Thursday, September 26, 2019

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE TO OPEN ANTITRUST INVESTIGATION OF MARK ZUCKERBERG'S FASCIST EMPIRE OF FACEBOOK



Report: DOJ to Open Facebook Antitrust Investigation

The Associated Press
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
1:58

According to a recent report, the Justice Department is opening an antitrust investigation into the Masters of the Universe at Facebook.

Reuters reports that the DOJ will soon open an antitrust investigation of Facebook according to an individual with knowledge of the matter, making this the fourth probe of the social media giant. The FTC is also conducting a probe alongside a group of state attorneys general led by New York and the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.
Investigations into the Silicon Valley tech giants were first discussed in June as government regulators began to question if multiple tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google had violated antitrust laws.
FTC Chairman Joe Simons has expressed interest in the past in investigating how Silicon Valley companies have changed the competitive landscape. Simons said in a Georgetown University speech last September: “It makes sense for the antitrust authorities to look in places where there might be significant market power, to ensure that such firms compete on the merits — and that might include some of the significant high-tech platforms.” A week later he told a Senate antitrust subcommittee: “This is something that is a priority for us.”
Data from S&P Global showed that since 2003, Facebook has purchased 90 companies adding to worries that the firm is edging out competitors. The probe into Facebook by the state attorneys general announced earlier this month is being led by New York and includes Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and the District of Columbia.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com



Report: Instagram and Facebook Opioid Recovery Hashtags Filled with Drug Dealers

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Ludovic Marin/Getty
2:46

A recent report from BuzzFeed News reveals that while Facebook claims that it helps individuals with opioid addictions, hashtags on the Facebook-owned Instagram platform related to addictions are filled with drug dealers offering their services.

BuzzFeed News reports that recently, Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, discussed the firm’s ability to help people addicted to opioids with the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, stating: “We have seen social media be a tremendous place of support for those thinking of harming themselves or struggling with opioid addiction. We’re exploring and developing ways of linking people up with resources. We’re doing that for opiate addiction, for thoughts of self-harm, people asking or searching for hateful content. We do think this can be a positive thing for overall wellness.”
But as Bickert discussed Facebook and Instagram’s ability to do good, the platforms were at that moment being used to further spread opioids and other drugs across America. Buzzfeed News reports that hashtags on Instagram and Facebook related to opioids are now being used as advertising spaces for drug dealers.
BuzzFeed News reports:
Dozens of top posts under the #opioidcrisis and #opioidaddiction hashtags contained comments touting Oxycontin, Percocet, Codeine, and other prescription opioids — along with phone numbers and usernames for encrypted messaging accounts. A typical entry, under a video describing tens of thousands of deaths by drug overdose, offered “fast deals” on “Oxys, Roxy, Xans, Addy, codeine, perc…Available 24.7 for delivery.”
“We do not allow the sale of illegal drugs on Instagram,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote in a comment to BuzzFeed News. “It is against our policies to buy, sell or trade non-medical or pharmaceutical drugs on our platform — including in comments. Inappropriate comments can and should be reported, and will be reviewed like posts or stories.”
Social media’s role in boosting the American opioid crisis, and the way dealers have used Instagram to connect with buyers, have long been known. Last year, the Washington Post described the service as “a sizable open marketplace for advertising illegal drugs.” Instagram responded by cracking down on the drug-specific hashtags where many of these offers once lived.
BuzzFeed News reports that Eileen Carey, a former tech industry executive and activist who has recorded the drug sales on social media platforms for years approached Bickert after the hearing and showed her the comments on Facebook’s platforms advertising drugs. Carey said: “She thanked me for flagging,” but these drug dealing accounts and hashtags are still active on Facebook’s platforms.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com


Facebook Incites Violent War on ICE

How Silicon Valley aids and abets the Left's escalating hate.
 
Michelle Malkin

Abolish ICE thugs in Colorado want to see the homes and families of immigration enforcement officials set aflame.
Denver communists want alien detention facility employees dead, swinging from nooses with broken necks.
Both groups are brazenly using Facebook to spread their inflammatory and violent messages. So, where is Silicon Valley — whose top companies partner with the Southern Poverty Law Center smear machine to de-platform conservatives, pro-lifers and Donald Trump supporters — to stop the open borders left's escalating hate?
On Thursday, Sept. 19, Abolish ICE Denver and the Denver Communists are organizing a protest outside the house of Johnny Choate, the warden of the immigrant detention facility in Aurora, Colorado. Choate works for GEO Group, which operates the center. Instead of laying blame at the feet of global profiteers who induce illegal immigrants to risk their families' lives to trespass our borders, anti-ICE agitators are targeting homeland security employees and contractors who simply enforce federal immigration and detention laws passed by Congress.
The Denver Communists group shared a poster on Facebook with Choate's face superimposed over a generic neighborhood map with private residential homes. "CONFRONT LA MIGRA WHERE THEY LIVE," the radicals urged members. The graphic describes Choate as "warden of Aurora's notorious ICE concentration camp." That's the same inflammatory and defamatory language popularized by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and used by antifa militant Willem Van Spronsen, who attempted to firebomb the Tacoma ICE facility, also run by GEO Group, in July.
The protest announcement also includes the phrase, "Chinga La Migra!" It's the slogan of Mijente, a Latino activist group leading the Abolish ICE movement. Translation: "F—- the Border Patrol."
A commenter edited a distorted image of Choate's face surrounded by flames, suggesting arson. His post was liked by three other fans/followers/members of the Denver Communists' Facebook Group.
Another commenter leveled his own explicit thread on the Facebook page targeting Choate and his family in his home:
"Reenact human rights abuses, get hanged by the neck until dead. Simple."
As I report in my book "Open Borders Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction?" this virulent hatred for ICE and the Border Patrol traces its ideological lineage back to the cop-bashing domestic terrorism of the 1970s that festered in academia and resulted in bloodshed across the country at the hands of the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. Today's Abolish ICE extremists harbor the same seething "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon" contempt for immigration enforcement as the "progressive" cop-haters of the 1970s and their George Soros-subsidized heirs in the Bush-era A.N.S.W.E.R. and amnesty coalitions, Code Pink, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movement.
The underlying mission back then was the same as now: Destabilization, disruption and destruction of civil order.
David Booth, who lives in Choate's neighborhood, refuses to sit by while these bullies invade his community.
"I was shocked and surprised when I found out there was going to be an 'ICE protest' in my neighborhood," he told me Tuesday. Booth discovered that Abolish ICE Denver used Facebook to spread information on how they will be "going door to door in the neighborhood to let people know that a 'monster' lives among us."
Booth condemned the witch hunt headed his community's way: "This policy of intimidation that we see the left continue to use is not OK. ... I would like to see the neighborhood rise up and support this man and his family."
I reached out to Facebook for a response to these public safety concerns, but received no answer by my deadline. For Coloradans, violent threats to law enforcement officials' neighborhoods are especially disturbing given the chilling 2013 assassination of the head of the Colorado Department of Corrections outside his home in Monument.
Booth will stand publicly in defense of his community Thursday and says he has his neighbors' support. "I think most of us, if not all, believe this protest is inappropriate regardless of where we stand on the issue of immigration," said Booth. "Our neighbor is just doing his job, and has done nothing wrong, or illegal, in carrying out his duties."
Following Stand With ICE rallies in Aurora, Colorado, and Montgomery County, Maryland, that have drawn nearly 1,000 citizens over the past two weeks, Booth decided he could not sit on the sidelines. He is not alone, and we have only just begun. I will join Coloradans again on Saturday, Sept. 21, when another Abolish ICE group marches to the Aurora ICE facility where the American flag was torn down in July.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Michelle Malkin is a conservative blogger, political commentator, and author.



ALIPAC Activists! Please take the 3 activism steps below and be ready to receive an important press release from us shortly. (Meme to circulate at end)

Sen. Lee has vowed to bring his India & China green card giveaway bill S 386 back up for a vote in the US Senate before Sept 27 where it clearly has enough votes to pass at this time!

President Trump may be signaling he wants the bill on his desk by appearing with the Prime Minister of India in front of thousands of people from India in a Houston stadium yesterday! (View Video)

Step 1: Call & write Trump to tell him to "Oppose and veto S. 386 because you promised to lower immigration levels and protect American workers, not make things worse for American workers through bills like S 386!"

Call: 202-456-1111 / 202-456-1414

Write:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump
https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/


Step 2: Call as many GOP Senate offices in DC as you can, starting with the states closest to you.

Make it clear to staff and voice mail systems, "I'm calling today to fight for American jobs and American workers who do not need more imported workers from India and China being used by tech companies and banks to censor and oppress Americans like me! Tell Senator ___ to oppose and vote against S 386!"

US Senate Contact Info
https://contactsenators.com/


REMEMBER THAT ALIPAC's SUCCESSFUL STRATEGY IN THE PAST IS TO HAVE OUR ACTIVISTS MAKE THESE TARGETED CALLS WHILE RALLYING OTHERS TO HELP AND THEN FOLLOWING UP WITH A WRITTEN VERSION OF OUR MESSAGE!


Step 3: Help fund ALIPAC.us adequately so we can do our best in this fight this week! Our contributors are responding very slowly, and we don't know how much of that is blocking from Silicon Valley or reluctance to oppose some of the Trump administration's efforts to pass Amnesty and raise legal immigration levels.

If you are hearing us and you are willing to fight, we need you on the phones as volunteers and stepping up to sponsor our efforts at--
https://www.alipac.us/donations/

Please make the calls then circulate this meme and alert by email and on (FACEBOOK HERE) .. (GAB HERE) .. (TWITTER HERE) .. (ALIPAC HERE)

It’s Time To Rein In Big Tech
Before Facebook there was FaceMash.  Mark Zuckerberg founded FaceMash in his Harvard dorm room in 2003 and Facebook a year later. According to the Harvard Crimson, FaceMash used “photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine [Harvard] Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the “hotter” person. Having gone viral (at least by 2003 standards), the Harvard authorities stepped in, shut FaceMash down and charged Zuckerberg with breach of security, violating copyright, and violating individual privacy.  The charges were later dropped.
Mark Zuckerberg remains proud of his hacker roots to this day.
Even now, Facebook’s campus is located at One Hacker Way. Zuckerberg may not run from these hacker roots, but what of the data privacy and security charges Harvard levied against him? Well, it seems that not much has changed in this regard wither.  In November 2018, Facebook revealed that it had exposed photos belonging to 6.8 million consumers to third party app developers without permission. The next month, The New York Times revealed that Facebook had continued to share troves of personal information with some of the world’s largest corporations long after it had sworn to cut off access to the data. These are but two recent examples of Facebook’s difficult relationship with user privacy.
Facebook is not alone among its peer companies, but it is the poster child for Big Tech’s attitude toward privacy. Eric Schmidt of Google has displayed equal disdain for privacy in his public remarks, once famously boasting "We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about." Sit on that one for a minute.
Having taken a hands off approach for years, there is a growing consensus among lawmakers that Big Tech must be reined in. But how? Most lawmakers now recognize that the nation’s privacy laws need to be modernized.  Efforts are currently underway in the Senate Commerce Committee to craft legislation that would create a ‘one-size-fits-all’ federal privacy standard for businesses, large and small.  
Beyond privacy, a smaller group of lawmakers is calling for the break-up of internet platforms under the antitrust laws. Last week, a precedent setting 48 states announced an investigation into Google and the week before a smaller group announced an investigation into Facebook. These investigations will take time, years even, and it may be challenging to build a case against Big Tech under current antitrust case law, but it’s a start.
Although these ongoing privacy and antitrust efforts are on separate tracks, there is a way to think about them in a joined up way.  The logic goes something like this: a one-size-fits-all or most to privacy is fine in theory but perhaps not in reality. The real world harm that lawmakers are seeking to address in privacy legislation is not the whole economy but rather a few dominant internet platforms and data brokers for whom data is not just important to the business model, it IS the business model. Not every website is Facebook.  In fact, most websites just want to collect information so they can help customers complete a transaction or provide a service. Facebook does not want to deliver a product.  For Facebook and other dominant internet platforms consumers ARE the product. Privacy legislation should reflect this reality.
When looked at this way, the number of companies that could be deemed ’privacy systemic actors’ are actually quite few in number. In fact, we can count them on the fingers of one hand. The EU already does and refers to them as “the GAFA.” Rather than over-regulate the whole economy, a better approach for lawmakers is to ask what can be done with these systemic actors that, like the banks before them, are too big to fail and present a risk to society? Privacy legislation is one path. Antitrust is another. However, there might be a third way that appeals to conservatives. A targeted approach that merges privacy and antitrust without doing regulatory harm to the whole economy would be optimal. This approach would bifurcate privacy legislation for systemic actors versus privacy legislation for everyone else. Rather than a regulatory sledge hammer, it would use a scalpel.
Think about it: Unlike most websites, Big Tech systemic actors engage in day-to-day surveillance in order to amass personal data using our cell phones, our in-home smart devices, and our search history. Privacy legislation could be crafted to reflect this reality by defining this data or these methods of collection to be particularly risky. Similarly, legislation could give law enforcers heightened powers to police Big Tech by structuring enforcement fines and penalties as a percentage of revenues a company makes from privacy invasive services. To counter Big Tech’s tendency to overshare user data with third parties like Cambridge Analytica, legislation could make the platform responsible, as the original data collector, for the third parties’ privacy compliance. These are just some of the ways in which lawmakers could take a bifurcated approach to privacy using a scalpel and not a sledge hammer to go after the real harm to society caused by systemic actors and not Mom and Pop websites.
Before the summer break, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on ‘Understanding the Digital Advertising Ecosystem and the Impact of Data Privacy and Competition Policy.” At the hearing, senators grappled with both privacy and antitrust and how to apply both policy frameworks to Big Tech. The hearing laid a solid foundation for bifurcated privacy legislation along the lines discussed above. Work remains to be done, but legislation that reflects legitimate antitrust concerns as well as the privacy concerns regarding Big Tech may just be the path forward.
The outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs to foreign countries is a business model that has been used by multinational corporations with little to no government repercussions. Corporations like AT&THarley-DavidsonRalph LaurenNikeVerizon, and IBM have all laid off Americans in order to send their jobs overseas to countries like China, India, and the Phillippines.










