SOME IDIOT PAID $9 MILLION TO “DINE” WITH WARREN BUFFETT? WHAT A MORON!

Warren Buffett© Vincent Tullo for WSJ

Warren Buffett is stepping out for his famed charity lunch again.

A mystery bidder paid just over $9 million to win an auction with the Oracle of Omaha, who last participated in the event in 2022.

DINE MAY MEAN MCDONALD’S ? after all this is with the world’s biggest cheapskate.

The winner will meet the Berkshire Hathaway chairman for lunch on June 24 in Omaha, Neb. They will be joined by Golden State Warriors point-guard Steph Curry and his wife, entrepreneur Ayesha Curry. The winning bidder can bring up to seven guests.

This year’s winning bid amount is a steep drop from the last time Buffett participated in the lunch in 2022, when an anonymous bidder paid a record $19 million. Buffett, 95, has helped raise more than $50 million for Glide, a treasured cause of his first wife, Susie Buffett, who died in 2004.

Winning bids for Buffett lunches

“At 92, I ran out of gas. The spirit remained eager but the flesh became progressively weaker,” Buffett said. “Both the money and the message remain important.”

The charity lunch has long been seen in the business world as a rare chance to spend time with the legendary investor, who retired as CEO of Berkshire in December.

ed Weschler, now a Berkshire investment manager, won the auction twice when he was a hedge-fund manager, paying more than $2 million each time. Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun is another previous winner. Sun said he gave crypto skeptic Buffett one bitcoin, as well as several Tron, the digital token of the blockchain he founded, during their meal in 2020.

Five bidders participated in this year’s auction on eBay, which opened at $50,000. Other items that were up for bidding include a $1 dollar bill signed by Buffett that sold for $9,100 and a signed Curry jersey that sold for $1,547.99.

The auction moved online in 2003, allowing Buffett fans around the world to participate. The winning price for the lunch has held above $1 million since 2008.

Proceeds from this year’s auction will be split between the charity Glide and the Currys’ Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation, which provides meals and reading resources to students in Oakland, Calif. Glide provides meals, healthcare and legal aid to homeless and other vulnerable individuals in San Francisco.

THE CUTE CAR DONATION SITE WE ALL HEARD IS REALLY FUNDING A JEWISH ORGANIZATION!

Judge Bars Kars4Kids From Broadcasting ‘Misleading’ Ads in California

The ads with a repetitive jingle encouraging people to donate cars do not disclose that most of the proceeds go to a Jewish organization in New Jersey, the judge ruled.

rs4Kids’s advertisements feature children singing a repetitive jingle with the organization’s phone number. Credit…Kars4Kids, via YouTube

By Michael Levenson

Kars4Kids, the charity known for its repetitive jingle that sticks like glue in a listener’s brain, must stop broadcasting its ads in California, a judge ruled.

Judge Gassia Apkarian of the Superior Court of California, in Orange County, found that Kars4Kids’s ads violated the state’s laws against false advertising and unfair competition.

For years, the charity has broadcast TV and radio ads featuring children singing a jingle with the organization’s phone number and urging listeners to “donate your car today.”

But evidence presented at a civil trial showed that “children, especially needy or underprivileged children,” were not the exclusive recipients of the proceeds of the donated cars, Judge Apkarian wrote in her decision on May 8.

Instead, Kars4Kids primarily funds a New Jersey-based Jewish organization, Oorah, which provides programs, including an adult matchmaking service, trips to Israel for teens and summer camps in New York, the judge wrote. The only program in California that Kars4Kids sponsored was a promotional giveaway of Kars4Kids-branded backpacks, she found.

Judge Apkarian said that Kars4Kids had 30 days to stop broadcasting its ads in California.

If Kars4Kids resumes advertising, she wrote, its ads must contain “an express, audible disclosure of its religious affiliation and the geographic location of its primary beneficiaries and the age of the beneficiaries, specifying whether they aim for children or families, or both.”

Kars4Kids, a nonprofit based in Lakewood, N.J., said it planned to seek a stay of the ruling and would seek to have it reversed on appeal.

“We believe this decision is deeply flawed, ignores the facts and misapplies the law,” the organization said in a statement. “It’s well known that we are a Jewish organization and our website makes it abundantly clear.”

Kars4Kids added that it helps “thousands of kids with youth development, mentoring and educational programs, including hundreds in the state of California, contrary to the judge’s complete mischaracterization of our work and of the testimony at trial.”

“Like many youth-serving organizations,” the statement said, “helping children often means engaging parents and families as well, and continuing support through young adulthood.”

The ruling was the result of a lawsuit filed by Bruce Puterbaugh, a California cabinetmaker in his 70s who had heard a Kars4Kids ad “over and over” on the radio and felt he had been misled by it after he donated a Volvo to the organization in 2021.

He testified that the ad led him to believe that Kars4Kids benefited “underprivileged kids” from around the country, including in California, the judge wrote. After donating the car, he learned from a neighbor that the proceeds would fund a Jewish organization based in the Northeast. Mr. Puterbaugh said he felt “taken advantage of.”

The judge admitted she had never heard the Kars4Kids ad until it was played in the courtroom, surprising one of Mr. Puterbaugh’s lawyer, Anthony G. Graham.

