, most obscenely, low-income Americans now have a life expectancy that is about 15 years lower than the wealthy. Poverty in America has become a death sentence.

Meanwhile, the people on top have never had it so good. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 92%, and the 50 wealthiest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 165 million people.

Of course Sanders believes that even more socialism is the answer, but more socialism is never the answer.

Centralizing wealth and power leads to widespread poverty. We have seen this same pattern over and over again all over the globe.

Decentralizing wealth and power leads to boundless prosperity like we saw in early America.

Unfortunately, our current system is what it is, and the middle class is being absolutely crushed.

Earlier today, I came across a tweet from Mike Cernovich that really resonated with me…

I made $10 an hour as a part timer worker in Home Depot style store. $12.50 on weekends. This was 1990’s in small town. Would be $19 an hour today and $24 on weekends.

I checked and same job TODAY is $12.50 an hour.

This is what inflation has done to the working class.

This is what so many of the “working poor” are facing today.

Wages for many jobs have not moved much at all over the years, but the cost of living has been absolutely soaring.

Cernovich also pointed out that a couple of decades ago hardly anything that we bought on a regular basis “felt expensive”…

Gas was often 99 cents / gallon. Gallon milk was 99 cents to $1.29.

This was in 1997-2000 era.

Nothing felt expensive other than “nice stuff,” luxuries.

Daily living, groceries, sure you had to budget but it didn’t feel like it does now.

Isn’t that so true?

I remember that time well. I could fill up an entire grocery cart for just 25 dollars, and that even included an entire cake.

Yes, I really liked to eat cake in those days.

But now if you fill up an entire cart with food, you will feel like you are making a house payment when you get to the register.

Needless to say, house payments are also much higher than they used to be. In fact, it is being reported that the average existing home actually costs approximately 93,000 dollars more than it did in 2020…

You read that right—existing homes cost around $93,000 more than they did in 2020. No wonder so many people feel like they can’t afford a house!

And newly built homes are even more expensive. In fact, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates new homes will cost around $425,786 in 2023. Out of 132.5 million American households, 96.5 million of them won’t be able to afford that median price.6 So even if we see a ton of new houses being built, 7 out of 10 households will have a tough time paying for one.

93,000 dollars!

In the old days, you could get a really nice home for 93,000 dollars.

But now the American Dream is out of reach for millions upon millions of families.

At this stage, many hard working families don’t even make enough money “to cover their most basic needs”…

More than a third of US families that work full-time do not earn enough money to cover their most basic needs, including housing, food and child care, a new study shows.

Researchers at Brandeis University found 35% of American families do not meet the “basic family needs budget” — the amount needed to afford rent, food, transportation, medical care and minimal household expenses — despite working full-time year-round.

And thanks to inflation, it is getting worse with each passing month.

According to one recent survey, approximately 70 percent of all Americans openly admit “to being stressed about their personal finances”…

Some 70% of Americans admit to being stressed about their personal finances these days and a majority — 52% — of U.S. adults said their financial stress has increased since before the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020, according to a new CNBC Your Money Financial Confidence Survey conducted in partnership with Momentive.

A lot of you out there are in the same boat.

You are working as hard as you can, but it seems like there is never enough money at the end of the month.

That is because the game is rigged.

Our system has been so corrupted that now almost all of the economic rewards are being funneled to those at the very top of the food chain.

Meanwhile, the middle class is being absolutely eviscerated, and poverty is spreading like wildfire all over the nation.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

The Probability Of A Recession Happening In The Next 12 Months Is The Highest In More Than 40 Years!

May 15, 2023May 15, 2023 by Michael

If they are actually telling us that a recession is coming this time around, how bad is it going to be? In 2008, officials kept assuring us over and over again that there wouldn’t be a recession, and then we plunged into the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But here in 2023, what is coming is so obvious that nobody can deny what is happening. The economy is already starting to come apart at the seams all around us, and the “experts” at the Federal Reserve openly acknowledge that they are making things even worse by hiking interest rates. Pretty much everyone agrees that rougher times are ahead of us, and “a probability model from the New York Federal Reserve” is now projecting that there is a 68.2 percent chance that there will be a recession within the next 12 months…

The odds that the United States will fall into a recession at some point over the next 12 months have risen to a 40-year high, according to a probability model from the New York Federal Reserve.

The probability that the country will enter a recession within the next year has risen to 68.2 percent, according to the New York Fed, which is the highest level since 1982.

The Fed’s recession risk indicator is now greater than it was in November 2007, not long before the subprime crisis, when it stood at 40 percent.

This is the highest that figure has been in more than 40 years.

Just think about that for a moment.

The recession of the early 1980s was a real whopper, and if you were alive at that time you probably still have very painful memories of it.