GOP Sen. Mike Lee Promises to Pass Green Card Giveaway to Indian Workers by Sept. 27

In this Feb. 22, 2018, file photo, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, speaks on the Senate Floor at the Utah state Capitol in Salt Lake City. President Donald Trump's list of candidates for the Supreme Court, posted on White House website in November 2017 includes Lee. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)
AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File
10:22

Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee will try again to pass his S.386 bill, which grants green cards to India’s college graduates if they take jobs from American graduates.

“I believe it’s ready for prime time,” Mike Lee said in a June 19 statement on the Senate floor, adding:
It is ready to become law … I intend to be back next week making yet another attempt to pass this bill into law. And I hope and expect that we will be able to do so.
Leon Fresco, a Democrat lawyer working with Lee to pass the bill, also declared the bill will pass the Senate:
All objections will be solved, this is an iterative process. Senator Lee his staff are doing a tremendous job working to address the objections of every single member. #GreenCardEquality will not be stopped now. Equality of opportunity is a priority for all 100 senators.
Fresco helped Sen. Chuck Schumer write the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill that nearly passed — and which would have provided investors with a flood of cheap labor for at least 20 years.
Lee’s promise came just after Georgia Sen. David Perdue blocked Lee’s request for the Senate’s “Unanimous consent” approval of his S.386 bill. The bill would allow up to 140,000 Indian workers and family members to get valuable green cards each year in exchange for them working in U.S. college jobs for several years.
Perdue’s block came after Lee negotiated a deal with Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who earlier blocked Lee’s bill in late July.
Opponents of Lee’s bill praised Perdue:


Lee’s chance of a Senate win next week is uncertain, despite enormous, behind-the-scenes support from Silicon Valley investors and business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, Amazon, Facebook, and FWD.us.
His radical, pro-outsourcing push has created a series of grassroots groups of technology professionals who are worried their careers will be outsourced to India. The new groups have been organizing to oppose the investors’ efforts to export millions of college graduates’ jobs. These groups include the American Workers CoalitionProtect US WorkersProgressives for Immigration Reform, and U.S. Tech Workers.


Long-standing reform groups, such as Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, also campaigned against the green card bill.


Perdue may decline Lee’s compromise offers, and other senators may step up to defend their voters, donors, and regional economies. For example, Lee’s bill has also triggered concerns among businesses which rely on trade and migration from South America.
“In Florida, we have a lot of aircraft engineers, workers in the hospitality industry as well as workers involved with importing and exporting and luxury goods,” Tammy Fox-Isicoff, a board member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Miami Herald. She continued:
Our workforce applicants predominantly come from Latin America and Europe. Miami is an international hub to Latin America. Because of this, employers tend to seek employees from Latin America … This [Lee bill] is a cheap fix, not the right fix … If it goes through, no one in Florida, except Indian nationals, will get residence through employment for the next decade or more. This will kill Florida, basically end all future Hispanic employment immigration to the U.S.
Also, Lee’s bill is being opposed by specialty groups — including lawyers who work with immigrant athletesvideo-game players, or chain-migration family migrants, and also by Chinese immigrants.


But the bill’s damage to the other population groups is a good thing, said Cyrus Mehta, an immigration lawyer in New York who supports Lee’s bill.
By putting Indians first in line, and so forcing other groups to wait many years for green cards, it would increase political pressure on Congress to further expand immigration numbers, he argued in a tweet after Perdue blocked the bill:
Not a perfect bill, but was a rare bipartisan effort to incrementally reforming the EB [employer green card] system, eliminating invidious discrimination [against Indians] and a down payment for further improvement once others besides Indians also experienced some waiting.
Lee’s bill is a huge giveaway to the U.S. investors who are investing in the huge U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy. That little-recognized economy is aided by the Indian government and is built on 800,000 Indian visa-worker college-graduates. The Indian graduates in the United States take U.S. jobs and also funnel millions of other jobs to at least two million Indians in India.
The Indian outsourcing economy is valued at almost $80 billion a year, and Lee’s bill would grow that economy by allowing investors to import more Indians graduates. The extra Indian graduates would take more jobs from citizens in computing, design, healthcare, management, and recruitment careers — and then be paid by Sen. Lee’s extra green cards.
U.S. graduates say Indian managers in the United States force them out of jobs, force down their salaries, and impose Indian-style workplace norms, such as favoritism for Indians from higher-status castes or particular regions of India.

.@LouDobbs Thank you for your support. I worked it the tech industry for 30 years, it shifted from an American dominated industry to an Indian dominated industry in America. Discrimination of Americans, by Indians if favor of other Indians is SOP, intel turns blind eye. https://twitter.com/AmWorkCo/status/1174878911207022592 




But Lee ignored those basic questions when he argued that Americans do not have the right to exclude groups of people because of concerns about their collective identity, for example, as being citizens of India. Lee argued:
Few ideas are more central to who we are as Americans than the notion that people should be judged and treated by their government based on their own merits, as individuals. As individuals with inherent God-given rights, and not on the basis of the color of their skin, or of the country in which they were born. As our founders wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
Lee sought to shame his critics, saying opposition to the immigration of people because of their national affiliations is “gross, unfair, difficult to justify or defend … [and] the fact is, I have yet to meet anyone in this body or in the House of Representatives who can defend this flawed policy on its merits because it makes no sense.”
Yet Lee argued that immigration is intended to benefit the nation’s CEOs, investors, and company owners, but not ordinary citizens,” saying “he employment-based visa system is supposed to enable American businesses to bring the best and the brightest to this country.”
Lee waved away concerns about the impact of cheap imported labor on wages, on the ability of heartland communities to attract investment from coastal investors, on communities’ lost payroll caused by H-1B workers, and about the growing wealth disparity between high-immigration coasts and low-immigration heartland. Lee said:
We need to recognize that we cannot necessarily solve all of our problems at once … We cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the excellent. That’s why I’ve come here to seek unanimous consent to pass this legislation today.
He promised to push his bill through the Senate next week:
I’m hopeful, and I’m optimistic that my colleague who raised an objection today can be persuaded that this bill needs to be passed. We can address these concerns and that we can resolve them. I’ll be working with my distinguished friend and colleague from Georgia throughout this weekend, trying to find a solution. Some explanation. Or, if necessary, language that can win his support. We’re very, very close on what we believe is appropriate and acceptable …
I believe it’s ready for prime time it’s ready to become law. But when seeking unanimity on a measure in order to pass it, one must do everything one can do in order to seek actual unanimity. And that is what I intend to do in the coming days. I intend to be back next week, making yet another attempt to pass this bill into law. And I hope and expect that we will be able to do so.
Lee’s office declined to answer questions from Breitbart News. However, Lee’s press secretary, Conn Carroll, said that Lee’s bill includes some measure to promote disclosure the hiring H-1B workers.
Congress has created a series of visa-worker programs so expanding companies do not have to “poach” Americans away from rival employers companies with promises of higher wages. The welfare programs for CEOs and investors now allow roughly 1.4 million foreign college graduates to work in U.S. jobs — including 800,000 H-1B workers — as well as at least 400,000 blue-collar workers.


🚨🚨 CALL @sendavidperdue at (404)865-0087

"My name is __ I'm a resident of state of Georgia. Pls BLOCK S.386 as its NOT a merit based immigration bill & will ONLY benefit India & it's outsourcing companies who consumes >90% share of H1B Visa to bring in cheap labor.
This fight is not over! Lobbyist & sold-out Sen.Mike Lee is working hard with Sen.Perdue to convince him & reintroduce for unanimous consent! FIGHT FOR AMERICA! Call your senators and expose this disastrous S386 bill!




Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or a university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of about 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers. The government also prints more than one million work permits for new foreigners, and rarely punishes companies for employing illegal migrants.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth and stock values for investors. The stimulus happens because the extra labor ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
The federal policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts wealth from young employees toward older investors. It also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes young Americans away from high-tech careers, and it sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with drug addictions.
The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal citiesexplodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbiashrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
But President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy is boosting wages by capping immigration within a growing economy. The Census Bureau said September 10 that men who work full-time and year-round got an average earnings increase of 3.4 percent in 2018, pushing their median salaries up to $55,291. Women gained 3.3 percent in wages, to bring their median wages to $45,097 for full time, year-round work.
But white-collar wages are growing slower than blue-collar wages, partly because of Indian outsourcing.

The Senate votes today on a stealth bill to reward many more Indian graduates if they take jobs from American grads. But the US grads who populate the estb media are ignoring the economic outsourcing threat to their friends, peers, and kids. Not Breitbart: http://bit.ly/2krRqOU 













EconomyImmigrationPoliticsDavid PerdueH-1BimmigrationIndiaMigrantmigrationMike LeeOPTOutsourcingvisa worker



The outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs to foreign countries is a business model that has been used by multinational corporations with little to no government repercussions. Corporations like AT&THarley-DavidsonRalph LaurenNikeVerizon, and IBM have all laid off Americans in order to send their jobs overseas to countries like China, India, and the Phillippines.












D.C. Rally: Tea Party Patriots Warn Against Growing Socialism in America

Volume 90%
9:00

Several hundred Tea Party activists gathered Thursday morning on the steps of the Capitol for a “Stop Socialism, Chose Freedom” rally hosted by the Tea Party Patriots and featuring members of the House and Senate and conservative activists, who called on fellow Americans to reject the resurgent socialism among the left.

