Category: Organized Labor

‘The Batman’ is an 11 out of 10: The root of all corruption comes from bad parenting

If you are thinking of seeing The Batman at the movie theater, waste no more time doing so. Just go do it. I think the new film in the Batman franchise is one of the best ever, and it’s a top 50 movie of all time, directed by Matt Reeves and acted by Robert Pattinson. Just talking about good movies; they just don’t make them much better than this one, at nearly 3 hours long. Technically it hits all the cylinders in a very satisfying way. The music is great, the cinematography, sound design, direction, acting, everything is fantastic. There is a love for this subject that obviously comes out of the filmmakers. They painstakingly put that love into every shot of the film, and it shows both behind the camera and in front of it. When you think of a movie that has been done so much, it is easy to be skeptical that anything substantial could come out of a new version of Batman. But this was clearly a fresh take on an idea that Warner Bros. has been building for nearly a century. And it culminated in this film. It reminded me of one of my favorite Dirty Harry films from back in the 70s called Magnum Force. It explores corruption on both sides of the law and why there is a need for good people to step in and fight for justice. But there is, of course, more depth to it than that, and that is why this film is an exceptional one with great artistic value for a culture like we have in our modern one in desperate need of clarity on the definitions for existence. There is big stuff in The Batman that is valuable on many levels, and for that reason, I can’t recommend it enough. I’d give it an 11 out of 10 stars. Go see it now!

I’d go further in scale in recommending this movie because there is an underlying element to it that says a lot about modern culture and its failures. This is the best Batman character I’ve ever seen in any form, comics, television show, or movie. At no point in the film does this Batman waiver in his resolution to fight for good and to fight for justice. He is never tempted or shoved over the edge, only to be redeemed later. He is solid throughout the entire film, and in the end, he becomes a great leader instead of a hiding recluse. Coming out of the Covid years, there is a lot that this film has to say about the state of our world. And this is not a Hollywood progressive offering of nonsense. It’s an honest story examining real human issues, and as Batman faces those issues, he is a solid pillar of virtue through the entire event. Apparently, they are planning to make three of these Batman movies, and if they put the kind of effort into the following two as they did this one, I can’t imagine what that will look like. The amount of work it took to make this The Batman movie is on a big scale that it would be hard to duplicate, ever. The focus on all the little details is overwhelming. This is Hollywood at its best. It’s just a shame that we can’t get more films like this from an industry that has turned so radically left politically. I would not say that this Batman film is political in the way of Republicans and Democrats, but it does explore in detail the cause of all corruption and gets into the weeds in a better way than even the best of the mobster films ever produced. In many ways, I kept thinking of Scarface from the 80s as a comparative film to what they pulled off with The Batman. 

Yet, the best part of The Batman is that it honestly explores the nature of evil and what leads to all corruption, and that is when the adults let kids down. Parents’ impact on children is a real, unexplored problem in our modern society. Governments have even attempted to replace the parents in society with government supervision, which has worsened the situation. We now have a culture in real life that has produced millions and millions of villains like the Riddler in this movie, the primary bad guy. But I found myself understanding the Riddler quite a lot.   Who could blame him for his anger when the world he sees is so corrupt, and all the parental figures in his life were robbed away from him? The constant theme in The Batman is the cost to young people when adults let them down. When dad runs off with a cheap whore. Or when the District Attorney spends the night in a risqué club instead of staying home with the kid’s doing cocaine with young women draped from his arms. When kingpin fathers manipulate the entire police force and have illegitimate children all over the place, leaving those kids to feel abandoned and broken as adults. The real villains in The Batman are the parents who fell short and left their children without something to hold on to, turning them into adults, broken and vengeful.   What is the cause of all crime and corruption, bad parenting? As I sat watching the movie, I looked around at the glassy eyes of the parents taking their kids to see this film.   Could the parents relate to the good guys or the bad guys? Or was it just too much for them?

I understood Batman and the Riddler. At the end of the film, I loved the question, which was the same posed to Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force. Who is good, and who is bad?   What does it mean to fight for what’s good when most of what’s going on in the world are so bad? Is any of it worth fighting for at all? Should we just leave the world and head for the country as Catwoman did at the end, warning Batman that his fight for justice would likely kill him? And when Batman said to her that he had to try to save the city, it’s the same things we are now saying about our country. Is it worth saving? Should we fight at all, given all the corruption that we see? It’s a worthy question, one that we are all asking in our own specific ways. These are complicated things to think about, but this movie, The Batman, has a definitive statement on it, and I think it’s a great definition that will take time for many to let wash over them. This is a movie worth seeing for more than entertainment. It’s what families should watch together and figure out their place after that where they fit into the puzzle. And hopefully, in the end, the resolution is that they’ll want to be more like Batman than the other characters.   And parents will want to be good role models for their kids instead of just the lately louse that fills the halls of corruption in almost every institution created by mankind. Despite the enormous responsibility it requires to bring children into the world, it is worth doing. But the job only gets more complicated the older they get, and if there is a lesson in the movie, The Batman, failing in that job can lead to all the corruption we see in Gotham City and the greater world in general. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Desecrators: Defining the evil we are all fighting to save America

Matt Schlapp and Deal W. Hudson’s excellent new book called The Desecrators ends with a prayer relevant to our present circumstances. It goes like this, “St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.” You might know Matt Schlapp and his wife Mercedes from Fox News and the hosts of CPAC. Good people.   They released this new beauty of a book just ahead of the 2022 CPAC in Orlando, and I noticed people asking me if I was going to have a booth there to promote my own book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. I thought about it, but my life is far too complicated for weekend conventions. I usually have a few hours for things like that, but I am not a sit in a booth and concentrate on one primary topic kind of guy. I am most happy when dealing with massive, big picture stuff where all these subjects are brought in under one large tent of thinking. I read an enormous amount of material. My time is most enjoyably spent reading 3 or 4 books a week to consume the amount of information necessary to consider what has been going on in the world, to us, and to our republic. But reading The Desecrators, I thought it was something extraordinary and even defined as a way to talk about the kind of evil we are dealing with and stepping into the chapter beyond the Book of Revelations into a new day we all deserve. Matt Schlapp and Deal Hudson had put their finger on something, and it was special.  

Matt Schlapp and his wife Mercedes are old political insiders, so it was fascinating to hear them talk about their journey from the Bush White House into becoming Trump supporters and the pain they experienced from their long-time friends along the way who rebuked them because of it. This book, The Desecrators, was very much them coming to terms with the post-election results of 2020, which we all know now was filled with so much trouble. We should have considered the certification process that put Joe Biden in office much more carefully with all the checks and balances that were more than ceremonial. Those checks were there for a reason, and the Joe Biden administration is a painful reminder of the fact that elections have consequences. Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences—to say the least. I remember how my wife and I felt; we packed up our RV and headed out into the deserts of New Mexico. I wrote a book in response to it for many of the same reasons. It was interesting to hear that Matt and Mercedes had similar thoughts and that this book The Desecrators was the result. What makes their book so valuable, I think, is that they are long-time political insiders, about as much of insiders as you can get these days. With all their history in politics and obviously with the help of their friend, Deal, they put their finger on the evil that is after all of us blessed to be born in the USA. The people against us, to name the enemy for clarity, are these Desecrators, people who want to do anything to taint and ruin the founding of America from its inception like some abortion of thought that played out on the world stage. 

