Seattle’s Minimum Wage Has Been a Disaster, as the City’s Own Study Confirms

Seattle's Skyline

Seattle provides a practical example of minimum wages leading to losses in income and employment.

(Tom’s view: There are some jobs that are just not worth paying someone to do above a certain hourly rate. If you raise the minimum pay rate to over that amount, the jobs don’t get done and the person who would do them at the lower rate goes unemployed. That’s just common sense. Now, how you factor that against the requirement to earn sufficient to keep body and soul together in a modern metropolis and the propensity for greedy, unethical employers to take advantage of a no minimum wage scenario is an interesting question!)

https://fee.org/articles/seattles-minimum-wage-has-been-a-disaster-as-the-citys-own-study-confirms/

How Long Have You Got?

How Long Have You Got?

Do you ever do a fire drill at your home?
Do you have a Primary Exit and a Backup Exit in case the Primary one is blocked?
Do you have an Primary and Backup emergency assemply point?
As Jack Reacher says, “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”
Do you have an ICE (In Case of Emergency) number in your phone contact list?

Financial Newsletter – From a person I know…


Last week I published the July issue of The Hard Truth. The issue was on the new crypto currency created by Facebook called Libra. I think what Facebook did with the creation of Libra is very cool. They created an actual crypto currency that will act as money. Meaning that the currency will have solid assets backing it up and it will be able to be used for the purchase of goods and services and will provide the ability to send money across the planet as if you were sending a text. Bitcoin and other crypto “currencies” are not really currencies. They have become investment assets like gold or silver. What merchant is going to accept Bitcoin in payment of say, a car, when the price of Bitcoin can fluctuate as much as $1,000 a day? The person pays the dealer in Bitcoin for a new Mercedes and the currency has fallen $1,000 before the car gets off the lot. Now, I thought it was very clever how they structured Libra as money and if you read the issue, you’ll see what I mean – www.thehardtruthmag.com. I got some very nice acknowledgments on the issue, which is always appreciated, but also got a few emails from people who think that I have the confront of Mary Poppins. I was upbraided for seemingly not understanding that the CIA “created” Facebook or that Facebook users were subject to government surveillance. I didn’t paint the potential dark side of Libra in the issue because I thought it was a work of considerable skill. It bypassed banks and governments and remained a stable digital currency – and still do. But for those who think I was promoting Facebook as the savior of the global financial system or that I am unaware of the gift that such a currency would provide the US intelligence spooks, please think again and subscribe to The Hard Truthand read some of our other issues. In the first two issues of The Hard TruthI dealt with the Snowden disclosures in great depth. We described Stellar Wind the CIA’s program that is plugged into the routing equipment of the major telecom companies and captures virtually all U.S. telecom and email traffic and “sniffs” it for “bad” words, sending offending phone traffic to the FBI, and the rest to a million square foot, billion dollar digital storage facility in Utah to be sniffed in more depth later. The NSA’s PRISM program monitors traffic to the social media world, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. as well as Google, Apple, and rest of the cyber hierarchy. We also covered X-Key Score, the CIA program that combines Stellar Wind and PRISM with your bank account to create a digital portrait of US citizens. In addition, subscribers that have been with us a while would have received in issue #9 an in-depth article on how CIA, NSA and DARPA (the Dr. Strangelove of military weaponry) funded the initial research for the Google algorithm when Sergei Bryn and Larry Paige were doing their PhD research at Stanford. That issue also covers the migration of top government spooks from DARPA and the CIA to the stock-rich executive suites at Google. And how Google is a front for government intelligence. That issue also covers the meetings of the infamous Highland Forum, the unseen hand of government intelligence. Issue #9 is my favorite. If you want to get a peek at the activities of U.S. government intelligence and have an eyepopping look at the new American Police State, a subscription not only gets you the new “controversial” issue on Libra, but all published issues: subscribe here for the article on Libra and the entire archive. www.thehardtruthmag.com. And in case you read the recent issue of The Hard Truth and were under the impression that I was unaware of the extent of government intelligence surveillance activities and their digital fingers in social media or the clear intention by the Bank for International Settlements and the IMF to turn the global financial system into an internationally controlled monetary system of zeros and ones…. think again. The Hard Truth is primarily a financial newsletter. But periodically, I venture into government, politics and help expose some of the dark corners of government surveillance. Solutions are available in the articles. At $34.95 it’s a hell of a deal. John Truman Wolfe

IN JUST ONE DECADE, CORPORATIONS DESTROYED 50 MILLION HECTARES OF FOREST—AN AREA THE SIZE OF SPAIN

Amazon Deforestation

THIS and pollution deserve our attention more than climate change! If we can get the crazies to stop spraying chemtrails, the greedy to stop destroying and polluting habitat, the depressed to go for a walk instead of popping crazy pills and pissing drugs into the waterways and the awake to enlighten the sleeping, we have a chance!