Monday, September 2, 2024

John Wilder, "The Drive To Kill The Constitution"

"The Drive To Kill The Constitution"
by John Wilder

“Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!” – "Return of the King"

One of the places that people on the TradRight have made progress over my lifetime in actually increasing freedom is in the area of gun rights. This is good, and has been aided by Federalist Society™ acting as an institution to bring justices to the Supreme Court whose goals aren’t to modernize the Constitution or to use it to end up being the opposite document that it was intended to be.

Of particular importance to the Constitution is the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights wasn’t quite an afterthought, but a creation of the complaints from the Anti-Federalists that the new government had no prohibitions against what it couldn’t do. The Federalists said, “Hey, don’t worry, dudes. The Constitution is fine because there’s a very limited role for the federal government in the document. Even if it wanted to, the federal government couldn’t take away your right to own guns. Hell, you guys have private warships with cannons on them – how badass is that?”
The Federalists were worried that with a list of prohibitions against the federal government, then the only thing that would be considered as rights were the ones that they listed, and not the much broader list they took as self-evident. The Federalists thought that there were just too many places the government shouldn’t be able to go to list them all. The Anti-Federalists said, “No, man, here are our minimums. And we’ll add one at the end, the 10th one, that says the states or the people get to keep that long list.”

The Anti-Federalists won the day. They created a dozen amendments, of which ten were finally adopted as the Bill of Rights. Obviously, keeping men away from power is harder than keeping Kamala Harris away from the Night Train®, and government grew into a colossus, much larger and with more powers than the framers ever intended. And like the fat girl at the middle school dance, the 10th Amendment is the most ignored of all of them.

This was obvious even by the time of the Civil War. I think, rightly, that the U.S. Civil War could be renamed the “War Against the States” because the central role of the States in the governance of the country was essentially dead at the end of the war. It only required the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1912, removing the election of senators from the state legislatures and giving it to popular vote for a final gutting of the rights of the State.

Now the GloboLeft has assumed the reins, and with the states out of the way, the final push has come against the people. Here’s the way that Aldous Huxley described it: “By means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms: elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”

That’s where we are now. Whereas the Constitution has been powerless to stop the creeping totalitarianism, the Federalist Society judges have been enough, equipped with just two parts of the Bill of Rights have kept totalitarianism from final victory.

If the GloboLeftElite see an obstacle, what do they do? Get rid of it. Thus, the idea is now being floated by the GloboLeftElite to ditch the Constitution. The writer of the latest hit piece against what remains of the Constitution is Jennifer Szalai, who wrote, “The Constitution is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” in the New York Times®.

Ms. Szalai was born in another country (Canada) educated in Europe, and now, for whatever reason, seems to desire to talk about a country to which she clearly has little allegiance to. The most laughable passage tries to skew the attempt to interpret the Constitution as it to what it plainly meant and was intended as “ideology” and noting that this prevents judges from “doing nice things”.
Szalai also notes that judges reading the Constitution and doing what it says frustrates what “the majority of people want”. Apparently Szalai doesn’t know that’s exactly what it was designed to do: to stop a majority of people, hot with passion, from trampling the rights of the individual. Yeah, that was the plan.

Look at Australia, banning most weapons and putting ludicrous rules on the ones that remained legal. Why? Because they didn’t have the 2nd Amendment stopping a knee-jerk reaction to a mass shooting that seems really like it was a set up. The only path to get all the guns removed from the hands of the people in the United States is to pass a Constitutional amendment, and even that probably won’t work for decades.

A case in point of bad law versus the Constitution: after 9/11 the Patriot Act was passed to target “terrorists” even though it gives a government of colossal size powers that would have made King George envious and would have made George Washington reach for an AR-15.

Unless the GloboLeftElite could take over every method that people have to communicate with each other. Outside of websites here and there and places like Gab®, there were very few places that people on the TradRight could get together to talk to each other. Places like Gab™ were literally cut off from things like payment processors (Coinbase©, PayPal™ and many, many, many others).

