Supply Chain Shortages Hit Cancer Drugs, Heart Medications, AOC Calls Increase in Retail Theft a "Hoax," Student Loan Forgiveness Totally Dead? (The Five for 12/07/21)
Hey, Welcome to The Five.
Couple of quick notes before we begin.
“In Memorium” isn’t a normal feature of The Five…but in the wake of Bob Dole’s death, I worry the world will miss the passing of Col. Edward Shames, the last surviving member of Easy Company, the WWII airborne division portrayed in HBO’s Band of Brothers.
Shames and his comrades dropped into Normandy on D-Day and fought all the way through Europe, before capturing Hitler’s “Eagles Nest” retreat in Germany.
When a Cognac was discovered labeled “For the Furher’s use only,” Shames stole the bottle and brought it back to the U.S., where he served the spirit to guests while celebrating his oldest son’s Bar Mitzvah.
There’s no good way to transition from that heartbreaking moment to a pitch for blatant capitalism…but this is the last week to order the ebook/crewneck to support The Five.
I wrote The Blue Collar Guide to Effortless Output to teach you the system I learned from mega-millionaire entrepreneurs to manage The Five (and several other projects).
With the discount code:
Now, let’s get into (the rather depressing) news.*
*Come back on Friday for Culture & Commentary, where things aren’t quite so grim.
[one]
Huh.
I might agree with AOC on this one.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., renewed her demand for the cancellation of student loan debt in a floor speech Thursday, arguing the financial burden on young Americans was "getting ridiculous."
Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives have called on President Biden to cancel student loan debt by executive order. So far, Biden has resisted the push, arguing such a move should occur through congressional action.
"It’s teenagers signing up for what is often hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. We just do that. Our government allows that," Ocasio-Cortez said. "We give 17-year-olds the ability to sign on and sign up for $100,000 worth of debt and we think that’s responsible policy."
Total student loan debt was estimated to be $1.73 trillion as of September, according to the Federal Reserve. A lengthy pause in payments on federal student loans implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic is set to expire in January.
Ocasio-Cortez also pushed back on claims from critics of her proposal who say a cancellation would benefit wealthy Americans. Biden made a similar assertion during a CNN town hall last February, noting it would mean canceling debt "for people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn."
Observations:
A. Whatever you think of student debt cancellation, Biden or AOC…Biden campaigned on this, then just pushed the idea off. So he’s getting what he deserves by being called to the mat by his own party.
B. I know people who came from working class backgrounds and went to Ivy League schools…only to be absolutely buried in student debt.
C. One way or another, there’s going to be a reckoning over student debt. If you’re looking for a solution, Fundfly, the crowdsourcing platform for student loans I’m a partner in, launches soon.
D. Given Biden’s dramatically low approval ratings…what does he have to lose, politically, on this one?
E. It’s not quite true everyday Americans who didn’t attend college (or take out loans) would be “paying this off,” the loans of regular folks, based on who pays net taxes:
[two]
…well, I’ll give AOC this, she certainly knows how to insert herself into the headlines.
The Freshman Congresswoman made waves for claiming that smash and grab robberies were a “hoax.”
The Washington Times reports:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that the smash-and-grab crime wave is a hoax drew howls from fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill, as retailers and police refuted the claim by detailing the huge impact of organized theft.
So far, the criticism of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has come exclusively from Republicans and retailers.
Rep. Jim Banks, Indiana Republican, called the New York Democrats’ remarks “tone-deaf and offensive” to the family of the Oakland security guard who was shot and killed in San Francisco last week. He was protecting a TV news crew covering a smash-and-grab theft in the area.
The Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), a trade association representing leading retailers, also took issue with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez‘s assertion.
“Respectfully, the Congresswoman has no idea what she is talking about. Both the data and stack of video evidence makes fairly clear that this is a growing problem in need of solutions,” Jason Brewer, RILA senior executive vice president of communications said in an email. “If she is not concerned with organized theft and increasingly violent attacks on retail employees, she should just say that.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview this week with The Washington Times that “a lot of these allegations of organized retail theft are not actually panning out.”
She continued: “I believe it’s a Walgreens in California cited it, but the data didn’t back it up.”
Well, let’s just contrast AOC’s statement with recent events in San Francisco.
Keep in mind, these are only from the last two weeks:
November 20th: Louis Vitton is hit, a gang of thieves steal $120,000 in merch.
November 28th: An Apple store is hit, a gang of thieves steal $20,000 in merch.
December 5th: Fifteen marijuana stores are hit for more than $5 million of product with 175 gunshots fired.
And even the journalists coving crime are not safe.
December 5th: a photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle was robbed at gunpoint.
And the death mentioned in the Washington Times article, Kevin Nishita was killed while protecting a CBS San Francisco news crew during a robbery…that broke out while the new crew was covering a previous robbery that had happened at the store.
There’s no hiding the fact that I’m not a fan of AOC, and The Squad’s blatant anti-Semitism is a large part of that opinion, given that my wife and daughter are ethnically Jewish.
However, I can certainly give credit where credit is due (like calling out your own party’s POTUS for not holding to campaign promises).
But it’s pretty hard for me to buy the party of “women and minorities” stuff when AOC and crew ignore such obvious suffering.
