When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Friday, August 16, 2019
DIRTY DEALS - SENATE PROBES BIDEN'S CHINESE BRIBES - BUT DIDN'T HILLARY AND ALL HER DEALS WITH RUSSIAN AND MUSLIMS DICTATORS GET AWAY WITH IT??? WHAT ABOUT FEINSTEIN'S LONG HISTORY OF DEALS FOR CHINA?
SENATOR DIANNE
FEINSTEIN: I got rich, really, rich, selling out my country as my husband/pimp
paid out bribes to other DEM POLS so they would keep their mouths closed about
our corruption!
IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional
ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules
Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the
ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been
beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics
experts.
*
“All
in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has
done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon
*
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and
Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with
third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by
its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER.com
Senate Finance Committee Probes Biden-Linked, Chinese Military-Boosting Tech Sale
3:44
The Senate Finance Committee is probing the Obama administration’s 2015 decision to approve the sale of a U.S. company with insight into “military applications” to the Chinese government and an investment firm run by former Vice President Joe Biden’s youngest son, Hunter Biden.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the committee’s chairman, sent a letter to the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Thursday requesting documents relating to the sale of Henniges, a Michigan-based automotive company, to Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) and Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). The latter was formed in 2013 by a merger between a subsidiary of the Bank of China and Rosemont Seneca, a firm started by Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry.
Since AVIC was a subsidiary of the Chinese government and Henniges, the producer of “dual-use” anti-vibration technology with military application, the deal required approval from the Obama administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The panel — made up of representatives from 16 different federal bodies, including the departments of State, Treasury, and Defense — is required to review any transaction that could lead to a foreign person gaining control of an American business.
In question is whether CIFUS was influenced by Obama administration officials, most notedly Joe Biden and John Kerry, who had an interest in seeing the deal move forward.
“The direct involvement of Mr. Hunter Biden and Mr. Heinz in the acquisition of Henniges by the Chinese government creates a potential conflict of interest,” Grassley wrote.
The senator noted in his letter that AVIC’s bid for Henniges should have immediately set off alarm bells in the Obama White House. In 2007, AVIC “reportedly involved in stealing sensitive data regarding the Joint Strike Fighter program,” which it later “reportedly incorporated … into China’s J-20 and J‑31 aircraft.”
Even more troubling, however, is that bid was facilitated at the same time China was staking out a more adversarial role in global affairs. At the time, Beijing was suspected of undermining U.S. cybersecurity by underwriting hackers stealing governmental data. There was also simmering tension over disputes in the South China Sea.
Despite the threat to national security, the $600 million deal was approved by CIFUS, with AVIC purchasing 51 percent of the company and BHR taking ownership of the other 49 percent. Upon purchase, an industry newsletter stated the deal was the “biggest Chinese investment into US automotive manufacturing assets to date.”
In his letter to Mnuchin, Grassley compared the deal to the Uranium One scandal, which arose when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved the sale of a Canadian mining company to Rosatom, the state-owned Russian nuclear energy conglomerate. It later emerged that both investors in the company and Russian energy officials had donated heavily to the Clinton Foundation.
“As with the Uranium One transaction, there is cause for concern that potential conflicts of interest could have influenced CFIUS’ approval of the Henniges transaction,” Grassley wrote. “Accordingly, Congress and the public must fully understand the decision-making process that led to the Henniges approval and the extent to which CFIUS fully considered the transaction’s national security risks.”
This is not the first time that Hunter Biden’s ties to China have caused grief for his father’s political career. As Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Hunter Biden signed the $1.5 billion deal creating BHR in 2013 only ten days after visiting China aboard Air Force Two with his father.
As China masses troops on border, Trump calls for end to Hong Kong “problem”
Following five days of protests by youth and workers that paralysed Hong Kong airport, US President Donald Trump reinforced his calls for the Chinese regime to bring the upheaval under control. With further mass demonstrations expected this weekend, Trump solidarised himself with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the “tough business” of dealing with social unrest.
“I know President Xi of China very well,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “He is a great leader who very much has the respect of his people. He is also a good man in a ‘tough business.’ I have ZERO doubt that if President Xi wants to quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem, he can do it. Personal meeting?”
Later, as Chinese paramilitary police paraded near the border, Trump urged Xi to “meet directly and personally with the protesters” to produce “a happy and enlightened ending to the Hong Kong problem.”