It can be overwhelming; we have the drug cartels from the south coming out of Mexico looking to poison all of us, literally. At the World Economic Forum, the Party of Davos is trying to crush our economy using banks as the new tanks and troops to overthrow our country.   We have China which wants communism around the world. We have Russia who wants to restore the old Soviet Empire for many of the same reasons. We have many factions of socialists and outright communists worldwide who want to topple the king of capitalism.   In America, they are represented by the Democrat Party. We have our education system deliberately dumbing down generations of our people. We have countless bands of terrorists worldwide who want to incite fear into our thriving culture. We have vile despots from every corner of the world wanting openly to inflict evil upon us. Up to this point, we have been gracious and accommodating of them all, hoping that they would see the light and follow America into prosperity by being understanding. But to be honest, the opposite has happened. These many groups coming from all directions want only to desecrate our country any way possible and ruin our souls in their very birthplace, and to be done with us forever. Their evil intentions are maniacally sinister in every way, demanding our action. 

I arrived at that conclusion in the deserts of Texas and New Mexico and many other places in the far-flung areas of The United States. In Jackson, Wyoming, I decided to buy that white cowboy hat that I wear everywhere now. For me, it’s the white hat of justice, a beacon to the world that is full of black-hatted bandits and thugs of every kind intent to bring our nation to ruin. I decided after the election of 2020 that I wasn’t going to let that happen. I wasn’t sure how, but upon reading Matt’s book, I saw clearly that I wasn’t alone in those thoughts. They have the same idea, Matt, Mercedes, and Deal, as I do. Even President Trump gets it; he endorsed the book, which is shown on the front cover. Our fight isn’t about policy or even restoring an excellent economy to our country. It is the sheer fight of good against evil, and it’s on a Biblical scale, and nothing short of that. We often talk about fighting for freedom and justice. But I don’t think many people really understand what that means. They feel something about it but have a hard time defining it. They have a hard time defining such a voluminous enemy. Well, they have done that in this book, The Desecrators. What a perfect title. And in this case, you can judge a book by its cover. The statue of George Washington draped in red paint, defiled by the enemies of America.

The enemies of all of us. A cauldron of personalities clearly intent on our destruction and the ruin of all our souls. It’s time we start dealing with these enemies in the way they deserve. We must take a stand for good, justice, and the American way. And it’s time to stop apologizing to these Desecrators for all the reasons they hate us. It’s not our task to explain away that hate or to apologize to them because they feel it. It’s our job to stand for good and to fight evil as it appears and to give America the respect it deserves. And much of that can be easily understood with Matt Schlapp’s new book, which I couldn’t recommend more. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Temptations of Tubber Tintye: Why we must protect ourselves from the lowlifes of government

As I watched the looters, thieves, and outright crooks of the Washington D.C. culture at the State of the Union address of March 1st, 2022, I thought about how wonderful it was that America formed a constitution that limited government not one that fed it. It is no accident that America, out of all the world’s countries, has been the most successful at everything it’s done. That is because it has limited government, not exacerbated it, how centralized governments in the East and in Europe have done. However, the government is management, and we need people to do these tasks. We need government just as we do in all management. But we always need to check its power, not yield to it. And after all that we’ve been through, watching that speech where just about everything Joe Biden said was a complete reversal of everything he’s done, just as Wisconsin announced significant flaws in their election count, which just pours more gas on the fire of the Biden administration even being legitimate, the dangers of low-quality people in government was obvious. The Federal Reserve has fed BlackRock and Larry Fink as a progressive activist for climate change directly connected to the World Economic Forum Davos guys, leading to massive corruption with quantitative easing. With thousands of terrible stories of deceit and scandal, America is a great place regardless of those awful stories. The bad stories don’t define us because we have a great Constitution that separates the lowlifes from the rest of us.

I’ve been on a reading binge, which has only confirmed my thoughts. Last year I spent a lot of time traveling and writing my own book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. It is pretty much the opposite of what all centralized governments want, including corporate structures, how to defend individual will from the desires of a lecherous mob of looters, which most groups and organizations become by default. And learning what I have recently about finance, woke politics, and the movers and players around the world vying for power and control on a grand chessboard has only confirmed my thoughts articulated in that Gunfighter’s Guide. Of course, my opinions create scandal because people generally don’t see themselves as lowlifes who must be defended from. They want to believe that with extensive, fancy educations and lots of money in their bank accounts, they would be respected as some aristocracy of money, which is the fundamental problem of Washington D.C. culture. However, my measure for these kinds of things goes back to the realm of myth, where much of my early reading days were spent thinking about such things. Early in my life, as I was working out the value of the human race over many omelets in Waffle Houses at 4 am in the morning, during my own college days, I studied mythology and comparative religion, and I fell in love with a particular Irish story that captured these values exceptionally well. It’s called King of Erin and the Queen of the Lonesome Island and features a young prince who goes on a treasure hunt to the castle of the Queen of Tubber Tintye to save his mother. This story is how I measure human beings’ worth, why I have no illusions about the kind of people who end up trying to run our lives, and explains why we must always be skeptical of them. 

The young Prince arrives at the castle and steps through a window to combat many monsters and maniacal creatures guarding it. But once he slays them, he comes to a corridor with 12 rooms down it. He sees sleeping there the most beautiful woman he has ever seen in the first room. He is tempted to go in and enjoy her company. But he is a person of great personal worth, so he stays focused on his treasure hunt and resumes his journey down the corridor. In the next room is a woman even more beautiful than the first. And so, it goes down the entire hall until he gets to the last room beyond the 12th. In the 13th room is a giant golden room with the most beautiful woman in existence laying upon a spinning golden couch. Of course, that is the Queen of Tubber Tintye, and the two live happily ever after, relative to the tragic nature of Irish mythology. But the point of the story is obvious. Most people of great wealth in the world usually go into those first two rooms in their lives and never go any further. They’ll grab the beauties and parade them around at parties and fundraisers, so everyone thinks of them as being great people. But they never come close to the treasures that are at the end of the hall. Obviously, there is more to just physical beauty, such as wisdom and experience. But many people I would call lowlifes never come close to those understandings. Instead, they fall for the first beauty they meet in the first room and use that treasure to brag on for the rest of their lives, never developing entirely as people. 