“Do you not have a television?” Mr. Graham asked, according to a trial transcript. Replied the judge: “Not the television I watch.”

But Judge Apkarian agreed that the ad was misleading, citing what she called “strikingly candid” testimony from the chief operating officer of Kars4Kids, Esti Landau.

According to the judge, Ms. Landau acknowledged that the 30-second ads, which have been running for two decades, do not “say anything” about the charity’s specific nature and do not mention the word Jewish, even though Kars4Kids is a Jewish organization.

Ms. Landau testified that Kars4Kids sends about $45 million a year, 60 percent of the money it raises, to Oorah, its sister organization, which operates out of the same office building in Lakewood, the judge said. Another 30 percent is spent on in-house advertising, and about 6 percent on administrative costs. Oorah has also spent money overseas, the judge wrote, including $16.5 million to buy a building in Israel.

Ms. Landau testified that while the children who benefit from the car donations come from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, Kars4Kids’s mission is to “help Jewish children and their families and provide them with the support they need throughout their life.”

Judge Apkarian found the ads violated California’s law against false advertising because they were “misleading by omission” and that Kars4Kids sought to make the jingle memorable through “extreme repetition, while simultaneously stripping it of all substantive facts.”

The ads also violated the state’s law against unfair competition, the judge wrote, because “the public is misled into believing donations aid underprivileged children in California, when in fact the funds primarily support a separate organization benefiting specific families in New York, New Jersey, and abroad based on religious affiliation.”

In addition to barring Kars4Kids from broadcasting the ads in California, the judge ordered the charity to pay Mr. Puterbaugh $250 for the fair-market value of the nonworking Volvo he had donated.

“This ruling reinforces a fundamental principle: charitable organizations cannot mislead the public to create one impression while concealing material facts from the donating public,” Neal Roberts, one of Mr. Puterbaugh’s lawyers, said in a statement. “Transparency and honesty matters, and donors have a right to know exactly who their contributions are benefiting.”

TRUMP’S CHINA TRIP A DUD? WE WILL SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!

U.S. President Donald Trump Departs China En Route To Washington© Getty Images

Many of the items handed out by Chinese officials to the American delegation were rounded up and dumped before they left the country on Air Force One.

US President Donald Trump is set to leave China after wrapping up critical talks with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on Friday.

Despite the apparent warm state visit, big differences remain between the world’s two biggest powers on key geopolitical issues like China and Iran. It comes after a mystery blonde joined Trump on his trip to China after Melania’s anguish.

Reports from the ground have revealed that before boarding Air Force One, staff from the American delegation took everything handed out by Chinese officials to the press pool and binned them.

According to New York Post’s Emily Goodin, this included “credentials, burner phones from WH staff, pins for delegation.”

She wrote on X: “Nothing from China allowed on the plane. We’re taking off shortly for America.”

The two-day visti saw Xi welcom Trump at his official residence, Zhongnanhai, for their final engagement of the summit before the US leader’s return to Washington.

The leaders took a short walk through the grounds that feature ancient trees and Chinese roses, and strolled through a covered passageway with green columns and archways painted with birds and traditional Chinese mountain scenes.

Over tea and lunch, Trump and Xi – with top aides and translators in tow – huddled for nearly three hours of talks before the US leader completed his three-day visit to China.

“It’s been really a great couple of days,” Trump told reporters.

CHINA-US-DIPLOMACY© AFP via Getty Images

Beijing has shown little public interest in US entreaties to get more involved in solving the conflict in Iran, even though Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity that Xi had, in their conversations, offered to help.

Xi, meanwhile, warned Trump during private talks that their differences on the self-ruled island of Taiwan, if handled poorly, could hurtle the world’s dominant powers toward “clashes and even conflicts,” according to Chinese government officials.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC News that U.S. policy toward Taiwan was “unchanged” and cautioned that it would be “a terrible mistake” for China to try to take Taiwan by force. He also framed Xi’s comments as standard practice.

“They always raise it on their side. We always make clear our position, and we move on to the other topics,” said Rubio, who was among senior aides to join Trump for the talks.

It comes after angry Trump told a reporter ‘you should be ashamed of yourself’ after an ‘act of treason’.

BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY POWER COMPANY HEADED BY GREG ABEL LOOKS LIKE A RISKY BET NOW

Berkshire Hathaway’s Power Bet is Starting to Look Riskier

Greg Abel has replaced Warren Buffett as the head of Berkshire Hathaway. The company’s annual meeting last week was the first one helmed by him. Mr Abel formerly headed Mid American Energy, a utility based in Des Moines, and then all of Berkshire Hathaway’s utility operations. When Mr Buffett spoke on issues of finance, investors listened attentively. Whether Mr Abel attracts the same reverential following remains to be seen. However, his views on electric utilities, based on his many years in the industry, are definitely worth reviewing. His comments can be divided into two parts, industry positives (high growth) and industry negatives (regulatory environment and related risks like wildfires).