The pesky 1st Amendment keeps the government from (overtly) clamping down on speech. Unless they ask Mark Zuckerberg to do it for them and he agrees because having people think for themselves about COVID was too dangerous. The press literally used those words – “thinking for yourself is too dangerous.” Look at the constant drumbeat to give away our freedom:
It’s the communications they want, first. As long as they can make us feel isolated and alone, the only person with dangerous opinions. Then, finally, they can win. Their goal is the removal of the freedoms we’ve cherished and slowly seen erode either through the cowardice of weak men or the avarice of greedy men or the schemes of bad men. The only thing that stands in their way? Us."

Adventures With Danno, "Grocery Shopping At Meijer, Best Deals And Money Savers"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 9/2/24
"Grocery Shopping At Meijer, 
Best Deals And Money Savers"
Comments here:

"Economic Market Snapshot 9/2/24"

"Economic Market Snapshot 9/2/24"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
o
Market Data Center, Live Updates:
Comprehensive, essential truth.
Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: creditequity valuationfunding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United Statesother advanced economies, and emerging markets."
Job cuts and much more.
Commentary, highly recommended:
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
And now... The End Game...
o

Sunday, September 1, 2024

"Walmart Rewards The Criminal, Fires Their Employee; Bank Runs And Pension Collapses Are Coming"

Jeremiah Babe, 9/1/24
"Walmart Rewards The Criminal, Fires Their Employee; 
Bank Runs And Pension Collapses Are Coming"
Comments here:

Dan, I Allegedly, "Enough is Enough - Wild Crime Stories!"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 9/1/24
"Enough is Enough - Wild Crime Stories!"
"Enough is enough! Filmed live from the bustling streets of Huntington Beach, California, where rallies and chaos ensue, this episode exposes the rampant lawlessness plaguing cities like Aurora, Colorado, and San Francisco. Discover how vigilante justice might be the only answer to the authorities' inaction. From Venezuelan gangs to the shocking crime in Union Square, this is a no-holds-barred look at what happens when communities take matters into their own hands."
Comments here:

"Attitude..."

"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude to me is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than success, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, gift, or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitudes. "
- Charles Swindoll

"The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable,
 or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same."
- Carlos Castaneda

Musical Interlude: Yanni & Samvel Yervinyan, "Until The Last Moment"

Yanni & Samvel Yervinyan, "Until The Last Moment"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Like delicate cosmic petals, these clouds of interstellar dust and gas have blossomed 1,300 light-years away in the fertile star fields of the constellation Cepheus. Sometimes called the Iris Nebula and dutifully cataloged as NGC 7023 this is not the only nebula in the sky to evoke the imagery of flowers. Still, this remarkable image shows off the Iris Nebula's range of colors and symmetries in impressive detail. Within the Iris, dusty nebular material surrounds a hot, young star.
The dominant color of the brighter reflection nebula is blue, characteristic of dust grains reflecting starlight. Central filaments of the dusty clouds glow with a faint reddish photoluminesence as some dust grains effectively convert the star's invisible ultraviolet radiation to visible red light. Infrared observations indicate that this nebula may contain complex carbon molecules known as PAHs. The bright blue portion of the Iris Nebula is about six light-years across.”

Chet Raymo, “The Sound And Fury”

“The Sound And Fury”
by Chet Raymo

“Not so long ago, I mentioned here Himmler and Heydrich, two of Hitler's most terrible henchmen. A friend said to me: "If there's no afterlife, no heaven or hell, then those two diabolical creatures got away with it. Their fate was no different than that of any one of their victims, an innocent child perhaps." And, yes, if there is no God who dispenses final justice, then we are left with an aching feeling of irresolution, of virtue unrewarded, of vice unpunished. Heydrich was gunned down by partisan assassins, and Himmler committed suicide a few hours before his inevitable capture, both fates arguably less tragic than that of their victims. How much more satisfying to think that the two mass murderers will spend an eternity in hell, while their victims find bliss.

This may not be a logically consistent argument for the existence of God, but it is certainly compelling. My friend says: "If there's no afterlife, then it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Of course, this emotive argument for the existence of God is balanced by another argument against his existence– the problem of evil: How can a just and loving God allow the existence of a Himmler or Heydrich in the first place. Here the argument is not just emotional, but consists of a thorny contradiction.