We must have a constitution like our one in America because of this story. Most people who take these jobs can never be trusted. We need them to do the work, but we can’t afford to give them the keys to our kingdom because they are the type of people who fall for the shiny stuff in life and don’t have the guts or patience to explore the whole castle of Tubber Tintye and resist the temptations along the way. Much of the kind of government these people are drawn to feeds their temptations; it doesn’t require them to fight it. And so, we have a world of massive corruption, and we shouldn’t expect anything less from them. But we do need the means to protect ourselves from their natures. Despite having these lowlife scumbags running our government, America has been prosperous because we have protected ourselves from their natures which fall for every temptation that comes at them. When I say that, I think of people like Larry Fink. They have bridged a gap between the Federal Reserve printing endless amounts of money to feed Wall Street, then using the power gained from that exchange to propel the goals of the Davos crowds’ radical progressivism, backdooring our political system in a public/private partnership that has turned out to be detrimental and terribly destructive. To me, Fink is just another sucker who fell for the beauty in the first room. He didn’t even make it to the second room. Let alone the golden chamber beyond the 12 rooms. And primarily, that is the same story we could apply to just about every person in attendance at the State of the Union speech where Biden was illegally inserted to protect that Beltway culture from the judgment of the outside world. And to me, most everyone falls short of my judgment. I’m not saying we get rid of the government. But we wouldn’t have a good country if we allowed the lowlifes who do make their way into government to ruin our lives with their bad decisions. And by bad choices, it’s the kind of people who fall for the temptations in the first rooms of the grand hallways of the Tubber Tintye castle. Within the scheme of things is most everyone. We aren’t proposing to throw those people away as useless. But we do have to protect ourselves from their gullibility to temptations that make them dangerous to the human race. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Intel is Coming to Ohio Despite Mike DeWine, not Because of Him: The Governor bans Russian Standard vodka

It was just another reminder of how embarrassing Governor Mike DeWine has been for Ohio. When DeWine ordered vodka made by Russian Standard for sale in Ohio’s 487 liquor agencies banned from purchase in the state, it was Covid all over again. An out-of-control power-hungry governor who loves to take orders from the United Nations, a politician all his life worth more than 20 million dollars for public service. A politician who was at the center of almost every corruption story around him during that entire duration. Here he was telling store owners what they could sell and when they would sell it based on some version of geopolitical circumstances only he understood. How much of an unstable business environment could you ask for from a governor with such a terrible track record during his first term. If we had elected a Democrat, we likely would have had a more conservative governor. And with all that said, it’s incredible that the microchip processing company Intel is planning to build a $20 billion facility in New Albany, Ohio, just north of Columbus by 2025. The DeWine reelection people are trying to take credit for the big announcement, but I would say that Intel is coming to Ohio despite DeWine, not because of him. 

Ohio is such a great place for businesses. For Intel, they were looking for a lot of flat land access to plentiful water supplies. They needed access to some of the nation’s best universities, which within 200 miles of the New Albany Intel site are many of the biggest, including Ohio State, right down the road. And from there are some of the best highway access routes in the world, with I-71 running north and south and I-70 running east to west. You can get anywhere from central Ohio, making it one of the most attractive sites in the world for building a semiconductor plant. Taiwan has a great location, and so does South Korea. But given the state of the world these days and the need for Intel to become the dominant chipmaker once again, this move to Ohio is a tremendous strategic opportunity not just for them, or Ohio, but for an America First agenda. America can not become a top manufacturer of anything ever again without controlling chip-making. I know that our Ohio House and Senate have done a great job over the last ten years creating lots of deregulations that would attract business to Ohio, so it’s all those things that made it possible for this to happen. We are fortunate that Ohio is so attractive that Mike DeWine couldn’t screw that up too.

However, think about how much better it could be if we had a governor more like Ron DeSantis from Florida rather than Mike DeWine in Ohio. DeSantis obviously is a Trump Republican, whereas DeWine is to the left of John Kasich, the blue-turning progressive who predated DeWine. Ohio has had some bad governors. It’s had some good legislators and senator members, but a string of governors have run as Republicans and turned hard left while in office toward extreme progressives. With DeWine, he was a disaster with Covid orders. He fell in love with ordering people around all during Covid and cost many billions of dollars in losses, harmed many businesses, and destroyed the lives of countless people. For anybody who thought that trend went away, all it took in the world was for Putin to invade Ukraine, and suddenly DeWine wanted to ban the sale of vodka to people wanting to buy it. How does he know the people selling the vodka from Russia support Putin? That’s like being attacked by space aliens and then DeWine banning the sale of Star Wars figures from our local Target store. For him to pick such an extreme position in a war that isn’t even our business is a clear indication to all companies that if there is some geopolitical circumstance that might befall them, they could lose their business at the drop of a hat by a governor’s order. Mike DeWine is a tyrant, not a leader.

We could get rid of DeWine in the upcoming primary, but the corrupt money machine behind his tyrannical imprint is hard at work trying to find a way to make the Governor look like he did something right. They are trying to give him credit for this Intel deal. But what we see there are looters like Sharrod Brown, Joe Biden, and Mike DeWine, all trying to hang their hat on a real necessity that Intel has to control their supply chain. But luckily, we have an option this time; we have Jim Renacci, who has promised to be Ohio’s own version of Ron DeSantis. Florida, Texas, and many other red states would love to have Ohio’s resources for many more opportunities to arrive than just Intel. Intel is just the tip of a technological iceberg. But we need a real governor to make that happen, not a looting loser beyond corruption who craves desperately to boss people around even over their choice in vodka. The situation in Russia and Ukraine is terrible no matter how it gets sliced up.

On the one hand, you have an extremist in Putin who is bent on war. On the other, a creation of the United Nations, who have done lots of bad things in their own way. That Mike DeWine would so quickly side with the United Nations position actually explains a lot about the level of corruption that has always followed so closely behind him. It certainly shows how under his watch, FirstEnergy was able to be taken over essentially by green activists from Davos from money management firms imposing ESG scores. Instead of defending Ohio’s power grid from an outside attack, DeWine used the situation to get rid of a political rival who was Speaker of the House at the time. DeWine is the king of dirty politics and is a spiteful little man who loves authority much more than should ever be healthy for a public servant. 

If we could get rid of DeWine, Ohio could really bloom into prosperity. There are a lot of companies like Intel out there who would love to set up shop and bring great jobs to the infrastructure. But there needs to be a good governor to go with a good House and Senate to make it conducive for significant investment, like what it takes to make the move. It wouldn’t take much for Ohio to beat out Florida and Texas for some of the great opportunities that are in Ohio for the reasons that Intel cited for coming. But to convince them, we need a good governor.  Intel decided, not because Mike DeWine was in office but even though he was. Suppose we had a governor like Jim Renacci. He actually understands how businesses work and isn’t trying to punish liquor stores just because they happen to sell Russian vodka during a painful period of global politics. In that case, we might be able to acquire hundreds of billions in investment. But to do that, Ohio would have to have a stable business environment for such investment. And what Mike DeWine reminded everyone with his ban on vodka is that he’s not that guy. Instead, he did remind everyone of his authoritarian nature and a deep desire to boss people around over every little thing, just as he did against churches during the Covid shutdowns. And as he did when he put an abortion rights activist in his administration with Amy Acton, the Dr. Fauci of Ohio. And now he’s done it again over vodka sales. What will it be next?   Well, if we vote him out at the primary in May of 2022, we won’t have to worry about it. The power is in our hands.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Populism is the Weakness of Davos: The Fed has sold us all out, and now we have to rethink how much power they should have

