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“GOING BEYOND THE HEADLINES” mentioning the Federal Reserve System was published in the in the House of Representatives section section on pages H3846-H3848 on March 18.
The Federal Reserve is the US's central bank, expanding many times during great financial uncertainty and panic. It has faced numerous criticisms since its creation in 1913, such as making the Great Depression worse and for lacking transparency and audits.
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GOING BEYOND THE HEADLINES
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Cherfilus-McCormick). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2021, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Grothman) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to comment a little bit on some of the issues that have been out there this week, issues that are important issues but about which, for whatever reason, I don't think the public has been adequately informed as to what is going on.
The first issue I would like to talk about concerns the bill yesterday regarding trade relations with Russia and an earlier bill with regard to oil exports from Russia, and that is an incredibly important provision in that bill that has not been discussed in the mainstream media, which is an amendment of something called the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.
Today, before that bill is signed, the U.S. President can sanction foreign leaders or, I guess, pretty much any foreign person, certainly any foreign elected official, if they violated any human rights, and the definition of human rights is fairly narrowly defined.
When we think of horrible foreign leaders, we think of murder. We think of kidnapping. We think of holding people without trial for excessive periods of time. And we think if somebody is going to be sanctioned, they should be responsible for those human rights abuses.
In this bill, we change the definition of human rights to be open-
ended, whatever the President thinks human rights are. Furthermore, we allow sanctioning of people who are indirectly responsible for violating human rights.
Already, the United States weighs in when countries try to preserve laws that were the laws of the United States not long ago, and I will say this with regard to two areas, the LGBTQ agenda and abortion.
Already, when you talk to people from Eastern Europe; the Caribbean; the Dominican Republic, in particular; Central and South America, people are mad because the United States throws around its substantial economic weight to fight the Christian beliefs of these countries.
Now, if these bills were signed to become law, if the Senate does not amend them, the President will have a new tool in his toolbox if he wants to force other countries to adopt the views of abortion and the views of LGBTQ that are the views, quite frankly, of the leftwing of the Democratic Party.
The President will be able to threaten the parliaments or, for all I know, lobbyists and demonstrators in foreign countries by saying: You can't get a visa to the United States because we don't like your stand on abortion. We don't like your stand on LGBTQ.
They can take assets in the United States. And we are told this was something that was threatened, at least the visa thing was threatened, with regard to elected officials in the Dominican Republic.
If you don't follow the U.S. party line, you are not going to get a visa to the United States. We are going to take your assets in the United States, take your bank accounts.
John Adams said that our Constitution was made for a moral and religious country. This is kind of going the opposite way.
We hold contempt with people, religious people, and say that we are going to weigh in with all the gifts we have been given, the financial gifts we have been given. We are going to weigh in as a country and say that we are going to use those assets to punish foreign leaders who had Christian beliefs that not so long ago were held by the vast majority of Americans.
I hope the press reports on this latest power grab of the President. I hope the public wakes up and makes sure that when these bills come back from the Senate--and that is to say, bills with regard to trade, bills with regard to oil--that they do not include this great, increased power of the President to punish, quite frankly, Christian countries.
I don't think that has been adequately addressed, and I think in most newspapers articles, it wasn't addressed at all.
Now, I will address something else. I am going to talk a little bit about inflation. A lot has been said about inflation recently, and a lot of it focuses on the price of gas, but there is high inflation everywhere.
I have a very large manufacturing district. I tour my manufacturers all the time. It is not unusual to find manufacturers whose costs for metals were up 400 or 500 percent well before there was an invasion of Ukraine.
Every manufacturer I talk to tells me that they expect big inflation in the next year. Again, that was before the invasion.
I want to draw your attention to the graph here of the M2 monetary supply, and you can look. We begin down around 1970, 1965, the amount year over year that the monetary supply goes up. It sometimes goes up 6 or 7 percent per year.
Those were in the bad old days of the 1970s and the inflation that kind of hit its peak during Jimmy Carter.
It kind of went up and down, and we went through a lot of years in which inflation was relatively low historically, 1 or 2 percent.
Then, you look in the last couple of years, and some of this was due to overspending on COVID. But, more recently, we also have the American Rescue Plan in which apparently financial literates felt the way to benefit the economy was to have the Federal Reserve print as much money as it can.
Now, look at this graph. Look at what an aberration we are in at this time where the money supply is going up year over year, over 35 percent.