AI and data centers are the main drivers of outsized demand for electricity right now. And this sudden demand is not evenly distributed. Berkshire owns utilities PacifCorp, NV Energy, and MidAmerican Energy along with gas pipeline and processing, and other unrelated assets. But Iowa, he pointed out, could see 50% demand growth in five years. He also emphasized his belief that new data center load should bear the full costs of its incremental demand on the system. These new costs should not be transferred to residential and commercial customers. (In the past, the cost of utility capital expenditures of this type were spread across all the ratepayers via the regulatory process.) And lastly Mr Abel touted the success of Mid American Energy, the company he formerly helmed, for both keeping up with accelerated demand growth and maintaining rates 45% below the US national average.

Having electricity rates roughly one-half that of the national average means that one’s service territory is blessed with either an abundance of hydroelectric power generating resources or a fleet of aging coal plants. In Mr Abel’s case, it is the latter. The MidAmerican fuel mix is 63% wind and 20+% coal plus a little gas, nuclear, and other resources. Needless to say, this aging coal fleet has drawn considerable scrutiny from environmental groups like the Sierra Club, who have advocated for expedited plant closures. The company’s position is that these plants will remain open until 2049, by which point the oldest facility in the present coal fleet will be 75 years old. For example, the George Neal South unit in Sioux City, Iowa was commissioned in 1975. The utility has one relatively new coal fired generating unit, commissioned in 2007, but apart from that, MidAmerican’s average coal unit entered service around 1980 which means that today these facilities are already about 45 years old. That is very old in power plant years.

Berkshire’s PacifiCorp unit is in a similar position with respect to coal fired power generation which comprises about 35% of its generation mix but is almost the exact same size as MidAmerican’s coal fleet. Only NV Energy of the Berkshire-owned US utilities has mostly completed the transition away from coal. We bring this up because it explains one reason why Mr Abel has stated his concerns regarding a potential degradation in his various regulatory environments.

We agree. If we owned over 9,000 megawatts of aging, polluting, politically unpopular coal-fired power generation in the US Midwest and Pacific Northwest, we’d have concerns about our regulatory environments too. And it gets worse. PacifiCorp has publicly stated that its litigation exposure from 2020 wildfires in California and Oregon could approach tens of billions of dollars. Berkshire has already paid over $500 million to settle various related lawsuits. Recently, the Oregon appeals court set aside the most financially damaging lower court ruling against the company, giving it some breathing room in this respect. Berkshire has been actively involved in getting state legislation passed that would limit its wildfire liability exposure. The Utah legislature passed a bill that management referred to as the “gold standard” with respect to liability mitigation. How many other states adopt this remains to be seen.

In his prepared remarks at the Berkshire annual meeting, Mr Abel reiterated that Berkshire might exit states that imposed arduous clean energy mandates. This is obviously no idle threat. In February of this year the company announced the sale of PacifiCorp’s Washington state assets to Portland General Electric for $1.9 billion, citing a desire to “improve our financial stability while simplifying our operations.” In this press release PacifiCorp’s CEO offered another reason for the impending asset sale: “Diverging policies among the six states PacifiCorp serves have created extraordinary pressure affecting the company’s ability to meet demand reliably and at the lowest cost to customers.” However, he did offer regulators a sort of olive branch, reaffirming his belief in the “regulatory compact”, where customers receive reliable service and pay a fair return on capital. He pointed out two things that stress this model, inflation (which is increasing) and other high cost requirements— like pollution controls on aging coal plants. All we can say here is that PacifiCorp serves about 2 million customers while Washington state accounts for less than 10% of the total. So PacifiCorp is selling a relatively tiny piece of the company. The bulk of the customers are in Oregon and Utah. Selling this asset looks to us more like an outreach effort with respect to the rating agencies, Moody’s and S&P, both of which downgraded PacifiCorp’s fixed income security ratings based on wildfire risk.

Now let’s try to put this in some kind of perspective. The three US utilities that Berkshire Hathaway Enterprises (BHE) owns have assets of about $90 billion out of BHE’s roughly $152 billion of total assets. That’s a sizable percentage. But BHE is, of course, only one part of the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate which listed assets of $1.25 trillion in its March 10Q. US electric utilities are only about 7% of Berkshire’s total assets. Financial commentators have been trying to find some way to differentiate Mr Abel from his legendary predecessor, Mr Buffett. We think this is asking the wrong question. The question for us is: are these the same utility businesses, with the same risk profiles, that were purchased by Mr Buffett more than two decades ago? Our answer is an emphatic no. The biggest risk we see relates to one of the oldest issues in the electric utility business—the huge cost differential between rural and urban utility customers. It’s much more expensive to serve low density rural customers. Always has been. And now those rural service areas also come with enormous, open ended wildfire liability risk. But what’s worse is that decentralized forms of power generation, like solar plus batteries, will now increasingly offer opportunities for rural customers to leave the grid while lowering their energy costs. If we were advising Mr Abel, we would tell him to keep selling.

WALMART AND COCA COLA ARE DIVIDEND KINGS, PAYING DIVIDENDS FOR OVER 50 YEARS, AND ARE BEATING THE MARKET THIS YEAR TOO…UNLIKE WARREN BUFFET, THE CHEAPSKATE OF THE YEAR, AND HIS BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY, INC. , FAILING TO PAY ANY DIVIDENDS FOR 60 YEARS!