As scary as it is, we’ve been here before in America. We can survive this, even as we learn of the sinister forces that have embedded themselves into our government and are presently threatening the world and everyone in it. I will admit reading Christopher Leonard’s Lords of Easy Money opened my eyes to a terrible menace at the Federal Reserve. I am thankful that there are people like Thomas Hoenig out there who was the star of that book and were soft “Rs” on the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) as the bank president of Kansas, who was during a reckless period of quantitative easing was the only dissenting vote on the 12 person committee. If all twelve members of the FOMC were like him, I would say that the Federal Reserve would do what it was supposed to do, which is manage the value of the American dollar in a proper way with the world. But, when members of that FOMC are extreme liberals or overly educated in Keynesian economics like Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, then the propensity for trouble and eventual scandal is all too tempting and justifies everything that President Andrew Jackson feared about central banking in America. And for that matter, this argument goes back to a significant dispute between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton wanted a strong central government, whereas Jefferson was the king of the Anti-Federalist position against them. Time has only proven Jefferson and Jackson correct about them. And today, we find ourselves in precisely the reason why they were so dangerous. Our current Fed has created an exacerbated “monied aristocracy” that has sold out our country to globalism and is a significant problem. If not for Hoenig’s dissenting votes, we might not know how bad it is. If not for those decisions, for finance reporters like Christopher Leonard, a liberal, he may not have been drawn to this story, which probably nobody thought would ever see the light of day. But because he did, we know that the Fed has created a massive asset bubble that has opened the door to major foreign influence and set us up in a vulnerable way to the Party of Davos, where Larry Fink directly has been the bridge that has connected them all, the Party of Davos, the Fed, China, and progressive woke politics pressed directly into all our lives in a very destructive way. 

Knowing all that, of course, people are worried. They think it’s all too late, that we’ve all been sold out, and that it’s over for America. But fortunately, this is an old argument in America, and we know how it can end because President Jackson showed us how to go about this. The amount of dollars involved is much more significant today than it was in 1828, but the concept is the same. Should there be a central bank running the money of America? Can it run correctly? And what are the dangers of a Federal Reserve getting out of control to where they no longer represent ordinary people but fall under the supervision of a foreign entity like the Party of Davos, where Larry Fink sits on the Board of Trustees at the World Economic Forum. When people talk about the “elite,” they are talking about these types of people, people who control the money supply and its value. Most people glaze over when talking about money. They just want to know that the money they earn can buy them a tank of gas or lunch. They don’t like the meetings in Jackson Hole, where the FOMC meets yearly and geeks out over finance talk. I personally find it all fascinating. I follow the meetings in Jackson Hole, which is where I bought my new Stetson cowboy hat, the white one I have been wearing everywhere these days. I like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, because many important things happen there, and it’s a very nice town. I don’t have a problem with the Fed as long as all the members of the FOMC are like Thomas Hoenig. Actually, I’d want them to be more conservative than him. I think we need a way to manage our money. But we must always watch the kind of people who are in charge of our money. I don’t expect it to be a perfect system. But I don’t expect the Fed to sell us all out as this modern Fed has. And for the monied class to use those mistakes to destroy our country was always the worry. Jackson and Jefferson were right from the beginning.

Ultimately, I think the fix at the minimum due to our current problem will be much more painful than what the country went through when Jackson was president. There will be lots of pain resulting from the Fed’s coming out and the eventual collapse of the asset bubble they have created. The Party of Davos has bet everything on this monied class sell-out by our current Washington D.C. culture. It doesn’t take much imagination to trace everything regarding election fraud, Covid, and the constant press attacks on Trump, the two impeachments, and investigations on the criminals who have been built off these artificially created asset bubbles. Suppose you peel back the curtain on Hillary Clinton’s Durham revelations, or the Biden laptop, or the FBI falling under control of the disptribution of budget money, or the Department of Defense activism into global affairs. In all those cases, you will find at the root of that Hydra of Evil the trillions and trillions of dollars the Fed printed out of thin air that allowed Wall Street to sell as assets to investors in a scam that will prove to be the most significant corruption case in world history. I would advise everyone to cash out their 401k plans now before the bubble bursts because it will. It has to. And the Party of Davos people are hoping that there is some major war in the world that can divert people’s eyes from the matter before they figure it out. Put this statement on your calendars, the Wall Street investment managers could not afford a second Trump term, and now that they know one is coming anyway, they are scrambling in panic. Their sell-out of our country is going to be noticed. 

But for everyone else, they can rest assured that the weakness of the Party of Davos people, people like Larry Fink, who we all have to deal with in some way or another, whether through our investment portfolios or our companies where BlackRock representatives have taken control of management, the biggest fear they have is in the rise of populism, just as it was in Jackson’s day. Trump is a populist, and populism is rising worldwide in reaction to what people see. They may not understand how dangerous this current Federal Reserve asset bubble is to the American economy, and thus, to the rest of the world. But they know that the mysterious “elites” are up to no good, and they instinctively know to be skeptical of them. I don’t think of those people as “elite.” I don’t even think of them as being smart. I know that the Fed doesn’t control the American economy. But the Fed and the government itself are terrified of losing control of their “monied class” in the Beltway. Ultimately, when we talk about draining the swamp, we are talking about taking control of our money from the centralized planners. We will survive that exchange. But they likely won’t, and as they go down in flames, they are going to scream and protest. It will be ugly, but the pain will be felt by those who have made their livings stealing our wealth and using it for their own means.

In populism, the people who actually do all the work will be empowered. And as we deal with the current crises and look forward to Trump being the president again in 2024, while on Biden’s watch, the Fed needs to have its collapse. Larry Fink needs to be shown for the fraud he is, and the Party of Davos needs to have their hands cut off from our money supply which they are using to invoke the world into their domination. It’s time to take our country back, starting with reform at the Fed, with an audit at the very least. And possibly, a complete reconstruction of how we manage the value of our dollar. The members of the FOMC are obviously not able to fight off corruption, and it’s time we start there in properly reforming our country with an American First policy that is defined by our money. And to Hell with the bandits who have been caught trying to rob it.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

China’s Purchase of Deliberate Incompetence: Remember more than 10,000 people died at Tiananmen Square

Shrill, unfettered incompetence is a national security threat. And when a known enemy purchases that incompetence, it’s far, far worse. And that is the proof that Peter Schweizer put together in his book Red Handed, the number 1 bestseller that is out presently. I’ve read lots of books, and I’ll have to say that after I read Red Handed that I went on to read 15 other books as direct spawns to confirm for myself the bombs of information that Peter Schweizer revealed. And what we end up with is a sad story of purchased incompetence. China wants desperately to become the world’s number one superpower. The “only” superpower. China has spent so much money buying up our political and entertainment icons to the point where it’s just ridiculous. In the book, there is a story about Tim Cook from Apple sucking up to President Xi Jinping when the Chinese dictator visited the Microsoft headquarters in Seattle, Washington, while on a diplomacy tour in the United States to see Obama. I don’t think that I can ever own an Apple again because of what I learned. My next phone will have to be something else. After shaking Xi’s hand, Cook said, “did you feel the room shake.” Referring to the remarkable presence of Xi, clearly sucking up. Tim reflects the rest of the Desecrators that have taken money or done business with China in that way, especially in the tech industries. They have been seduced into disparaging America and investing that desecration into China with money created by the American capitalist system as the ultimate trojan horse, and it is sickening. A team of investigators extensively researched Peter’s book, and it all holds up. I checked much of it myself, so it’s a safe testimony into a trial we must have on the incompetent fools who have taken China’s money and turned their sheer stupidity against America on purpose for the result of our destruction, which is pretty serious stuff.

