Crooked Media - What A Day: I'd like to buy a Powell

Jerome Powell, if you’re reading this (and we know you are) we’re getting pretty tired of this bullshit. 
 

• After a great deal of anticipation, the Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it has once again raised interest rates, this time to a 16-year high of 5.25 percent. In a statement announcing the tenth-consecutive rate hike since March 2022, however, the Fed omitted language it has previously used to signal the likelihood of more hikes to come. 
   

• This most recent hike comes as inflation has dipped and unemployment has stayed at historic lows, leading many to speculate that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is not particularly concerned about tipping the United States into a recession, even if that’s not his main intention. Consumer confidence is, unsurprisingly, low. Many Americans report that they haven’t felt so discouraged about their personal finances since the beginning of the pandemic. 
   

• Like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Powell has been unequivocal in his warnings about the dangers posed by Republicans refusing to increase the federal debt limit, and plunging the country into default. Speaking about the possibility, which House Speaker Kevin McCarthy seems determined to make a reality, Powell said, “We’d be in uncharted territory and…no one should assume that the Fed can protect the economy from the potential short and long-term effects of a failure to pay our bills on time.” Yellen warned Congress earlier this week that the Treasury may hit the debt limit as soon as June.

Though Powell’s rate hikes may have reached an end, he told reporters Wednesday that the central bank still thinks inflation is too high, and that he thus could not say for sure that the rate-hike cycle is over. 
 

• Inflation is still more than double the two-percent target rate, and economic growth remains small. The squeeze caused by additional interest rate hikes will only compound consumer anxiety. Inflation has remained stubborn, and a long-held theory as to why is finally gaining more traction. If you can believe it, it’s corporate greed. A new report from the European Union’s statistics agency showed that European consumer prices in April were seven-percent higher than they had been the year before, an increase from March and more than triple the target rate set by the European Central Bank. 
   

• Supply-chain issues were ubiquitous during the first couple years of the pandemic, and the bottleneck of raw materials caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine only compounded the problem, but reports indicate that companies did much more than cover their costs. The European Central Bank says businesses padding their profits (and we’ve all heard them brag about their “record profits”!!!) has been the biggest factor in sustaining inflation. 

Will the government tamp down on corporate greed, which is impervious to interest rate hikes? It certainly should! If the Fed is willing to squeeze everyday consumers, other government agencies should be willing to impose some sort of check on runaway corporate avarice, which is keeping the world in a permanent state of inflation.

A man on the New York City subway was murdered on Monday by another rider who put him in a chokehold for about 15 minutes. Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine identified the 30-year-old victim as subway busker and performer Jordan Neely. According to passenger accounts, Neely entered the subway car addressing everyone in it with a speech “saying he was hungry, he was thirsty, that he didn’t care about anything, he didn’t care about going to jail, he didn’t care that he gets a big life sentence,” and that it didn’t even matter if he died. Part of the incident was recorded on video, and shows two other passengers restraining Neely while a 24-year-old man choked him. Neely was pronounced dead on arrival when he was taken to the hospital. The man who choked Neely has not yet been publicly identified but was reportedly taken into police custody for questioning, then released. The medical examiner’s office ruled Neely’s death a homicide. Neely was reportedly homeless, had a history of mental illness, and had a warrant out for his arrest. None of those are punishable by vigilante execution. Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) have both overseen major diversions of the city and state budget to the NYPD, while programs for mental health and the city’s rapidly-increasing homeless population remain woefully inadequate.

The Department of Justice has indicted former FBI agent Jared Wise for illegally entering the Capitol on January 6 and encouraging the MAGA mob to kill police officers. Yeah, that’ll do it!

President Biden has nominated four more judges to the federal bench in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Washington, DC, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), u up? Actually, don’t answer that. 

A 13-year-old boy in Belgrade, Serbia, carried out a mass shooting at his school, killing nine people in a pre-planned attack. 

Nightmare billionaire and Twitter CEO Elon Musk has threatened to reassign NPR’s Twitter account to “another company,” after NPR stopped posting on Twitter because Musk falsely labeled their account “state-sponsored media.” 

Torrential rainfall and flooding has killed 129 people in northern and western Rwanda. 

New internal reports allege that a racist text was the “smoking gun” that led to Tucker Carlson’s ouster at Fox News, but we still don’t buy that the decision was anything other than financial and they don’t care about racism, because…it’s Fox News, and Carlson was racist on air for years.

Co-chairman of the Federalist Society’s Board of Directors and all-around comic book villain Leonard Leo was instrumental in choosing disgraced former president Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, including his Supreme Court justices. The Federalist Society is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) “charitable” (lol, sure) organization, which means it is, hilariously, prohibited from engaging in political activism. But Leo has a dark money network of his own, and used his position at the Federalist Society to cultivate a relationship with 91-year-old multi-billionaire Barre Seid, who eventually gave Leo’s network $1.6 billion, believed to be the largest political donation ever. This slippery little arrangement suggests previously undisclosed ties between Leo’s dark-money network and the Federalist Society, which describes itself (again, suspend your laughter) as a nonpartisan educational organization. Leo has a long history of political activism and use of donor money to enhance his own wealth, neither of which is appropriate for a 501(c)(3). It sure looks like right-wing billionaires are paying Leo a ton of money to get judges who will advance their interests nominated and confirmed to the bench—a perfectly corrupt arrangement, which explains why Republicans like it so much.

In a new campaign ad talking about how American life is “worse” under President Biden, disgraced former president Donald Trump used images from…his own presidency. That’s pretty fun.

A New York State Supreme Court judge dismissed disgraced former president Trump’s lawsuit against the New York Times for its 2018 reporting on his tax records and ordered Trump to reimburse its legal fees. We love to see it. 

A district court judge in Utah ruled in favor of Planned Parenthood on Tuesday, blocking the state’s latest abortion ban from going into effect on Wednesday. 

Another woman threw a drink at Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Keep up the good work, ladies!!