Speakers pointed to positions of the 2020 Democrat presidential candidates, arguing that they have been skewing further left to meet the demands of progressives on everything from wealth distribution, gun control, health care, and abortion.
One rally-going donned a “Don’t Tread on Me” cape. (Credit: Matt Perdie / Breitbart News)
Alek Skarlatos, who was one of three Americans who stopped an attempted terrorist attack while in France, implored attendees to stand up for liberty.
“I think that socialism is leading us in the absolutely wrong direction for this country. I think that everyone in this country has a right to defend themselves. And I mean, I carry a gun on me everyday,” said Skarlatos, who served in the Army National Guard and is now running for Congress in Oregon’s 4th Congressional District.
“This next election is going to be incredibly important, to take a stand against socialism simply because the Democrats have gotten increasingly more socialist. Even if you just look at the presidential candidates, you have Beto O’Rourke saying, ‘We’re going to come take your AR-15s, your AK-47s.’ That’s something that not even Democrats — just going back to last cycle — would never admit publicly. Now we know what their true agenda is,” he said.
“It’s all about personal liberty, and not using our taxpayer dollars to pay for other people’s lives,” he argued.
Rally-goers gathered on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Credit: Matt Perdie / Breitbart News)
Oskar Arreaza Hernandez, who fled socialist Venezuela and has been in the United States for five years, urged everyone to look at Venezuela for an example of how socialism can ruin a country.
“How can the richest country in South America become the poorest in South America?” he asked. “There is only one word: Socialism.”
Morgan Zegars, founder of Young Americans Against Socialism, spoke about the spread of socialism among young Americans.
“My generation was raised on participation trophies. So we lack those values of hard work. We went through the education system where we weren’t really taught about the dangers of socialism and communism,” she said.
“It’s official. There are polls that will say that a majority of young Americans, my generation, would choose socialism over capitalism. It’s official. So we’ve got to do something about it,” she said.
“Politicians are training my generation to accept the idea of wealth distribution by saying, ‘You have a lot of debt, these evil rich people, the one percent, the millionaires and billionaires,’ as Bernie likes to say, they have all the money and we’re going to give it to you because you deserve it, you just have to give us power,” she added.
Some rally-goers brought signs in support of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. (Credit: Matt Perdie / Breitbart News)
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) was among members of the House Freedom Caucus to address the crowd.
“Free enterprise says you have the right to decide what you’re going to do with your God given talents, and you have the right, with the money that you’re able to earn, to determine how you are going to best take care of your family,” he said.
He warned that socialists were trying to take away Americans’ power by allowing non-citizens voting rights.
“Socialism is an anathema to freedom and liberty. It is an anathema to free enterprise. And it guarantees one thing — that’s economic failure and poverty,” he said.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), another member of the House Freedom Caucus, spoke at the rally. “You see all the Democratic nominees for president running right now. They want to take from you, to redistribute wealth, we should never stand for that.”
Reps. Jody Hice (R-GA) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX) also addressed the crowd.
Several hundred rally-goers attended the event to show their support. (Credit: Matt Perdie / Breitbart News)
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), noted that although the Tea Party movement does not get as much attention as it once did, it “remains strong.”
“The spirit of the Constitution lives on in our hearts. It’s made a difference in who we elect. And for many of us it makes a big difference — all the difference — in how we vote,” he said.
“Socialism, my friends, is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution. It doesn’t belong on U.S. soil, let’s keep it out,” he added.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) delivered an impassioned rebuke of Democrat candidates’ economic plans, which he said would raise taxes for Americans.
“You see them embracing positions as they gallop to the left, further and further and further left, every one of them is saying we’re going to raise your taxes. Every one of them is saying we are going to triple the price of gas at the gas pump,” he said.
“Every one of them is supporting open borders. And not only that, they’re saying we got to provide free taxpayer health care for every illegal alien in America,” he said. “You want to know what those Democrats are all about, they’re all about socialism.”
Cruz, whose father was born in Cuba, urged Americans to look at how socialism worked in other countries:
Look at Venezuela. Look at Cuba. Look at Nicaragua. Did you know that in 1950 Venezuela was the fourth wealthiest country on the face of the earth? … Today people are literally starving in the streets, they’re eating from trashcans. And what are the people’s nationalist Democrats who are running now say, ‘Let’s bring more of that here.’
Conservative host and author Mark Levin also spoke to the crowd. (Credit: Matt Perdie / Breitbart News)
“The greatest enemy poverty has ever seen in the history of humanity is the American free enterprise system,” he added.
Jennifer Zeng, who escaped socialist China and is a member of the Falun Gong, a group persecuted in China, shared a gripping story of being arrested four times in China, imprisoned in a labor camp, and tortured.
She said labor camp prisoners were forced to squat outside in the hot sun with their hands behind their head. If any fainted, they would be prodded with an electric rod so they would regain consciousness and continue squatting, she said. She said they were also forced into slave labor for products that would be exported, including to the U.S.
“I never wanted to live in any sort of socialism again. But here in the U.S. I’m starting to feel that it has followed me…the majority of young Americans are attracted by it,” she said, adding:
The [Chinese Communist Party] controls everything…it can make all the rules, it can take away people’s liberty, property, and dignity, and persecute them at will,” she said. “Socialists promise heaven on earth but always end up giving you a one-way ticket to hell.”
Mark Levin, a popular conservative personality and author, fired up the crowd towards the end of the rally.
“We are here today because we believe in one word. Liberty. Socialism is the opposite of liberty. Under socialism you surrender your heart, your soul, and your mind to Elizabeth Warren, to Bernie Sanders, and Corey Booker, and the rest of them,” he said. He continued:
When I hear them pushing their leftwing progressive agenda…telling us this country was founded in slavery, they’re very confused, they must be talking about Red China, they must be talking about the Red Soviet Union and Russia, they must be talking about modern day Iran and North Korea. Look around you, this is liberty. You’re free to move. Mobility! You’re free to speak! You’re free to start your own press enterprise! You are free people! In the vast majority of the world, people are not free, they’re starving, they don’t have a roof over their head. They have nothing and not one damn one of those countries is capitalist.
That’s what the framers of the Constitution gave us — life, liberty, happiness and prosperity, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to swap Elizabeth Warren for James Madison, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to swap Bernie Sanders for George Washington, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to swap any one of them for any of our founders and framers of the Constitution.
Levin also blasted the mainstream media, arguing that they are doing more harm to a free press than the government could ever do.
“We don’t have a free press. We have a modern mass media filled with progressives and ideologues and Democrats and social activists who have done more to destroy freedom of the press more than any government to do,” he said.
“We, average Americans, we live better than any human beings lived on the planet before,” he said. “This election is a choice between … capitalism and socialism. It’s a choice between liberty and tyranny.”
“This can be lost. And in most societies it is lost. … that is left to us,” he warned. “We are here to tell the press and the Congress that we are not going anywhere.”
He finished with a message to President Trump: “Stand strong, keep in the fight, we back you. Because you stand between us and them.”
Rally-goers also showed their support for President Trump. (Credit: Matt Perdie / Breitbart News)



"The Democrats’ role in creating the framework for dictatorship reflects the fact that they, like Trump’s Republicans, express the social interests of the financial oligarchy and the affluent upper middle class, both of which look with horror at the growing movement of the working class."











Washington invokes "domestic terrorism" to justify police state rule

Behind the backs of the population, a bipartisan group of US lawmakers, military leaders and intelligence agents are engaged in a secret operation to endow the executive branch with dictatorial powers to suppress social opposition in the United States.
On July 27, Donald Trump offered a glimpse of this movement within the state apparatus, tweeting, “Consideration is being given to declaring ANTIFA … a major Organization of Terror (along with MS-13 & others). Would make it easier for police to do their job!” On August 17, Trump repeated the same threat.
Trump has seized upon the actions identified with ANTIFA, a loose amalgam that includes middle class protesters and, no doubt, police provocateurs, in order to label any form of left-wing opposition to fascism “terrorism,” a hallmark of police-state dictatorships from Hitler’s Third Reich to Pinochet’s Chile.
A US Army Bradley Fighting Vehicle waits to be driven into place in front of the Lincoln Memorial for President Donald Trump's 'Salute to America' Fourth of July event. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Trump is not merely expressing a personal opinion. In the face of growing strikes and protests and mounting social unrest internationally, the American ruling class is acknowledging that maintaining the flow of corporate profits and defending unprecedented levels of social inequality against the opposition of the broad masses of people requires dictatorial forms of rule. Under conditions in which three US billionaires control as much wealth as half the US population, even the worn-out forms of democratic rule have become untenable.
Trump increasingly legislates by “national emergency,” deploying troops on US soil, diverting Pentagon funds to build a border wall, threatening to end due process and constructing a network of concentration camps presently filled with desperate asylum seekers.
The next steps—including for martial law, mass arrests of left-wing dissidents, and shutting off the Internet—are being developed out of the public view.
For example, Brennan Center co-director Elizabeth Goitein wrote in theAtlantic in February that the military-intelligence agencies now interpret a section of the 1934 Communications Act as granting the executive branch the power to “seize control of US internet traffic, impeding access to certain websites” as well as to shut down the internet, block the delivery of email and manipulate smart speakers like Amazon Alexa upon the president’s proclamation “that there exists a state or threat of war involving the United States.”
The government is also developing plans to abolish the Constitution and carry out mass arrests.
Since 2012, Congress has granted the Justice Department’s requests for funds to update secret executive directives called Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADS) used to plan “continuity of government” operations in case of national emergencies including mass social unrest, strikes and protests.
Perhaps the most well-known PEAD was the directive that authorized Lt. Col. Oliver North and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to establish a contingency plan authorizing “suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis,” as The Miami Herald reported in its 1987 exposure of the program, known as “Rex 84.”
Goitein notes that such plans are far from dormant:
“A 2007 Department of Homeland Security report lists ‘martial law’ and ‘curfew declarations’ as ‘critical tasks’ that local, state, and federal government should be able to perform in emergencies. In 2008, government sources told a reporter for Radar magazine that a version of the Security Index [the mass arrest list of the mid 20th century] still existed under the code name Main Core, allowing for the apprehension and detention of Americans tagged as security threats.”
Trump’s July 27 and August 17 tweets to label Antifa a “major terrorist organization” are an expression of these police state plans, which can only be implemented through massive censorship and the silencing of dissent. These plans lie behind the international imperialist campaign to imprison and vilify WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, both of whom remain locked up for the “crime” of exposing such crimes to the world.
These plans are bipartisan.
Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff recently introduced the “Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terrorism Act.” This bill, which has a high chance of passage, would allow the Attorney General to prosecute people or groups as “domestic terrorists” if they engage in or conspire to engage in activity that seeks to “influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” if that activity impacts “interstate or foreign commerce,” which by nature any workers’ strike would do. The “conspiracy” clause will facilitate the prosecution of individuals based on political opinion alone.
The Democrats and the Democratic-linked press present this initiative as aimed against right-wing mass shooters. But because shootings, bombings and other acts of terrorist violence are already illegal in every state, the only purpose for the proposed law is to criminalize free association with those who will be listed as “domestic terrorists,” as well as to apply anti-foreign terrorist laws like the PATRIOT Act against US citizens engaged in First Amendment-protected speech and activity. This is directed ultimately against the working class.
As law professor and former Justice Department attorney Robert Chesney enthusiastically explains, a domestic terrorism statute would allow the government to compile “a list of proscribed organization to which it becomes a crime to provide, knowingly, any form of support (including becoming a person subject to the group’s orders).”
In addition, if “domestic terrorism” is made a legal category, then Sections 1021 and 1022 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) may give the executive branch the power to arrest and indefinitely detain without charge or trial anyone labeled a “suspected terrorist” based on “extreme” political views.
The introduction of the war on terror into domestic law has more than legal significance. For nearly two decades, US imperialism has used the most brutal and criminal methods against the international working class in a desperate bid to maintain the hegemonic position it enjoyed in the post-war period.
To this end, the US has killed millions in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere. Under the pretext of fighting “terrorism,” the US has fought to control the world’s geopolitical chokepoints and natural resources. But these wars have solved nothing. They have engendered massive opposition at home and have only metastasized the historical crisis confronting American imperialism.
Now, methods of equal or greater ruthlessness and criminality are being planned within the US itself, both in an attempt to maximize the level of exploitation of the working class and to terrorize the population into submission, ensuring the ruling oligarchy’s monopoly of political power.
Congressional Democrats have been key participants in creating the powers Trump is now wielding, voting overwhelmingly for the PATRIOT act, supporting the Obama administration’s assertion of the right to kill American citizens without trial, and now, acquiescing to even the most flagrantly dictatorial actions by the would-be tyrant in the White House.
The Democrats’ role in creating the framework for dictatorship reflects the fact that they, like Trump’s Republicans, express the social interests of the financial oligarchy and the affluent upper middle class, both of which look with horror at the growing movement of the working class.
The threat of dictatorship in the US is part of an international process. Across the world, governments are creating the legal and physical framework for mass repression.
But these conspiratorial cabals of financiers, generals and spooks will not be able to implement their plans for dictatorship without arousing the profound social opposition of billions of workers and young people worldwide. That opposition must be politically mobilized in a conscious struggle to tear control of society out of the hands of the capitalist class, dismantle the military-intelligence agencies and reorganize the world’s productive forces on an egalitarian socialist basis.


The judge found these releases, together with the publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she pledged to be their representative, were “matters of the highest public concern.” They “allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election.”


“Clinton also failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after his presidential tenure to make themselves multimillionaires, in part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street bankers.”
Democrats Move Towards ‘Oligarchical Socialism,’ Says Forecaster Joel Kotkin
Associated Press
 4 Sep 2018299

Left-wing progressives are embracing a political alliance with Silicon Valley oligarchs who would trap Americans in a cramped future without hope of upward mobility for themselves or their children, says a left-wing political analyst in California.

Under the headline “America is moving toward an oligarchical socialism,” Joel Kotkin writes:
Historically, liberals advocated helping the middle class achieve greater independence, notably by owning houses and starting companies. But the tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on Wall Street — have a far less egalitarian vision. Greg Fehrenstein, who interviewed 147 digital company founders, says most believe that “an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ’gig work‘ and government aid.”
Numerous oligarchs — Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, founder of the Y Combinator — have embraced this vision including a “guaranteed wage,” usually $500 or a $1,000 monthly. Our new economic overlords are not typical anti-tax billionaires in the traditional mode; they see government spending as a means of keeping the populist pitchforks away. This may be the only politically sustainable way to expand “the gig economy,” which grew to 7 million workers this year, 26 percent above the year before.
Handouts, including housing subsidies, could guarantee for the next generation a future not of owned houses, but rented small, modest apartments. Unable to grow into property-owning adults, they will subsist while playing with their phones, video games and virtual reality in what Google calls “immersive computing.”
This plan, however, is being challenged by the return of populism and nationalism when President Donald Trump defeated the GOP’s corporatist candidates and the progressives’ candidate in 2016. In his 2017 inauguration, Trump declared:
For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.
That all changes starting right here and right now because this moment is your moment, it belongs to you …
What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.
For several years, Kotkin has been dissecting the Democrats’ shift from working-class politics toward a tacit alliance with the billionaires in the new information-technology industries that are centralizing wealth and power through the United States. In 2013, for example, he argued that California’s politics were increasingly “feudal“:
As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates, the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.
At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.
Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one recent report. Nor are things expected to get better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey, most Californians expect their incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.
Read Kotkin’s “oligarchal socialism” article here.



“Protecting citizens from industrial capitalism’s giant corporations? Where were the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight as the mortgage bubble blew up in 2008, nearly taking the whole financial system with it and producing the worst economic bust since the Great Depression, which even today has sunk the labor-force participation rate and hiked the suicide rate among working-class men and women to record levels?”

“By contrast, many voters give Barack Obama no such credit for his analogous response to the Great Recession.”

“Mexican criminals really have infiltrated the country and really have killed Americans, inevitably, under the administration’s anything-goes immigration stance.”

WHY ARE VOTERS SO FUCKING MAD?