I mean, you don't need to be a Ph.D. in economics to know what is going to happen. The cost of everything is going to go through the roof, oil being one of those things that is going to go through the roof, and the cost of food, the cost of any manufactured goods.
I talk to farmers in my district. The cost of fertilizer, the cost of any other chemicals--through the roof. They are going to have to pass that on.
Before you say that this inflation had anything to do with Ukraine, look at what the M2 money supply was like even before Ukraine.
This is such an aberration from anything else we have experienced in the United States, and it comes from people who have convinced themselves that you can spend unlimited on anything, and there is no cost to pay.
I hope that the press in this country gets ahold of a graph like this and gives it to the American people so they can see where we are and why the cost of everything is through the roof.
I really think the value of the dollar, not only in the last couple of months but over the next few years, is going to go downhill like nothing we have ever seen before.
I think since we switched to the Federal Reserve system in whatever it was, 1916, 1917, we are now in uncharted territory.
Some people say that we should never have paper money because Congress won't be able to risk destroying the value of the Nation's currency. Well, it hasn't happened until now, but wow.
As amazing as it is, as horrible as these numbers are, the majority party talks about still trying to pass the Build Back Better bill that will make this go up even more rapidly.
So, I beg the press corps to pay attention to the monetary supply and connect the dots as to why we have such inflation.
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Issues at the Southern Border
Mr. GROTHMAN. Now, there is another issue that is going on, and I think to a certain extent because of Ukraine it has been pushed into the background, but it is still a vitally important issue, and that is what is going on at the border. Just because Kamala Harris has been appointed the Border Patrol czar, and she does absolutely nothing as far as we can tell, and it doesn't mean we should stop talking about this huge tragedy.
In February, we had 165,000 encounters with the Border Patrol, up 63 percent over last year. There were about 72,000 people let into the country, and the figures aren't out there, but they can guess that ICE let in another 19,000 more. Of that amount, 9,000 were unaccompanied minors.
If an unaccompanied minor shows up at the southern border, we don't turn them back to their parents. They usually write an address on their T-shirt, and we send them off to their aunt or uncle, whoever, you know, it could be just a friend, whatever, and that is just par for the course. We pay to put the little child on the airplane, we pay to ship them somewhere; maybe not their parents, maybe just friends or whatever. If you want to talk about divided families or breaking up families, you look at the current system where every month 9,000 kids who are younger than age 18 are let in this country without their parents.
I had a staffer go down there because we had to work late last week, but I will be down there next week. And there were some other observations I made as far as what it is like on the border. Gangs play music on the Mexican side of the border as people march across. It is a festive atmosphere. Nobody even pretends that the United States cares about what is going on at their border.
The drug gangs make $3 billion a year, we believe, transporting people here. The charges are between $2,000 and $20,000 to come here because they run that border.
It is not in just our Vice President where we have a lack of leadership. The California Highway Patrol can't report illegals they find to ICE because of the, I would almost call it, treasonous behavior of one of our States. Increasingly, we are getting people coming here who not only do they not speak Spanish, they speak an indigenous language from southern Mexico or, more likely, from Central America. They are obviously very difficult to process, and you have to wonder about the wisdom of letting people in this country when nobody can speak their language.
We are getting people from Iran, Iraq, and Uzbekistan, which of course are breeding grounds for terrorism. These people are paying up to $20,000 a head to come into this country. Doesn't that concern anybody?
The hotels, the airlines in Mexico obviously know this is going on because people take airlines from, for example, Cancun to Mexicali. We know hotels south of the border are being used by illegal immigrants, but because it is becoming so common, it is built into the Mexican economy.
Obviously, when we do so little to prevent this illegal immigration, morale from the Border Patrol is low. How would you like it if you are taking a job--and recently they have even been shot at--taking a dangerous job like that and getting as little support from the executive branch as you can imagine?
Actually, I did notice in the recent appropriations bill that passed last week, we are putting a lot more money into monitoring the Border Patrol and making sure they are not mistreating people. It is not a big concern for us apparently when an illegal immigrant shoots at a Border Patrol agent, but we have to put millions of dollars more into the budget to make sure the Border Patrol is not breaking the law. No wonder the Border Patrol does not feel good about their situation right now.