Key Points

Walmart has embraced e-commerce, where it has an edge in its existing massive store base.
Coca-Cola has taken various steps to keep its drinks affordable for its global fan base amid inflation.

The S&P 500 has rebounded from earlier-year losses and is back to hitting new highs. Conventional wisdom is that growth stocks drive the market higher in good times, and safe stocks outperform when the going gets tough.

But that’s not always the case. Consider that despite the market’s rise this year, Walmart (NASDAQ: WMT) and Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) are both trouncing it right now. These stocks are Dividend Kings, meaning they have increased their dividends for at least the past 50 years. They offer tremendous value in their safety and dividends, and are demonstrating strength beyond that. Here’s why the market loves them.

^SPX© YCharts

Walmart

Walmart is a simple retailer, but that’s all you need to dominate as a business. It’s the largest physical retailer in the world, with more than 5,000 U.S. stores and nearly 11,000 global locations. It has stores within 10 miles of 90% of the U.S. population, and since it’s a discount essentials retailer, it’s resilient no matter what’s happening in the economy.

But it’s not stagnating and relying on an old model, either. One of the reasons it’s been gaining recent momentum is the growth explosion in its e-commerce business. While Walmart has only 9.2% of the market, in contrast with Amazon‘s 40.1%, it has gained market share over the past few years and is the second-largest e-commerce company in the country.

And though it may not catch up to Amazon, it has a structural edge over it in its physical store network. It’s using its stores as distribution hubs without having to invest in creating a national fulfillment network, and having a storefront gives customers more options in delivery and pickup.

Having a strong online presence also gives it exposure to more people who may not generally come into a Walmart store, such as more affluent consumers. Walmart can feature a much larger assortment of merchandise on its website, which could appeal to a broader socioeconomic range of customers, and higher-income shoppers have accounted for a major portion of the company’s recent growth. Walmart is also targeting these customers through new product lines. In the 2026 fourth quarter (ended Jan. 31), sales increased 5.6% year over year, and e-commerce was up 24%.

Walmart has raised its dividend for the past 53 years, and the market is prizing its consistency, reliability, and growing dividend right now.

Walmart associate.© Walmart

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is the largest all-beverage company in the world, and loyal fans continue to buy their favorite Coke-labeled drinks no matter what’s happening in the economy. That gives the company pricing power, and it has been able to successfully raise prices to counter increasing costs. It has also taken other actions to keep people buying, including changing product packaging and launching smaller sizes that are more affordable.

The company’s bottles and cans may seem ubiquitous to Americans, but management notes that it’s still a small presence globally. Although it has a major presence in developed regions, it holds only 14% of the global market share. It has an even wider opportunity in underdeveloped regions, where its market share is just 6%.

It also has opportunities in organic industry growth, new categories, and new brands. For example, it has a portfolio of about 200 brands right now, and although carbonated beverages like Coca-Cola and Sprite do a lot of the company’s heavy lifting, it also has brands in the dairy, juice, and tea categories that provide excellent growth springboards. Some of its more recent acquisitions include dairy brand Fairlife and sports drink brand BodyArmor.

Since Coca-Cola is dependable in times of pressure and pays a lucrative dividend, its stock tends to outperform in challenging times. But it has THAT AGING continued to outpace the market this year, even as the market rebounds, since it has reported very strong performance. In the first quarter, revenue increased 12% year over year.

Coca-Cola has raised its dividend for the past 64 years, giving it one of the longest track records on the market. It also yields 2.6% at the current price, providing shareholders with growing passive income at an attractive yield as well as the opportunity for price gains

SHAME ON THAT AGING CHEAPSKATE, WARREN BUFFETT, CHAIRMAN, WHO REFUSES TO SHARE THE WEALTH WITH THE STOCKHOLDERS OF BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY, INC., while receiving over $800 million in dividend payments annually from its Coca Cola stock position.

AMAZING TRANSFORMATION IN SWEDEN!!TO CAPITALIST SYSTEM!!!

The World’s Most Surprising Capitalist Makeover Is Under Way in Sweden

The shake-up of cradle-to-grave care is lowering government spending, spurring innovation and stirring fears about those left behind

Sweden—This paragon of collectivism is pivoting toward rugged individualism.

For decades, Sweden was shorthand for the brand of high-tax, high-spend government that managed people’s lives from cradle to grave through state-run hospitals, schools and care homes.

No longer. With little fanfare, this Nordic country of 11 million has embraced capitalism.

Today, nearly half of primary healthcare clinics are privately owned, many by private-equity firms. One in three public high schools is privately run, up from 20% in 2011. School operators are listed on the stock exchange.

Sweden’s experience has lessons—good and bad—for other rich countries, including the U.S., where New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is looking to emulate parts of the state-centric model such as universal child care and city-run stores.

The capitalist makeover has allowed Sweden to do what few industrialized countries have managed in recent years: shrink the size of the state. That has enabled the government to sharply lower taxes and, economists say, sparked a surge in entrepreneurship and economic growth.

Its total public social spending bill—which includes healthcare, education and all welfare payments—has fallen to 24% of gross domestic product, similar to the U.S. and well below the over 30% for nations like France and Italy.

Sweden’s economy is expected to grow by around 2% a year through 2030, roughly the same pace as the U.S. and double the growth rates of France and Germany, according to an April forecast by the International Monetary Fund.