CITY JOURNAL

MYRON MAGNET


Haunting this year’s presidential contest is the sense that the U.S. government no longer belongs to the people and no longer represents them. And this uneasy feeling is not misplaced. It reflects the real state of affairs.
We have lost the government we learned about in civics class, with its democratic election of representatives to do the voters’ will in framing laws, which the president vows to execute faithfully, unless the Supreme Court rules them unconstitutional. That small government of limited powers that the Founders designed, hedged with checks and balances, hasn’t operated for a century. All its parts still have their old names and appear to be carrying out their old functions. But in fact, a new kind of government has grown up inside the old structure, like those parasites hatched in another organism that grow by eating up their host from within, until the adult creature bursts out of the host’s carcass. This transformation is not an evolution but a usurpation.
What has now largely displaced the Founders’ government is what’s called the Administrative State—a transformation premeditated by its main architect, Woodrow Wilson. The thin-skinned, self-righteous college-professor president, who thought himself enlightened far beyond the citizenry, dismissed the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights as so much outmoded “nonsense,” and he rejected the Founders’ clunky constitutional machinery as obsolete. (See “It’s Not Your Founding Fathers’ Republic Any More,” Summer 2014.) What a modern country needed, he said, was a “living constitution” that would keep pace with the fast-changing times by continual, Darwinian adaptation, as he called it, effected by federal courts acting as a permanent constitutional convention.
Modernity, Wilson thought, demanded efficient government by independent, nonpartisan, benevolent, hyper-educated experts, applying the latest scientific, economic, and sociological knowledge to industrial capitalism’s unprecedented problems, too complex for self-governing free citizens to solve. Accordingly, he got Congress to create executive-branch administrative agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, to do the job. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt proliferated such agencies, from the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Housing Administration to the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to put the New Deal into effect. Before they could do so, though, FDR had to scare the Supreme Court into stretching the Constitution’s Commerce Clause beyond recognition, putting the federal government in charge of all economic activity, not just interstate transactions. He also had to pressure the justices to allow Congress to delegate legislative power—which is, in effect, what the lawmakers did by setting up agencies with the power to make binding rules. The Constitution, of course, vests all legislative power in Congress, empowering it to make laws, not to make legislators.
But the Administrative State’s constitutional transgressions cut deeper still. If Congress can’t delegate its legislative powers, it certainly can’t delegate judicial powers, which the Constitution gives exclusively to the judiciary. Nevertheless, after these administrative agencies make rules like a legislature, they then exercise judicial authority like a court by prosecuting violations of their edicts and inflicting real criminal penalties, such as fines and cease-and-desist orders. As they perform all these functions, they also violate the principle of the separation of powers, which lies at the heart of our constitutional theory (senselessly curbing efficiency, Wilson thought), as well as the due process of law, for they trample the citizen’s Fifth Amendment right not to lose his property unless indicted by a grand jury and tried by a jury of his peers, and they search a citizen or a company’s private papers or premises, without bothering to get judge-issued subpoenas or search warrants based on probable cause, flouting the Fourth Amendment. They can issue waivers to their rules, so that the law is not the same for all citizens and companies but is instead an instrument of arbitrary power. FDR himself ruefully remarked that he had expanded a fourth branch of government that lacked constitutional legitimacy. Not only does it reincarnate the arbitrary power of the Stuarts’ tyrannical Star Chamber, but also it doesn’t even meet the minimal conditions of liberty that Magna Carta set forth 801 years ago.
Adding insult to injury, Wilson, his allies, and their current followers call themselves “progressives,” a fatuous boast implying that they are the embodiments and chosen instruments of the spirit of an ever-improving, irresistible future. In tune with the German idealist philosophy that Wilson and his circle studied, they claim to be marching toward an as-yet-unrealized goal of human perfection. But that perfection, the German philosophers believed, would look something like Prussia’s enlightened despotism. For Americans to think that it is progress to move from the Founders’ revolutionary achievement—a nation of free citizens, endowed with natural rights, living under laws that they themselves have made, pursuing their own vision of happiness in their own way and free to develop as fully as they can whatever talent or genius lies within them—to a regime in which individuals derive such rights as they have from a government superior to them is contemptible. How is a return to subjection an advance on freedom? No lover of liberty should ever call such left-wing statism “progressive.” In historical terms, this elevation of state power over individual freedom is not even “liberal” but quite the reverse.
As these agencies have metastasized, they have borne out not a single premise that justified their creation, and their increasingly glaring failure has drawn citizens’ angry attention to them. Expert? As a New Deal congressman immediately recognized with shock, many of those who staffed the Administrative State were kids just out of law school, with zero real-world experience or technical knowledge. Efficient? Can-do America, which built the Empire State Building in 11 months and ramped up airplane production during World War II from 2,000 in 1939 to nearly 100,000 in 1944, now takes years of bureaucratic EPA busywork to repair a bridge or lay a pipeline, and who knows how many businesses never expand or even start because the maze of government regulation is too daunting and costly to navigate? Only last year, EPA “experts” fecklessly stood by as workers under their supervision accidentally dumped 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Colorado River, and the agency vouchsafed not a word of warning to downstream Colorado and New Mexico officials for an entire day before the poisonous, fluorescent-orange flood hit them. Over at Veterans Affairs, those who’ve fought for their country die in droves while waiting for medical care. But what’s the problem? asks agency head Robert MacDonald blithely. After all, at ever-popular Disneyland, “do they measure the number of hours you wait in line?”
Non-political? Ask Lois Lerner at the Internal Revenue Service. Oh wait: she pleaded the Fifth Amendment—and her boss, John Koskinen, simply ignores Congress’s orders, even as more than 2,000 of his enforcement agents have acquired military-grade weaponry, among 200,000 of such administrative-agency officers now similarly equipped with lethal arms, presumably for coercion of the citizens they supposedly serve. Or there’s the Federal Elections Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, lackeys of President Obama and his ultra-partisan agenda.
Protecting citizens from industrial capitalism’s giant corporations? Where were the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight as the mortgage bubble blew up in 2008, nearly taking the whole financial system with it and producing the worst economic bust since the Great Depression, which even today has sunk the labor-force participation rate and hiked the suicide rate among working-class men and women to record levels? Moreover, from the establishment of the first administrative agency—the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, essentially designed to create shared railroad cartels—these agencies have been key instruments of crony capitalism, which today often takes the form of senators and congressmen pressuring agencies for rule changes or waivers to benefit their contributors, usually at the expense of their competitors as well as the public, as the author of the recent Confessions of Congressman X complains of his fellow legislative “puppets.” Little wonder that today’s Americans think that such people don’t represent them. Pollsters report that trust in government is at its lowest level ever, with only 19 percent expecting government to do the right thing, according to last year’s Gallup and Pew polls.
Ensuring the citizens’ health and safety? Where is the Food and Drug Administration as counterfeit medicines and medical supplies from China infiltrate our hospitals? As for the infamously dysfunctional Transportation Security Administration, its Keystone Kops’ regularly reported inability to spot journalists carrying banned weapons onto airplanes, while they are too busy fondling travelers’ private parts or undressing grannies, is a standing national joke—on us. We lost our constitutional safeguards for this?
FDR spewed out his agencies in a “try anything” spirit to cure a Depression that his predecessor’s misguided palliatives had worsened, and debate still surges over whether the New Deal agencies did harm or good, putting aside their doubtful legitimacy. But the majority of Americans at the time gave the president credit for good intentions. By contrast, many voters give Barack Obama no such credit for his analogous response to the Great Recession. They see it as a cynically calculated ploy to extend government’s power over the people, especially given the White House chief of staff’s crack that a president should “never let a good crisis go to waste.” So on the pretext of addressing the financial crisis, the administration partially socialized American medicine with legislation that only Democrats voted for, without bothering to read it, and that citizens who opposed the measure—still a solid majority of those polled—saw as a kind of coup d’état, framed with utter irresponsibility and ignoring the scary financial mess. As happened during the New Deal, a timid Supreme Court found the act constitutional only by the politically driven legerdemain frequent in that institution’s checkered history. It struck many as flimflam, not government by consent.
The result was a spectacular expansion of the Administrative State, with some 150 new agencies and commissions created; no one knows the exact number. And these agencies purposely removed the Administrative State even further from government by the people. One agency, the Independent Payment Advisory Board—the so-called death panel—is so democratically unaccountable that Congress can only abolish it by a three-fifths vote in both houses within a seven-month period next year. After that, the law bars Congress from altering any of the board’s edicts, a provision as far from democratic self-government as you can get.
When the administration finally confronted the financial crisis, lengthened by Obamacare’s disincentives to hiring, its reflex response was to expand the Administrative State still further with the Dodd-Frank Act, named for its two legislative sponsors, both of whom had been in bed with the mortgage racket, one figuratively and one literally. Whether it solved the problem is dubious. What is certain is that it is as undemocratic as Obamacare, with its Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose budget Congress can’t control, its Financial Stability Oversight Council, whose rulings no court may review, and its army of regulators occupying the big banks and squeezing multimillion-dollar penalties out of CEOs clinging to their supersize compensation, regardless of what happens to the stockholders. Meanwhile, the opaque Federal Housing Finance Agency, formed during the crisis to salvage the misbegotten mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, seems bent on nationalizing permanently this sizable chunk of the economy, putting the government in charge of citizens’ housing as well as their health care.
As for the “stimulus” that was supposed to give a Keynesian boost to the economy: since you can’t prove a negative, no one can show that if all that money had stayed in the private economy, it would have created more jobs and economic growth than the economically anemic Obama era has done. What unemployed or underemployed workers saw, though, is that a good portion of stimulus money went to protect the jobs of public employees, whose welfare evidently trumps that of the citizens whom they supposedly serve. Coal miners saw that, even as the administration aimed to kill their jobs, its stimulus shoveled out hundreds of millions of dollars to now-defunct Solyndra and other nonviable, crony-capitalist “green” energy companies, supposed solutions to a global-warming crisis that many think a hoax, though some two dozen public officials seem keen to suppress, Inquisition-style, the very utterance of that thought. And voters noticed that America’s three highest-income counties are in the Washington suburbs that house the federal government’s recession-proof functionaries. (See “Hail Columbia!,” Winter 2013.)
Unease over illegal immigration also has stoked today’s fear that the government no longer belongs to the people, and it’s important to understand the separate but mutually reinforcing ways that it has done so. Once again, President Obama has made a bad situation worse—this time, by his contemptuous refusal to execute the laws faithfully. His catch-and-release policy for illegal border-crossers, as well as his ban on deporting young aliens brought here by their illegal-immigrant parents, are imperial, antidemocratic edicts that might have sparked impeachment proceedings, had not Congress’s silly move to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about his sex games with an intern tainted that weapon for years to come. The result of Obama’s diktat, as contrary to the spirit of the Founders’ Constitution as is the Administrative State, is that law-abiding taxpayers must pay for the kids’ welfare support, health care, and schooling—as they already do for “anchor babies” born to mothers who have sneaked over the U.S. border for the purpose of having a child eligible for “child-only” welfare benefits, scarcely less than ordinary welfare payments and vastly more than the income of Central American peasant families. No American voted to incur these costs, which, if current trends continue, are likely to persist for several generations of such families, so they amount to taxation without representation as naked as George III’s.
As for the illegals who work, often for long hours at low pay, off the books: because immigrants, 13 percent of the population, hold 17 percent of the jobs—and no one knows the percentage of workers who are here illegally—jobless working-class citizens have understandably concluded that a lawless government, by countenancing such cheap labor, is taking the bread out of their mouths. Should they eat cake instead?
America’s highest-income counties are in the suburbs that house Washington’s recession-proof functionaries.
What citizens want to know is that, of all the world’s people who seek to live in America, our government will admit those who come legally, whose families will not harm us, and who will add to the wealth of the nation, not reap where they have not sown. After all, public safety—not clean energy or national health care—is government’s purpose. Nevertheless, Mexican criminals really have infiltrated the country and really have killed Americans, inevitably, under the administration’s anything-goes immigration stance. Further, it’s no comfort to any American who has suffered loss from an Islamist terror attack within our borders—from Ground Zero and Fort Hood to San Bernardino and Orlando—that such incidents pose no threat to our existence as a nation, as the president has said by way of reassurance, while refusing to call such outrages by their right name. How many citizens would have to die in a dirty-bomb attack in Grand Central Terminal for such events to strike him as a threat to the nation’s existence?
The question of providing a path to citizenship for the 12 million illegal aliens already here is also germane to the debate about whom the U.S. government serves and to whom it belongs. Talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh jokes that “illegal aliens” is a politically incorrect term; we must say “undocumented Democrats” instead. But it’s a joke with a barb, for no one can doubt that these 12 million, if they could vote, would vote for the Democratic program of an ever-larger, richly paid government extracting ever-larger transfer payments from productive workers to the dependent poor—James Madison’s definition of the tyranny of the majority in Federalist 10. With black poverty and exclusion steadily ameliorating, thanks to decades of striving by well-intentioned Americans of all races—even though Obama’s ex–attorney general Eric Holder devoted his tenure to denying this plain truth—the Democratic Party needs a new class of victims to justify its “helping” agenda and its immense cadre of well-paid government “helpers.” Central American peasants fill the bill.
Formerly, our open economy drew the enterprising and energetic to these shores, and our lack of a public safety net, with only private ethnic and religious charities to help the unfortunate, meant that those who couldn’t contribute to the U.S. economy went home. But today, when we have a vast welfare state that didn’t exist during earlier waves of immigration, the mothers of anchor babies come for handouts, and even the children of hardworking legal Hispanic immigrants end up on the welfare rolls at troublesomely high rates. In addition, our showering of self-proclaimed refugees with welfare benefits, which attracts the shiftless rather than the enterprising, only compounds the government-sustained dependency problem—dependency upon taxpayers who didn’t choose this particular philanthropy.
The phalanx of privately supported settlement houses and other institutions that met the great immigration wave around the turn of the twentieth century, along with the public school system, aimed to “Americanize” the new arrivals—teaching them our language, manners, and customs, and especially our republican civic ethic. Culture, after all, is as important an element of national identity as political institutions. To become an American in those days meant little more than learning English and subscribing to a broadly shared creed of self-reliance, self-government, self-improvement, and allegiance to a tolerant nation that most people agreed was unique in the freedom and opportunity it afforded—as well as in its readiness to confer citizenship on newcomers who almost universally desired it. But today’s legal Hispanic immigrants often don’t apply for American citizenship, or retain dual nationalities: Americanization often is not high on their agendas.
Moreover, our new doctrine of multiculturalism gives today’s immigrants nothing to assimilate to, since current intellectual fashion—set by the universities, Hollywood, and the mainstream media—celebrates everything that makes us different rather than the creed that once made one nation out of many individuals. And multiculturalism’s accompanying creed of victimology encourages dependency rather than self-reliance. Who are the victimizers of illegal Hispanic aliens? According to today’s politically correct “progressivism,” it is the neocolonial United States that has exploited the Third World’s natural resources, shored up its ruling oligarchies, and subverted its incipient democratic governments. And then it further victimizes them with racism when they try to escape to this country.
Deference to the greater wisdom of government, which Wilsonian progressivism deems a better judge of what the era needs and what the people “really” want than the people themselves, has been silently eroding our unique culture of enterprise, self-reliance, enlightenment, and love of liberty for decades. But if we cease to enshrine American exceptionalism at the heart of our culture—if we set equal value on such Third World cultural tendencies as passive resignation, fatalism, superstition, devaluation of learning, resentment of imaginary plots by the powerful, and a belief that gratification deferred is gratification forgone—the exceptionalism of our institutions becomes all the more precarious.
Supercharging American anger over illegal immigration and its consequences is the politically correct ban on openly discussing it, with even the most reasoned reservation dismissed as racism and yahooism. And political correctness generates its own quantum of anger among citizens, who think of freedom of speech and debate as central to American exceptionalism. But elite culture stigmatizes plain speaking, so that now a rapist or a murderer is a “person who committed a crime” or an “individual who was incarcerated,” says the Obama Department of Justice, or, according to the latest humbug from the Department of Education, a “justice-involved individual.” Implicit in these euphemisms is the theory that “society,” not the criminal, is to blame for crime, a long-exploded idea aimed at blurring the distinction between right and wrong.
That’s what makes it so disheartening to learn that the University of California has just deemed it a politically incorrect offense to declare America a land of opportunity, so as not to stigmatize those who’ve failed to seize it. It’s disheartening not only because such a retreat from our traditional culture will hold back immigrants, but also because our long cultural unraveling already has damagingly demoralized the native-born working class in the face of economic change. They dimly know that, and part of what makes them so angry is what they have allowed themselves to become.
When Theodore Roosevelt, who unsuccessfully ran against Woodrow Wilson in 1912 on the Progressive Party ticket, first declared his intention to go into politics, his fellow clubmen jeered at him for wanting to associate with the “saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors,” and other “rough and brutal” characters running the nation’s political parties. “I answered,” recalled TR, “that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that the other people did—and that I intended to be one of the governing class.” That’s the true voice of “progressivism” speaking. As the Founders often cautioned, a self-governing republic doesn’t have a governing class. Part of America’s current predicament is that it now has such a class, and the American people are very angry about it.