It comes down, essentially, to head vs. heart- what we would like to be true with all of our heart, vs. what our head tells us is an unresolvable conundrum. So each of us decides: To follow our hearts and make the blind leap of faith, or to follow our heads and learn to live with the sound and the fury. For those of us who choose the second alternative, the relevant words are that distressing coda, "signifying nothing." Our task is one of signification, of finding a satisfying meaning this side of the grave.

For many of us, that means finding our place in the great cosmic unfolding, and of recognizing that our lives are not inconsequential, that by being here we jigger the trajectory of the universe in some way, no matter how small, and preferably for the good and just. Yes, we make a leap of faith too, I suppose- that love, justice, and creativity are virtues worth living for- but at least it is a leap of faith that is not into the unknown, does not embody logical contradiction, and is consistent with what we know to be true, or at least as true as we can make it.”

“How Does It All End?”

“How Does It All End?”
by Bill Bonner

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
 - Soren Kierkegaard

“‘How does this all end?’ It’s a regular subject for guesswork here at the Diary. Of course, to see what’s coming, you have to look back on what’s come before.

Fantastic vision: In 1900, a survey was done. ‘What do you see coming?’ asked the pollsters. All of those people questioned forecast better times ahead. Machines were just making their debut, but already people saw their potential.

You can see some of that optimism on display today in the Paris Metro. In the Montparnasse station is an illustration from the late 1800s of what the artist imagined for the next century. It is a fantastic vision- of flying vehicles…elevated sidewalks…incredible mechanical devices, all elaborated from the Machine Age technology as it was understood at the time. There is no sign of hydraulics, jet engines, or electrical devices, for example, just gears and pulleys…and flying machines that flapped their wings like a bird.

But when asked what lay ahead, the most remarkable opinion, at least from our point of view, was that the government would decline in size and power. Almost everyone thought so. We wouldn’t need so much government, they said. People will all be rich. Wealthy people may engage in fraud and finagling. But they don’t wait in dark alleys to bop people over the head and steal their wallets. They don’t need government pensions or government health care either. Nor do they attack their neighbors.

The great illusion: In 1909, British politician Norman Angell published a bestselling book, "The Great Illusion," in which he explained why. Wealth is no longer based on land, Angell argued. Instead, it depended on factories, finance, and delicate relationships between suppliers, manufacturers, and consumers. And as this capitalism made people better off, he said, they wouldn’t want to do anything to interfere with it. It would only make them poorer.

One of his most important readers was Viscount Esher of Britain’s Committee of Imperial Defence. Set up in 1904, its task was to research and coordinate military strategy for the empire. Esher told listeners that ‘new economic factors clearly prove the inanity of aggressive wars.’ One of the most important components of the wealth of the late 19th century was international commerce. Capitalism flourishes in times of peace, sound money, respect for property rights and free trade. It was clear that everyone benefitted. Who would want to upset that apple cart?

‘War must soon be a thing of the past,’ Escher concluded. He was wrong. In August 1914, the cart fell over anyway. The Great War began five years after Angell’s book hit the bestseller lists. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme- 100 years ago- there were more than 70,000 casualties.

By the time Americans arrived in 1917, the average soldier at the front lines had a life expectancy of only 21 days. And by the time of Armistice Day- on the 11th day of the 11th month at 11:00am of 1918- the war had killed 17 million people, wounded another 20 million and knocked off the major ruling families of continental Europe- the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs, and the Romanoffs (the Bourbons and Bonapartes were already gone from France).

The age of ‘isms’: After the Great War came a 30-year spell of trouble. In keeping with the metaphor of the Machine Age, the disintegration of pre-war institutions broke the tie rods that connected civilized economies to their governments. Reparations imposed on the Weimar Republic after the war sparked hyperinflation in Germany. The US, meanwhile, enjoyed a ‘Roaring 20s’, as Europeans paid their debts- in gold- to US lenders.

