The summer economic forum in St. Petersburg used to be a vanity fair of Russian opulence and corruption as “Russia’s Davos.” But last week’s (6/14-17) modest, if not frugal, event was rather an exercise in self-reassurance of sustainable stagnation.

The international profile of the event was seriously curtailed, and the guest of honor was Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who was eager to agree “with everything Comrade Putin said” and to sign the declaration of an “enhanced strategic partnership” between the two countries (Kremlin.ru, June 15).

Putin’s speech was entirely devoted to amplifying positive news about Russia’s economic performance, which according to his estimates, is still capable of delivering the volume of weapons necessary for sustaining the “special military operation” and providing broad prosperity (Kommersant, June 17).

Unemployment is indeed low, due to extra-high out-migration, but as for the alleged decline of poverty, that has been achieved primarily by doctoring the data (The Insider, June 16).

Economic statistics have indeed become scarce and carefully “improved,” thus enabling Putin to assert the diminishing dependency on oil revenues and the benefits of high war expenditures without any concern for a seeming departure from reality (Moscow Times, June 16).

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I was recently told that humanity is “rapidly advancing” toward solving the socialist calculation problem. I wasn’t told why, but around the same time, economist Daron Acemoglu suggested that artificial intelligence could be the solution.

To get literary, perhaps we are on the verge of creating the Machines, the artificial intelligences that plan the global economy in Isaac Asimov’s short story, “The Evitable Conflict” (which became the last chapter of his book, I, Robot.)

The Machines perfectly calculate the needs of humanity and organize the economic order to best provide for them, in keeping with the first law of robotics, that “a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.”

Given Asimov’s insistence that the Machines were mere calculators of unimaginable speed, not “super-brains,” artificial intelligence could be a further step beyond Asimov’s robotic brains. So could artificially intelligent Machines, at last, prove the central planners right?

No, they could not, and I’ll answer the question in three ways.

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For the past year, the House Oversight Committee, where I serve as chairman, has been investigating the Biden family’s influence peddling schemes that generated millions of dollars for the Biden family. We are following the facts. We need to know whether these deals threaten national security and if President Joe Biden is compromised.

The Oversight Committee has already obtained thousands of pages of financial records related to the Biden family and has traced millions of dollars from China and Romania to the Biden family and their associates. Americans are asking: What is the Biden family business? They don’t sell anything, they don’t have lucrative assets generating income, yet they receive millions from around the globe. What are they selling? Influence and access.

President Biden has repeatedly lied to the American people about his family’s business dealings. Now, Americans are left wondering if Joe Biden was involved with them.

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Former President Donald Trump has been indicted for illegally storing and hiding classified documents. As conservative radio host Steve Gruber describes it, the “bananafication” of our republic continues apace.

There are three reasons every American — even those of us not supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign — should find this further assault on the former president repugnant.

All three are glaring demonstrations of how corrupt the Biden Deep State is on a gargantuan scale.  Let’s discuss them.

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U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) is again taking action against (literally) weaponized bureaucracy by leading the charge in the upper chamber to ensure the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is not using tax dollars from hardworking Americans to arm its employees — and going beyond just that to disarm the taxman and move the IRS' investigation division over to the Justice Department.

According to an Open the Books report released last month, the IRS has spent more than $35 million since 2006 on firearms, ammunition, and tactical gear for its glorified and federally empowered accountant force, with some $10 million of that taxpayer-funded armament coming since just 2020.

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 “Inclusive Capitalism” – the globalist buzzword for fascist control over all our lives

It’s been a bloodbath for the majority of companies that go overtly woke in the new era of American consumer rebellion, and the establishment is not happy. Corporations like Disney, Anheuser-Busch and Target are plunging in profits and losing billions in market cap after pledging fealty to the trans agenda.

In particular, the public is setting out to make examples of institutions that support trans indoctrination of children. Simply put, a line in the sand has been crossed. With conservative boycotts far more effective than leftist boycotts ever were, the movement makes evident that the political left is a paper tiger and that conservatives and independents have the real majority power in the US.

So why are corporations actually willing to destroy the very brands they spent so much time and money developing all in the name of political idolatry.  It seems like pure madness, but what if they know something we don’t? What if they are riding out an engineered economic crisis so that they can be rewarded later with “too woke to fail” riches?

Here’s how they’re planning it.

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