With Regard to the Recent Insanity

Colin Gallagher

Oct. 4, 2024

I’ve been hesitant to publish recently, and have been busy with taking care of business locally, working in hardware and local supply-related issues, while outside of that assessing the potential for new executive clients for strategy and cryptocurrency consulting, and I’ve recently started up a new business in Monterey that required I obtain a California ammunition vendor license, so I’ve been working.   Back on Jan. 26, 2024, I commented and was published regarding the decline in local businesses across the State of California, and what I didn’t realize at the time was just how widespread the potential for decline in businesses could become beyond what I was clearly observing then.

Anyone rubbing neurons together can see that it’s not only the State of California – which is sort of a canary in a coal mine here – but also that there has been an acceleration of many other businesses either severely contracting or going through bankruptcy.  This is across the country, and it differs from what I observed earlier in the year in commenting on California, where business owners are either retiring, closing their business or moving their business out of California.

So what we see here is a trend where there are profound losses of various workers from parts of our industries, and various companies themselves from various sectors of the industry, and I’ll lay out a few examples here (these are just some of the largest bankruptcies in 2024, which are larger than 1 billion for both assets and liabilities):

– Red Lobster Management LLC

– Recession Proof Partners LLC

– American Tire Distributors, Inc.

– The Hercules Tire and Rubber Company

– Big Lots, Inc.

– Truck Components, Inc.

– Transportation Technologies Industries, Inc.

– Tupperware Brands

– Primecare Pharmacy LLC

And that little sample doesn’t even scratch the surface of the many companies that size either going through bankruptcy or those with much smaller assets and liabilities but which still employ plenty of people and/or have provided a long-term service that clients have come to rely upon.  True Value is going through bankruptcy (and recently having exited from it, but with impacts to the company), TGI Friday’s is going through bankruptcy, and tech businesses in California are either cutting down substantially or preparing to close.  Just a few of these in California in the wave of tech layoffs are Intel, Gigamon, Maxar Space, AppLovin, Upwork, Coursera, Kraken, Meta, Tesla, and numerous other tech firms either shedding substantial employees or taking further steps.  Over 47,800 jobs have been cut in the Bay Area alone since 2022.

Of course, it’s not only big companies with significant assets (and/or liabilities) that are going through this; it is also smaller ones as well.  In the first six months of 2024, 346 companies

filed to either liquidate or re-organize through bankruptcy – which is the highest half-year bankruptcy level since 201, according to data in S&P Global Market Intelligence.  Most of these are “consumer discretionary” (clothing, restaurants, car dealerships, and many more categories), and most are small or mid-sized.  This should give people pause because the issues with federal monetary policy leading to the pain of the continuing decrease of purchasing power of the dollar (from inflation and other factors), interest rates, lack of availability of lenders, and more, as well as onion layers of regulatory pain added to many who start a new business, create significant barriers to success.

Some of these companies, of course, have made the claim that this is just due to COVID aftereffects, and they are careful not to assign blame to anyone or any other particular thing. Yet the reasons businesses give when surveyed for either leaving the State of California or closing are clear.  In 2022, the Hoover Institution provided a report showing several hundred businesses leaving California and moving their headquarters to a different state between 2018 and 2022. High rent, high taxes, high costs of living for employees, and red tape were a few of the reasons. Further studies were done later on by the Hoover Institution, revealing that between January 2022 and June 2024, employment in US private business increased by about 7.32 million jobs. Of those jobs, about 5,400 were jobs created in California businesses — representing only about 0.07 percent of the U.S. figure.  This is ridiculously small, and while some businesses certainly are trying to recover from events of the past few years in California, such small new numbers of jobs can only be explained by the California  Legislature’s hostility toward business in the State.

Unfortunately, people now are facing the possibility of having someone who has been the Attorney General of California and a U.S. Senator for California entering the White House not as Vice President but as President, and if that were to be the case, Harris would be in a unique position to promote and enforce using executive power, as well as sign off on Congressional bills, all policies that are typical of and favored by California politicians, and thus would enforce those bad ideas across the country.