But that joyride came to an end in 1929. Then the feds flooded the carburetor, in their disastrously maladroit efforts to get the motor started again- including the Smoot-Hawley Act, which restricted cross-border trade. The ‘isms’- fascism, communism, syndicalism, socialism, anarchism- issued forth, like carbon monoxide. They offered solutions!

Finally, the brittle rubber of communism (aided by modern democratic capitalism) met the mean streets of fascism in another six-year bout of government-led violence: the Second World War. By the end of this period, the West decided enough was enough. Europe settled down with bourgeois governments of various social-democrat forms. The US went back to business, with order books filled and its factories still intact.

The end of history? The ‘isms’ held firm in the Soviet Union and moved to the Orient- with further wear and tear on the machinery of warfare in Korea…and later Vietnam. Finally, in 1979, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping announced that, although the ruling Communist Party would stay in control, the country would abandon its Marxist-Leninist-Maoist creed. China joined the world economy with its own version of state-guided capitalism. Then, 10 years later, the Soviet Union gave up even more completely…rejecting both the Communist Party and communism itself.

This was the event hailed in a silly essay by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’ Finally, the long battle was won. It was, wrote Fukuyama, the ‘endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’"

Graphic: Salvador Dali, “The Persistence of Memory”

"Everybody's Pretending..."

"We are what we pretend to be, 
so we must be careful what we pretend to be."
- Kurt Vonnegut, "Mother Night"

"People are sad. People are broke. People are worried about money, people are worried that they're not enough and not amounting to anything and they don't feel good about themselves. People have rough times, and everybody's pretending it's not true, and we need to break that veneer." - Eve Ensler

“You go up to a man, and you say, “How are things going, Joe?” and he says, “Oh fine, fine... couldn’t be better.” And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.”
- Kurt Vonnegut

The Daily "Near You?"

Gilmer, Texas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Tom Disch, "What to Accept"

"What to Accept"

"The fact of mountains. 
The actuality
Of any stone - by kicking, if necessary.
The need to ignore stupid people,
While restraining one's natural impulse
To murder them. 

The change from your dollar,
Be it no more than a penny,
For without a pretense of universal penury
There can be no honor between rich and poor.
Love, unconditionally, or until proven false.
The inevitability of cancer and/or
Heart disease. 

The dialogue as written,
Once you've taken the role. 

Failure,
Gracefully. 

Any hospitality
You're willing to return. 

The air each city offers you to breathe.
The latest hit. Assistance.
All accidents. The end."

- Tom Disch

"Accomplished Fugitives..."

“Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems. We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don’t want to know ourselves, don’t want to depend on ourselves, don’t want to live with ourselves. By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.”
- John Gardner

"It's Not the End of the World"

"It's Not the End of the World"
by Jeff Thomas

"Periodically, I’ll encounter someone who has read one of my essays and has decided not to pursue them further, stating, "You’re one of those ‘End of the world’ guys. I can’t be bothered reading the writings of someone who thinks we’re all doomed. I have a more positive outlook than that." In actual fact, I agree entirely with his latter two comments. I can’t be bothered reading the thoughts of a writer who says we’re all doomed, either. I, too, have a more positive outlook than that.

My one discrepancy with such comments is that I don’t by any means think that the present state of events will lead to the end of the world, as he assumes. But then, neither am I naïve enough to think that if I just hope for the best, the powers that be will cease to be parasitical and predatory out of sympathy for me. They will not.

For any serious student of history, one of the great realizations that occurs at some point is that governments are inherently controlling by nature. The more control they have, the more they desire and the more they pursue. After all, governments actually produce nothing. They exist solely upon what they can extract from the people they rule over. Therefore, their personal success is not measured by how well they serve their people, it’s measured by how much they can extract from the people. And so, it’s a given that all governments will pursue ever-greater levels of power over their minions up to and including the point of total dominance.

It should be said that, on rare occasions, a people will rise up and create a governmental system in which the rights of the individual are paramount. This was true in the creation of the Athenian Republic and the American Constitution, and even the British Magna Carta. However, these events are quite rare in history and, worse, as soon as they take place, those who gain power do their best to diminish the newly-gained freedoms. Such freedoms can almost never be destroyed quickly, but, over time and "by slow operations," as Thomas Jefferson was fond of saying, governments can be counted on to eventually destroy all freedoms.