Apparently #StopAsianHate isn’t so much a thing when a security guard is killed by a mob…
…and #BlackLivesMatter isn’t inclusive enough to care about life or livelihood of Alphonso Blunt, a marijuana small business owner barely holding on after more than a dozen cases of vandalism and the recent robberies in San Francisco.
Blunt claims 50% of the stores that were hit won’t be able to re-open, many of them minority owned.
“'I was safer, and had more money, (selling) on the street, illegally,” he told the Daily Mail.
I try to stay away from absurdly extreme emotional statements and conspiracy theories when covering news for The Five…
…but if an American claiming it’s safer to be a drug dealer than to be a small business owner in San Francisco…
…well, maybe we’re not at “failed state” status as a nation, but the Bay area certainly is as a region.
[three]
A jr. college math professor in Nevada pushed back against his administration to keep high standards in the math department…and was nearly fired for it.
Professor Lars Jensen, a tenured math professor who has worked at Truckee for 22 years, had defended math standards when Nevada’s new curriculum changed to essentially allow remedial math courses to count as college credit, The College Fix reported. On October 1, Truckee initiated a formal hearing process to end Jensen’s tenure and fire him, citing two years’ worth of bad performance reviews. Jensen, however, told the outlet that the negative performance reviews are just cover for the school to fire him for objecting to the new curriculum.
“The reason I received the unsatisfactory evaluations, I believe, is in retaliation for having spoken up against President Hilgersom and other administrators’ management style,” Jensen told the Fix in mid-October. “In particular, I have spoken openly about how the college has lowered the standards of a college math course, as the college has transitioned its curriculum in the course to the co-requisite remediation model now sweeping the country.”
A five-person faculty termination board, however, recommended Jensen keep his job, a decision that was accepted by Truckee President Karin Hilgersom.
As a former college prof myself, I can tell you that there are several education philosophies that can be followed to guide a classroom.
But telling students they’re “ready for the workforce” by passing them…isn’t helping anyone.
In fact, it’s an abuse of power.
I’ve spent a good deal of my career working in tech, where “close enough” doesn’t work…quite literally. If a website or database is a little off on the code, it won’t work.
And if you’re the employee responsible for said project not working, you’re not going to be employed long.
Of course, we could always teach college students the skills to be employable…which is what colleges were, until 2015 or so.
Now they’re turning into feelings factories.
And the four year warm hug where the emotions of the students are protected at all costs just makes the cold of the post-graduation world sting that much more.
And the lies about reality often come with piles of student debt.
[four]
There’s an emerging trend of active duty military stealing explosives, often due to fear of political unrest.
The Marine Corps demolition specialist was worried — about America, and about the civil war he feared would follow the presidential election.
And so, block by block, he stole 13 pounds (6 kilograms) of C4 plastic explosives from the training ranges of Camp Lejeune.
“The riots, talk about seizing guns, I saw this country moving towards a scary unknown future,” the sergeant would later write, in a seven-page statement to military investigators. “I had one thing on my mind and one thing only, I am protecting my family and my constitutional rights.”
His crime might have gone undetected, but authorities caught a lucky break in 2018 as they investigated yet another theft from Lejeune, the massive base on coastal North Carolina. In that other case, explosives ended up in the hands of some high school kids.
These are not isolated cases. Hundreds — and possibly thousands — of armor-piercing grenades, hundreds of pounds of plastic explosives, as well as land mines and rockets have been stolen from or lost by the U.S. armed forces over the past decade, according to an ongoing Associated Press investigation into the military’s failure to secure all its weapons of war. Still more explosives were reported missing and later recovered.
Troops falsified records to cover up some thefts, and in other cases didn’t report explosives as missing, investigative files show. Sometimes, they failed to safeguard explosives in the first place.
The consequences can be deadly.
In August, an artillery shell exploded at a Mississippi recycling yard. Chris Smith had been taking a work break from the heat, drinking water and chewing tobacco. Suddenly he found himself cradling a co-worker who was bleeding profusely from his legs. The man died right there.
Like the Rittenhouse case…the cure is in the prevention.
Nobody would have died in Kenosha, WI is if Governor Tony Evers had sent in National Guard troops when the city first requested them…there wouldn’t have been a riot for Kyle Rittenhouse, Joseph Rosenmbaum and Anthony Huber to show up to.
An active duty Marine thinking 13 pounds of C4 was going to protect his family in a state of anarchy is…probably more crazy than a teenager taking a rifle to a riot, but both have the same root cause.
When society becomes unstable, people do dumb stuff.
That doesn’t make the dumb stuff not illegal, and doesn’t mean the active duty personnel who are stealing shouldn’t be punished to the full extent of the law.
Just that maybe we should consider trying to get back to an America where, crazy or not, our soldiers are not tempted to steal explosives to feel safe.
[five]
This December it’s beginning to look a lot like…
…Venezuala.
As life saving drugs start to run short at pharmacies due to supply chain issues.
The Federal Reserve reported Wednesday that many parts of the country were hit by supply chain disruptions and labor shortages in November.
While these problems have continued into December – with price increases reported to be widespread across the U.S. economy – empty shelves aren't the only issue for Americans.
Pharmacies are reportedly running out of important prescription medications, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shows there are about 111 drugs on backorder – including heart medications, antibiotics and cancer drugs.
If you or a loved one depends on a daily medication, it’s a good idea to see if you can get a three month supply, or possibly mail order delivery.
Until the next one,
-sth