I will give you another example of the brazenness of the illegals coming here. Right now, migrants aren't afraid to call 911 and get escorted with a ride to where they want to go, and we just taxi them in. If they are kind of wandering around, let's make a 911 call, and they show up. Nothing wrong with them, no healthcare problem, we just use our local emergency services as an escort service.
We still have a situation in which people don't have to be tested for COVID. Okay. But it is kind of strange that American citizens, say if you work for a hospital, are required to get a vaccine, and we don't even test you if you are trying to come in this country. What are the priorities here?
People coming in from what we call special-interest countries are going up, be it Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, countries like this.
So, in any event, I encourage the press, and that encourages the so-
called conservative press, or the balanced press, to report to America when we are having 80,000 or 90,000 people cross the border every month, report what type of people are coming here, report on the mass decrease in the number of deportations, as even people who have committed crimes are removed at a much lower rate than they were by Donald Trump. Because I do think if we look back at America 10 years from now and say, how did the policies of 2022 affect America, still the number one most damaging thing is that we ignored our border.
I will point out one more thing about ignoring the border. Right now, we do have a crisis in Ukraine. Hopefully, we are not going to have a similar crisis in Taiwan. I have felt all along that an effect of not enforcing our border is to tell foreign leaders who don't like us that we have kind of a wimpy, ineffective, incompetent government in charge right now.
Other normal countries do not let 90,000 to 100,000 people a month cross into their country, and leaders around the world look at that, and they, quite frankly, think that the current executive branch of this country is not a serious elected official, and they challenge somebody who is not a serious elected official.
There is no doubt in my mind that if we had been enforcing that border and taking a tougher stance in other places around the world, we wouldn't be in this mess in Ukraine like we are today.
Issues Surrounding COVID
Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, the next issue that I think has disappeared a little bit is with regard to COVID. We are now in a dip in new people getting COVID, but I think in the last week we are still around 5,000 people who died of COVID. I think the last four people I have known who have died of COVID really haven't had a lot else wrong with them, maybe nothing else wrong with them. I think there are a couple of things that have been underreported or not focused on.
I have railed for almost 2 years here now on vitamin D. There was a study out of Israel that was released fairly recently that said that if you were deficient in vitamin D--and in the study they say deficient being 20 nanograms per milligram, which is pretty deficient--that you would be 11 times more likely to die of COVID.
Now, given all the massive amount of ink--if they still use ink--and the massive amount of time that has been spent educating the public on how to avoid COVID or avoid dying from COVID, I would think a little bit more time would be spent by the public health establishment looking at the effects of vitamin D.
You are 11 times more likely to die if you are under 20 nanograms. What can we do about that? First of all, it ought to be publicized. Secondly, it should be par for the course that, particularly if you are older and you go in for a checkup, that your doctor gives you a vitamin D test. Right now, your reimbursement levels for that test may not be quite up for the cost.
We all know that the medical establishment in America today, particularly the hospitals, are obsessed with money. But people are dying out there. If you test somebody for vitamin D, and they are down around 15 or 17 nanograms, you can alert that person and perhaps save a life. There are all sorts of people walking around with insufficient vitamin D levels. They don't even know it. They don't know the importance of it.
I will also point out that they should especially point out the value of vitamin D to people of color. We know people of color are more likely to have low levels of vitamin D, and therefore the incompetence or the failure of the public health establishment not to educate people on vitamin D has disproportionately affected people of color.
They talk about people of color a lot in this institution, and I think a lot of times they talk about prejudice that is not there. But here you have something in which people are dying overwhelmingly, and for whatever reason, the public health establishment does not ring the alarm as far as how much darker skin increases the possibility that you are going to get serious COVID. So I beg the CDC and the public health establishment to focus a little bit more on vitamin D.
I will also point out that different doctors have different opinions as to how you should treat somebody for COVID, and I have no problem finding doctors who find that drugs like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine given early will save lives, and a lot of times those same doctors feel a drug called remdesivir is not effective.
Now, I don't think the subcommittee that we have had here has studied that enough. But with remdesivir, apparently the hospitals--and this is largely the drug companies getting the money--you are going to get billed out over $3,000 a day for the treatment, and the treatment for ivermectin is nominal.
I talk to doctors, smart doctors, doctors that are well published, who tell me that they could have saved tens of thousands, maybe over 100,000 lives if doctors could give the off-label drugs that were originally prescribed for another purpose, but the doctors aren't allowed to by the hospitals that they work for.