Chinese military forces massing across the border from Hong Kong [Credit: Global Times]
Trump’s comments are a further sign of the anxiety in the ruling class globally about the protest movement in Hong Kong and its potential to feed into similar discontent internationally over deepening social inequality and attacks on fundamental democratic rights.
In effect, while urging a “humane” solution—to avoid sparking even greater popular opposition in Hong Kong—Trump backed the police crackdown on protesters. Already, riot police have fired tear gas and rubber bullets at point-blank range, and arrested more than 700 protesters, including on serious charges of “riot” or breaching airport ordinances.
That brutality was on display in Hong Kong’s working-class Sham Shui neighbourhood on Wednesday. Police fired multiple rounds of tear gas to disperse protesters who shone lasers at a police station. Police armed with riot shields and batons marched through the neighbourhood, firing tear gas as they advanced.
The Beijing regime is conducting a show of force in the city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Aerial photographs of a sports stadium show hundreds of military vehicles inside. The state-run People’s Daily noted that the para-military People’s Armed Police was in charge of “handling riots, turmoil, seriously violent, criminal activities, terrorist attacks and other societal security incidents.”
Another state outlet, the Global Times, warned protesters: “If they do not pull back from the cliff and continue to push the situation further beyond the critical point, the power of the state may come to Hong Kong at any time.”
Even as the Trump administration pursues its trade and economic war against China, and accuses Beijing of “coercion” in the Asia-Pacific, the two regimes have come together against the entry of the working class into the protests, which has included significant strikes by Hong Kong workers.
In backing the regime, the US president is not acting alone. Worried commentary in corporate media outlets globally declared that by occupying the airport, the “young, angry and leaderless” participants in the 10-week-old protest movement had “gone too far.”
“Hong Kong movement that thrived without leaders veers out of control,” the Wall Street Journal declared. From Britain, the former colonial ruler of Hong Kong, a Financial Times editorial board statement warned that the behaviour of protesters was “increasingly out of control.”
While advising Beijing to avoid a military intervention that could inflame the opposition, the commentary echoed the propaganda of the Beijing government itself. The media accused protesters of unacceptable “violence,” singling out two incidents in which demonstrators captured suspected undercover police provocateurs. One reportedly turned out to be a Global Times journalist.
These incidents reflected the rising anger among the protesters, and the Hong Kong population more broadly, over escalating police violence. One young woman was partially blinded when a bean bag bullet was fired at her face. Police agents have infiltrated protests to cause provocations, aiding Beijing’s efforts to brand the demonstrators as “terrorists.”
The media establishment’s real concern was not “violence,” but what the Financial Times called the “material interests” at stake in Hong Kong. It said the ex-British colony remained a “crucial” hub of global capital, making Hong Kong the world’s fifth largest stock market.
The airport occupation directly threatened the financial oligarchs and underscored the potential power of the working class. The full impact emerged when the Airport Authority revealed on Wednesday that 979 flights had been cancelled since Friday.
The White House is clearly in intensive discussion with Beijing about how to suppress the movement and prevent it from spreading to China and elsewhere.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and China’s most senior foreign policy official, Yang Jiechi, a Politburo member, met in New York on Tuesday. State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said the two officials “had an extended exchange of views on US-China relations.”
Featuring marches of up to two million people, the Hong Kong protests first erupted on June 9, calling for the total withdrawal of a proposed law to facilitate extraditions to China.
Since then, the regime’s police crackdown has triggered four further “major demands,” voted for via social media platforms: an independent inquiry into the police brutality, retraction of the “riot” classification of the clashes on June 12, the immediate release and exoneration of all arrested demonstrators, and free elections with universal suffrage.
These democratic demands are driven also by the social crisis produced for young people and workers by the Hong Kong, Chinese and global financial elite, whose wealth has soared since the restoration of capitalism in China during the 1970s. As of last year, Hong Kong hosted 67 billionaires—the highest concentration per head of population in the world—while the rest of China had 476, second only to the US.
A report in the South China Morning Post warned: “[M]any young people in what is one of the world’s most densely populated and expensive cities are also infuriated by sky-high living costs and a feeling that a home of one’s own will never be more than a dream.”
Right-wing, anti-communist elements within the protest movement have attempted to whip up anti-Chinese chauvinism, blaming mainland Chinese for the social problems in Hong Kong.