Time for America to get through the fog and wake up




It's harder than ever to know what's going on in today's messed up world, thanks to the flood of misinformation and the political censorship of mainstream news and social media.  It seems at times best to shut out the noise, put in a good day's work, and conclude with a prayer.  Unfortunately, that luxury is no longer an option in today's ruptured America.
What comes clearest through the fog of misinformation and censorship may be identified as a sort of table of essential requirements for today's Americans.  Americans are being made to believe that to be decent people, they have to
  • renounce the sovereignty of their country
  • accept illegal migration across the Mexican border
  • allow instant citizenship to illegal migrants
  • allow exposing themselves to foreign terrorists
  • condone Islamic jihad and accept sharia law
  • tolerate the vilification of police officers
  • accept the export of American jobs to other countries
  • denigrate America's heritage and remove its symbols
  • denounce people of white skin
  • reject the nature and reality of male and female
  • reject freedom of speech
Missing from this list (admittedly incomplete) is the disclaimer that each one of these requirements is the opposite of what decent Americans should do. 
Notice the reversal of moral value – a major tactic of the left to deconstruct America and groom it for socialist-communist domination and takeover, which seems outrageously stupid, given the historic and ongoing failure of collectivism to make life good for anyone.  In language free of academic frills, this reversal-of-moral-value tactic may be summarized this way: take something considered evil by the opposition, recast it in language that makes it sound good, then accuse opponents of being against what is "right."  It's a tactic also used to smear opponents with the faults of the smearers, who, need it be said, need to take a hard look in the mirror.
The ceaseless broadcast of falsehood-as-truth from the mainstream media – the voice of the left since most of us have been alive – continues to stifle the ability of Americans to see that they are being played like pawns on a global chessboard– or learn that prominent globalist schemers finance NGOs, lobbyists, and demonstrations against everything and everybody standing in the way of their agenda for global hegemony, let alone be given the opportunity to ask why these "elites" should be in charge of our lives or question whether their "superior wisdom" is in fact superior arrogance and power.
Moneyed egomaniacs with an obsession to lord it over others, if it means stripping them of their freedom, or even their right to live, were never more active.  Enemies of America, external and internal, are doubling their efforts to destabilize America by creating discord and division and inciting violence.  The talk of "civil war" in the air highlights the fact that the very basics of civil order and well-being are being attacked, even in high places, a red flag indicating very bad management by central and local government officials.  The need to wake up has never been greater.
A full review of all that has been happening behind closed doors is not necessary to know that the time is now for sensible people of good will to vote out of office all who choose not to defend America against its enemies, foreign and domestic, or choose to violate their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States – and vote in those whose words and deeds show a dedication to America, its core values, and its Constitution.
Anthony J. DeBlasi is a war veteran and lifelong defender of Western culture.

Watch– Rep. Matt Gaetz: Republicans, Democrats Have Been ‘the Valets’ for Multinational Corporations




https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/01/17/matt-gaetz-republicans-democrats-valets-multinational-corporations/



 17 Jan 2019361
2:31

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) says past Republican and Democrat presidents have been “the valets” for multinational corporations and business lobbyists with their support for job-killing multilateral free trade deals.

During an interview on Fox News’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, Gaetz called out former Republicans and Democrats who have allowed the big business lobby, Chamber of Commerce, and corporations to dictate U.S. trade policy.
Gaetz said:
Breitbart TV

CLOSE | X
Well, this president will take [the business lobby] on. The difference is that presidents that are Republican and Democrat in the past have been the valets for the special interest on K Street and the multinational companies. Those people didn’t elect Donald Trump. [Emphasis added]
Donald Trump was elected in spite of the millions of dollars that big business put against him. So he has a unique opportunity to actually fight for the American worker. [Emphasis added]
You look at where this 2020 election is going to be won, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, there are a lot of people there who want a fair shake at putting the best product out into the world without being the laughing stock as a consequence of bad trade deals. Reciprocal trade will get the job done. [Emphasis added]
Gaetz, who is co-sponsoring Rep. Sean Duffy’s Reciprocal Trade Act, encouraged House and Senate Democrats to sign onto the effort for fair trade that gives Trump the authority to impose reciprocal tariffs on specific foreign imports.
“A lot of Democrats represent these districts in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Minnesota and what are they going to say to their workers when multinational companies keep trying to offshore jobs,” Gaetz said. “We’ve got this president and a few Republicans fighting for the American worker. We could use a few of those pro-Trump Democrats here in the Congress.”
The outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs to foreign countries is a business model that has been used by multinational corporations with little to no government repercussions. Corporations like AT&THarley-DavidsonRalph LaurenNikeVerizon, and IBM have all laid off Americans in order to send their jobs overseas to countries like China, India, and the Phillippines.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

 Nearly 40% Of Americans Say They’ve Lost Faith In American Democracy


 “People’s expressed faith in democracy is tightly coupled with their partisanship in ways that threaten the system itself.”
“Concern about voter fraud peaks among Rs, while worry about hacking by foreigners is significantly higher among Ds.”
AXIOS Posted at 4:45 pm on March 11, 2018
axios.com/americans-lose-faith-democracy-754a034d-2a8a-4b20-b1d4-fbd4127385a5.htm

AMERICA’S ROAD TO REVOLUTION:
THE BANKSTER REGIME WILL BE TOPPLED AND MEXICO PUSHED OUT OF AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS!


 "The report was drafted in conjunction with a survey conducted among nearly 1,000 banking and business executives, government officials and academics, which found that 93 percent of them feared a worsening of confrontations between the major powers in 2018. Fully 79 percent foresaw a heightened threat of a major “state-on-state” military conflict."

