Free Republic

But just because an economic system generated wealth and innovation doesn’t mean it guarantees a good society," Obama said. "Because from the outset, market-based systems have been compatible with slavery, caste systems, colonialization, war, exploration, corruption, fraud, autocracy, the poisoning of our natural environment." As Obama listed, the audience applauded. The former president went on to credit Democratic governments for "moderating capitalism's excesses" with a "social safety net." According to him, it will take "young leaders to help us think and act anew" about "creating an economic system that supports and sustains our democratic values."

Do you feel as if everywhere you turn something else is pushing the United States closer to the brink? You’d be right. It’s by design. Called “the Cloward-Piven Strategy,” our nation is being thrust into the center of every kind of disaster, expeditiously, by whoever it actually is that is running the show. The ultimate process is to “speed-up the destruction of our economy by overwhelming it.” The goal is to foist us into an economic crisis leading to the collapse of the United States as well as capitalism. A two-class system will then rise out of the ashes –...

The Clinton Foundation is back, and it’s headed to Ukraine. Founded by former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the foundation put its annual “Clinton Global Initiative” on a hiatus for a few years when their relevance ebbed and fundraising dried up, but their scandal-plagued charity has returned with a plan to provide humanitarian relief to warn-torn Ukraine, complete with a benediction from Pope Francis. The Clinton Foundation’s shady dealings were exposed in 2015 by Peter Schweizer in the bestselling book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses...

People around the world may fear the gray hairs, crows feet, and stagnation that come with a midlife crisis. But over in China, millennials fear hitting an age milestone now thought to be a death sentence for one's career: 35. These anxieties have been summed up in the phrase "Curse of 35," a concept and hashtag that's gone viral on China's Twitter-like Weibo. It refers, specifically, to the average Chinese employer's preference for hiring workers who haven't reached the sell-by date of their 35th birthday. "I am scared that I won't be able to keep my job, and then I...

Just as Japan saw a substantial increase in foreign residents in 2022, it also registered a decline in its native population of approximately 800,000 people, marking the biggest drop on the country’s record. According to the report, the local population has dropped by 0.65%, leaving the total number of Japanese nationals at 122.4 million for the year 2022. This also marks the 14th consecutive year of the population’s decline. More foreign residents: The government data also highlighted the 10.7% increase in the number of foreign residents, reaching an all-time high of nearly 3 million people. The notable surge in foreign...

RePlatform Vegas September 30th-October 1st, 2023 https://www.replatformvegas.comProduced by the Defeat the Mandates Team, RePlatform: The Parallel Economy Convention at the Flamingo, Las Vegas, Sept 30-Oct 1st is the culmination of years of working around Corporate America. We're gathering the tribes--an army of entrepreneurs, experts, visionaries, and audacious dissidents, igniting an entire ecosystem of startups and institutions who recognize the danger of corporate centralization. RePlatform is NOT a "Complain-a-con", our purpose is to sharpen the parallel economy through our conference program, keynotes, expert panels, & focus on upgrading the capabilities of everyone who joins us.

Federal regulators have sued Amazon, alleging the company for years "tricked" people into buying Prime memberships that were purposefully hard to cancel. The Federal Trade Commission, in a legal complaint filed on Wednesday, says Amazon illegally used "manipulative, coercive, or deceptive" designs to enroll shoppers into auto-renewing Prime subscriptions. Regulators also accuse Amazon of purposefully building a convoluted, multi-step cancellation process to discourage people from quitting. "Amazon tricked and trapped people into recurring subscriptions without their consent, not only frustrating users but also costing them significant money," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. The Prime membership costs $139...

CLAYTON COUNTY, Ga. — In the metro Atlanta area, a county police department is set to hold an all-day gun buyback Event on the weekend. The Clayton County Police Department will hold the buyback on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the department headquarters in Jonesboro. According to the department, payment for the guns bought will be given through gift cards in $25 increments. Flyers for the event show pricing for different types of guns and related items. Here are the prices listed on the event flyer: $100 for rifles $75 for handguns $25 for broken frames and...

...Is distinguishing Polanski spitting in the face of all victims”? What about watching his films – does that mean tacitly endorsing that “raping women isn’t that bad”? If the film is about antisemitism, how does that affect the morality balance sheet? Of course, really all these questions amount to just one, well-worn dilemma: can we separate the art from the artist?...Woody Allen (and) his relationship with Soon Yi-Previn, adopted daughter of Allen’s ex-wife Mia Farrow, made her feel “affronted, personally somehow” since she had, as a girl, identified with Allen due to his performative fragility and neuroticism. (Allen has repeatedly...

On the Glassdoor profile of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC—the world’s biggest manufacturer of semiconductor chips—current and former U.S. employees swap messages about grueling working conditions. “People… slept in the office for a month straight,” an engineer wrote in August. “Twelve-hour days are standard, weekend shifts are common. I cannot stress… how brutal the work-life balance is here.” “TSMC is about obedience and is not ready for America,” another engineer wrote in January. TSMC says it has on-boarded nearly 2,000 staff for its Arizona plants so far, including 600 engineers. But interviews with recruiters indicate those were hard-fought hires...

