Cambodia Owned by Chinese Mafia? NY's Republican Gov? Another MAJOR Interest Rate Hike, Politico's Self-Own, (The Five for 11/02/22)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
Let’s dive into the news.
[one]
Well, the recession just got deeper today.
USA Today reports:
The Federal Reserve is poised on Wednesday to raise interest rates for the sixth time this year. That increase will have a direct impact on consumers' wallets, making it even more expensive for them to get a mortgage and pay off credit card debt.
The central bank is boosting rates to curb inflation, which hovers near a 40-year high. September's consumer price index report showed that annual inflation fell slightly to 8.2% but rose by 0.4% on a monthly basis, exceeding economists’ expectations.
The Fed faces growing calls from lawmakers as well at the United Nations to stop hiking rates over concerns that it could ignite a painful recession. But it hasn’t signaled it will hit the pause button time any time soon, as it aims to bring inflation closer to its 2% target, even if it causes job losses.
For now, at least, the labor market remains strong. Job openings are plentiful and unemployment is remarkably low. But economists don’t expect that to be the case in 2023, especially if the Fed continues lifting rates at an aggressive pace. If today's hike comes in as expected – 75 basis points – it would mark the fourth straight increase at that high level.
[two]
The Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia is allowing Chinese gangs to operate slave labor camps.
The LA Times reports:
In a dystopian nightmare come to life, the Cambodian government has given Chinese crime syndicates free rein to bring in tens of thousands of foreign men and women who — according to human rights organizations and their own accounts — are held captive to work in crowded cyber scam mills.
Lured by the promise of legitimate employment, they are instead forced to run online and telephone rackets targeting people around the world with gambling, money lending and romance schemes, to name a few. Other scams have included fake real estate developments and bogus initial coin offerings.
“The criminals are limited only by their imagination,” said Jason Tower, an executive at the United States Institute of Peace and an expert on transnational Chinese crime syndicates. “These are sophisticated schemes.”
Workers who meet their targets are rewarded. Those who fail are tortured, abused and sold like chattel to other gangs on private messaging apps such as Telegram. Reports of murder, depression and suicidal ideation are rampant.
The syndicates run their operations not unlike private companies trying to motivate a sales force. The big difference: Employees aren’t allowed to leave.
“Instead of getting fired for poor performance, you get physical punishments — forced push-ups and squats, tased, beaten, deprived of food, locked up in dark rooms or worse,” said Jacob Sims, country director for International Justice Mission Cambodia, a rights group that has helped rescue more than 100 victims. “On the other hand, those who consistently meet or surpass their targets are rewarded with more freedoms, food, money and control over other victims.”
The duped workers come from across Asia, including China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Many cite the economic fallout from the pandemic as a motivating factor for taking a job in Cambodia.
One thing that absolutely baffles me about the “social justice warrior” movement in the U.S. is how these keyboard activists can get angry about the mildest perception of online bullying, but completely turn a blind eye to global suffering, that makes America look like a place with next to no problems by comparison.
Of course, we do have real problems in this country…but none of those problems involve a population the size Bend, OR living in slavery at the hand of the Chinese Mafia.
[three]
Well, this is a weird follow up to the Pelosi attack.
Politico came out throwing firebombs that right wing outlets were spreading misinformation around a third person in the home.
But the only problem is…those outlets were actually CITING Politico’s previous article (now offline, but captured via screenshot), which mentions the third person.
To be fair, on-the-ground crime reporting is very difficult (I’ve done it in the Chicago market), and I can see how Politico were doing their best to get a breaking story out as accurately as possible…and part of it proved not to be accurate.
But also to be fair, the “spreading misinformation” was just citing Politico.
Rather than the “mainstream media is bad” narrative…I’ll put a bit more nuance to it.
There’s still excellent reporting done daily in the NY Times, WaPo, Politico, etc. And we don’t applaud them when they do their jobs well. We don’t even notice.
But are many who work in media…
…arrogant?
…smug?
…entitled?
That was certainly my experience with many co-workers in the field.
Politico didn’t do bad reporting…they just got one detail wrong on a breaking story.
But rather than correcting the issue, the outlet lashed out.
[four]
One signal that Republicans may make a strong showing in the midterms is the NY Governor’s race…where the Governor’s mansion may flip red for the first time in 40 years.
In a normal year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul might be coasting to victory in November. She’s a reasonably popular Democrat running for re-election in a blue state that hasn’t elected a Republican governor in 20 years. For months, she led her GOP opponent, Rep. Lee Zeldin, by double digits in the polls.
Yet as Democrats brace for a Republican wave in the midterm elections, Hochul’s race has tightened, getting too close for Democrats’ comfort. An Oct. 28 Emerson poll found Hochul up by just 6 points, down from a 15-point lead in September. Another poll released the same day by Democratic polling firm Slingshot Strategies had Hochul up by the same slim margin, and found that Zeldin led by 2 points among the most enthusiastic voters.
The biggest factor in Hochul’s shrinking lead has been Zeldin’s push to make the race about crime. Nationwide, Republicans have sought to make the midterms a referendum on public safety. The argument has particular resonance in New York, which in recent years has passed sentencing reforms that raised the age of adult prosecution to 18 and eliminated cash bail for most low-level crimes. While it’s not clear these reforms are to blame, crime has surged in New York City, according to NYPD data, with robberies up more than 30%, rapes up more than 10% and a spate of random attacks on subway commuters, even as the murder rate has declined.
[five]
The Tulsa massacre is one of the worst race riots in history, primarily motivated by the jealousy of local whites against successful black entrepreneurship.
The American education system…basically doesn’t teach it.
Well, additional victim’s bodies were just found 101 years later.
The Associated Press reports:
The search for remains of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has turned up 21 additional graves in the city’s Oaklawn Cemetery, officials said.
Seventeen adult-size graves were located Friday and Saturday, Oklahoma State Archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck said Monday. Additionally, the city announced Tuesday that four graves, two adult-size and two child-size, had been found.
The coffins, then the remains, will be examined to see if they match reports from 1921 that the victims were males buried in plain caskets.
“This is going to part of our process of discriminating which ones we’re going to proceed with in terms of exhuming those individuals and which ones we’re actually going to leave in place,” Stackelbeck said in a video statement.
The work, by hand, was still underway, and the types of coffins and gender of the victims have not been determined, according to the city’s statement.
Until the next one,
-sth