Democrats Would Lose the Second Civil War, Too

It’s obvious that the central tenet of the Democrat Party platform is now hatred and contempt for Normal Americans. Taking their cue from the elites in Europe and Canada who are stripping dissenters of their free speech rights and religious freedoms, the leftist elite is moving to solidify its hold on power here with the eager assistance of tech companies and the moral support of the Fredocons who yearn to return to pseudo-relevance as the ruling class’s slobberingly loyal opposition. In California, the leftist government is practically firing on Fort Sumter. And nationally, these aspiring fascists are especially eager to disarm Normal Americans – doing so would be an object lesson in who’s the boss, as well as solving that frustrating problem of the Normals having the ability to resist.
Probably because I’ve spent time where they actually had a civil war, many people ask me – people whose names you know – whether I think this turmoil will all end in a Second Civil War. They are seriously concerned, and not without cause – the left’s hatred for Normal Americans and its dedication to totally stripping the people who are the backbone of this country of their ability to participate in their own governance is threatening to rip the country apart.
Do I think there will be a civil war? No, but there could be. This is the Age of Black Swans, and anything is possible – we could easily see the country split into red and blue. Civil war is unlikely, but never underestimate Democrat stupidity and hatred. The Schlichter family learned that lesson a century and half ago, the last time the Democrats decided to try to impose their hatred of basic human rights on the rest of the country, when an army of Democrats burned our family hometown.
Oh, they paid for it. And they would pay again. Democrats are 0-1 in insurrections, and if they went for another round, they would be 0-2. It’s a matter of terrain, numbers, and morale.
Democrats, who think history began when Obama was elected, don’t understand the dangerous game they are playing when they talk about how they want to impose their brown shirt vision upon red America. The keyboard commandos of the left seek to hand wave away the massive strategic challenge of imposing control by force upon a well-armed, decentralized citizenry occupying the vast majority of the territory, so they babble about drones and tanks as counterinsurgency trump cards. But there are no trump cards in war. There are men, with rifles, standing on patches of dirt, killing the people trying to push them off. That’s the ugly reality of war. And multiply the usual brutality of war by ten when it’s a civil war.
There are two Civil War II scenarios, and the left is poorly positioned to prevail in either one. The first scenario is that the Democrats take power and violate the Constitution in order to use the apparatus of the federal government to suppress and oppress Normal Americans. In that scenario, red Americans are the insurgents. In the second scenario, which we can even now see the stirrings of in California’s campaign to nullify federal immigration law, it is the blue states that are the insurgents.
The Democrats lose both wars. Big time.
Let’s talk terrain and numbers. Remember the famous red v. blue voting map? There is a lot of red, and in the interior the few blue splotches are all cities like Las Vegas or Denver. That is a lot of territory for a counter-insurgent force to control, and this is critical. The red is where the food is grown, the oil pumped, and through which everything is transported. And that red space is filled with millions of American citizens with small arms, a fairly large percentage of whom have military training.
Remember what two untrained idiots did in Boston with a couple of pistols? They shut a city down. Now multiply that by several million, with better weapons and training.
Let’s look at the counter-insurgent forces in the Democrat oppression scenario should they attempt to misuse our law enforcement and military in an unconstitutional manner to take the rights of American citizens. There are a lot of civilian law enforcement officers, but the vast majority of the agencies are local – sheriffs, small town police departments. They will not be reliable allies in supporting unlawful oppression of their friends and neighbors. The major cities’ police departments are run by Democrat appointees, so the commands would be loyal. But the rank-and-file? A small percentage would be ideologically loyal. More would be loyal because that’s their paycheck – they could be swayed or intimidated to support the rebels. Others would be actively sympathetic to the insurgents. This is true of federal law enforcement agencies as well.
And the military? Well, wouldn’t the military just crush any resistance? Not so fast. The military would have the combat power to win any major engagement, but insurgents don’t get into major engagements with forces that have more combat power. They instead leverage their decentralized ability to strike at the counter-insurgents’ weak points to eliminate the government’s firepower advantage. In other words, hit and run, and no stand-up fights.
For example, how do a bunch of hunters in Wisconsin defeat a company of M1A2 Abrams tanks? They ambush the fuel and ammo trucks. Oh, and they wait until the gunner pops the hatch to take a leak and put a .30-06 round in his back from 300 meters. Then they disappear. What do the tanks do then? Go level the nearest town? Great. Now they just moved the needle in favor of the insurgents among the population. Pretty soon, they can’t be outside of their armored vehicles in public. Their forces are spending 90% of their efforts not on actual counter-insurgency operations but on force protection. Sure, they own their forward operating bases, and they own a few hundred meters around them wherever they happen to be standing at the moment, but the rest of the territory is bright red. As my recent novel illustrates, American guerillas with small arms are a deadly threat to the forces of a dictatorship.
But the military is so big it would overwhelm any rebels, right? Well, how big do you think the military is? And, more importantly, how many actual boots on the ground can it deploy? Let’s put it in terms of brigade combat teams, which total about 4,500 troops each. There are about 60 brigades in the Army, active and reserve, here and abroad, and let’s give the Marines another 10 brigades, for about 70 brigades. Sounds impressive. But that’s deceptive.
Let’s put aside a big consideration – the existence of red states that would provide for an insurgent government structure and possibly attract the loyalty of some National Guard and even federal brigades. For example, if President Hillary Clinton put down her chardonnay long enough to sign a ban on privately owned guns, it’s not unreasonable to expect the governor of Texas to reject federal authority – after all, California just taught us that this is totally cool. But in this case, look for several brigades located there to hoist the Lone Star flag.
So, now the blue states are facing unconventional and conventional forces.
Let’s ignore that problem and focus on a different challenge. Even a normal unit has about 10% non-deployable members. Now, if these troops were assigned to combat operations against other Americans, you would have significant additional losses through desertion. Many of the senior leaders would participate – the Obama generation – and there is a certain type of junior officer only too happy to curry favor by sucking up in defiance of their oath (which is to the Constitution, not to some leftist president). You can identify them because they usually have “strategist” in their Twitter bios. But a lot of key, capable officer and NCO leaders, and enlisted troops, would vanish. That is proper. It is a violation of their oath to unconstitutionally oppress fellow Americans; their duty would be to refuse such unlawful orders.
So, you have significantly understrength units going in. Now, how many of the troops in a brigade are actually even front line combat troops? About a third – the rest are support. So a brigade is really about 1500 riflemen tops before you count losses. Cut those in half for sleep, training, and refitting at any one time (which is very generous) and your brigade is really 750 troops on your best day with everyone showing up. Realistically, it’s 300.
That holds one mid-sized town. And there are hundreds of mid-sized towns. Plus there are millions of Normal Americans who would fight back. Nothing would move without their permission – a few guys shooting up big rigs along the interstate would shut down the entire trucking industry. Bottom line: there simply are not enough military forces to clear and hold red America.
What about drones and bombers? Both are useful. But the minute a bombing strike kills some red civilians the families of counter-insurgent drone operators and pilots will be knocking at the base gates to be let inside. Now you’ll need many of those brigades to protect the civilians you now need to protect from retribution.
Civil wars are harsh. That’s why you avoid them.
How about the blue insurgency scenario? That goes even worse for the Democrats. You have the federal government apparatus in the hands of red America, and the insurgents are the opposite of decentralized and armed. They are conveniently centered in gun-unfriendly blue cities. In other words, the blue civilian population is much less of a threat.
A red counter-insurgency avoids the problem of a decentralized insurgency and insecure logistical lines. In the case of California, whose secessionist antics are approaching the point where President Trump could legitimately employ his power to crush insurrections, the tactical problem is relatively simple. For example, San Francisco is a hotbed of treason, but the populace is largely unarmed and is trapped in a confined area. You put a brigade on securing the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, then put a brigade on the San Francisco Peninsula to cut off the I-280 and US-101 corridors. Next you go to the Crystal Springs Dam and cut off the water. Then you watch and wait as the tech hipsters run out of artisanal sushi rice and kombucha.
After about a week, they surrender. After all, you can’t eat and drink smugness. LA is just bigger in scope – more corridors to cut off, but in the end the population concentrations in large liberal urban areas that are their strength also make them extremely vulnerable to logistical pressure.
Then there’s another factor, an intangible but a crucial one. It’s commitment. The Democrat threat to peace is based on its policies designed to deprive Normal Americans of their right to speak freely, to worship freely, and to defend themselves and their rights with firearms. Make no mistake – millions of Normal Americans are willing to risk death to defend those rights. In fact, many swore to do so when they entered our military and law enforcement. But who is the leftist big talker willing to die to impose the fascist dream of censorship, religious oppression, and disarmament on Normal American citizens? Is the screeching SJW at Yale going to suit up in Kevlar? Is the Vox columnist going to grab a M4? Is the Hollywood poser going to switch her gyno-beanie for a helmet?
No. Hell, we just heard our liberal opponents explaining why a cop shouldn’t be expected to go fight a scumbag murdering kids because it’s scary. America might split apart, but it’s highly unlikely Team Kale n’ Vinyl would fight should their big talk finally push Normal America too far.

Millions march against climate change, capitalism and war

By Bryan Dyne and Will Morrow
21 September 2019
Four million people participated in the global climate strike across every continent on Friday, many of them school students who skipped school on that day. Demonstrations in more than 5,800 locations in 161 countries began in Australia and the Pacific, and moved to Asia, Antarctica, Africa and Europe, and North and South America. This is the third such climate strike this year, following similar mass global demonstrations this past March and May, and the largest to date.
The protests were directed at the inaction and inability of world governments to take any significant measures to resolve the crisis, despite increasingly dire warnings from the United Nations and other agencies that if greenhouse gas emissions are not immediately halted, at least half the world’s population will face one or more climate-related catastrophes likely in the next decade. Similar outrage was directed against international climate summits such as the 2015 Paris Agreement, which have proven worthless in the face of the crisis.
Tens of thousands protest at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate
Some of the largest demonstrations occurred in Germany, where over 100,000 protested in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, according to news reports, and up to 270,000 according to the protest organizers, for a total of 1.4 million people across the country. More than 330,000 demonstrated across Australia, 100,000 in Britain and up to 300,000 in the United States. Thousands more took to the streets in Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, across North Africa, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and New Zealand.
Significant protests were also held across the South Pacific, including in the Solomon Islands and Fiji. Countries in the region are among the hardest hit by the deepening climate crisis, as a result of rapidly rising sea levels.
The political views of those who attended were very varied. Capitalism, however, was a dirty word for the overwhelming majority of the protesters. Many expressed their outrage over the refusal of governments to take any action over years to address the issue, and spoke about the subordination of life to the interests of the rich under capitalism.
The protest in Sydney
“The problem is that the big companies aren’t being held accountable,” said Ondina, a Salvadorean worker IT worker living in Stuttgart, Germany. “They shouldn’t be allowed to be so powerful. They want to get the most out of everything—from the markets, from their workers, and from the environment. Everyone who is aware of this exploitation should begin to take action. Governments won’t change that—that’s why we have to do something.”
Many protesters, including many born after 2001 who have lived under perpetual US-led wars their entire lives, connected environmental to social inequality and the danger of war. Sarah, a Canadian student in Paris, noted that “there’s so many causes today, so much you can fight for… I’m also concerned about war. It’s because they spend so much money on the military and have these guns and tanks and they want an excuse to use them.”
Members of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) and other supporters of the World Socialist Web Site attended demonstrations in several countries, where they distributed copies of the WSWS statement “The only solution to climate change is world socialism,” explaining the SEP’s fight to mobilize the working class against capitalism.
Kourosh, a law student in San Diego, agreed that capitalism is the source of the climate crisis. “Any talk about climate change must include socialism and the economic system. Also the military is a huge polluter as well that doesn’t get talked about in liberal circles. I’m definitely for socialism.” Kourosh also mentioned that he is studying law to defend democratic rights, including the protection of whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.
In the working-class regional city of Newcastle, Australia, Daniel and Haily came out to lend support to the students. “The system is not designed for the human spirit,” said Daniel. “We need to understand we’re not in a system designed to move forwards. Currently what’s promoted is greed and gluttony. It’s not designed for ‘Joe Blo’ (like you and I) but for the one percent, the Johnson & Johnson owners and the like. It’s disgusting! We need a society which empowers people to pursue social goals. Once people are given the power, there is no shortage to what we can do!”
Martin in Miami noted the politically amorphous nature of the official slogans, “This is the first protest I’ve taken part in, and I don’t know if I would do this again. It’s not really political, they don’t have a perspective. A lot of people don’t really know what they’re here for. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes up this issue for her own political gain, but she can’t and won’t do anything to change this.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who recently voted for US President Donald Trump’s proposed $738 billion in military spending, is one of the authors of the “Green New Deal,” which is based on the fiction that anything can be done to stop climate change within the framework of the Democratic Party, nationalism and the capitalist system.
Opposition to establishment politics was also graphically expressed in Manchester, where Andy Burnham, the right-wing Blairite Labour Party mayor, used the protest of 2,000 people as the occasion for a photo opportunity. This backfired as he was denounced by young people, including a 10-year-old speaker, not simply for his inaction on climate change, but also his record implementing right-wing policies as a mayor.
Ynez in Los Angeles spoke against those who push for global warming solutions through “diet” or “lifestyle” changes. “Some people will have you believe climate change is everyone’s individual responsibility, and will focus on something like only using reusable water bottles—but that’s only a tiny change. We need to make systemic changes to stop the horrible things being done to the Earth.”
Other political questions were raised, including widespread support for the ongoing national strike by US autoworkers against General Motors. There was also broad sentiment against the establishment media and the so-called “left” parties in each country, despite the veneer of support they gave.
The massive influx of resources needed to halt and reverse climate change requires the reorganization of economic, social and political life on an international scale. Energy production must be coordinated on a global scale in order to transition to renewable forms, which in turn requires the most serious scientific investigation into new techniques and ideas. Such a fundamental shift, however, comes into direct conflict with the nation-state system and the drive of corporations for private profit.
Some sections of big business, like the fossil fuel companies, are openly opposed to any concessions to the growing movement against climate change. But the capitalists in every country—including the 3,024 companies that in one form or another sanctioned the current round of climate strikes—are equally opposed to any serious action. They hope by slapping on a “green” label they can neutralize the protests and turn millions of working people and youth away from a struggle against the profit system.
It is not a question of appealing to the powers that be, but of directly opposing the domination of society by a handful of billionaires and the social system over which they preside. At the same time, as the global nature of the protests objectively demonstrates, students must turn to the decisive revolutionary and international social force, the working class.
A century of unplanned and increasingly irrational capitalist development has caused a worldwide ecological crisis. But the scientific and technological advances made in the course of the past century provide the ability to address this crisis in a rational and socially beneficial way. However, to free up the resources needed to tackle climate change—along with war, poverty and inequality—requires a complete socialist reorganization of economic life. The economy must be placed in the democratic control of the working class, the only social force capable of establishing a society based on human need, including a healthy global environment.

Climate strike protesters speak out: 

“There’s willful blindness on this 

issue, because fixing it conflicts with 

capitalism”
The worldwide protests over the environment, dubbed the “global climate strike,” began in the Pacific Islands, New Zealand and Australia, as Friday began, and followed throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and North and South America.

Australia

In the regional city of Newcastle, Australia, Daniel and Haily came out to lend support to the students.
Daniel and Haily
“The system is not designed for the human spirit,” said Daniel. “We need to understand we're not in a system designed to move forwards.
“Currently what's promoted is greed and gluttony. It's not designed for 'Joe Blo' (like you and I) but for the one percent, the Johnson & Johnson owners and the like. It's disgusting!
“We need a society which empowers people to pursue social goals. Once people are given the power, there is no shortage to what we can do!”
In Melbourne, Australia’s second city, Ellie, a 15-year-old high school student said: “I’m here to fight for my future and everyone else’s as well. I think it’s really good that the youth have come out, and other generations as well.
Ellie
“I feel like climate change hasn’t been handled and has definitely been ignored in the past. They just say ‘yes it’s a serious issue’ and do nothing about it.
“I guess they might not believe it’s real and just pretend they’re on our side. It definitely could be solved through global action, because it’s not just one country, but an all-round issue. I think this global protest is good, especially considering all the past—the wars and stuff—we are now coming together to create change.”

Germany

Claudia, 41, came to the protest in Berlin, Germany with her seven-year-old son. She is a single parent, and was opposed to any increase in the price of gas and petrol, being barely able to make ends meet at present.
“The Finance Minister Scholz nevertheless said recently that several billion euros of additional receipts of taxes flowed into the treasury,” she said. “Why can’t we use this money to build new power lines, so that the energy from the wind parks in the sea can be developed further and fed into the electricity net?”
She denounced the Grand Coalition government for increasing the military budget: “Who needs more weapons? We will all not survive a new war, or if we do, the earth will be so destroyed that we will not be able to survive.”