We’re passing through a period in history in which the process of removing freedoms is nearing completion in many of the world’s foremost jurisdictions. The EU and US, in particular, are leading the way in this effort. Consequently, it shouldn’t be surprising that some predict "the end of the world." But, they couldn’t be more incorrect.

Surely, in 1789, the more productive people of France may have felt that the developing French Revolution would culminate in Armageddon. Similarly, in 1917, those who created prosperity in Russia may well have wanted to throw up their hands as the Bolsheviks seized power from the Romanovs.

Whenever a deterioration in rule is underway, as it is once again now, the observer has three choices:

Declare the End of the World: There are many people, worldwide, but particularly in the centers of the present deterioration – the EU and US – who feel that, since the situation in their home country is nearing collapse, the entire world must also be falling apart. This is not only a very myopic viewpoint, it’s also quite inaccurate. At any point in civilization in the past 2000 years or more, there have always been empires that were collapsing due to intolerable governmental dominance and there have always concurrently been alternative jurisdictions where the level of freedom was greater. In ancient Rome, when Diocletian devalued the currency, raised taxes, increased warfare and set price controls, those people who actually created the economy on a daily basis found themselves in the same boat as Europeans and Americans are finding themselves in, in the 21st century.

It may have seemed like the end of the world, but it was not. Enough producers left Rome and started over again in other locations. Those other locations eventually thrived as a result of the influx of productive people, while Rome atrophied.

Turn a Blind Eye: This is less dreary than the above approach, but it is nevertheless just as fruitless. It is, in fact, the most common of reactions – to just "hope for the best." It’s tempting to imagine that maybe the government will realize that they’re the only ones benefitting from the destruction of freedom and prosperity and they’ll feel bad and reverse the process. But this clearly will not happen. It’s also tempting to imagine that maybe it won’t get a whole lot worse and that life, although not all that good at present, might remain tolerable. Again, this is wishful thinking and the odds of it playing out in a positive way are slim indeed.

Accept the Truth, But Do Something About It: This, of course, is the hard one. Begin by recognizing the truth. If that truth is not palatable, study the situation carefully and, when a reasonably clear understanding has been reached, create an alternative. When governments enter the final decline stage, an alternative is not always easy to accept. It’s a bit like having a tooth pulled. You want to put it off, but the pain will only get worse if you delay. And so, you trundle off to the dentist unhappily, but, a few weeks after the extraction, you find yourself asking, "Why didn’t I do this sooner?"

To be sure, those who investigate and analyze the present socio-economic-political deterioration do indeed espouse a great deal of gloom, but this should not be confused with doom. In actual fact, the whole point of shining a light into the gloom is to avoid having it end in doom.

It should be said here that remaining in a country that is tumbling downhill socially, economically and politically is also not the end of the world. It is, however, true that the end result will not exactly be a happy one. If history repeats once again, it’s likely to be quite a miserable one.

Those who undertake the study of the present deterioration must, admittedly, address some pretty depressing eventualities and it would be far easier to just curl up on the sofa with a six-pack and watch the game, but the fact remains: unless the coming problems are investigated and an alternative found, those who sit on the sofa will become the victims of their own lethargy.

Sadly, we live in a period in history in which some of the nations that once held the greatest promise for the world are well on their way to becoming the most tyrannical. If by recognizing that fact, we can pursue better alternatives elsewhere on the globe, as people have done in previous eras. We may actually find that the field of daisies in the image above is still very much in existence, it’s just a bit further afield than it was in years gone by. And it is absolutely worthy of pursuit."

"How It Really Is"

 

Labor Day, Sept. 2, 2024

"I Would Rather Have..."