“Sweden is a real land of opportunity,” said Elisabeth Svantesson, the country’s finance minister. “I want people and capital to stay here and grow.”

While many European countries are raising taxes, Svantesson has cut them three years in a row. Sweden’s top income-tax rate has fallen close to 50% from nearly 90% in the 1980s.

Considering the overall tax burden, “it’s more attractive here…than the U.S.,” said Conni Jonsson, the billionaire founder of EQT, a Stockholm-based private-equity firm.

Critics say the paring back has gone too far. Inequality is soaring in this traditionally egalitarian country. Gang violence has surged in dozens of immigrant-heavy suburbs, creating areas where local criminal networks challenge state authority and hinder policing. A public debate is raging over for-profit schools, which critics say make money by skimping on playgrounds, libraries and staff.

“The American perspective of Sweden is so far off from reality,” said Andreas Cervenka, a Swedish author who recently returned home after living in California. “We are going from a society which is like, ‘One for all, all for one,’ to ‘Everybody is on their own.’”

Spurring entrepreneurs

Sweden didn’t always have a big public sector. The country climbed from being one of the poorest to the third-richest country in Europe over 100 years through 1970 without high levels of taxation.

But starting in the 1960s, the center-left Social Democratic Party—which dominated the country’s postwar politics—sharply raised taxes and spending, ultimately taking government spending as high as 70% of GDP by the 1990s.

The changes triggered a long period of weak growth, stagnant after-tax incomes and ballooning budget deficits and debt that culminated in a banking crisis in the early ’90s.

Under pressure from investors, the government instituted sweeping economic reforms over the next two decades. They included cuts to unemployment benefits and housing subsidies and the privatization of public services, as well as tax cuts and a reform of the pension system to make it more affordable. Strict limits were imposed on government debt. (Sweden’s debt to GDP is a meager 36%, compared with 129% for the U.S.) In the mid-2000s, the government eliminated wealth and inheritance taxes.

The result: Wealthy entrepreneurs who had fled Sweden’s high taxes have been returning, said Jacob Wallenberg, a member of the Swedish industrial dynasty that owns big stakes in Ericsson, Saab and other large companies.

When Wallenberg was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, Swedes weren’t very wealthy, he said. The country, he noted, famously only had one Rolls-Royce car.

Today, international polling suggests Swedes are far more open to wealth than the French, Germans, Spanish or Italians, and more positive about the market economy than any European country except Poland. Sweden’s Rolls-Royce count is now over 800, and when the automaker decided to open its first showroom in Scandinavia in 2016, it chose Stockholm.

As the state retreated, the private sector expanded. A study published in April by the Stockholm School of Economics found that after Sweden removed inheritance and gift taxes in 2005, private firms with potential family successors grew faster, invested more and paid higher corporate taxes than firms without natural heirs.

Businesses championed new technologies in a bout of risk-taking with few equivalents in a region dominated by older industries and ambivalent about tech.

Niklas Zennström, the billionaire founder of internet-telecommunications pioneer Skype, said the privatizations helped fuel innovation in sectors like telecoms, which have underpinned the country’s tech boom. Zennström himself started his career building fiber-optic networks for a private telecom operator in the 1990s.

“Sweden was very early with mobile phones, with a high penetration of 3G and competition in mobile networks,” Zennström said. “There was a sense of entrepreneurship.”

The country saw more than 500 initial public offerings over the 10 years through 2024, more than Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain combined, according to a landmark 2024 report on Europe’s economy by former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi. It has now moved ahead of the U.S. in the number of billionaires per capita, thanks to a thriving tech startup scene and videogame industry that has produced hits like Minecraft and Candy Crush.

‘More for less’

At St. Göran’s hospital in downtown Stockholm, radiologist Karin Dembrower huddled over a computer screen, pointing to tiny light spots indicating cancer on a black-and-white image.

“We cannot see with our eyes that there is something going on here but somehow the AI is seeing” it, she said.

CHINA IS ROLLING-OVER USA AND THE EU..DANGER???

China expanding its industrial dominance, warns US business group

Chamber of Commerce says west is running out of time to sever its growing reliance on Chinese supply chain

China is rapidly expanding its capabilities in high-tech fields such as robotics © Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

The US Chamber of Commerce has warned that countries have only a “finite” window to respond to Chinese policies that are deepening reliance on its supply chains and harming the global economy.

The Washington-based lobby group said Beijing was “doubling down” on state intervention in manufacturing, services and frontier technologies.

It said China was ushering in a “new phase of global impact” marked by rising trade dependence and a rapid global expansion by its companies. It is also using tools such as export controls to entrench its position in global supply chains and counter foreign diversification strategies.

The warning came in the preface to a report on new Chinese industrial policies produced for the chamber by Rhodium Group, a consultancy. The chamber said the world had underestimated previous Chinese policies, including the Made in China 2025 programme to make the country more self-reliant in critical technologies.

“The challenge the world now faces is not the result of an intelligence gap . . . Reports were published. The warnings reached senior levels of government and industry across major economies. Yet in too many cases, the response was insufficient,” the chamber concluded.