France

The protest in Paris
Sarah is studying business and environmental sustainability in Paris, France on exchange from Canada. She said she came to the demonstration because “this is one of the most important issues in the world right now.”
Sarah (Paris, France)
“I also think these events are important to show that people care. Coming to an event like this gives me hope. I think the politicians are listening, but I don’t think they’ll do anything to change their policies. Maybe it’s because their mandates are too short, and in four years you can’t address an issue like this.”
“But also I think we need to change the whole system. I think capitalism is the problem. You can’t just change that overnight. It’s like businesses, if they have the option to make a lot of money doing something easy, or invest in infrastructure that will improve the lives of people, they’re going to take the easiest route that will make them money.”
“Also there’s so many causes today, so much you can fight for. I find that I’m passionate about climate change and I’m putting my energy here. I’m also concerned about war. It’s because they spend so much money on the military and have these guns and tanks and they want an excuse to use them.”
Jean-Baptiste (Paris, France)
Jean-Baptiste is a 15-year-old high school student in outer Paris. His sign says: “Politicians: If you think our environment is less important than our economy, just try to hold your breath for the time it takes you to count your money.”
“It’s a quote I saw,” he said, “and it’s a message to the politicians and the companies because we see the planet getting worse and we hear many speeches from them, but what’s needed is action now and not empty words and laws that might start beginning in 2025.”
“The billionaires are already building themselves bunkers on their own islands. I saw a show about it. It’s totally crazy. They think only of themselves. But we would like to have a future. Even now we have seen dozens of reports from scientists, the last in July that we need to act within 18 months or we will see major environmental catastrophes. We see 60 percent of the world’s species in the process of going extinct.”
“We want actions and that’s why we’re protesting, but it’s now 3 protests that I’ve been to. This is even bigger than in May. But the politicians don’t listen. It’s true we need a change in the system. There is also a return to war because the arms industry lobbies are so powerful.”

Great Britain

Jem (London, UK)
In London, Jem, a college student, said, “I think it’s so important that we all come together to make a difference, because the governments aren’t doing anything, and it’s our future. They say all the time that they’ve made plans to address climate change, but nothing serious ever comes of it. The world is still warming, deforestation is still taking place, and they’re not doing anything like enough to combat it… Even if the effects aren’t felt as strongly here in this country right now, it’s our job to try and do something while we can.
“It’s important to get as many people as possible involved. We’re all on this planet together, we all have to do our bit. And nothing can be solved by single countries. The world needs to work together.”
Elisa (London, UK)
Elisa, a London hospital administration worker, said, “I’m here because of a report that showed 100 companies account for 71 percent of all global emissions. Which means that even if all of us went vegetarian, recycled, stopped using plastic, used sustainable methods to live, that would not account for what is actually the vast majority of global emissions. The companies need to be held accountable. They are polluting for the sake of cutting costs, for profits. I’m here to remind everyone that we can individually do our best but we need to change these 100 companies to really make a difference.
“Climate change impacts the poorest and most vulnerable communities worst. You see on the news the hurricanes, the tornadoes, and the floods, and the communities they impact are the poorer ones. People wonder why the migrant crisis is happening—well a large cause is the global climate crisis which is making it impossible to live in some areas. People are being forced into desperate situations.
The protest in London
“I think it’s very important that this is a global protest. It goes to show how borderless this issue is. It doesn’t matter what your ethnic background is, or your age, it impacts everybody. And future generations too. We have to ask ourselves how our children and children’s children will look back on us.
“I very deliberately told my manager why I’m taking a ‘sick day’ today. Because she needs to know, everyone needs to know that this is a life or death issue. That’s why it was so important for me to come out—I couldn’t stand the thought of being at my desk as usual knowing that I could come out here and remind people that it’s the huge corporations having the worst effect.”
Karen (London, UK)
Office worker Karen said, “I’m here as someone whose striking from my workplace. I want to hold the government to account for their inaction and support all the young strikers who have been doing the same for the past few months.
“There’s willful blindness on the part of governments towards this issue, because fixing it conflicts with capitalism. So our economic system needs to change and be replaced with a more reciprocal economy, where money and profit are not the arbiters of what happens. I think if people who are running businesses start to see their profits affected by workers going on strike, that’s the only way they’d even begin to listen.”
Josh said, “I’m here because I recognize the catastrophe around the corner, and because when you have a young baby, the issue becomes all the more heart wrenching and urgent. The money exists to address climate change. They printed trillions to prop up the banks. But there are vested interests in play which keep the world’s resources invested for profit not for vital needs.”
Josh (London, UK)
In Manchester, Bobby a 14-year-old student at Chapel-en-le-Frith High school in nearby Derbyshire, came to protest with his school friends. “I want to do my bit before it’s too late,” he said. “No one else is going to do anything. The oil and fossil fuel companies are selfish—it’s all about money!”
Protesters march in Leeds
In Leeds, Emily, a student from Greenhead college in Huddersfield, attended the protest. “I think one person can't make a difference,” she said. “The government needs to do something, but without globally making a change—just paying lip service—nothing will happen. There's hundreds of people here and that's brilliant, but we need to make a difference, not through companies, but sort it out through revolution, by trying to create a socialist environment where we can make a difference and change things. This doesn’t affect the upper class, the people from Eton, the prime minister—he’s not going to care. It's going to affect us… People in third world countries are going to be affected the most so it's really harsh.”
Alex, a 16-year-old student in Leeds, said, “I’m here to take a stand for what I believe in, which is that our planet is the only one we get. If we don’t take charge and look after it then we don’t have a future as young people.” Asked why he thought there was government inaction on a world scale, he said, “The big companies and the media, they want to overshadow it and stop the reality getting out because they don’t want people to stop giving them money or lose faith in them and they’ll have less power if we take over.”
Alex (right) and friend (Leeds, UK)
Ban and Laila are university students and attended the Sheffield demonstration.
Ban said, “We’re here because we want to make sure the planet survives and to show solidarity with the young people all over the world. I agree with your headline that only world socialism can answer the threat of climate change. The rise of fascist forces is having a direct impact on how governments are run. It especially impacts on people at the bottom of society. Socialism, a system that works for all, is the only way to move forward.”

United States

In New York City, where the largest US protest took place, Jenny posed the question, “How do we fight climate change? Individual changes are not enough, we need to stop the big companies. The Democrats take big money like the Republicans and won’t make a change.”
Organizers estimate 250,000 marched against climate change in New York City.
Jose said, “As an immigrant I feel like I fled the problems they created and now I’m being made a scapegoat for those same problems by these same politicians, so I’m here to try and listen and learn. One more thing, people talk about different problems, homelessness, poverty, climate change, etc. I feel that the only way to solve these problems is if we unite.”
At the rally in Washington, DC, Josh, a worker from Tennessee who has a degree in soil science, said “Everyone needs to go on strike. We need to show them who runs this country.”
Josh told the WSWS about the situation in Tennessee. “I interned at Smokey Mountain National Park. Where I live there is a major drought, so there is a ban on controlled burns in multiple counties. In 2016, a controlled burn in Gatlinburg, Tennessee got out of hand and killed 14 people, according to the official count. I've heard over 100 actually died. The fires destroyed 2,500 homes.”
Alex, a student in government from George Mason University, was attracted to the IYSSE's promotion of socialism. “We need to nationalize fossil fuel and other industries and move towards a form of eco-socialism,” he said. “Young people are fed up, they've seen the destruction capitalism has done, to the environment and their lives. Even if many of them don't have fully formed understanding of it, a lot of them agree with its main ideas.”
Abby, Bria and Assanatou in Washington, D.C.
Abby, Bria and Assanatou are three students from Frederick Community College in central Maryland. They told the WSWS that they had heard the protests outside as they were visiting a museum in the city. “You should not be surprised that young people are out marching,” said Abby. “Young people are aware of the situation they are facing. The fate of the planet is our future.”
Several protesters spoke to a WSWS reporter in Miami. Sophie said, “I think the most important thing is that the youth have to stand up for what we want to say, because it is our future. It’s important that the youth uses its voice. Even now climate change is affecting us in Miami. Hurricanes are stronger, it’s getting hotter. What are you going to do with your profits if there’s nothing left?”
Gitanjali added, “This is our future and we really need to stand up for it. A lot of school districts think it’s just an excuse to skip class, they don’t see it as an important thing for us to take part in. But this is our future and we’re going to fight for it.”
Julia was one of those given about a minute to speak to the crowd in Miami, but she was told to limit her comments. She told the WSWS the organizers did not what to make the issue political, and on the organizers’ group chat they were sharing comments about Amazon “committing” to reducing carbon emissions by 2040, as though that was something to be pleased about.
Thousands of Denver, Colorado students walked out of classrooms to protest, defying the Denver Public Schools threats to mark them “unexcused.” Sebastian Andrews, 17, from the Denver School of the Arts held a sign with a picture of Bill Nye, the Science Guy, demanding, “Listen to this man.” Shreya Shrestha, 17, held a sign, “Our oceans are rising and so are we.”
Preston Enright, joining the thousands at the state capitol, told the WSWS, “I think this gathering shows that a growing number of people are concerned. The heart of the problem is capitalism, this relentless pursuit of increased revenues by the fossil fuel industry is an absolute catastrophe. They’ve been undercutting alternatives for decades. As with the tobacco industry, they buried the science and went on to promote their profits. Profit-motive over everything else is a real problem. Agribusiness is putting poisons everywhere.”
“Basically what seems obvious to me at this point is that capitalism has run its course,” said another young man, “When it came about during the Industrial Revolution, it was a different time. Back then, it wasn’t a global economy and we weren’t extracting resources like we are now. It just doesn’t work any more. We’re at a breaking point. What scientists are saying is that our biosphere can’t survive the current model.
“The Republicans are the A team, and the Democrats are the B team of capitalism. They really represent the same people, the same ruling class. I still do vote, pretty much always Democratic but people shouldn’t be fooled in thinking the Democrats are going to help us progress as a human species. I’ve worked pretty much working class jobs my whole life, construction for a while. Workers need to rise up. We have no time to lose.”
Max and Ida from LACES High School came to the climate rally in Los Angeles. “I think the protests are an important step,” Max said. “Corporations are so short-sighted. Profit is all they care about. They can’t look further than the ends of their noses. I think the protests are an important step.”
Ida said, “We’re here today because if we don’t protest, no one else will. Our generation has to fix this; the older generations caused it. Democracy in America is not real democracy. If ever there was a time for socialist ideas, it’s now. Capitalist society tries to convince us that the small things we do are responsible for this, when it’s the corporations who are responsible.”
Students holding placards distributed by Berkeley IYSSE.
Another protester in Los Angeles, Jose, said, “A lot of problems affecting climate are not because of individual choices. The little actions we take help, but it won’t be enough until we change the system. Capitalism isn’t a sustainable system. The planet can’t sustain it. Kids are starting to understand that there’s more to this than just personal choices, and talking to their families and people around them. I’ve been making an effort to talk to other people interested in leftism.
“There’s heavy American propaganda against socialism. My dad is from Guatemala, and he used to tell me about Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically-elected president, who was murdered by the CIA for the fruit companies.”
Juan, Devon, and Ynez all emphasized that individual lifestyle changes were completely inadequate for the crisis posed by climate change. “We need a system change,” Devon said, “and to encourage people to act as soon as possible.”
Juan added, “The focus on individual responsibility is a red herring, a distraction. Already, we’re in such dire straits, shortages of food will cause mass starvation and social breakdown. I don’t want a Green New Deal that will be implemented in 2030. We need it now!”
At the rally in San Diego, Jennifer came to the rally to support her daughter. “I'm here to support this generation, they're taking control of their future and making a change. Young people are scared to go to school, church or Walmart because of shootings and everything else. It's a scary world for them and we need to stand up and make a change.
“We're all valuable and we shouldn't have to sacrifice our lives for the rich. When they had fires up north, a direct result of climate change, the people were stuck in death traps because they couldn't leave. Trump is bringing back all the coal and fossil fuel interests and that should never have happened.”


