Prof. Manuel Frondel, a member of the RWI Essen (Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, Essen) think-tank, has lashed out at Robert Habeck, Germany’s economics and climate change minister, saying that the country is devolving into an “eco-dictatorship” under his watch.

The statement was in response to Habeck’s latest great reset plan which will see oil and gas heating completely banned in the country from 2045, with the minister also planning to implement restrictions on heating systems allowed in the German market much earlier.

With Habeck having also implemented numerous other controversial energy policies already, this was seemingly the last straw for Prof. Frondel, who expressed outrage regarding the proposed plan.

“Germany is on the way to eco-dictatorship,” the think-tank tsar told Bild. “I am appalled by Robert Habeck’s plans to ban [gas and oil] heating.”

In the years before Silicon Valley Bank’s sudden failure, federal regulators gave the firm a special exemption from rules designed to prevent deposit-taking banks from engaging in risky investments and financial speculation, according to records reviewed by The Lever.

The move — which was a precursor to regulators later extending a similar exemption to the entire banking industry — coincided with Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, continuing to invest in the high-risk venture capital industry in the lead-up to its collapse, which is the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

As the federal government now protects SVB’s depositors from losses, the bank’s demise has touched off alarms about broader risk in the financial industry, just a few years after both lawmakers and federal bank overseers began rolling back some of the reforms that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

In this particular example of that deregulation, the Federal Reserve created significant carve-outs to the so-called Volcker Rule, named after former Fed chairman Paul Volcker. That regulation was supposed to prevent federally insured banks from owning or investing in private equity or hedge funds — opaque pools of assets that are considered illiquid, meaning they cannot be easily sold and turned into cash.

Webmaster addition:

The Conservative Treehouse laid this out in an article a couple of days ago.  This is a very important read.  What this shows is that the Democrats and the Deep State needed an “emergency” on January 6th to culminate their 2020 Election steal.

In order to complete the 2020 Election coup, Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell and Pence needed to create an emergency.  The only way to prevent Congress from delaying the certification of state electoral votes was to create a crisis that could easily be designated an emergency.

Just moments, literally 3 minutes before two representatives issued a vote for motions to suspend the certification, the House members were “informed” by capitol police and other “agents” that a protest was about to breach the chambers. It was at this time that key people: Pence, Pelosi, Schumer, Mcconnell can be seen being walked out and escorted from the chamber. This effectively halted the Entire Chamber Process…

The crisis was created to eliminate the motion challenges to halt the certification and to begin voting to look into voting irregularities and fraud.

Webmaster addition: Mention Vincent Foster, lose your job! Been there, done that, didn't buy the t-shirt!

A diplomatic row kicked off Tuesday after a Russian fighter jet harassed and then bumped a U.S. surveillance drone over the Black Sea, forcing U.S. pilots to ditch the uncrewed aircraft in the water.

The collision added to the U.S.-Russian tensions that have already soared over the war in Ukraine.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political team released a video Tuesday showing the graphic results of multiple transgender surgeries alongside President Biden’s comments on "The Daily Show" calling the Republican’s policies "cruel."

During an appearance on Comedy Central Monday night, Biden said that "what’s going on in Florida" when it comes to transgender people is "close to sinful." 

DeSantis’ video of Biden's remarks features a split screen with Biden on the left and still photos of double mastectomy and skin graft scars on the right. The bottom of the screen reads, "Biden thinks it’s ‘cruel’ Florida banned these surgeries for children."

"It's just terrible what they're doing," Biden says in the video. "It's not like, you know, a kid wakes up one morning and says, you know, I decided I wanted to become a man, or I want to become a woman. I mean, what are they thinking about?"

The GOP is calling for Mayorkas to resign —again.

On Sunday, more than 1,000 migrants rushed the El Paso border after word circulated online that they would gain entry into the U.S. By Monday, videos of the event had gone viral.

Now, prominent conservative voices are calling on DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to resign.

Butler County, Ohio, Sheriff Richard Jones told “Fox & Friends First” Monday that America is “losing the battle” after seeing the border crisis firsthand.

“There are places on the border where there’s not even any security. I’m asking for [Mayorkas] to resign immediately. He doesn’t tell the truth. If you don’t think our country is in crisis and all you got to do is see a thousand people rush the border, and they come across. They used to come across in the dark. Now they come across in the daylight.”