I’m a capitalist. You are a capitalist. Karl Marx was a capitalist. Josef Stalin was one of the biggest capitalists ever. Bernie Sanders is a capitalist. AOC is a capitalist. All the members of Occupy Wall Street, Antifa and BLM are capitalists, even if they don’t know it or won’t admit it.Capital is anything used in production that is not a free gift of the earth like land or human effort like labor or entrepreneurship. That is a bit of a long economist way of saying capital is tools. So, if you favor using tools, you are a capitalist. Less...

In a development straight out of a dystopian sci-fi thriller, fast food giant Wendy’s has embarked on a chilling experiment, replacing its drive-through order takers with an AI chatbot powered by Google software. This technological takeover aims to streamline the ordering process by training the AI to understand customer requests and decrease waiting times at the drive-throughs. According to reports from the Wall Street Journal, Wendy’s is set to launch this eerie transformation in its home state of Ohio, starting with locations in Columbus. The company plans to implement the change in June, all in the name of shorter lines...

A Toronto cafe for anti-capitalists, "The Anarchist," is permanently shuttering after just 12 months in business after following a "pay-when-you-can" business model.The Anarchist describes itself as an "anti-capitalist, anti-colonial cafe, shop and radical community space on stolen land.""Unfortunately, the lack of generational wealth/seed capital from ethically bankrupt sources left me unable to weather the quiet winter season, or to grow in the ways needed to be sustainable longer-term," the owner, Gabriel Sims-Fewer wrote last week.The Anarchist, which opened for business in March of 2022, went viral last year, with internet users mocking the leftist cafe for charging high prices for...

As Colorado kids struggle to recoup learning losses post-pandemic, teachers unions keep proving that’s not their priority. Standing at the center is the state’s most prominent teachers union — the Colorado Education Association. At the CEA’s statewide conference on April 22, the organization — which claims to represent teachers — took a brazen, ideological stance when it passed a resolution attacking capitalism for “inherently exploit(ing) children, public schools, land, labor, and resources.” Never mind how America’s free enterprise system enables businesses and homeowners to pour billions of dollars into our state’s education system through taxation, or the philanthropic contributions of...

A Denver councilwoman has sparked fierce debate after suggesting that white-owned businesses pay additional tax, which would be given in reparations to the owners of minority-owned businesses. Candi CdeBaca, a 37-year-old Democratic Socialist, told a business forum in Denver on Thursday that more needed to be done to provide reparations. 'Capitalism was built on stolen land, stolen labors, and stolen resources,' said CdeBaca, speaking at a forum at the Greater Metro Denver Ministerial Alliance.

The Colorado Education Association [CEA] reportedly passed a resolution that declares that "capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources." A final version of the resolution that was passed states that "CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy, (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality. However, a screenshot captures an earlier draft of the resolution that included a call to replace capitalism with a "new equitable economic system."

MORE STORIES 'Rupert Murdoch doesn't like all that spiritual talk': Tucker Carlson was fired after preaching about good, evil and the need for prayer - after tycoon's ex-fiancée Ann Lesley Smith said the firebrand anchor was a 'messenger from God' One of the contributors to Tucker Carlson's sudden firing from Fox this week may have been an evangelical speech on Friday night where he preached about 'good and evil', according to a source cited by Vanity Fair. Carlson was fired without warning on Monday morning after leading Fox News' top primetime show for seven years. There has been much speculation...

“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them down between the millstones of taxation and inflation,” goes a line apparently misattributed to Vladimir Lenin. While the quotation is more likely a paraphrase of Lenin by famed economist John Maynard Keynes, it also “seems like a pretty good description of what the Biden administration is doing to America’s middle class,” wrote the New York Post a year ago already. Of course, “inflation,” as in rising prices, is at least largely caused by a phenomenon expressed via another definition of the term: inflating the money supply. Now, one thing Lenin...

Why is communism so appealing to a certain subset of leftists? If something had a track record of 100 million dead and explicitly called for the subjugation of people, most would call it evil. Yet some people still call themselves communists and socialists. Why? It is not as if these facts about the recorrd of communism are obscure, certainly not to professors and intellects. Knowing of the gulags and famines and still advocating for what made it possible, is a singularly wicked form of evil. Clearly there is something causing these advocate to supersede common sense and decency. A recent...

Private equity is rapidly making inroads into the child care sector, expanding in size and political power while damaging quality, accessibility and affordability. Investor-backed child care chains differ from independent “mom-and-pop” programs because they are either owned by a private equity firm or, in one case, traded on the stock market. In other words, they are accountable to investors looking for a big return on their money and therefore are hopelessly conflicted. Their growth since the turn of the millennium has been explosive. Several of these chains are now owned by overseas firms based in countries like China. Quality in...