This is a potential scandal. I would think normally the press would be a little bit inquisitive when we say one drug is worth $3,200 a day and one drug is under $50 a day, and smart doctors feel the drug for
$50 a day or under $50 a day is more effective. But for whatever reason we don't talk about it. If something wrong is going on around here, the reason they are able to get away with things going on is because the press doesn't highlight it.
The reason why hospitals are not giving drugs that some doctors feel are more effective are directives from the NIH. And, again, I think drug companies have too much power in this town, but it is something that should be looked into by the media. It surprises me that some people still aren't aware of this.
Conflicts Between Russia and Ukraine
Mr. GROTHMAN. The final thing that we will focus on here a little bit is what is going on in Ukraine. I still feel that for whatever reason, and I have talked about it here, we have not done enough to discuss the Holodomor. The Holodomor was the starvation of 4 million Ukrainians in the early 1930s by the Communist government.
At the time, it was underreported in the United States because at that time, for reasons unknown to me--I wasn't around at the time, it is a mystery to me today--The New York Times is perceived to be the paper of record. And The New York Times, a guy by the name of Walter Duranty decided not to talk about the starvation. He decided to keep it secret. Probably because at the time the intellectuals, the type of people who work at the big newspapers, liked to look upon the left favorably, and because it was Communists who were starving people, it is not something they like to talk about.
I do not know how you can intelligently talk about the relationships between Ukraine and Russia without talking about the 4 million--and that is the lowest, by the way, other people talk about 15 million--
without talking about the 4 million Ukrainians who were starved to death by the Communist, Marxist government that ran the Soviet Union at that time.
I would again ask that our press run special features on the starvation that took place 90 years ago. First of all, when 4 million people are starved, it should be something every American school child knows about anyway; but secondly, when you look at the animosity of the Ukrainians toward the Russians, that certainly plays a big role. I have a sneaking suspicion the reason we don't talk about it is because it is one more embarrassment to the atheistic, totalitarian left that some powerful people in this country like to look up to. So again, I wish that the newspapers would cover the Holodomor, and I wish that the schools would cover it because no school child should be able to graduate from high school without knowing about this.
{time} 1145
And it is also important so they can be on the lookout for big government atheists, wherever they are. I think you also have to know about what the big government atheists did to understand why we fought in Korea, to see why we fought in Vietnam.
But America's school children, quite frankly, well older than school children, are blissfully ignorant of the Holodomor and what can happen if you let a bunch of atheistic big-government types take over the government.
The final thing that I am going to focus on here a little bit, I have before thanked President Biden for giving the State of the Union speech and not talking about racism. But I still think one of the problems we have with high crime in this country--and my district borders the city of Milwaukee. The city of Milwaukee, for the second time last year, had the highest murder rate they have ever had.
When I was a child, the city of Milwaukee was the safest of the 25 biggest cities in the country. But we have gone downhill. And I think a lot of that is the police have been beat up; they are called racists, and they are afraid to do their job. They are afraid of having a complaint filed against them. We still have a bill floating around Congress saying it should be easier to sue police. And, as a result, we do get these high murder rates.
In addition to the high murder rates, we have, together with our lax policy at the border, 100,000 people dying every year from drug overdoses. But, again, it was 45,000 7 years ago. That was high. And I think whether it is 45,000 or 100,000, people's eyes glaze over. If it was your child, if it was your sibling who died of a drug overdose, maybe your eyes wouldn't glaze over. But the media in this country, their eyes have glazed over, and we continue to let people die.
So, in conclusion, in any event, my final ask here is that President Biden, who has done what he can to fan the flames of saying police are racist, police are racist, I think it would do a lot toward making it easier to hire police around the country and easier to be an effective policeman if he would publicly apologize to the police of this country for his slandering them and his compatriots slandering them, and tell them what a good job they are doing.
So those are some of the issues that I hoped the press would pick up on.
In conclusion, I will make one more comment with regard to Ukraine. This is a disaster for Ukraine. It is just a horrible thing. We all feel so good about how brave they are; about the fight they have put up.
Eventually, that war has got to end, and I never feel, when I am dealing with members of this administration, or Congress, in general, quite frankly, that there is enough focus on ending the war.
There are newspaper reports saying that Israel might be getting involved in trying to negotiate an end. But the United States is still the most important powerful country in the world. And I wish the administration would take a little bit more time negotiating, trying to negotiate an end to that conflict.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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