 US drone MQ-9 fell into the Black Sea on Tuesday morning due to its own sharp maneuvering, Russian fighters did not come into contact with it and did not use weapons, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

"As a result of sharp maneuvering around 09:30 Moscow time [06:30 GMT], unmanned aerial vehicle MQ-9 went into an uncontrolled flight with a loss of altitude and collided with the water surface. The Russian fighters did not use airborne weapons, did not come into contact with the unmanned aerial vehicle and returned safely to their home airfield," the ministry said.

The ministry clarified that on the morning of March 14, the airspace control of the Russian Aerospace Forces had recorded the flight of US unmanned aerial vehicle MQ-9 over the Black Sea in the region of the Crimean peninsula in the direction of the Russian state border.

After the Labor Department on Tuesday released its monthly inflation report, President Joe Biden declared it a victory, pointing to a decrease in the inflation rate from its record peak last summer as proof of his success in "working to lower costs for hard-working Americans." That point may be of little relief for many Americans, however, as February's inflation report showed prices of many essential goods up more than 10 percent from a year ago and general inflation outpacing wages.

The price of grocery store food surged 10.2 percent in February from the year before. Several energy services were also elevated from last year, with electricity up 12.9 percent and utility gas up 14.3 percent.

Instead of addressing the explosion in prices of those goods over the last year, Biden highlighted the decrease in the inflation rate from months ago, saying in a statement that "annual inflation is down by a third from this summer ... the slowest annual increase since September 2021."

Long time CTH reader “Regitiger” has spent a great deal of time reviewing the entire process, looking at the granular timeline and then overlaying the bigger picture of the constitutional and parliamentary process itself.  What follows below is a brilliant analysis of the federal government motive to create a J6 crisis that permitted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to trigger an emergency session and avoid the 2020 election certification challenges.

Those congressional floor challenges, known and anticipated well in advance of the morning of January 6, 2021, would have formed a legal and constitutional basis for ‘standing’ in judicial challenges that would have eventually reached the Supreme Court.  The certification during “emergency session” eliminated the problem for Washington DC.

The president of Silicon Valley Bank, which federal regulators closed down Friday, made a quick $3.6 million shortly before the collapse.

CEO Greg Becker exercised stock options February 27 at a purchase price of $105.18, which he sold the same day at market prices. He sold the stocks that cost him $1.3 million for a total of $3,578,643, netting approximately $2.3 million in profit that day, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Epoch Times further reported:

Documents show that the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) sold $3.6 million in shares of the failed financial institution’s parent company several weeks before its collapse—the biggest U.S. bank failure since 2008 that sent a shudder of anxiety across markets.

Fox News reports that the student in question is Canadian Catholic high school student Josh Alexander and that he claims he was arrested and charged with criticizing trans ideology. He says he has been barred from attending classes at school.

He was a student at a Canadian Catholic high school in Ontario until he spoke his mind about what he thought about transgender ideology. In particular, he took issue with the idea of transgender people using school bathrooms that do not correspond with their biological sex. He mentioned those concerns, which appear to have led him into a world of trouble with the authorities for whatever reason.

The student suggested that God only created two sexes, men and women, and authorities allegedly arrested him for having dared to make comments like that.

New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has authorized a congressional investigation into the possible weaponization of the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Justice. In addition to investigating the FBI’s suppression or unlawful leaking of evidence and the response to the Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol, Fox News host Tucker Carlson is calling for an investigation into government infringements of personal privacy.

In 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced the National Security Agency (NSA) hacked his secure (Signal) text message account. At the time, left-leaning legacy media outlets painted Tucker as an unbalanced conspiracy theorist.

A month later, Axios reported  that Carlson’s assertions were factual. The NSA had monitored Carlson’s text messages, and a red flag was raised when Tucker texted “Kremlin intermediaries” regarding a possible trip to Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin.

President Biden has made many claims throughout his decades-long political career, including one about being "arrested" when he was 21 years old for sitting in the Senate presiding officer's chair illegally.

A 2007 interview Biden gave with comedian David Letterman is circulating on social media after being reposted in the wake of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s publication of Capitol footage from the Jan. 6 riots.