Some disturbing trends that we’ve seen recently from the Harris group are a reminder of what it was like when a Californian agency, at the request of Harris during her time as Attorney General, directly censored the speech of Californians online during and prior to 2017.  At that time, it took the action of the Eastern District Court in California to stop Harris and the unconstitutional actions of the State agency acting with her counsel.  The Eastern District Court ruled on Feb. 27, 2017, in Publius v. Boyer-Vine that “content-based laws — those that target speech based on its communicative content — are presumptively unconstitutional.”  This decision was never appealed by the State of California, probably because it was based on unanimous decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court which had decided that prior restraint against speech was unconstitutional.

Nonetheless, Harris and her team were dedicated to looking for ways they could suppress speech.

Some of the various ways that Harris and team are attacking free speech in America:

– Biden, Harris and team are directing the DOJ to attempt to  use German government laws to scare alternative social network users and managers into silence, by using legal threats that have no valid legal basis.

– Harris and team are falsifying support for their campaign by astroturfing, including but not limited to editing headlines and subheadlines of publicly available stories of interest not managed or owned by the campaign to directly promote the campaign, resulting in tens of thousands of illegal and fraudulent computer misinformation actions.  This also results in people reading ordinary news sites not meaningfully understanding whether or not something is real because of the depth of misinformation.

– Harris has been using both German and U.K. foreign organizations to attempt to circumvent U.S. law protecting free speech.  CCDH is a nonprofit organization established and mainly staffed in the U.K. that has promoted unconstitutional censorship on social media platforms for years.  In London, it shares an address with “Labour Together,” a U.K. Labour Party-associated think-tank that met with Harris’s campaign at the DNC in Chicago and has promoted unconstitutional censorship on social media platforms for years.  Currently, America First Legal (AFL) released new evidence that CCDH and its leader have engaged in coordinated efforts to censor Americans’ speech and are part of a foreign influence operation to interfere with U.S. elections, and AFL is thus challenging them in court.

– Harris’s allies in California continue to attack free speech.  These include California Governor Gavin Newsom (a likely aspirant to the next Presidential campaign) who just lost a court case where his legal losses in advancing several anti-speech laws were clearly displayed by the most recent decision of a federal court to again strike down his anti-speech law provisions.  Another example of Harris’s allies in California who continue to attack free speech and business, even nationwide, is Diane Boyer, Harris’s right hand woman for implementation of laws in the Uniform Law Commission in California.  Boyer was actually elected Vice President of the Uniform Law Commission in 2021 despite Boyer’s and Harris’s failure to achieve legal victory in their censorship case against California (as decided in the court case in Publius v. Boyer-Vine in 2017).

– Indeed, these free speech issues have also caused direct impacts on businesses as the Biden and Harris regime have used agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission to attempt to not only control what executive boards of companies say, but also have been opportunistically taking over companies that go public that are not prepared to resist the advances of a government that has decided it will insert its own agents onto the boards of private companies and issue fines against firms that resist.  Thankfully, in California, a State law that allowed that to happen was deemed unconstitutional, and there is a federal court case challenging the federal government to help overturn the current regime’s unconstitutional abuse of power which it is employing in certain cases to assume ownership of companies which the federal government does not agree or align with.

It’s assumed that by now you’ve voted or have already made up your mind about voting.  But if you are one of those people who still hasn’t voted, I hope that this will encourage you to at the very least, go to the booth and make a choice that will help get the United States going in a different direction, which is to say, one that isn’t going to rely on incumbents.  Let us not repeat Biden’s Brezhnev Doctrine again with Harris in the driver’s seat.

Colin Gallagher has experience in international development, working with corporate clientele, and has successfully developed bank licensing methodology and global business and regulatory strategy for one of the largest crypto-fiat exchanges by 24-hour volume in the world. He resides in Monterey, where he has been working in hardware, exploring the potential for new executive clients for future consulting, and has started a new ammunition vendor business. Tip post (Strike or via Lightning), or Call Colin.