“I would rather have questions that can't be answered 
than answers that can't be questioned.”
- Richard P. Feynman

"More High-Profile Retail Stores Are Getting Kicked In The Teeth"

"More High-Profile Retail Stores
 Are Getting Kicked In The Teeth"
by Mark Gilman

"Lackluster consumer confidence is negatively affecting discount retailers such as Dollar General and Big Lots. Dollar General’s shares dropped 32 percent on Aug. 29 after the company admitted in its earnings report that lower-income customers are still struggling, while Big Lots’s fortunes are in a tailspin.

Middle-scale retailer Abercrombie & Fitch, which made a significant comeback in 2024, saw its stock drop 15 percent this week, while drugstore chain Rite Aid has emptied up to 500 stores amid its bankruptcy filing.

National Retail Federation (NRF) chief economist Jack Kleinhenz wrote in its August monthly review that while the U.S. economy appears healthy, consumers are skeptical. “While the overall economy continued to display remarkable strength in the first half of 2024, consumer confidence remains weak,” he said.

That sentiment was bolstered by the latest University of Michigan’s monthly survey in July, which fell for the fourth month in a row. Dr. Joanne Hsu, who authored the report, wrote: “Sentiment has lifted 33 percent above the June 2022 historical low, but it remains guarded as high prices continue to drag down attitudes, particularly for those with lower incomes.”
In Dollar General’s case, the discount store reported it expects fiscal 2024 same-store sales to be up 1.0–1.6 percent, lower than its prior outlook for a 2.0–2.7 percent increase, with earnings per share for the year expected to be in the range of just $5.50–6.20. That prediction was below its original forecast of $6.80–7.55 per share. Dollar General’s core consumer base comprises households earning less than $35,000 annually, contributing to 60 percent of overall sales.

On the company’s post-earnings call, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said, “While middle and higher-income households are seeking value as well, they don’t claim to feel the same level of pressure as low-income households, as customers have felt more pressure on their spending.” He added that what he is seeing in the numbers “would indicate that this is a cash-strapped consumer, even more than we saw in the first quarter.”

Meanwhile, another discount retailer, Big Lots, is struggling in this economy. In its June filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Big Lots reported that 244 of its 1,392 stores are underperforming and planned to close 35 to 40 of them. Its net sales ended in May this year dropped 10 percent year over year ($415 million), to a little over $1 billion. The company also announced it owed another $72.2 million in debt, accounting for a total of $573.8 million.

In a press release, Big Lots President and CEO Bruce Thorn wrote: “While we made substantial progress on improving our business operations in the first quarter, we missed our sales goals due largely to a continued pullback in consumer spending by our core customers, particularly in high-ticket discretionary items. We remain focused on managing through the current economic cycle by controlling the controllables. As we move forward, we’re taking aggressive actions to drive positive comp sales growth in the latter part of the year and into 2025 and to maintain year-over-year gross margin rate improvements, all driven by progress on our five key actions.” The company’s second-quarter results will be announced on Sept. 6.

Neil Saunders, the managing director of GlobalData Retail, told Modern Retail, “It doesn’t look as if they are going to be able to stop the bleeding anytime soon. The financials are going in the wrong direction. This is a business that has suffered sales declines for a reasonable period of time, and what you come to expect is that, as you go forward, those declines start to moderate a bit and then you start to go back into growth, but Big Lots shows no signs of that happening.”

Comeback darling Abercrombie & Fitch saw its stock rise 21 percent in the second quarter this year, but immediately drop 15 percent after CEO Fran Horowitz used the word “uncertain” in his earnings analysis. “We delivered a strong first half of the year, and we are increasing our full-year outlook. Although we continue to operate in an increasingly uncertain environment, we remain steadfast in executing our global playbook and maintaining discipline over inventory and expenses,” he said.