In the interview, Letterman asked the Delaware Democratic senator what it was like walking into the Senate chamber in his 20s.

U.S. nuclear reactor vendor Westinghouse Electric announced this week that it signed a contract with Energoatom, the state-owned nuclear utility of Ukraine, to build five 1150 MWe AP1000 reactors at four separate sites in Ukraine. Four of the units will be new and one will complete a partially built reactor at the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant.

Former President Jimmy Carter is currently in hospice care —but President Biden is already talking about giving the eulogy at his funeral.

According to a Fox News report, while speaking at a fundraising event in Rancho Santa Fe, California, President Joe Biden revealed that former President Jimmy Carter has asked him to deliver the eulogy at his funeral.

“He asked me to do his eulogy – excuse me, I shouldn’t say that,” Biden said.

“I spent time with Jimmy Carter, and it’s finally caught up with him. But they found a way to keep him going for a lot longer than they anticipated because they found a breakthrough,” Biden told the crowd.

Maricopa County filed a response to Kari Lake’s Petition for Review in the Arizona Supreme Court yesterday.

The Gateway Pundit has reported extensively on Kari Lake’s stolen election and lawsuit challenging the fraud. On March 1, 2023, after the Maricopa County Superior Court and the Arizona Appeals Court dismissed the case, Lake filed a ‘Petition for Review’ and a Motion to Expedite Review’ for her election contest in the Arizona Supreme Court.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, on March 2, the Arizona Supreme Court agreed to expedite Lake’s lawsuit and scheduled March 21 to consider whether or not they will accept Lake’s new Petition. “At the conference, the Court will decide whether to accept review and schedule an oral argument,” states the order.

Responses from Defendants were ordered to be submitted by yesterday, March 13.

Maricopa County submitted a bogus response, falsely claiming that Kari Lake “presents—for the first time—a misleading factual theory about chain-of-custody documents” and “does not present any argument illustrating a need for this Court to review the court of appeals’ Opinion.”

They don’t even want the Supreme Court to consider this case because they are terrified.

Posts on Twitter and other social-media platforms helped fuel concerns about the U.S. banking system in recent days, as a range of users from prominent investors to internet provocateurs speculated more chaos could ensue.

Some users were trying to offer financial advice aimed at helping readers. Others appeared to take a more extreme view of the situation. In total, fairly or not, the messages sowed anxiety at a time when confidence in the country’s banking system was shaken, lawmakers and social-media observers said. 

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed on Friday and was shut down by regulators. It was the second-largest failure in US history and the first since the global financial crisis. Almost immediately, the calls for bailouts started to come in. (Since Friday, First Republic Bank has failed, and many other banks are facing collapse.)

In fact, on March 9, even before SVB failed, billionaire investor Bill Ackman took to Twitter to insist a federal “bailout should be considered” if the private sector could not save the bank. Hours after SVB officially failed, Ackman was still at it, and in a 646-word panicky screed, he demanded that the federal government “guarantee SVB deposits” and essentially backstop the entire banking industry to keep failing, inefficient, and poorly managed banks afloat.

Now, many readers might be saying to themselves, “I thought bank deposits were insured!” That, of course, is correct, but deposits are only legislatively insured up to $250,000 by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Given that most normal people keep less than this in their bank accounts, that means the majority of bank users are not going to lose any of their money should their banks fail. Moreover, it is extremely easy to acquire deposit insurance on much more than $250,000 by simply keeping money at more than one bank. That $250,000 limit applies to the deposits at each bank where a depositor keeps funds. For customers with high liquidity needs, the financial sector offers tools for dealing with the risk of exceeding FDIC limits.

In an illustration of the laziness and arrogance that so characterizes our modern financial class, however, many of the wealthiest depositors at Silicon Valley Bank couldn’t be bothered with managing their deposits, and they essentially ignored the deposit-insurance rules that even a ten-year-old understands when opening his first bank account.

As a result, many venture capitalists and other wealthy SVB customers stand to a lot of money. At least, they stood to lose a lot of money before Sunday evening, when the Federal Reserve announced its new “Bank Term Funding Program” (BTFP), which promises to flood the banking system with new money and shore up the personal finances of wealthy depositors.