Significantly, the New York Times this week prominently featured one such group—Hong Kong Indigenous—describing its leader Edward Leung as the “closest thing” that the protest movement has to a “guiding light.” Leung, currently in prison, and his group have incited physical attacks on “mainlanders” who shop in Hong Kong, accusing them of driving up prices.
The promotion of Hong Kong Indigenous is clearly aimed at dividing Hong Kong workers and youth from their counterparts throughout the rest of China who confront similar problems. The Chinese Communist Party long ago severed any links to genuine socialism and communism, and today rests on and represents the interests of a thin ultra-rich layer in China, including Hong Kong. The fight for democratic and social rights can only advance through unified struggle of the entire Chinese working class against the CCP regime in Beijing and its puppet administration in Hong Kong.
Eight Things to Know About the Biden Family’s Culture of Corruption
The family of former Vice President Joe Biden has earned millions of dollars since the start of his political career, often from dealings with heavy political overtones.
Biden, the frontrunner among 2020 Democrats, often touts his middle-class bonafides on the campaign trail. Although Biden did not become a multi-millionaire until he left the White House in 2017, the same cannot be said of his family. In fact, several members of the Biden clan became immensely wealthy over the span of the former vice president’s 40-year political career.
Breitbart News is providing an in-depth breakdown of a few instances in which Joe Biden’s political career and his family’s financial interests seemed to intersect.
1. Joe Biden’s younger brother, James Biden, secured generous bank loans.
In the wake of Joe Biden’s upset election to the U.S. Senate in 1972, his younger brother James was able to secure a series of generous bank loans to start a Delaware night club.
Although James Biden had no business experience and a net worth of less than $10,000 at the time, he was able to arrange more than $160,000 in start-up capital for the venture. When the nightclub proved to be unsuccessful, generating more than $500,000 of debt by 1975, James Biden and his business partners were thrown a life-line by a Pennsylvania bank that loaned him a further $300,000.
During the same time period James Biden was receiving the extensive lines of credit, Joe Biden was sitting on the Senate Banking Committee, which had purview over the financial sector. A specific jurisdiction of the committee was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which provides bailouts to banks if they should become over-leveraged.
2. Joe Biden’s top campaign contributor hired his youngest son Hunter right out of law school.
Shortly after Joe Biden was reelected to the U.S. Senate in 1996, his largest campaign contributor, the credit card issuer MBNA Corp., hired his son for an undisclosed role. The job raised eyebrows from good government groups because MBNA employees had just donated $63,000 to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign in what appeared to be a coordinatedmanner to sidestep federal campaign finance regulations.
Clouding the picture even further was that, at the time, Hunter Biden was a 26-year-old recent graduate of Yale Law School with no prior banking or business experience. Both father and son defended the job offer, claiming nothing improper had or would result because of the arrangement.
“Unfortunately, no matter where I went to work, some people would make an issue of it,” the younger Biden told the Delaware News Journal in November 1996 when the job was announced.
Despite his role being unknown at the time of his hiring, when Hunter Biden left the company in 1998 to join the Clinton-era Commerce Department it was as a senior vice president.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Joe Biden was championing bankruptcy reform legislation endorsed by financial interests and credit card companies like MBNA.
3. An MBNA executive purchased Biden’s house for the full asking price in a deal that appeared facilitated by the company.
A senior MBNA executive purchased Biden’s 10,000 square foot colonial mansion in the Wilmington, Delaware, suburbs for the asking price of $1.2 million in February 1996. The sale garnered notice because larger and newer homes in the vicinity sold for less. The issue became a minor campaign problem for Biden’s reelection but was quickly dismissed when the senator provided local media appraisal forms showing his home was worth the value for what it was sold.
“In comparison, it appears [the MBNA executive] simply paid Biden’s full asking price,” York wrote. “And, according to people familiar with the situation, the house needed quite a bit of work; contractors and their trucks descended on the house for months after the purchase.”
As York also noted, it appeared that MBNA may have played a role in facilitating the purchase. Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that “in 1996 MBNA reimbursed [the executive] $330,115 for expenses arising from the move.” Of that total, $210,000 “was to make up for a loss [the executive] suffered on the sale of his Maryland home.”
4. Hunter Biden remained on MBNA’s payroll while Joe Biden was writing bankruptcy reform legislation.
Throughout the early 2000s, Hunter Biden remained on MBNA’s payroll as a consultant while his father was writing and pushing the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. The arrangement, which did not become public until after the law was passed, started in 2001 after Hunter Biden had left his position in the Commerce Dept. MBNA was paid monthly consulting fees, with some claiming they ranged upwards of $100,000, to advise the company on online banking issues.
The 2005 bankruptcy tightened regulations to make it extremely more difficult to declare bankruptcy. It was heavily favored by MBNA and other giants in the banking and finance sectors. Many consumer protection advocates, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), have claimed the bill benefited special interests at the expense of consumers. Some have even suggested the law only served to hasten and aggravate the recession of the late 2000s.
As previously reported by the New York Times, Biden worked against many of his own fellow Democrats in Congress to ensure the final version of the bill was free of provisions opposed by companies like MBNA.
Biden “was one of five Democrats in March 2005 who voted against a proposal to require credit card companies to provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying only the minimum amount due each month,” the Times noted.
5. Joe Biden paid his family members with campaign cash.
During his failed 2008 presidential campaign, Joe Biden paid more than $2 million to his family members and their business. According to the Washington Times, the money went to a company that was a long-time employer of Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens. Biden also directed funds to a law firm started by his old campaign treasurer, which at the time also employed his youngest son Hunter.
6. James and Hunter Biden sought to monetize off Joe Biden’s political standing.
In 2006, close to when Joe Biden assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launched his second presidential campaign, James and Hunter Biden purchased a hedge fund called Paradigm Global Advisors. Although neither man had a strong background in finance, James and Hunter Biden reportedly believed they could leverage Joe Biden’s political connections to their benefits.
“Don’t worry about investors,” James Biden purportedly told Paradigm’s senior leadership upon taking over the fund, as reported by Politico. “We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”
Paradigm’s executives claim that James and Hunter Biden saw the hedge fund as a way to “take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money” to Joe Biden’s campaign account.
“We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” James Biden allegedly told Paradigm’s staff.
Hunter and James also tried to solicit labor unions to invest their pension funds in Paradigm by relying on Joe Biden’s long record of advocating in favor of collective bargaining.
The efforts proved to unsuccessful, though, with James and Hunter Biden choosing to strip and sell the company off by 2010 after a number of bad decisions, including partnering with a Ponzi scheme.
7. James Biden’s received a $1.5 billion contract to build houses in Iraq while Joe Biden was overseeing the region.
After his foray into the world of high finance ended disastrously, James Biden joinedHillstone International LLC as a vice president in 2010. The company, a subsidiary of Hill International, at the time, was pursuing technology and construction projects around the globe.
Although the company had been losing money for some time, James Biden’s arrival resulted in something of a reversal in fortune. Within six months of James Biden joining the firm, Hillstone was the recipient of $1.5 billion dollar contract to build 100,000 houses in war-torn Iraq. The deal, which was never finalized because outside funding failed to materialize, quickly caught attention as Joe Biden was overseeing the Obama administration’s policy in the region.
Both the Obama White House and Hillstone denied Joe Biden had anything to do with the deal, pointing to the fact the contract was awarded through a South Korean group working to build homes in Iraq. Despite the denials, Irvin Richter, the founder of Hill International, did admit James Biden may have had something to do with the deal.
“Listen, his name helps him get in the door, but it doesn’t help him get business,” Richter told Fox Business in 2012 when discussing James Biden. “People who have important names tend to get in the door easier but it doesn’t mean success. If he had the name Obama he would get in the door easier.”
Complicating matters was the fact James Biden was likely to get rich if the deal went through. Fox Business reported that a group of minority partners, which included James Biden, owned 49 percent of Hillstone. The other 51 percent was owned by the company’s parent group, Hill International. Given Hillstone’s profit breakdown structure, James Biden and the other minority partners would have been eligible to split more than $735 million after the deal was completed
8. Hunter Biden’s firm scored a $1.5 billion deal with the Bank of China only days after Joe Biden and his youngest son visited the country.
In a SiriusXM Breitbart News Tonight radio interview from last year, Schweizer explained how the Biden-China deal unfolded:
“In December of 2013, Vice President Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a visit to Beijing, China,” said Schweizer. “To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely criticized on that trip for going soft on China. So basically, no challenging them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.”
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