In the University of Michigan report, Dr. Hsu said one of the worries consumers now have is stagnant wage growth. “While consumers exhibited confidence that inflation will continue to soften, many expressed concerns about the effect of high prices and weakening incomes on their personal finances, she wrote.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, the three-month average for payroll gains slowed to 177,000 in June, down from 267,000 in March. As of June 30, the bureau reported the number of job openings was unchanged at 8.2 million, but compared negatively by nearly one million (941,000) compared to June 2023. Hiring also fell from 5.7 million jobs in May this year to 5.3 million in June. (What hallucinogen is in the Kool-Aid this bureau drinks? - CP)

But she added that even though inflation has slowed, higher prices continue to make an impact on consumer sentiment. “Over the past two years, our surveys clearly reveal that consumers distinguish between their experiences with high price levels and their views of overall inflation rates,” she writes. “On one hand, they recognize that inflation has softened substantially and expect that trend to continue. On the other hand, slowing inflation does not generally lead to reductions in overall price levels; the persistence of high prices continues to exert pain on household budgets.”

"From Price Controls To Mass Starvation"

Article image is Florence Thompson, "Migrant Mother,"
a migrant pea farmer family by Dorothea Lange in March, 1936
"From Price Controls To Mass Starvation"
By Peter St. Onge, Ph.D.

"From taxes to spending, Kamala is the most left-wing major party candidate since George McGovern - who proposed a Universal Basic Income in 1972 and went on to win a single state. But her most hare-brained scheme - so far - has been price controls, where she's to the left of McGovern, threatening to punish grocery stores for daring to charge more than their costs. In fact, grocery stores make 1 to 2 pennies on the dollar. Meaning they have to pass along costs that come straight from the Washington money printer. That means price controls would, in short, break food.

Price Controls Always Fail: In a recent video, below, I mentioned how price controls have been tried many times, and each time they failed so spectacularly they were repealed. After much pain, suffering, and empty shelves. When France tried, they got a black market that actually did price gouge. Even Venezuela repealed price controls in 2016 after food shortages and nationwide riots.

But what do price controls look like in reality? For that I go to a great thread by Robert Sterling, a former M&A executive at one of the biggest food producers in America. Robert walks us through a thirteen step process from grocery price controls to widespread food shortages -- something we haven't seen in this country since the Great Depression, when FDR also imposed price controls.

Stage One: Bankrupt Grocers: So, first, the government announces grocery stores can't raise prices even though inflation continues - courtesy of the Fed and Wall Street. That means their costs keep going up, so those pennies of profit turn into losses. Like any business that's losing money, they shut down. Of course, not all grocery stores are created equal - small ones lack economies of scale, and while rich people buy high-margin vegetables and expensive cuts, the poor buy low-margin packaged foods. So the small stores and the low-income stores go first.

You get food deserts, as people in urban centers or rural areas have to drive miles -- or take multiple buses -- to find food. And, ironically, you get more concentration, as the little guys drop out.
The survivors increasingly aren't even selling food. They shift shelf-space to things that aren't price-controlled. Clothing, furniture, supplements. Grocery stores start to look more like a Dollar Store, with a little food and a lot of junk.
As cities clear of food, you'd need police patrolling parking lots and armed escorts on delivery trucks - perhaps you could even have government-run groceries like Chicago just announced.

The only way to save any grocery stores is to price-control their costs. Meaning food producers like Kraft, Heinz, Tyson, Hormel. Of course, again, Kraft's costs aren't being controlled - their ingredients, wages, parts and electricity. So now they're losing money. Like groceries, they wind down, closing marginal factories and running out equipment then not replacing it. As food producers downsize or go under, now you start getting actual shortages. And the only solution - once again - is price control the next level down. Farmers.

Stage Three: Bankrupt Farmers: Which brings us to the final stage. Because remember Farmers, too, are now forced to sell at a low price, yet their inputs like fertilizer or tractors are still going up. They, too, go under.

You are now full Venezuela, with the only alternative to starvation a complete government takeover of the food supply, centrally planned from farmer to grocer. As Sterling puts it, "The government will struggle to operate one of the most complex industries on the planet. The entire food supply chain starts imploding." “Imploding” as in starvation.

What’s Next: It's very unlikely we'll get to the point of starvation. For the simple reason that at some point the frog boils and the voters - or rioters - share their thoughts with policymakers. That's exactly why price controls fail, from France to Venezuela. Having said, we managed it before under FDR. And, unfortunately, if the morons running Kamala's brain trust are dumb enough for price controls, they're dumb enough for a whole lot more."