Are we about to experience something similar?

Larry Summers says that he also believes that we probably have about a 70 percent chance of a recession within the next 12 months…

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has also expressed his view that the odds of a downturn are “probably about 70 percent.”

“The chance that a recession will have begun this year in the U.S. over the next 12 months is probably about 70 percent,” Summers said in a recent interview with Foreign Policy. “As I put together the lags associated with monetary policy, the credit crunch risks, the need for continuing action around inflation, the risk of geopolitical or other shocks affecting commodities, 70 percent would be the range that I would be in.”

So many pundits are very negative about the next 12 months, but we certainly don’t have to wait for bad economic news, because it is happening all around us right now.

In fact, the New York Fed’s Empire State business conditions index just fell more than 42 points in a single month…

After an unexpected surge into growth territory in April, the New York Fed’s Empire State business conditions index plunged 42.6 points in May to minus 31.8.

Economists had forecast a milder slump to negative two.

Readings below zero indicate worsening conditions. The May decline is the sharpest on record apart from the initial lockdown months of the pandemic.

Read that last sentence again.

Not even when nearly the entire country was locked down did we see a drop of this magnitude.

And this comes at a time when consumers, small businesses, and large businesses are all struggling.

On Monday, we learned that total consumer debt in the U.S. has just reached a brand new all-time record high…

Total consumer debt hit a fresh new high in the first quarter of 2023, pushing past $17 trillion even amid a sharp pullback in home borrowing.

The total for borrowing across all categories hit $17.05 trillion, an increase of nearly $150 billion, or 0.9% during the January-to-March period, the New York Federal Reserve reported Monday. That took total indebtedness up about $2.9 trillion from the pre-Covid period ended in 2019.

Of course interest rates are moving higher at the same time.

If you can believe it, the average rate of interest on credit card balances is now over 20 percent…

The rise in credit card usage and debt is particularly concerning because interest rates are astronomically high right now. The average credit card annual percentage rate, or APR, hit a new record of 20.33% last week, according to a Bankrate database that goes back to 1985.

Carrying credit card balances in this environment is financial suicide, but many Americans find themselves forced to charge food and other basic supplies these days because they don’t have any other options.

Millions upon millions of people are barely scraping by from month to month, and delinquency rates just continue to move higher…

Delinquency rates for all debt increased, up 0.6 percentage point for credit cards to 6.5% and 0.2 percentage point for auto loans to 6.9%. Total delinquency rates moved up 0.2 percentage point to 3%, the highest since the third quarter of 2020.

Meanwhile, here in the early stages of 2023 small businesses are “filing for bankruptcy at a record pace”…

Small businesses throughout the United States are currently filing for bankruptcy at a record pace, exceeding the levels observed in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to a UBS Evidence Lab note reviewed by The Epoch Times, the four-week moving average for private filings was 73 percent higher than it was in June 2020. They also warned the situation may worsen as the repercussions of the recent banking crises start to manifest.

“[We] believe one of the more underappreciated signs of distress in U.S. corporate credit is already emanating from the small- and mid-size enterprises sector,” Matthew Mish, head of credit strategy at UBS, wrote in the recently published research memo. “[The] smallest of firms [are] facing the most severe pressure from rising rates, persistent inflation and slowing growth.”

Things weren’t even this bad during the extended lockdowns during the early stages of the COVID pandemic.

And many more small businesses will inevitably fail in the weeks and months to come.

Large businesses are faring relatively better, but right now we are witnessing “the most prolonged corporate profits downturn in seven years”…

As the US economy teeters on the brink of recession, Wall Street is already enduring what could turn out to be the most prolonged corporate profits downturn in seven years.

With the first-quarter earnings season drawing to a close, the profits of S&P 500 companies are estimated to have dropped 3.7% on average, compared to a year ago.

And as I have detailed extensively in previous articles, large companies all over the U.S. have already started conducting mass layoffs.

Needless to say, they aren’t letting people go because they think the economy is about to turn around.

They can see what is coming, and they are trying to get ready in advance.

Before I end this article, let me give you one more very troubling sign.

In April, the federal government brought in 26.1 percent less tax revenue than it did in April 2022…

The Treasury took in $638.52 billion in April. That was more than double the receipts in March. This is to be expected as the government collects a large amount of tax revenue in April. But compared to April 2022, tax receipts were down 26.1%.

This is one number that the federal government cannot doctor, and it is absolutely horrible.

We really are heading into an economic nightmare, and of course the economy is just one element of the “perfect storm” that we are now facing.

So what should you do?

I would encourage you to do whatever you need to do in order to get prepared for very rough times.

Our system is in the process of melting down, and the government is not going to come riding to your rescue when everything finally hits the fan.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

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