Even if these measures could be enacted in 
country in which three individuals own as 
much wealth as the bottom half of the 
population, it would be child’s play for billion-
dollar corporations to circumvent them

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren mixes anti-corruption demagogy with identity politics at New York City rally

On Tuesday, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a leading contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, spoke to a crowd of 10-15 thousand people at Washington Square Park in lower Manhattan.
The crowd was a mixture of campaign supporters and bystanders, many from New York University across the street. Warren spoke under the park’s historical arch, which was festooned with campaign banners and surrounded by her most vocal supporters.
She was introduced by two New York state Democratic politicians and Maurice Mitchell, the head of the Working Families Party, a paper organization that was set up by the unions—including the corrupt United Auto Workers—in 1998 and endorses various Democratic candidates, including Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Warren began by making a dishonest and self-serving reference to the women killed at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911 at the nearby Brown Building. She recounted in some detail the horrible deaths of the scores of women in one of America’s worst industrial accidents. Warren proceeded to elicit the loudest applause of the evening from her supporters by telling the audience that, “We’re not here because of men at all. We’re here because of some hard-working women.”
She was referring the Triangle Shirtwaist workers, but these women came from the largely immigrant working class in lower Manhattan, which was, a century ago, socialist-minded and would have known exactly what to call a capitalist politician appealing to them for votes for the Democratic Party.
Warren then put forward two of her main campaign proposals: to fight corruption and tax the wealthiest Americans two percent of their annual income.
The thrust of Warren’s first argument was that she would enact laws to fight the excessive influence of corporations in government. While she correctly observed that “Corruption and influence peddling has seeped into every corner of our government,” she offered no explanation of why this was the case but sought to attribute nearly the entire social crisis of capitalism to “corruption” alone.
“So, what has this corrupt business as usual gotten us? The extinction of one species after another as the earth heats up, children slaughtered by assault weapons, the highest levels of inequality in a century, wages that barely budge, crippling student loan debt, shrinking opportunity for the next generation.”
She even managed to explain Trump’s far-right policies in terms of the president’s corruption: “Donald Trump is corruption in the flesh … He tries to divide us, white against black, Christians against Muslim, straight against queer and trans and everyone against immigrants. Because if we’re all busy fighting each other, no one will notice that he and his buddies are stealing more and more of our country’s wealth and destroying the future for everyone else.”
In other words, if only the rich had less influence in the government, then life could improve for millions. She made proposals such as banning former officeholders from becoming lobbyists, and full transparency in meetings with lobbyists. “Anyone who wants to run for federal office will have to put their tax returns online,” she said.
Even if these measures could be enacted in 
country in which three individuals own as 
much wealth as the bottom half of the 
population, it would be child’s play for billion-
dollar corporations to circumvent them

A set of “reforms” that leaves large-scale wealth intact is no surprise coming from Warren. As she said in an interview with CNBC in July, “I am a capitalist. Come on. I believe in markets.”
On Tuesday, she also called for the impeachment of Donald Trump based on his supposed collusion with Russian agents outlined in the Mueller report.
The second element of her program that Warren raised was her plan to tax assets above $50 million at an annual rate of two percent. With the billions from this tax, she said, “We can make technical school, community college and four-year college tuition free for everyone who wants to get an education.” She also proposed making childcare and pre-kindergarten education free to all.
She framed her housing plan—to reduce rental costs by 10 percent over the next ten years, a laughably inadequate figure in New York City—in terms of race. “My housing plan will help families living in formerly redlined areas buy a home and start building the kind of wealth that government-sponsored discrimination denied their parents and grandparents,” she said. Her proposals to reduce global warming were also pitched to the politics of racial identity: “My climate plan includes justice for the Black and Brown communities that have struggled with the impact of pollution.”
She remained silent on foreign policy, neither raising the trade war with China nor the vast and expanding American military machine, nor Trump’s war threats against Iran.
She was equally silent on the role of her own party in the growth of inequality and the “corruption” that she attacked. As the WSWS noted when she announced her campaign in December, she has nothing to say “on the role of the Democratic Party in the growth of economic inequality, particularly the Obama administration’s bailout of the banks and its decision to block any efforts to punish the Wall Street speculators who triggered the 2008 global financial collapse.”
Warren’s proposed reforms, however, do attempt to make inroads into the support Bernie Sanders has among millions of young people and sections of the working class. Most polls in the last week show that Warren is now closing the gap with Sanders and Biden making her one of the top three in the contest for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
Tuesday’s rally itself was an effort on the part of the Warren campaign to capture the support by younger people who are currently leaning toward Bernie Sanders with appeals to restriction on the influence of corporations and demagogic references to the massive social inequality in the United States.
Jacobin, the magazine affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which supports Sanders, was indignant that the Working Families Party had endorsed Warren.
Concerned about a threat from the Warren campaign to its own efforts to integrate itself with the Democratic Party leadership, the magazine notes, “Her proposals (domestically, at least) are, on the whole, solid progressive policies, though never stronger than Sanders’. But not until the last few weeks has she even made rhetorical nods to building the kind of movement that Sanders argues we need, much less done anything to actually build that movement.”
Not much of the layer of younger people who attended Sanders’ Brooklyn rally in March or a similar one in Washington Square Park in 2016 were to be seen. The crowd, at least those who had come to the rally to see Warren, were largely in their thirties and forties and the minority of younger people were mostly curious bystanders. Certainly, holding a rally at night with floodlights and cheering in front of a large university is bound to attract some attention from students.
Warren’s speech did not convince many of the bystanders, especially students. One NYU student : “She’s just like the other Democrats, she gets up on the podium and makes all these promises, but they mean nothing. They continue to bomb and kill people across the world. Despite what they say even people like Sanders back the American military and its crimes in the Middle East.
“I was interested in Bernie in 2016 but then he backed Clinton and didn’t do anything about Yemen or about occupations in Palestine. I am not interested in anyone from either party for 2020; they all fight for the same big business interests that profit from American war.” 







Donald Trump Ignores Sen. Lee’s Green Card Giveaway Bill at India Rally

US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attend "Howdy, Modi!" at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas, September 22, 2019. - Tens of thousands of Indian-Americans converged on Houston on Sunday for an unusual joint rally by Donald Trump and Narendra Modi, a visible symbol of the bond …
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty
10:16

President Donald Trump did not endorse Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s green-cards-for-India bill when he spoke at the Sunday rally in Texas attended by 50,000 Indian supporters of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Trump spoke at the Houston rally after a personal invite from the visiting leader who heads the Hindu political party in India’s chaotically diverse democracy.
But Trump did not endorse, praise or even mention Lee’s Indians-before-Americans bill, even though Modi’s 50,000 supporters strongly support it, Modi’s government is lobbying for the bill, and Lee is trying to push it through the Senate this week.
Instead, Trump combined his usual advocacy for energy and defense trade deals with routine stump speech material. The address included pro-American condemnation of illegal immigrants — but without directly mentioning that roughly one-in-seven Indians in the United States are illegal migrants:
My administration believes our first duty — the highest loyalty of all — [is that] we must always be for the American people. Whether it’s African-American, Hispanic, Indian-American, we are going to take care of our citizens first. We are going to take care of our Indian-American citizens before we take care of illegal immigrants that want to pour into our country.
The Indian population in the United States is roughly 4 million, including roughly 1.5 million Indian-born visa workers and family members. The actual Indian-American voting population is perhaps 1.5 million, and they vote roughly five-to-one for Democrats.
Trump’s silence and anti-illegal comments were both a nod against Lee’s bill and a signal for the wavering GOP Senators.
The GOP Senators are under intense stealthy pressure from Silicon Valley investors and technology companies who want to pass Lee’s green card giveaway legislation, as soon as Tuesday.
On September 19, Lee’s bill was blocked by GOP Sen. David Perdue, who is up for election in 2020. Perdue was able to block the bill because Lee is trying to pass the college graduate outsourcing bill via the “unanimous consent” rules, which are usually applied to mundane bills, such as the renaming a local post office. Under those rules, a Senate can pass a bill if no one objects. The process has allowed Lee — so far — to prevent hearings, TV networks, newspaper articles, and floor votes recorded by C-Span’s cameras.
The bill offers up to 140,000 green cards per year to college graduate Indians who agree to take white collar jobs — in many industries, and at low pay — from American graduates. There is no legal limit to the number of Indian graduates who can compete for those employer-provided green cards by using OPT, H-1B, L-1 or B1 work visas to take Americans’ jobs at lower wages.
Aside from Perdue, no other GOP or Democratic Senator has risen to defend America’s millions of college graduates from Lee’s green card giveaway. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul ended his July opposition after getting a deal favorable to his donors. So the only objection on September 19 came from Perdue.
But Perdue is now is under intense pressure to quit his opposition and let the major donors hire more low-wage Indians instead of the young graduates in his home state of Georgia.
However, Lee’s radical bill has created grassroots groups of technology professionals which oppose the outsourcing of their jobs to Indian graduates. These groups include the American Workers CoalitionProtect US WorkersProgressives for Immigration Reform, and U.S. Tech Workers. Also, Florida business groups worry the bill will block the inflow of South Americans graduates and are pleading with their two Senators — Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Rick Scott — to block Lee’s bill.
All Democratic leaders will support Lee’s bill, according to Leon Fresco, an immigration lawyer who is helping Indian visa-workers to lobby Senators for the bill. In 2013, Fresco helped Sen. Chuck Schumer write the Gang of Eight’s amnesty-and-cheap-labor bill. That bill proved to be a disaster for Schumer and the Democrats, partly because it helped elect Trump to the presidency in 2016. “The entire Senate Democratic Leadership—Schumer, Durbin, Leahy were cosponsors of #greencardquality in 2011 …. The only way the current bill is different is that Durbin-Grassley H-1b provisions added,” Fresco tweeted September 22. 
Some GOP Senators openly support the outsourcing bill. For example, North Dakota’s Sen. Kevin Cramer is an enthusiastic supporter even though Indian-owned companies in North Dakota import cheap “high skilled” Indian graduates via the H-1B program while ignoring the American graduates at job fairs in nearby state universities. On September 22, Cramer posted a tweet of himself with Modi and India’s ambassador to the United States:

Agricultural trade, energy, high skilled workers and military cooperation were on the lunch agenda with @PMOIndia @narendramodi in Houston today. It was an honor to share the day with @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and 50,000 of our best Indian American friends.





View image on Twitter




Modi used the Houston rally to flatter Trump, and to bind Indians in the United States to India and his Hindu party — but also to impress a slew of legislators, lobbyists, CEOs, and investors. 
According to the English-language Indian news site, LiveMint, 
Prior to the “Howdy Modi” event, soon after his arrival on Saturday, Modi met the CEOs of 16 [energy] companies including Baker Hughes, Cheniere Energy, Exxonmobil, Lyondellbasell Industries, Schlumberger and Tellurian Inc. And immediately after, India’s state-run Petronet LNG Ltd signed a pact to negotiate the sourcing of around 5 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) liquefied natural gas (LNG) from US developer Tellurian Inc’s Driftwood project in Louisiana.
In New York, [Indian Ambassador Harsh] Shringla has set up a second meeting between Trump and Modi in three days – this time a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly scheduled for 24 September.
Also in New York there is second meeting with heads of a record 45 US companies including the Bank of America, Coca Cola, Deloitte, IBM, Cisco Systems Inc, JPMorgan & Chase, Lockheed Martin, MasterCard – Financial Services, Microsoft and Qualcomm Technology. This is to take place on 25 September.
Modi is offering to open up India’s economy to investment, development, and exports by the U.S. companies and their investor-owners.


Naturally, Texas politicians support more trade, partly because the state’s companies can sell oil, gas, and weaponry to India. For example, Texas Sen. John Cornyn attended the “Howdy Modi” event in Houston:

Turns out and my wife’s birthday are both today. Prime Minister @narendramodi kindly offered his best wishes to Sandy






Embedded video




Cornyn is a co-sponsor of Lee’s bill — but Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has not sponsored the bill.
Trump touted the trade deals during his speech, saying:
When it comes to expanding our commercial relationship, no issue is more important than energy security. For the first time ever, the United States is the Number One producer of both oil and natural gas on planet Earth … with much of it coming right here from the great state of Texas.
That means more jobs, more wages, and lower prices at the pump. Yesterday, we were thrilled to hear about the Indian company. Petronas [Energy] pledge to purchase up to 5 million tons of LNG [liquid natural gas] per year from the United States, which could lead to billions of dollars of LNG exports to India in the coming years. And we have plenty of it! Over the last year crude [oil] exports to India have grown by 400 percent. and liquefied natural gas exports continue to soar at record numbers. Thank you. These tremendous exports not only expand employment in America, but they increase freedom and security for India.
To keep our nation safe, the United States and India are forging an even stronger security partnership. U.S. defense sales have also reached $18 billion over the past decade — we make the greatest defense mechanisms and equipment anywhere in the world, and India knows that well. We’re looking forward to concluding several new defense deals very soon. There are a lot of them in the works.
But the Indians must have something to sell in exchange for the U.S. purchases.
So far, the Indians produce little exportable food, energy, factory goods, or technology. At the moment, India’s chief export is young Indians, including the 800,000-plus Indian visa-workers graduates who work on the American side of the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy. That economy now provides India with $78 billion in annual revenue — and so the Indian government is backing Lee’s outsourcing bill because it will allow more Indian graduates to work in the United States.
Both Walmart and Amazon are competing to build retail empires in India, so both are supporting Lee’s green-card giveaway bill because it would help India’s economy by boosting the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.

The demand by investors for endless migrant labor has created a new thing: The US-India Outsourcing Economy. This no-regulation zone redirects new wealth into a few cities & a small elite. Elites want to expand it, so US college-grads get . http://bit.ly/2LpqAmx 




For example, Walmart is boosting its stock value by outsourcing 569 finance and accounting jobs in North Carolina to cheaper H-1B workers from India. If the company saves $10,000 per employee, Walmart will save $5.7 million per year.
On Wall Street, Walmart’s price to earnings rate is 25 to one, so the $5.7 million in payroll savings will boost its stockholders’  value by $142 million.
Walmart picked an American company, Genpact, to supply the Indian workers. The company is a spin-off of General Electric, and it prospers by providing Indian H-1B workers to many companies in the United States. For example, the company asked for 271 H-1Bs in 2018, 410 H-1Bs in 2017, and 307 H-1Bs in 2016.
Genpact’s H-1Bs work on the U.S. side of the vast and growing U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy. Part of their job is to funnel additional work back into India. For example, Genpact may only need to use 100 H-1Bs in North Carolina to help steer the work of the 569 fired American finance experts back to large teams of low-wage Indian graduates in India.
Genpact’s $3.3 billion in revenue is enough to generate $7.5 billion in stock value for its investors, which include Bain Capital, Blackrock, and Charles Schwab Investment Management.
Democrats also used the Houston event to bolster their lopsided political support from naturalized Indians in the United States. The Democrat visitors included the House Democrats’ deputy leader, Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer.