Orr's Observations Podcast

#24 RFK and Trump, Why Kamala Harris is the not the "lesser of two evils", CEO of Telegram Arrested

I give my thoughts on RFK "dropping out" and endorsing Trump, explain why Kamala Harris is not the answer, why her plans for price controls and unrealized gains taxes will destroy the country, explain my thoughts on the CEO of Telegram's arrest and the attack on free speech across the globe.

Music by Yevgeny Sorokin from Pixabay

Duration:: 57m
Broadcast on:: 31 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome back to the Orr's Observations podcast. My name is Elliot Orr and I am your host. I am back from an extended break. I just moved to the Netherlands from Oregon, so it was a long process for me having to get all set up and all that. But I am officially moved in. This is one of the first episodes with video. I did video with the sit down with Patrick a few weeks ago, but this is the first official Orr's Observations podcast style that will have a video. The video will be posted on X and maybe you rumble as well. So if you're interested in seeing me, you know, it's not gonna be that much different, but the option is now there. So with that all being said, a lot has happened since the last time I was on this podcast. So my plan is to just kind of get on here and talk about as much stuff as I think is very necessary. I'm gonna talk about RFK dropping out. I'm gonna spend a lot of time on that. I'm gonna talk about Kamala Harris. She just did her first interview. That was pretty interesting. There's been, you know, some news regarding some of the more like kind of war stuff, but it hasn't been super important in anything else I'm not thinking about right now. It will come to me. So you should be excited because I'm excited and it starts right now. (upbeat music) All right, welcome back guys. So I'm gonna start off this episode talking about, you know, my candidate, you know, quotations, Robert F. Kennedy. He sort of dropped out this week and endorsed Donald Trump. And you know, what I haven't been looking too closely at what the corporate press has been saying because I don't really look at anything that the corporate press says, but he didn't drop out necessarily. He kind of suspended his campaign in a way. He's dropping out of 10 to 13 states, swing states that, you know, would if he stayed in the race when Kamala Harris, the election. So this is really a move saying that, you know, Kamala Harris is, you know, obviously this is my perspective as well, much worse than Trump is. It would be much worse for the country. We'd be going down a much worse hole, you know, ascribe whatever you want to Trump. And unless you're one of the people who thinks he's Hitler, who thinks he's just this awful, horrible person, then, you know, think whatever you want. But from my perspective on a pretty equal, like, you know, Republican, Democrat, distrust. And, you know, I don't think either of them are really the answer. That's part of why I was so into Kennedy. I do, I think that America, as it is, as what it should be, the future will be better with Donald Trump as president versus Kamala Harris. Because Kamala Harris, it's not really about Kamala Harris. It's about what her agenda, you know, it wouldn't be her really making the decisions. It's literally, I mean, obviously Joe Biden is a puppet president. He's so old, he can't talk, he can't think. We're not even really talking about Joe Biden a lot. Right now, and that's all by design. What his presidency has fundamentally exposed is that America, you know, the decisions aren't made by the president. They aren't made by the people that we elect. Because, obviously, Joe Biden can't do the job. It's not possible. He's so old he doesn't know what he's talking about. So if, you know, you're, you got two brain cells, you can see that this means that, you know, he isn't running the government. It's the deep state, it's the CIA, it's his aides, whoever you want to say it is, right? You could even say it's Kamala Harris. It's not Kamala Harris, but you could say it is if you want to. It isn't Joe Biden, but he's the figurehead in power right now. And Kamala Harris is going to be very, very similar. She just did her first interview today. I'm going to talk about it a little more later. I haven't watched it because it just came out, you know, just a little bit before I'm recording this, I haven't had time to sit down. But it's only 18 minutes long. She had to do, you know, let alone, she couldn't do an interview by herself. She had to bring Tim Walz with her. But it was only an 18 minute interview. I could never vote for someone who can't sit down with friendly media for longer than 18 minutes. 18 minutes is nothing. I sit down here and can do an hour and a half podcast by myself with no notes, you know? So the bar for a president, I need them to be very, if it's even going to be an hour, it better be a deep, you know, very productive hour of substantive conversations, showing your intellectual ability, showing your plan that you really have a plan 'cause our country is in need for one so desperately. And there's just no way that you can lay down any sort of comprehensive policy plan in only 18 minutes. It's not possible. And I've seen clips of her talking, you know, questions, she answers and they're not even the question that was asked, right? They're third great explanations of what, you know, inflation is instead of how she's going to fix it. So I just, you know, can't imagine that in the 18 minutes, of an edited interview, mind you, it had to be edited. So you're not even seeing probably the worst parts of Kamala Harris. And this totally exposes the corporate press as a propagandistic news outlet. And now I'm, you know, talking about Kamala Harris' interview. This will probably be the segment about Kamala Harris' interview. Maybe I will pull up a few clips later on, but I, you know, 18 minutes, I can't really expect any more from Kamala Harris. I can't say it surprises me, but it is very disappointing that after having to wait for, you know, the amount of time that we had to wait to even have her do an interview for it to only be 18 minutes is just totally disrespectful to the American people, you know, that's my take on it at least. So that being said, Kennedy dropped out of the swing states and he's still gonna be on the ballot in most of the other states. So, you know, me being an Oregon voter, I'm still going to vote for Robert F. Kennedy in Oregon. And if you're in a red state or a blue state, I encourage you to vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Because he had just established the We the People party. And if he gets 5% nationwide, then his party, the We the People party in 2028 will be a national party. He'll get funding, he'll be on the ballot in all 50 states and not have to go through what he did this year. And it will make a big difference. So if you're in a blue state or a red state, you know, it's going to go Trump or Kamala 100% either way and you still want your vote to count. Don't not vote. Don't vote for the libertarian party. Don't vote for, you know, Jill Stein. Don't write in. Vote for Robert F. Kennedy. Make your vote matter, right? It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with Kennedy on everything, but if you disagree with the duopoly, if you disagree with the uni party, then this is the way to make your vote count. Because it's not even guaranteed that Kennedy will be the candidate for this party next year. But we will have a freedom oriented party. We'll have a party literally called We the People. For the interests that the people are actually interested in. And I'm sure it will be similar to a lot of the key parts of Kennedy's platform, such as health, such as, you know, ending the CIA surveillance state cutting back on big government, ending the wars other than Israel, of course, because Kennedy is very into that. Unfortunately, that is my biggest quarrel with him. But part of this deal for him to endorse Donald Trump was that he was going to get a big role in Trump's administration. And right now he is the head of the transition team. So he's actually choosing who's going to go into Trump's administration. And this is the thing that gives me very hopeful about our Donald Trump presidency. It isn't Donald Trump. And, you know, I think that all things considered, he may be coming to some senses a little more. Maybe he learned some of the lessons that he didn't learn in his first administration. 'Cause his first administration was swampy. He didn't drain the swamp. He made it bigger. He spent a lot of money. He did Operation Warp Speed. He made the COVID vaccines. He was president during the lockdown. Fauci was there because of him, you know? It's not like it was a democratic administration during COVID. It was his administration. And then Joe Biden came in after. So, you know, all of these quarrels that many people have rightfully so with the way that COVID was handled, those are quarrels with Donald Trump. And not everyone realizes that, right? And obviously, Kennedy, best candidate on COVID, no matter, you know, even Chase Oliver, the libertarian candidate was kind of pro-lockdown, pro-mask, all that kind of stuff, pro-vaccine. So, he really is the only guy for that, right? He's good on the Ukraine war, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, Tulsi Gabbard has already joined the unity government as they're calling it. Elon Musk is supposed to have a role, part of the conversation that Trump and Elon had on an ex-space a week or two ago, was about putting Elon, it came up in conversation, about putting Elon on some sort of government efficiency committee. So imagine having Elon Musk overseeing, you know, government efficiency, making sure that we're not adding to the national debt, making sure, you know, look at what he did with X. He came in and he cut down most of the employees. And obviously, it didn't make a substantial difference. And hopefully that is the same kind of thing he would come in and do. I'm assuming that Vivek Rameswamy will be in there. Thomas Massey might be Secretary of Agriculture. Nicole Shanahan might be Secretary of Agriculture. She might go run for Governor of California now. I don't know if she'll win. I, you know, I would love for her to be Secretary of, sorry, Governor of California, but not totally sure if that's a realistic possibility for her to actually take California, especially now that she's, you know, aligned with Kennedy, publicly so, a lot of the Kennedy or the California Democrats probably are not gonna have that. So the thing about the unity government that really excites me is that this is kind of the best way for Bobby to have any kind of say, right? There was a point where I genuinely do believe that he could've won, and there was a point where, you know, he genuinely believed that he could've won. But the Democratic Party, the DNC, sued him off the ballots, the Clear Choice PAC, Democratic Political Action Committee, sued him off the ballot in multiple states. He's been having to spend millions of dollars and time defending his right to be on the ballot. So how does the party that is fighting for, you know, saving democracy, actively undermining democracy while saying it's good for democracy? It is straight up lunacy. There's no explanation for it, right? Not only this, they infiltrated his campaign. They had people go in there and intentionally collect fraudulent signatures. They are actively sabotaging third parties, actively suing them off the ballots, actively smearing them via the captured media. So this is not a Democratic institution. And, you know, you can say whatever you wanna say about Trump being a threat to democracy, but he at least stands for democracy. And that is not what I can say about the Democratic Party today. So, you know, Kennedy, obviously, she's a Kennedy, lifelong Democrat, Nicole Shanahan, lifelong Democrat, both left the Democratic Party and endorsed Donald Trump. If that isn't saying enough right now, then you need to reflect. Look at the actual facts. Look at the non-fake numbers, right? The real numbers that aren't kind of fucked with, inflation, prices, mortgages, economy, everything was much, much better under Donald Trump. And, you know, it's not like I'm a Trump guy, but this is just objective, right? And there's not an argument that you can make right now that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy because he's gonna be a fascist. He's gonna be a dictator. He's going to weaponize the Justice Department, right? He, you know, the weaponizing of the Justice Department has already happened. It's being used by the Democrats, not only to kick Kennedy off the ballot. They kicked Trump off the ballot, but to possibly put Trump in jail next month. He might go to jail next month for, you know, the hush money thing, which, you know, no one's been charged that way other than him, let alone go to jail. So if this isn't a political prosecution, tell me what is. So if you are actually worried about the end of democracy, about, you know, fascism, the end of free speech, the dictatorial powers of the government, the weaponization of the Justice Department, that is already happening. Those people are in power right now. And listen to this, right? What is the narrative been the last few years about the economy? Bidenomics is great. The economy's the best it's ever been. But then all of a sudden, once Kamala Harris starts running. Oh, well, I'm gonna fix the economy. Well, I thought there was no problem with the economy. You guys have been saying there's no problem with the economy. Oh, but she's gonna fix it. Well, she's already the Vice President right now. So why, you know, if she has this great plan of fixed inflation, she's already in power. This is partially her administration, right? They've been saying, oh, there's no problem at the border, right? Kamala Harris is gonna fix the border. She was the border czar. And now the same outlets who literally called her this, the same outlets who use the exact language are now saying that this was never true, that she was never that border czar. She was the border czar. She is partially, if not the reason that the border is wide open still. And now she's gonna fix it. But apparently there wasn't a problem, right? So this is the kind of thing that you have to be, you know, have enough of a memory and enough critical thinking to say, hmm, hmm. And it doesn't even mean you have to go support Trump, right? But to just hold your own party accountable, to say, no, you can't do this, right? Look at what they're doing in Gaza right now. Kamala Harris is claiming that she's, you know, working tirelessly to get his ceasefire. Wow, at the same time saying that she's going to continue to arm Israel. You could stop this right now, Kamala Harris. You're the vice president. But the vice president and the president don't actually run this country. And that is what Joe Biden exposed, made clear as day to anyone with a working brain who isn't deeply propagandized, who isn't deeply caught in the duopoly, the Democratic Party cult, you know, it's sad to see that there are still people so deep down that, you know, Kamala Harris doesn't have to make a policy point for weeks, months, and just the fact that she's a woman and that she's smiling and that she's a Democrat. It's enough for people to act like all of a sudden, she's this really impressive candidate. She's a great candidate. She had to drop out before the first primary in 2020 and she was well-funded. She was, you know, a legitimate candidate who didn't even make the first primary. No one voted for her to be the candidate this year. She was selected. There wasn't a primary because Joe Biden wanted to run again. They kicked Marianne Williamson. They kicked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Out, they didn't give them a fair chance. And now after their candidate steps down, they select a new one. They don't let you vote. They don't let you choose yet their touting that they are the defenders of democracy. Do you see where I'm going with this? It isn't even about the whatever policy you want to agree with, right? The fact is that what they're saying and what they're doing are totally opposite of each other. And this is the real problem, right? And this is why Robert F. Kennedy left the party and why he endorsed Trump, even though he was helping Kamala Harris win if they didn't rig him out of the race. Then Kamala Harris would have a much easier path to victory, but they were so terrified that if they let him get on the debate stage that he would clearly expose how awful Kamala Harris is as a candidate. She is not impressive. Listen to her talk. Listen to her talk not reading off of a teleprompter. Do you realize that these speeches at the DMC are all written by someone else? They are read on a teleprompter to a friendly audience. This isn't Kamala Harris talking to you. It's some intern whose name you're never gonna know. And when she finally sits down to do an interview, not only is she incapable of doing an interview by herself, but it is only 18 minutes, edited. It's an edited 18-minute interview. Joe Biden did a 29-minute interview and Kamala Harris can't even do 20 minutes. How are you gonna vote for a president who cannot sit down for 20 minutes? That's all I'm gonna say about this. I'm gonna move on to the next topic. Free speech is under attack. Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, which is a free speech, private messaging app, doesn't sell any of the data, doesn't let any governments in, has been arrested in France. He was supposedly there on some kind of US duty. He is a French citizen and he was arrested. He's being charged with all of the crimes committed on his platform. So this is the thing about when the Twitter files and Facebook, that kind of stuff that was being exposed by that. If they didn't cooperate, like if Facebook didn't cooperate with the Biden administration's asks to censor a certain information, they would have lost their protected status. Because in like a normal newspaper, if you publish something that is factually inaccurate, you can get sued for defamation. And if you're on a social media platform, technically the social media platform could be sued for that. So the government has protections in place, designating certain social media platforms with this lawful thing where they're not gonna be charged for crimes or whatever kind of hate speech is being said on their platforms. And this is why in the European Union, a lot of companies have to censor stuff online because they will be sued for the hate speech. They will have to pay for whatever said on their platform. And this is kind of similar to what happened to Ross Ulbricht. Ross Ulbricht founded like a dark web, kind of eBay sort of thing called Silk Road. And he got charged with every crime on the site. He's been in jail for I think 12 years and is supposed to be in there for 400 more like insane sentence for this guy. And they're just making an example out of him. And it seems like this telegram guy could face, I think I wanna say off the top of my head, it was 20 years, you know, a long time in prison, simply for having a free speech platform and standing by the moral standing on the ideals of free speech, not, you know, giving the government access. And, you know, it's really scary because if they make an example out of this guy, which I'm sure they're going to, that sets the precedent. And, you know, Elon Musk might be next. X, you know, they've been going after the European Union has been going after X and Elon Musk. They wanted to like, he's the commissioner of the EU. Thierry Brenton sent Elon Musk a memo basically saying, "Be careful what's said on here. "Be careful while you're still, you know, "subject to the laws of the EU on this platform." So it's not necessarily direct censorship in that way, just from that memo, but you see the threat is there. And depending on what happens with this whole telegram guy, Elon Musk, the president's set. And, you know, if X falls, if rumble falls, if telegram falls, then there is nowhere that you can express alternative ideas that are contrary to the government or mainstream narratives. And, you know, regardless, sure, hate speech, sure misinformation, disinformation, sure, that could all exist on these platforms and they definitely absolutely do. But just because some of that exists doesn't mean that you get to ban free speech. What has been one of the biggest liberal ideas trying to be spread across the world forever? Free speech. Free speech has been a tool of American state building. All, you know, they've been using free speech 'cause they wanna build resistance movements. Without free speech, resistance is barely possible. If the government can arrest you for criticizing them, then, you know, that's straight up fascism, straight up tyranny, you know, whatever you wanna call it. It's not okay, right? And this is kind of the thing that's so interesting about politics today is that the way the politicians talk, they kind of try and hide these really sinister agendas under a banner of social justice or, you know, being a good person, right? So they're trying to get rid of free speech in the name of misinformation and in the name of hate speech. They're trying to, you know, sell war. They're trying to send your kids to die because, oh well, Ukraine, the bastion of freedom, you know, this poor Russia is a big country. Ukraine is a little country and Russia invaded the little country and that's bad, you know? They're really trying to have an emotional appeal to something that is terrible, something that is absolutely awful, right? And it's not like, in the case of Ukraine, it's not like Russia's not to blame partially, but the US also serves a huge part in this. If the US never wanted to put Ukraine and NATO as per the agreement, Ukraine would not be invaded right now. If we did not overthrow their government in 2014, a pro-Russian government who was gonna make a trade pact with Russia, Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine. And if we had just been friends with Russia for, you know, post World War, sorry, post fall of the Soviet Union, if we had been friends with Russia, like Russia wanted to be, if we really brought them in and said, hey, this is a new world stage where we are going to embody the principles of the free market and we're all gonna grow together. Russia, tons of resources, tons of oil, sell most of, you know, most of the energy in Europe comes from Russia. So why can't we just be friends with Russia? We're a huge market for them. Putin wanted to join NATO, but guess what? I'm not totally remembering if it was Bush or Clinton, but one of the presidents was having a meeting with Putin. Putin said, hey, I wanna join NATO. And he said, okay, let me see what I can do. He had a meeting with the suits and he said, no, they say no. So, you know, again, like Joe Biden has confirmed, the president is not the one making the decisions and this is, you know, a huge part of the problem. How can we reform anything if the people that we elect to reform stuff don't actually have the power to do it? You know, so that's where, you know, something like a revolution is very necessary, but we'll see if it comes, we'll see if it comes in time. But yes, free speech, absolutely critical to free and liberal societies. And it is actively under attack. We're gonna see what happens, what falls. But it is a very, very interesting time to be alive to say the very least. We're gonna have to hunker down for these next few months. It's only gonna get crazier and crazier. The closer that we get to election season. I don't know, I'm pretty worried about it. And yeah, it's getting real, guys. As I've been saying, monkeypox, I kind of almost forgot about this with everything else going on. Monkeypox is possibly the next pandemic. Remember that, guys, right after COVID, they were teased in monkeypox a little bit. But apparently, even though it's essentially, and I don't mean this in any hateful or derogatory way, is a gay STD. Not literally passed through homosexual sex is how this gets passed. Somehow kids are getting it, somehow dogs are getting it. We'll see. But there was apparently a new strain in Africa that was discovered, apparently more deadly, more transmissible. So the World Health Organization is already down there, monitoring it, surveilling it. We'll see what happens. It's supposed to probably start spreading soon. We're gonna see definitely chances of some kind of lockdown or something happening. Not confirmed, but that's what they want. They really want that. I'm gonna just go into headlines 'cause I've been rambling for a second and I'm gonna try and just get this a little more streamlined. I'm gonna let the headlines kind of guide me a little bit. I'm gonna talk about Kamala Harris' price controls because this is one of the few parts of her policy that she's unveiled. That and an unrealized gains tax. So if you have stocks or real estate or you own a company, blah, blah, blah, and you haven't sold the stock, but it goes up X amount of money. So right, you have a painting and the painting is worth a million dollars and it goes up a little bit in value. Now you have to pay 25% of that value. And the problem is that it's not like you have this money. It's not like you've gained the money that it's worth yet. You still have this item as a painting. And now essentially you have to pay, you know, 25% of its value out of your pocket even though you didn't make this money. It just went up in value. But now you have to pay it. So you have to take something out of, you know, it makes no sense. It's really stupid and 25% is absolutely ridiculous. And this is only supposedly applying to, you know, I think it's the wealthiest 3% or something. But even for them, it's not like they have unlimited cash on hand. A lot of it's in assets. So all their assets, if they have to pay 25% of their gains every year, then, you know, they're going to have to sell massive amounts of stocks and that's going to tank the stock market for everyone else. So pretty weird, pretty crazy stuff, you know, actual socialism. Yeah, I just figured out that the video was not recording for most of this. So maybe this one won't have video, but I will figure it out for the next one. I probably got to get in better software for this because my software does not support video yet. So we're going to see what happens with that. But this is a post from Robert Sterling at Robert M. Sterling on X. And I think this is a great description of price controls, what it will eventually lead to. This guy worked in the M&A food industry. So here's what he said, a step-by-step summary of what would actually happen should Kamala reduce food inflation, right? Number one, quote, "The government announces that grocery retails "aren't allowed to raise prices, too. "Grossery stores which operate on a 1 to 2% net margin "can't survive if their suppliers raise prices." So the government announces that food producers, Kraft Heinz, Conagra, Tyson, Hommel, et cetera, also aren't allowed to raise prices. Not all grocery stores are created equal. Stores in lower-income areas make less money than those in higher-income areas as the former disproportionately sell lower-margin prepackaged foods, the center of the store, and set up the higher-margin, fresh products like meat. Because stores in lower-income areas aren't able to cover overhead, remember even if their wholesale costs are fixed, their labor, utilities, insurance, and other operating expenses aren't fixed yet. Grocery chains start to shut them down, food deserts in rural areas and in low-income urban areas alike become worse. Meanwhile, margins for food producers are also quickly eroding. Their primary costs, ingredients, energy, and labor aren't fixed and their shrinking gross profits leave cash flow available to cover, sorry, leave less cash flow available to cover overhead, maintain facilities and reinvest in additional production capacity. Grocery chains which have finite shelf space start to repurpose their stores, those they didn't have to shut down, I should say, to sell more non-price-controlled items. Everything from nutrition supplements to kitchenware to apparel and less price-controlled food products. Your local Kroger or Safeway starts to look and feel more like a Walmart. Food producers stop making products with lower margins, grocery chains start competing with each other to secure inventory since they can't compete by offering stronger prices. Remember, producers aren't allowed to raise prices here and even if they could, grocery chains no longer have the gross profit to bear price increases. They compete on things like payment terms. Small grocery chains start to shut down entirely or get sold to larger chains like Kroger. In addition to not being able to cover fixed costs, a major reason for this is because they can produce, sorry, they can no longer reliably secure delivery of products due to producers prioritizing sales to larger customers, which are able to leverage their stronger balance sheets to offer superior payment terms. Smaller food producers, which typically sell via distributors rather than directly to grocery chains, start to go out of business. Because these producers have an additional step, their value chains and because they have lower volumes over which to spend their fixed costs, their cost structure is inherently disadvantaged compared to major food producers. When grocery stores aren't able to raise prices, cutting product costs becomes all the more important and deprioritizing purchases from smaller producers is an easy way to do so. As supply chains break down, lines start to form outside grocery stores every morning. Cities assign police officers to patrol store parking lots and food producers draft contingency plans to assign to arm escorts to delivery trucks. The federal government announces a program to issue block grants for states to purchase and operate shutted grocery stores. The USDA also seizes closed down production facilities. The government announces that prices for all key food costs, corn, wheat, cattle, energy, et cetera, are now fixed to stop quote profiteers from gouging the now government operated food industry. Shockingly, the government struggles to operate one of the most complex industries on the planet. The entire food chain starts imploding. Communism, mass starvation, and the end of America quickly ensue. And this is what I've been talking about for a while that the government wants to control food, right? I talked about this on the podcast a few episodes ago that food is actually a weapon. People don't always realize this, but food is very important, obviously. And when we take it for granted that we're always gonna be able to go get it at the grocery store, that we're always gonna be able to afford it, how many people know how to hunt and cut their own meat? How many people know how to forage? How many people can grow their own food sustainably to the point where they can sustain their family, I mean, right? Very, very few know how to do this. So, you know, should a situation like this happen? Now the government controls the most important resource and now you're relying on them, you know, not like we're already not relying on them, but additionally so. This is literally communism. Price controls are actual communism. There's no reason to do it. And this is the thing similar to, you know, the ESG planned the environmental social governance scores, World Economic Forum, Agenda 2030, that kind of stuff. They say that it's for you, it's gonna benefit the people. We're trying to stop the corporations. What all of these do, and this goes back to what I was just saying a few minutes ago about coding these really evil sinister agendas in social justice, populist language, right? Price controls. We're stopping the price gougers. We're going after the corporations who are price gouging. But really what this does is it doesn't allow small businesses to compete. It gets rid of independent business. So this is actually the opposite of for the people. 'Cause if it were really for the people, it would be, you know, actually going after the big corporations instead of giving the big corporations the small businesses. 'Cause that's what it's gonna become. All your small local grocery stores, your maybe even small local chains, or just your local kind of corner store, they will be bought up by the corporations, the big, huge multinational chains that can afford it, that are operating in non-price controlled countries that, you know, are still making enough profit to keep everything afloat. They are not going to struggle the same way that smaller businesses will be forced to struggle. And, you know, that is a very, very, very scary possibility. I don't even understand that, you know, how this works, right? So here's another thing talking about price gouging, right? So this is a post from Steve Weisner, SMB on X. And I'm gonna just read this, it's a long post, but it explains how price gouging isn't the problem here. And it's more inflation, right? So $47.61 for paper towels and toilet paper at Target today. Absolutely insane example of corporate greed and price gouging. In fact, it made me so angry, I decided to do some analysis. Many prices have increased by 50% or more since COVID. So I decided to put on my investment banking hat and spend some time looking at financials back to 2018 and 2019, and man was I ever surprised. I started by looking at Target's annual revenue. In 2018, they made $75.4 billion, you know, it steadily increases and in 2023, they made 107.4 billion. The last 12 months, they've made 106.6 billion. Couple things I noticed. First, revenue has slipped a bit since 2022. They made 109 billion in 2022. And then as of the last 12 months, they've made 106 billion. And is continuing to do so in 2024, not a great sign for the broader economy. Second, there's been big growth since 2018. That must be price gouging. Well, I looked a little deeper. Let's look at their cost of goods sold over the same period, the price they paid to buy the products that they sold you. In 2018, they spent $53.3 billion, and this was 70.7% of sales. And in 2022, they spent 82.2 billion, which was 75.4%. And in the last 12 months, they spent 76.8 billion, which is 72%. Wow, so let me get this straight. Target is making less money, 28 cents, on every dollar of sales today than they were in 2018. 29.3 cents. That's weird. Maybe they're not so good at this price gouging thing. So I decided to dig even deeper. They were probably being evil and firing all their employees so they could make up for the money they weren't gouging, right? So I looked at their operating expenses, the amount they paid to run the stores and the overall business. In 2018, it was 15.7 billion, which is 20.9% of sales. And in 2022, it was 20.7 billion, which was 18.9% of sales. Over the last 12 months, it was 21.7 billion worth 20.3%. Very unusual behavior for someone price gouging. Let's sum all this up by looking at their operating cash flow. 2018 was 6.3 billion, 8.4% of sales. 2022 was 6.2 billion, 5.7% of sales, and the last 12 months was 8.1 billion. And that's 7.6%. So what this all means is that targets making less overall profit on every dollar of revenue today, 7.6 cents than they were in 2018, 8.4 cents, and revenue has grown at an average of 7.3% per year since 2018, and operating cash flow has grown at a 5.1% per year, both of which are pretty much in line with the overall rate of inflation during that period. I guess I expected price gouging to be more profitable. No price gouging at target. Well, Steve, you may say that's all fine and good, but even if target is in price gouging, Kimberly Clark and international paper, both of whom are involved in the manufacturer slash marketing of paper towels and toilet paper, sure as hell must be. Well, yes, surely they are. I'll spare you all the numbers, but here's the summary. Kimberly Clark, five-year average revenue growth 2%, 2018 gross margin, 69.7, last 12 months with 64%. The 2018 EBI TDA. I don't totally know what that acronym stands for. I'm going to be totally honest. The margin was 12.1%, last 12 months, 15.6%. Aha, look at the EBI TDA margin, you say. They must be gouging. Well, the gross margin clearly says otherwise. In the five-year EBI TDA, sorry, I think it's just gross revenue, is 6.6%, pretty much in line with inflation. Again, management is clearly bad at price gouging. Well, okay, I'm sure international paper must be capturing all that extra profit because they're the ones gouging. Well, international paper, five-year average revenue growth, 0.8%. 2019, the gross margin was 30.8, last 12 months, 27.8%. The EBI TDA margin in 2018 was 16.1%. Now is 11.6%. I guess IP is the worst price gouger of all since, well, they've basically been destroying value since before COVID began. You would think price gougers would be gouging too. I don't know if they make more money at all. Well, IP made almost 3 billion of EBI TDA in 2019 and a little over 2 billion over the last 12 months. So there's no price gouging at international paper either. So maybe this means the inflation that we've been dealing with hasn't been about corporate greed and price gouging after all. Maybe it has to do with, oh, I don't know, government spending in stimulus run amuck or something. So rather than going on populist rants about implementing price controls for the greedy corporations, which you know have never worked out so well in the past, maybe we should consider some price controls for government spending. That's a novel idea. P.S. And those of you who say, hey, wait a minute, your receipt says bouncy. That's not Kimberly Clark. That's P&G. They must be price gouging. Here's Proctor and Gamble. Five-year average revenue growth, 4.4%. 2019 gross margin, 48.6%. Last 12 months with 51.4%. The EBI TDA margin was 20.4% in 2019 and this year is 23.7. So gross margin up, EBT IDA margin up, good management, price gouging, no. So clearly this shows that the problem isn't price gouging. So price controls on price gouging aren't going to change a thing. The only reason stuff is so expensive is because our government is $35 trillion in debt, funding more wars, printing more money. This is the problem. We do not need to be relieving student debt via the government. We don't need to be funding overseas wars. We are $35 trillion in debt. That is why everything's so expensive. Government spending is through the roof. The, you know, we add millions and millions of dollars to the federal debt every second. That is why things are expensive. Not because of these evil greedy corporations, right? The evil greedy corporations are evil and greedy, but price controls will benefit them in the long run until they eventually can't make any more money. But for a short, short period of time, they will be absorbing more money than, you know, they were before because all the other stores are going out of business, right? That is just some more of, you know, Kamala Harris's very suspicious, you know, policy considerations, very weird. You know, I'm gonna keep going through some headlines. I spent a long time on the price gouging part. So this is when I meant to read on the last one and it is about universal basic income, right? So this is another thing that is often taught about by, you know, kind of socialist, communist people. Oh, well, you know, universal basic income, everyone blah, blah, blah, news, money, yes. So here are the largest controlled experiment of American universal basic income was just released in July. It was funded by the founders of chat GPT and this is, you know, presumably to mitigate potential job losses because of AI. It was 1100 randomized households making under 29,900. They were given $1,000 per month for three years. Essentially their income increased by 40%. The UBI participants lived in urban suburban in rural towns in Texas and Illinois. The UBI participants ended up earning $1,500 less despite being given 12,000 more annually. For every $1 received total household income dropped by at least 21 cents. UBI participants stayed unemployed for an extra month compared to those unemployed in the control group. UBI participants worked less and there were no substantive changes in quality of employment. UBI participants did little to improve their education or training to improve their income. UBI participants self-reported increased rates of disability to limit the work they can do. Two ways that you can look at these results. The American underclass is so worn down that when thrown a life preserver, they could only float rather than paddle to safety. UBI advocates will argue that 1,000 per month wasn't enough. Or that universal basic income and its collectivist derivatives are never enough. Work is intrinsically tied to human dignity, happiness, and progress. In other words, according to Ronald Reagan, when he accepted the 2018, sorry, the 20, wow. 1980, the 1980 GOP nomination. Work and family are at the center of our lives, the foundation of our dignity as a free people. When we deprive people of what they have earned or take away their jobs, we destroy their dignity and undermine their families. And this post was from Athens_K on X. He has the full link to it. That was his breakdown of it. I just liked it a lot and it was straight to the point, all that, I like it a lot. More information's come out about the Trump assassination, which has kind of actually like fallen off of the, you know, face of the news right now. No one's really even talking about it, which is super weird. Doesn't make a lot of sense, but it seems like there was definitely another shooter, the, sorry, I'm thinking of the word I'm trying to think of right now. The secret service director was dismissed and there's some new stuff coming out that a local cop shot the shooter and not the secret service, which totally changes a lot of the narratives, really makes it look even more like an inside job as if it didn't already seen that way. In other news, Congressional Democrats have asked the FEC to censor Elon Musk's grok AI stating threats to democracy from its image generation. So continuation of censorship online by the American government. The FBI has just declassified two documents on the Patriot front totaling 950 pages. Nearly every page is fully redacted and this is like a white nationalist group that a lot of people online have been saying are like feds that they're kind of like a false flag group and fully redacted. So, you know, doesn't help those accusations at all. Oregon is now giving $30,000 for new home buyers. The only requirement, you can't be an American citizen. Something similar is happening in California where they get a $150,000 to put towards a mortgage. You know, interesting enough. Doesn't make a ton of sense, but who knows? After saying that a wall and voter ID or racist, Democrats built a wall around the DNC convention and required ID to enter. So that's pretty funny. Doesn't make a lot of sense for people that are saying that. This is an interesting one. Putin has offered visas to people trying to escape Western liberal ideals. So, you know, if you want to go move to Russia, you can. You can get a visa right now. The Oversight Committee has found Joe Biden has committed it impeachable offenses. Americans now know that Joe Biden was the brand that the Biden sold around the world to enrich the Biden family and Joe Biden knew of, benefited from, and participated in his family's influence peddling schemes. Makes the Hunter Biden laptop, you know, just the fact that that got censored just makes it even more upsetting that it was never, never talked about at all. And the Secret Service at a Massachusetts rally, they actually broke into a hair salon taped over the security cameras to use the bathroom, to let Kamala Harris supporters use the bathroom. They did not ask permission. They broke in to a hair salon to let them use the bathroom and didn't lock the door. So yes, Kamala Harris is a criminal, essentially. You know, obviously she didn't do it, but her fucking Secret Service broke into a building. The government is the biggest criminal organization in the world, and this continues to further prove that. As, you know, in the last few days, Kamala Harris also said that she's gonna not tax tips, which was something that Trump said, which was something that Ron Paul said a long time ago. But funnily enough, Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to let IRS tax the tips of workers. So again, she's causing the problems that, you know, she now wants to quote unquote fix. Being very dumb doesn't make a lot of sense at all. And I don't know if I read this on the last one, but the government accidentally sent at least $239 million to the Taliban accidentally. So, you know, how the fuck are we accidentally sending money to terrorist groups? Really doesn't make any sense at all. I don't think I have much left to talk about. If something comes out, then I will definitely try and get back into having and making these. Hopefully I'll be a little bit more prepared in the future for some of these episodes. I just really wanted to get one out 'cause it's been so long. And I haven't had the time to sit down, really draft out an episode, but I just wanted to get this out. So thank you guys if you made it all to the way to the end, it means a lot. And I'll see you guys next time, good night. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]