However, I do have a different take on the motivations of everyone, specifically China. Xi desperately wants to restore China’s honor in the world after the embarrassments from 200 years ago during the Opium Wars. Xi plans to have by 2050 the complete destruction of the West and be the global leader in everything, including the currency standard and government example, which he has dangled in front of the Party of Davos to lure in trillions of dollars in investments. BlackRock, which has been on my radar for many reasons, currently controls over 10 trillion dollars as the world’s largest asset manager. That is a lot more money than the entire economy of Russia, for perspective. Peter doesn’t cover it in his book how Larry Fink gained his muscle that he now applies to the world to impose climate change standards from the hard left. All that information is in other books, many other books ranging from Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke Inc to Christopher Leonard’s Lords of Easy Money. Essentially the American Federal Reserve, obviously on purpose, has built up Larry Fink directly and BlackRock and other Wall Street money management firms to bring great harm to American infrastructure, crippling them while transitioning all financial transactions into China. BlackRock is the first money management firm in the world to gain access to the Chinese market and not without a cost. Larry isn’t such an activist for China. In fact, he’s laying down at their feet over every rule they wish to impose on him and his company. As Larry has said, “BlackRock is a Chinese company when doing business with China,” to put the fears away that loyalty to America or Wall Street specifically might compromise their relationship and violate their trust. 

BlackRock is important because they gained all this global muscle by buying up assets that dropped in value to virtually nothing after the Crash of 2008. In a special relationship with the Fed and Ben Bernanke at the time, the policy of quantitative easing was started to pump in cash to save those assets. Over the next ten years, the Fed has created a massive asset bubble that turned BlackRock and others into an enormous weapon of international finance. They have used their leverage to control many boards in America into imposing extreme leftist policies through ESG scores and other catastrophic measures to productive enterprise. BlackRock showed its cards in dealing with China and has shown themselves to be enemies of America in so many ways. Traditionally we would have said of this relationship to be one of national security. It has even given George Soros a reason to blush who has been against Larry Fink in the cozy relationship he has with China. If it not Fink from BlackRock, or LeBron James, Mitch McConnell, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, who actually asked Xi to name his baby, and countless other traders to America for the price of some looted money, what we have learned about the relationship China has and desires with the United States is essentially that of a step-parent marrying into all our families while pushing the dads out to the curb through a divorce. 

That is essentially what China wants to gain respect for, but they have that little problem with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. I remember it well, but I didn’t remember that there were reports that over 10,000 people were killed when the Chinese government put down a student protest at Tiananmen Square. The way the media reported it, I always thought of it as a much smaller event, such as the tragedy of the Who concert in Cincinnati back in the 70s. As reported in Red Handed, the number was much, much higher, leaving many in America who wanted desperately to do business in China because of the massive amount of people they have there, willingly ignoring the cost of the massacre. That was certainly the position of the Kissinger and the Bush family. What happened at Tiananmen Square certainly messed up all the bridge-building Nixon had started with China. And Xi knows that the only way to put that event behind them is to tear down the rest of the world and show how bad their cultures are too. That is the origin of many of the Woke cultures we are dealing with in America presently. It’s a declaration by China that the West has its own problems as if pointing out negatives could erase their embarrassment at Tiananmen Square. And knowing that has revealed a vulnerability that I had forgotten about. It’s what China most wants to forget, so we should never let them do so as a policy going forward. It is the reason that they have spent so much money buying up most of our politicians in some way or another so that they can purchase incompetence and our eventual destruction, what they call “decapitating leadership.” The more I learned, the less powerful I realized that China actually was. Their power comes from our own people, like Larry Fink, and ultimately the Fed in creating the money that China is using to buy off so many politicians and entertainment figures. But at least we can see how vulnerable they truly are, what they fear the most, which is the memory of Tiananmen Square, and how we can reverse these trends. Yet, we cannot ignore those who sold us all out and acted against our country. For them, we can only call it treason, and they took the money without ever thinking that there would be an eventual cost, which is a problem they’ll have to resolve with themselves as we Drain the Swamp and leave them all without a place to hide, and exposed for the world to see.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Foreign Power Attacks Ohio’s Energy Grid: The Real story of corruption behind FirstEnergy, The Fed and Mike DeWine

ESG scores (Environmental Social Governance) are for business what CRT (Critical Race Theory) has been for public schools. Once parents found out what the game was in sliding CRT under the door and trying to program their children into outright Marxism using race as the mask, they became enraged and have started the process of retaking control of their public schools. Businesspeople, too are on the cusp of a similar necessity. That is why I have never accepted the FirstEnergy scandal as being what the FBI tried to paint it as. Over the summer of 2021, I watched pretty enraged at a press conference the Ohio FBI had boasting that they had received a settlement from FirstEnergy over a bribery scandal they had been investigating, which involved the Speaker of the GOP House, Larry Householder, and many others. It was a story that put Ohio in the number 1 state for corruption in the entire United States, and Governor Mike DeWine was right in the center of it. The FBI proudly bloviated that FirstEnergy settled the case with $230 million, which they indicated was an admission of guilt. The story for me was always about a much more sinister kind of corruption, one that actually points to ESG scores and environmental wacko policies that are an attack on our infrastructure in America from foreign interests. In this case, it all points back to the Party of Davos, the billionaire types who attack countries without a country of their own and seek to impose politics on those countries that bypass their elections domestically. What these finance companies like BlackRock, Blackstone, and Icahn Capital were doing to the nuclear power capability in Ohio was no different than if a country like China had attacked them with missiles and planes to take them out and destroy our power grid. And here was the FBI helping them do it. And the money for all the power leverage came straight out of the American Federal Reserve, created by Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell over a ten-year period to put money behind ESG rankings to impose climate change politics on us all.

After that FBI press conference, around December of 2021, Blackstone bought up 1 billion dollars in stock, which will put yet another activist investment board member on the Board of Directors at FirstEnergy, which will continue to direct the company toward a zero-emission world, to get their ESG scores at the targeted range. Back in 2019, when this ESG imposition was just becoming a practice, the management of FirstEnergy thought the regulatory burdens were ridiculous as these money management firms were pushing them to implement zero-emission standards. Of course, these requirements come from the United Nations, which are driven by the World Economic Forum, which sets them with Al Gore, Klaus Schwab, and the BlackRock CEO himself, Larry Fink. These are extreme left-wing wackos who wouldn’t get the time of day in a political theater, but when they tie themselves to our money, now suddenly they have all the power in the world. And it is through those methods, FirstEnergy was imposed upon through ESG scores to move their coal and nuclear plants to zero emissions by a ridiculously impossible deadline, which would essentially shut them down. FirstEnergy tried to fight back; they funneled $61 million in donations to the GOP through Larry Householder to protect them from these United Nations standards reflected in the ESG means of measurement. The GOP created House Bill 6 to roll back some of the environmental burdens that were killing companies like FirstEnergy. Suddenly the FBI was busting members of the GOP, but not these radical investment firms connected to the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. They were clearly attacking the American power grid to destroy coal and nuclear and replace them with wind and solar. 

Many of my friends in the House and Senate in Columbus wanted to distance themselves from Larry Householder as he was strung up and ran from his seat. It looked like dirty politics to me, and internal power struggles between Householder and Governor DeWine. But some of the other people who took money from FirstEnergy were never-Trumper types leftover from John Kasich, so there wasn’t much of a desire to fight to defend them in public. But the issue continued to bother me. That year of 2021, my wife and I traveled extensively in the West, everywhere from southern New Mexico and Texas to Montana all the way out to Utah and Idaho. I wanted to get away and think about some of these big things clearly. And during that trip, I saw what many truckers have been talking about, the changes to our country that were happening, with these giant wind farms, everywhere, from Iowa to Texas and everywhere in between. This wind power thing was much more advanced than I had been led to believe. In fact, at the Iowa 80 Truckstop, the largest of its kind in the world, I had a chance to see up close the trucks bringing these massive wind turbine blades to their construction sites. This was an enormous project that was going on everywhere, yet not much discussion was happening about it on the news. How was all this happening? Indeed, Americans weren’t imposing this on themselves. 

Doing a lot of research from then until now, it’s quite clear what has been happening. These wind power farms were not coming from the people of America but from energy companies and states seeking better ESG scores to stay compliant with their shareholders, like Blackstone, Icahn Capital, and of course, BlackRock. And the rate of manufacturing has been consistent with all the money the Fed has been printing through quantitative easing over the last decade, creating a dangerous asset bubble that directly contributed to the rise in power of these money management firms. The leverage and power these gained in managed resources, which allowed them to buy all these stock options, to start controlling these companies at the level of the Board of Directors, came directly from the inflated wealth the Federal Reserve created through their ZIRP policies and quantitative easing. Otherwise, BlackRock would have never had the financial leverage to impose these ESG scores on all these companies. And how convenient was it for Blackstone to buy up $1 billion in stock after the settlement story broke about FirstEnergy driving the price down. And guess who pushed FirstEnergy to settle the case, Icahn Capital. 

So as everyone can see, the story is much more sinister than an Ohio energy company trying to prevent itself from being put out of business by ESG politics that come not from the American government but from the United Nations and the Party of Davos. They sought help from the GOP-controlled House because it was their only option. But obviously, the game was rigged against them from the start. And now we see too late that the United Nations fully intends to close down all coal and nuclear power plants in the country and switch us all over to these solar and wind options. We know from California wind and solar alone is not sufficient for the power needs of our economy. But for the enemies of America, that is kind of the point. These finance companies taking control of these Boards in companies all across America over ESG scores are not on an America First agenda. They seek a zero-emission world and massive wealth redistribution from rich countries to poor ones, where they have already leveraged their financial bets. And we have been the pawns in the game because we have let this attack happen, unchecked completely. 

The actions we can take immediately is to understand how ESG policies became part of our SEC rules, at the Federal and State levels.   Because those rules are directly attacking our business infrastructure from elements outside our county.  We need to remove those ESG policies, legislatively.  From there, we need to stop our Fed from funding Wall Street so that an open door to foreign investment can flow money into the backdoor of our country and buy our political system behind our backs destroying our vote through finance and attacking the very heart of our republic without a single shot fired by military aggression.  Make no mistake about it, it’s a war just the same. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Real War is at the Doorstep of Davos: Ukraine is just the latest distraction and justification to raise gas prices

I’d rather not, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the story that is in the news right now, and because it is, I should say something about it. But my thoughts on it are not what the news is espousing. For me, it’s just another attempt by the world, and specifically, Democrats, to use Russia as a punching bag to cover all their vast incompetence. Biden has to give a State of the Union speech. He has nothing but bad news and an economy with inflation creeping in, pushed there by a giant asset bubble created by the Fed through over a decade of quantitative easing. Call it Modern Monetary Theory, call it Keynesian economics, call it whatever socialist theory of modern academia you want. Too much money chasing after too few goods and personal productivity will be a disaster, and it is for Biden presently.

Additionally, Biden has been a disaster in foreign policy, specifically regarding Afghanistan. Covid has been traced back to a Chinese lab in Wuhan, and his own science guys that he picked to be on his staff were part of the deal with the Department of Defense. There is a lot of embarrassment to go around on Covid, and now people are sick of the rules and are pulling off the masks whether or not the government likes it. The Biden vaccine mandates were a loss in the Supreme Court. The President’s bosses at the World Economic Forum didn’t seem to understand when they came up with the plan to begin with that the American Constitution would win on that, leaving the Davos crowd perplexed.

Yet that isn’t even the start of the story. As I have been saying more lately, we aren’t talking about conspiracy theories concerning the Party of Davos. It’s not the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, or the typical Illuminati tin foil hat talk; we have actual names like Klaus Schwab and Larry Fink who have made the conspiracies real. The World Economic Forum board has announced themselves with ESG grades to change the world’s economy from fossil fuels to 100% emission-free standards, which are directly connected to each and every one of our 401K plans. We’re not talking about theory here; it’s a fact, and it’s in our faces every day. The testbed for this behavior was Covid. The Party of Davos watched how various countries reacted to the lockdowns and how the economy behaved. They have made adjustments to their plans based on what they saw—watching their summit from Davos this year, which included Janet Yellon and Dr. Fauci, it’s clear they are perplexed about how to deal with their intentions for a Great Reset. The populism that is going on around the world is a problem for them, so they very much want a distraction. Putin tends to like playing the bully in the room. The whole thing comes out like a night of WWF big-time wrestling with Vince McMahon to those who see the big picture. The Russian invasion is a scripted wrestling match with Putin playing the bad cop, and the Davos guys are trying to help Biden out by looking like the good cop. But behind the curtain, they are all shaking hands and patting each other on the back.

Then we have the China situation; Russia is in partnership with them. The Davos gang uses China to prop up as their stabilizing authoritarian model, which will help maintain global banking. They have invited Xi to be the keynote speaker at their World Economic Forum that they had in January. They are invested in China, but now that all these books are being written about all the American politicians and celebrities who China pays off, some damage control must be done. China’s hostile intentions toward America have been uncovered, and the bad guys need a distraction. Russia invading Ukraine is the perfect thing to do; it diverts everyone’s attention away from the real problems, which are massive.

To make matters worse, and this traces right back to the doorstep of the Party of Davos, they have a real need to push people away from gas cars and to convince people to buy their electric cars, which through ESG, Ford, GM, and most of the other car companies have joined in the effort to manufacture purely electric vehicles instead of those driven by oil. To pull that off, they need an excuse to push gas prices up over a reasonable limit to change behavior in the West in the kind of cars they are buying. When people wonder why election fraud happened, now they can see why the Party of Davos could not afford another term of Trump. They had all these plans, and they had to have a president that would follow the party line. Not that party line from the Democrat Party, but to make the Democratic Party follow the Party of Davos. This is simply part two of the ESG scores that started this process years ago, of monitoring the environment, then social behavior behind a new kind of governance created by the Party of Davos, an authentic thing. Just follow the money from the Federal Reserve to BlackRock and Larry Fink, then back to his Board of Trustee position at the World Economic Forum. You will have your answer. He’s just one of these desecrators of American life. The Party of Davos has many of them.

Now knowing all that is very inconvenient. When people say, even people who should know better, “why isn’t Biden turning on the American oil reserves to bring down gas prices?” That is because Biden was put in place to tear down the West’s machine, prop up China in the East, and be the new global economic model for the world run by the Party of Davos, who is essentially the United Nations. Biden is doing what they put him in power to do. The American people didn’t elect him. He was put in place by the people who wanted to control the entire world. And people are catching on to it, so they called up Putin to cause some trouble in the world and get everyone to look at it. They did it to stop the rise of populism in America and other places, which is their most significant threat to all these long-established plans. And to keep those plans something of a secret, even as the conspiracies are blowing up everywhere, they need this Ukraine war as a diversion in a political year in America in hopes to continue their desecration and a total takedown of Western Civilization, finally. So if I’m not all that excited about the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin, well, it’s because I know it’s just Russia, Russia, Russia all over again. This time it’s not Hillary Clinton making up garbage on President Trump and our legal system ignoring the incursions. Now it’s Biden, a compromised globalist himself and one who was put in place to destroy our country, not help it. And he needed this diversion, and the Party of Davos gave it to him. Putin is just playing a part in the fake wrestling match.   Besides being a diversion, the primary objective is to increase gas prices from 4 dollars per gallon to $6 or $7. It’s a repeat of the Obama era war against fossil fuels, and that real war is at the doorstep of the Party of Davos. Not in the Ukraine where they want you to look.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why You Must Always Be Ready: The biggest secret in the world

In the video above, I answer a question that I get asked a lot, “what’s in the backpack?” Well, I carry that backpack with me everywhere. When I’m not at my house, it’s always nearby. And of course, watching the video, you will quickly see what’s in it, my .500 magnum, which is one of my conceal carry guns. And additionally, that backpack is heavily armored. If someone shoots at me from behind, or even from another direction, I can have a way to absorb the bullet harmlessly and take away the danger. It’s a big pack for that reason; it covers a lot more body area. Then hearing that the next question is, “why do you feel you have to be so well-armed and to defend yourself so heavily?”

Most people would be happy with some little Glock tucked in their pants. But not me. I want to be ready for a small war, and there is a good reason for it. I put those thoughts into my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which has become highly relevant in the early years of 2020. When I was writing that book, I knew that it would stir up trouble, and it has. To my mind, it’s the good kind. But one thing is for sure; you don’t have to go out into the world looking for trouble. Trouble will come to find you, and for all kinds of reasons. The main reason is that the world’s bureaucracies were all built to conceal a dark truth about human nature. They were built to conceal laziness and the unambitious, which is in the majority. Everyone wants a trophy for success, but not everyone wants to do the work to become the best at something. And when people discover they can’t loot off you for their own efforts to make them their own, then they seek to get rid of you in any way possible to erase your memory from their minds. And that is why it’s important to be well-armed and always ready for trouble when it comes looking for you.

While I was writing The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business a few years ago, I had a confrontation with a consultant from a very expensive and powerful firm that teaches Lean Techniques worldwide to the biggest corporations that there are. When he found out that I had my own theories on process improvement and that I took exception to his constant beratement of “shooting from the hip,” as if it was a reckless assertion toward productivity, he became irate when he discovered I was writing that book. “what are you going to say that hasn’t been already said, the field is crowded with opinions on process improvement. Pick your poison and get with the program.” My response was, “well, I want to create a system that doesn’t involve poison, something that is more reflective of what is really going on in the world.” That’s when he lost it and pretty much swore himself to be my enemy, which didn’t work out very well for him. There was no provocation to try to make the guy mad. He went there on his own. It was the realization that a kind of scam was being exposed that he secretly feared was the real issue. And ultimately, this secret is a big problem out there in the world. I knew it was, but watching some of the violent reactions that played out, knowing that the secret would be put into a book I was writing, was just too much for him, and many, many others. 

The truth of the matter is what I said in the video when people find out they can’t steal from your efforts to hide their own lazy and unproductive natures; they actively seek to eliminate you from the discussion, whether it’s cancel culture, outright violence, social ostracization—whatever means they can come up with. And we are seeing that play out on a mass scale these days in business, politics, media, and even neighborhood soccer games. It’s everywhere. But what’s worse for them is when you don’t care, and you don’t need what they offer, which is kinship in a team environment. At that point, everything they have ever been taught turns out to be a lie, and they can’t handle that knowledge. There is a great yearning in the world for nobility and individualized respect. While traveling all over the world, I have found that when people see those elements in you, they often pay reverence instantly. People crave the kind of individualization that evolved in American culture and, ultimately, American business. But there have been many who have shaped this European collectivist mindset into global affairs and have evolved a kind of socialism during international trade that has found its way into every aspect of business. And the big secret was to hide the incompetency of the many from the eyes of the few. So when people often criticized me for “shooting from the hip,” they meant that I should always sit down and consult with others to figure out the best next step. Even if my idea ended up being the way to go, the bureaucrats wanted to believe that they had some hand in the process and wanted to share credit for the endeavor. But to a person like me, that all takes too long, so I cut them out and take my shots without them, which denies them of the theft, which makes people angry, very angry, for being exposed. That’s why I carry the backpack, and it has come in handy often. 

After dealing with that guy, and many others like him over the years, I felt it would be good to address the process improvement problems that all businesses have, especially these days with all the woke problems that are entering our places of employment. There are many great techniques for process improvement out there, but most of them never address the real elephant in the room. What makes people corrupt, and why do they intentionally sabotage process flow in a business? I often point to the time clock, even the salary people, and say, “look how quickly they leave for the day.” Their minds were never on their work; they just collect their paychecks and associated with other people waiting for someone else to do something. They are too lazy to do things independently and often leave all the heavy work for the few with a mind to do it. And there is no fancy consultant class that can address that issue. To deal with that, we must deal with the real problem that sits at the heart of all process improvement needs, the lack of human capital and raw individualized leadership. That is why I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, to empower the types of people who really do all the work and to prevent those who get in the way from doing so. And also to explain that consensus building and teamwork are only distractions away from productivity. In the world we have today, it is the few who make everything happen and the many who try to hide behind those exploits and take credit for them as their own. If you let them take that credit, they will love you. But if you don’t, they will do everything in their power to get rid of you, even if it means killing you any way they can. Sometimes they become so jealous that their minds lose all reason, and their thoughts become a Shakespeare play. And the only way to have real peace is to carry a backpack like the one I do and make sure that their intentions do not become your reality.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

A Review of ‘The Lords of Easy Money’: What’s behind the smokescreen they don’t want you to see

As bad as things seem, I’ll have to say I feel privileged to live in a culture that can produce books like The Lords of Easy Money. The new book by Christopher Leonard is what I consider a real treasure to a rich culture. After reading it, it spawned in me an insatiable appetite for solving some of our modern problems, and right there in those pages, everything was clear to see. I took last week off everything essentially to read an additional 12 books of all types of wide-ranging subjects connected to the subject of the Federal Reserve and the history of Banking in America and the Constitutional problems that are part of it. I think I slept 3 hours last week as my reading list was very aggressive. Good books are better than sleep to me.   We’ve all talked about this before, but never has there been a writer who was able to put their finger on the problem quite like Christopher Leonard has. For me, it was the big block in the puzzle that put everything else together, and I feel greatly enriched by it. Because of it, I am much more inclined than I was before toward the banking policies of Andrew Jackson as he let the charter expire for the second attempt to put centralized banking in charge of our central government. These subjects are too complicated for our news reporting, so they never get talked about, yet the corruption at play here is mind-blowing, and it is there that we must focus on in the future if we want to save our nation. I’ll have a lot to say about this book in the months to come, but for now, we’ll talk about the tip of the iceberg. 

The problem starts with the American Constitution and Alexander Hamilton and his debates with Thomas Jefferson over the merits of centralized banking. Hamilton’s interpretation comes from Article 1 Section 8 at the very end, “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution and Foregoing powers, and all other Powers by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Office thereof.” In other words, if the government thinks it needs it, it can have it. This is also why the duel between Aaron Burr and Hamilton should have happened on the day before Jefferson and Hamilton had this discussion. Hamilton’s argument opened the door to the kind of crazy lunacy regarding fiscal policy that we see today. Lucky for us, we have had great presidents, such as Jackson, who fought this battle before. It has taken a lot of time for the crooks and thieves of Wall Street and politics to become emboldened to the level they are now, to rob openly, loot, steal, and sell out our country in the fashion that The Lords of Easy Money articulates. But make no mistake about it, Christopher Leonard is not arguing against the Fed. He is, in fact, a Democrat. He’s not at all crazy about the Tea Party movement or President Trump. He wants the system to work. He actually makes an excellent argument for the Federal Reserve. Still, in the research he conducted, which went on for years, the actual Federal Reserve regional bank president Thomas Hoenig out of Kansas, Missouri, where this real glimpse into the problems of the Federal Reserve came to light and is the heart of the whole book.

The Federal Reserve has a consistent problem because it functions as many school boards do or any government that emphasizes consensus rather than dissent and argument. In the case of the Federal Reserve, all the bank presidents who end up on the FOMC (the Federal Open Market Commission) consist of 5 appointed positions; the other seven are rotated among the regional bank presidents. There is always one permanent seat for the Federal Reserve Chairman and another for the New York Federal Reserve. Around 2010, when Fed Chair Ben Bernanke began a policy of quantitative easing to deal with the crash of 2008, the only person on the FOMC committee to vote against it was Thomas Hoenig, which was embarrassing for Bernanke. They had always had consensus up to that point, at least what they showed the public. But Hoenig felt that the policy was dangerous, and he continued to vote that way until he retired eventually. But the Fed ignored his vote and kept the policy going anyway until things really exploded out of control after Covid came and did its damage, which is our present problem. The most obvious problem that comes to mind with this arrangement is that all the members have PHDs from socialist-oriented schools where Marxism is heavily studied. So they all think the same way. Thomas Hoenig was considered a soft “r” Republican, but they all essentially thought the same way about fiscal policy. The value of something was supposed to need Fed action for it to be useful. Rather than dealing with what elements of the economy create value, such as free people able to function and produce, the Fed believed that all activity was more or less fixed. It was their job to manipulate interest rates or print money to inspire growth. When you have 12 people who all think the same way on these matters, you will get what you are going to get. 

In reaction to the housing bubble bursting in 2008 and the election of the socialist Barack Obama, who put tight controls on economic behavior, Ben Bernanke, then Janet Yellen, then Jerome Powell would turn to what they call ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) to flood the market with cheap money and to build up a massive asset bubble that Wall Street could count on a “Fed Put” strategy to bottom out the risks on an asset pricing strategy. For instance, to inspire the buy-up on all those risky mortgages after 2008 for which BlackRock became so wealthy, the Fed boosted the purchase with a public-private partnership that removed much of the risk by pumping up the potential losses with the money supply. There has never been a restoration to normal on the Fed’s balance sheet. What started as a mess on that balance sheet of 900 billion in inflated assets in 2009 ballooned to 4.5 trillion by the end of 2019. Now, after Covid, the balance sheet is at 8.2 trillion as of this writing, and it’s going up every month by 120 billion with no signs of an end to it. So now we have an asset bubble that is poised to burst at any moment, and the smoke and mirrors of the political arrangement between Congress, Wall Street, and the Fed is out of control and explains a lot of why major investors are putting so much effort into pumping up the Chinese economy. They are trying to hide the money they have gained during all this in a new economy for their own preservation. The whole situation truly is a mismanaged disaster. Of course, if money is all you care about, and you want to protect what you’ve built, China suddenly doesn’t look so bad. Why is everyone so upset over their human rights violations and communist central government?    

But the first step is in understanding it all. I never was, and I’m not now a person who will say we shouldn’t have a Fed. There needs to be a way to manage the money of society. As I said in the video above, with space exploration coming on fast, spikes in the gold standard and other precious metals will need to be managed through a stabilized currency. But when you create something like the Fed and put a bunch of people trained in Marxism in charge of it, well, you get the failures of Marxism as a result. Rather than have people running these banks who actually understand the value of labor and how to apply it to actual assets made by the human mind, instead, they have created a bureaucratic nightmare that is poised to blow up out of this artificial asset bubble that they have made at the Fed and will cause significant harm to all the people who depended on the Fed to do the right thing. And in doing that right thing, Thomas Hoenig has told his story of how painful it was, which is the point of the excellent book, The Lords of Easy Money. This has been the smokescreen nobody wants to talk about, behind nearly every news story that they hope you never find out about—until it’s too late.

Rich Hoffman

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