The report comes as President Donald Trump prepares to visit Beijing this week for a two-day summit with his counterpart Xi Jinping. Immediately after the leaders met in South Korea in October, Treasury secretary Scott Bessent told the FT he had warned Europe and others that Chinese exports would flow elsewhere after the US erected a “tariff wall”.

Rhodium said China’s industrial policy was evolving from sectoral intervention to an “industrial policy of everything”. It said Beijing wanted to extend its dominance in industries such as critical minerals and magnets to a broader range of industrial products. Beijing was also putting more attention on services, it added.

The report said sustained government support and weak domestic demand had driven a rapid expansion of its goods trade surplus — doubling to $2tn since 2019 — in what some have dubbed “China Shock 2.0” as the country rapidly moves away from an economy based on low-cost manufacturing.

It said China was making significant gains in industries such as chemicals, machinery and industrial equipment, following earlier significant expansion of market share in industries such as electric vehicles and clean energy.

“Global reliance on Chinese supply chains is deepening across a growing number of critical products,” Rhodium said, adding that China was using regulation and economic coercion to reinforce control over key supply chains. “The window for effective policy response is narrowing,” it added.

Camille Boullenois, lead author of the report, told the FT that China’s evolving industrial policies posed a “real threat” to the economic engine of countries such as Germany and other advanced industrial economies.

“China’s rise is broadly eroding some of the last areas where they still have a technological and industrial edge, like chemicals, autos, machinery and robotics,” she said. “China is gaining market share incredibly fast in these sectors. If countries don’t react now, the industrial landscape could look very different in just a few years.”

The report noted that China’s most recent five-year plan had for the first time included a focus on advanced technologies such as biomanufacturing, nuclear fusion energy and brain-computer interfaces. This suggested that its industrial policy was evolving from focusing on strategic sectors to a “broader effort to reshape the entire industrial ecosystem”.

The trade surplus growth represented success moving up the production value chain and exporting high-tech goods but also its success substituting domestic products for imports.

Chinese companies are also becoming more reliant on revenues from sales outside China. It said the share of total revenue from overseas for the top 500 Chinese companies reached an average of 47 per cent by 2024, roughly equivalent to the figure for US groups.

Jörg Wuttke, former head of the European Chamber of Commerce in China, said the threat was particularly acute for manufacturing and export-focused economies such as Japan and South Korea. But he said Europe faced an economic juggernaut driven by overcapacity in China in addition to a strong euro versus the renminbi.

“The Chinese are always kind enough to tell us how they will roll over us, but we never want to hear it,” said Wuttke, partner at the DGA-Albright Stonebridge consultancy. “We cannot go on like this. If you are in the Eurozone you’re a dead duck.”

UNITED NATIONS IS A JUST A MONEY PIT AND AMERICAN TAXPAYERS ARE PAYING FOR THE WASTE!

Projects—and No One’s Watching

The federal government’s own watchdog has confirmed what the numbers have long made clear: the United Nations cannot be trusted to manage the money it receives, and the State Department has been complicit in letting it happen.

A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in April examined 11 U.N. capital projects worth more than $4 billion combined. It found a predictable mess: years-long delays and nine-figure cost overruns, coupled with contractor failures and unusable designs, and a State Department bureau with no formal system for monitoring any of it.

American taxpayers are left footing the bill, though. GAO confirmed the U.S. was the largest financial contributor to the U.N. in 2023. As of early 2026, the U.S. owed approximately $2.2 billion in unpaid dues, a figure the U.N. has been loudly publicizing while simultaneously running construction projects into the ground. An organization pleading poverty while mismanaging billions in active construction budgets is not a victim of underfunding. It’s a management failure dressed up as a cash crisis.

The United States Must Stop Supporting the United Nations

The single biggest disaster is the U.N.’s “Strategic Heritage Plan” in Geneva, a renovation now four years behind schedule and $91 million over its original $871.4 million budget. COVID, supply chain issues, contractor failures: GAO cites them all. So does every private construction firm that still manages to finish buildings. The U.N. has no competitive pressure and no consequences for failure, and it shows. The report, linked above, noted:

“Costs increased by 27 percent from the baseline because of the SHP’s schedule extensions.”

The project’s risk firm calculated that for every month of delay, the costs rise about $1 million.

It gets worse. The contractor on Building H, part of the same Geneva project, couldn’t manage its own subcontractors, finished two years late, and then left behind a defect list that kept growing long after “completion.”

“In December 2022, the list of minor defects that were not addressed included 10,588 issues that the SHP team had identified. By February 2024, the list had increased to 11,350 issues and included 412 on which there was disagreement with the contractor.”

Then there’s the International Telecommunication Union headquarters project. Member states approved architectural blueprints without anyone considering “cost and functionality.” Architects had “free rein,” billed for designs that were never buildable, and walked away. The GAO reported the U.N. burned through more than $20 million before scrapping the original plan entirely — not one wall built, not one foundation poured. In any organization accountable to someone, that would be a career-ending failure. Here, it barely registers.

The State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs had no formal guidance for monitoring any of it. No written indicators. No threshold for when to intervene. No chain of accountability. Staff rotated every few years and largely made it up as they went.

“State IO officials said they do not systematically monitor key indicators, such as budget and schedule, and do not have clear triggers, such as percentage over budget or time behind schedule, for when to take action.”

GAO recommended State develop formal oversight guidance. And State agreed, a basic step that somehow required a congressional audit to produce.

Now consider the timing. In January, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned all 196 member states of “imminent financial collapse” if the U.S. didn’t pay its dues, claiming the organization would run out of money by July. Pay up, or else.

What Guterres didn’t dwell on: his organization was four years behind schedule in Geneva, had torched $20 million on unusable designs, and let a defect list balloon past 11,000 unresolved issues. This is the same organization demanding to know why Washington is hesitating.

President Trump has already pulled the U.S. from several U.N. agencies. He should keep going. The GAO report makes the case without any editorializing: $4 billion in projects, years behind schedule, $20 million torched before a shovel hit dirt, and a State Department with no system to catch any of it. We need to stop paying, and start leaving them for good.

Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.

HOW RUDY MADE NEW YORK GREAT AGAIN!!!

When Rudy Giuliani Made New York Great Again

New York Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s recent brush with mortality reminds us how clearly his administration showed that people, not impersonal forces, make history— especially men of vision and courage like him. His mayoralty also offers today’s floundering New York the fundamental lesson that good government can make a city flourish, while bad government impairs it.

Reigning wisdom when Mr. Giuliani took office in 1994 was that the problem-ridden city was “ungovernable.” Crime had skyrocketed in the preceding decades, with murders doubling in the 1960s and doubling once more over the next two decades before reaching 2,154 in 1991—one every four hours, roughly. Dope dealers hustled on the street alongside pushy panhandlers and prostitutes. Derelicts slept alongside graffiti-smeared buildings. An epidemic of car break-ins led owners to post “No Radio” signs in their windows, and auto alarms blared indignantly at all hours. Businesses fled: The 116 major corporate headquarters in Gotham in 1971 had dwindled to 49 by 1995. Small-business owners buzzed customers in through locked doors and, at closing time, rolled down metal security gates, luring graffiti vandals.

Mr. Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, ignored the cliché that you could cut crime only by addressing so-called root causes, poverty and racism. He instinctively grasped the theory of social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling that stopping small crimes would prevent more serious crimes, just as replacing a broken window halts more window-breaking by showing that somebody watches and acts. He had seen this theory proven in the subways in the two years before his election, when Robert Kiley, head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, kept subway trains and stations hosed clean of graffiti and transit police chief William Bratton started arresting turnstile jumpers and graffiti vandals. Crime in the subways began to fall. When Mr. Giuliani entered City Hall, he named Mr. Bratton the city’s police commissioner.

With the mayor’s vocal support, Mr. Bratton put broken-windows policing to work, arresting “squeegee men” who smeared dirty rags across motorists’ windshields, holding them hostage for a “contribution.” Even minor crime, he showed, had no place in Mr. Giuliani’s New York—a lesson he amplified by arresting graffiti taggers and public urinators. Police stopped, questioned and frisked those suspected of carrying weapons or casing a business, dissuading the ill-intentioned from packing guns while reducing shootings. Mr. Bratton made computer maps of crime hot spots and concentrated cops where thugs operated. City Hall’s revolutionary idea was that cops should prevent crime, not solve it after it happened.

The results were spectacular. Murders fell 20% to 1,561 the first year and a further 58% to 649 in 2001, Mr. Giuliani’s last year in office. With newly safe streets and subways, New York roared back to life. As the mayor cleared sex and smut businesses out of Times Square, he enticed Disney to restore a stately vacant theater as that area’s anchor. A visionary private effort had turned Bryant Park from a dope dealers’ den into a green oasis, and that district now thronged with tourists and office workers.

Restaurants and theaters boomed. Old businesses grew, and new ones opened, including even a tech Silicon Alley. Columbia and New York University became hot schools once parents stopped fearing urban crime. With opportunity burgeoning and the city’s rich inheritance of museums, concert halls, and landmark buildings safe to use, property values skyrocketed. Global tycoons looked to city real estate as a glamorous safe haven for money. New development proliferated, and construction workers, service staff and luxury retailers all profited. New York became once more the capital of the world.

Policy can change culture, Mr. Giuliani showed. It wasn’t the legacy of slavery that had created the disproportionately black urban underclass, he understood, but the message of victimhood and helplessness sent by framing crime as an inevitable response to oppression and welfare as deserved reparations. Criminals, not society, were to blame for crime, and welfare recipients were also citizens with agency who were responsible for their own fates.

Seizing on the 1996 welfare reform act, the Giuliani administration started an ambitious workfare program. Welfare offices became “job centers” and set welfare recipients to painting park benches, raking leaves and cleaning courtrooms. Recipients learned discipline and gained self-respect. Many moved into conventional jobs and, as in the nation as a whole, caseloads dropped dramatically.

A remarkable dividend of the new approaches to crime and welfare, one with only anecdotal rather than social- science evidence, was a dramatic thaw in race relations, as fear and resentment abated. But it didn’t last.

Beginning with the De Blasio administration in 2014, the Giuliani reforms slipped away while Amazon and then Covid and Zoom sharply challenged New York’s economic model of retail stores and office towers. As it holds on to old economic engines and searches for new ones, the city urgently needs the culture of personal agency and public safety that Mr. Giuliani fostered.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani evidently believes that legacy businesses and institutions are inexhaustible wealth-generators that, even as lowtax states beckon, will enable him to cultivate the tax-eaters and punish the taxpayers. That will prove a costly and tragic mistake.

ILLEGAL ALIEN’S AND OTHERS FINALLY STARTING TO GET REMOVED FROM DRIVER ROLLS!

US States Have Revoked 28,000 Non-Domiciled CDLs

Nationally, FMCSA Says 194,000 Drivers Could Lose CDLs

“When state leaders failed to keep Americans on the road safe, we stepped in and held them accountable,” Duffy said. (Adam Gray/Bloomberg)

May 7, 2026 10:48 AM, EDT

More than 28,000 foreign truckers no longer deliver cargo in the U.S. after states revoked their non-domiciled commercial driver licenses due to stricter federal regulations expected to remove nearly 200,000 drivers from hauling freight.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy highlighted the revoked non-domiciled CDLs among a list of one-year accomplishments to support the trucking industry under the Trump administration.

“We’ve brought back common-sense rules of the road including requiring English-language proficiency and valid working documents for foreign drivers,” Duffy said May 1. “The Trump administration has hit major milestones in our efforts to rein in the trucking industry which has been allowed to operate like the Wild, Wild West for far too long.”

He recalled how the U.S. Department of Transportation spearheaded a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration audit last June of states issuing non-domiciled CDLs and commercial learner’s permits.

FMCSA Enforcement Actions Sent to Numerous States

Duffy’s announcement stated that 26 states received “official enforcement actions” from FMCSA.

Auditors determined that more than 30 states had issued illegal licenses and permits to foreign truckers.

FMCSA previously stated that more than 30 states “issued tens of thousands [of] non-domiciled CDLs contrary to federal regulations.”

These violations involved driving credentials issued to:

Drivers with noncompliant non-domiciled CDLs beyond a driver’s expiration date for lawful U.S. presence
Citizens of Mexico and Canada who aren’t entitled to non-domiciled licenses due to a reciprocal agreement enabling them to use their country-issued licenses
Lawful permanent U.S. residents who should have been issued regular CDLs instead of non-domiciled ones
Foreign truckers without evidence verifying legal U.S. residence under FMCSA regulations

Trucking Industry Expected to Lose 194,000 Foreign Drivers

Duffy’s announcement emphasized FMCSA’s final rule in February 2026 that took effect March 16 “to stop unqualified foreign drivers from obtaining a non-domiciled CDL. More than 28,000 illegally issued licenses have been successfully revoked nationwide.”

This statistic represents 14% of the 194,000 current non-domiciled CDL holders expected to “exit the freight market,” as predicted by FMCSA’s final rule.

The final rule stated that FMCSA recognizes there is a population of current non-domiciled CDL holders who will no longer meet new eligibility standards, as well as new drivers with a different immigration status who will be ineligible.

The narrower regulations governing state licensing of foreign truckers are expected to result in a much smaller national pool of 6,000 foreign truckers able to hold these non-domiciled driving credentials.

(THEPALMER/Getty Images)

FMCSA stated that “given the need for non-domiciled CLP and CDL holders to be vetted properly, this final rule limits individuals eligible for non-domiciled CLPs and CDLs to those maintaining lawful immigration status in these employment-based nonimmigrant categories: H-2A and H-2B nonimmigrant visas for foreign workers in agriculture or seasonal/peak-load non-agricultural roles, or E-2 investor visas.”

The revised FMCSA regulations now restrict eligibility to statuses subject to consular vetting and interagency screening of driver history records to close a significant safety gap, because such screening had been required for U.S. citizens but not for non-domiciled foreign truckers.

Under the previous regulations, states lacked access to either a driver’s historical record or concurrent driving record outside the United States. State driver license agencies also didn’t receive notifications of serious traffic violations that occurred in a foreign country during the validity of a non-domiciled CDL. The consular vetting process remedies those past deficiencies.

State Department procedures require consular officers to assess applicants’ driving history, experience and licensing eligibility when reviewing H-2A, H-2B and E-2 visas.

More Non-Domiciled Drivers Could Lose Licenses

More foreign truckers could lose their licenses if they live in a state “prohibited from issuing CLPs or CDLs because the state’s CDL program is decertified,” FMCSA’s final rule predicted.

Although states aren’t required to issue these driving credentials, most do. FMCSA’s enforcement actions after the audits require states to complete corrective actions or face withheld federal grants and possible prohibition from issuing non-domiciled CDLs and CLPs for prolonged noncompliance.

Both California and New York have found themselves one step closer to losing the ability to issue driving credentials to foreign truckers after FMCSA issued final noncompliance notices and permanently rescinded millions of dollars in federal funds as a first-step sanction.

Duffy’s recent announcement also contained a warning to noncompliant states.

“When state leaders failed to keep Americans on the road safe, we stepped in and held them accountable and we’re just getting started,” he declared.

North Dakota has resumed issuing non-domiciled CDLs after recently receiving FMCSA recertification.

Oregon and Nevada opted to permanently cease issuing their versions of non-domiciled CDLs and CLPs to foreign truckers.