ROME — The lockdowns established to counter the spread of the coronavirus have pushed 100 million more people into “extreme poverty,” Vatican News announced Saturday.
Citing reports from the Catholic relief organization Caritas Internationalis as well as from the World Bank, Vatican News said that the global health crisis continues to take a dire social and economic toll, noting that twice as many people — 100 million — have fallen into extreme poverty than were previously expected.
Underscoring the importance of the new “poverty virus,” Vatican News praised the work of doctors, scientists, and researchers to curb the impact of the Wuhan coronavirus while questioning whether “the political class” has worked equally hard to address the economic fallout of the disease.
The report goes on to cite Pope Francis in saying the time has come to reform “sick social structures” and grow “an economy of integral development of the poor and not of welfare.”
The response to the pandemic must therefore be twofold, it declares, again citing Francis. On the one hand, “it is essential to find a cure for a small but tremendous virus, which brings the whole world to its knees” while on the other hand, “we must cure a great virus, that of social injustice, inequality of opportunity, marginalization and lack of protection of the weakest.”
The report also cites the president of the World Bank, David Malpass, who has confirmed new, higher estimates of massive numbers of people around the world being dragged into abject poverty due to effects from coronavirus lockdowns, noting further that “the number could grow.”
“We had predicted this scenario as early as March, which means that the economic and food safety consequences could be even worse than the pandemic health emergency,” said Marta Petrosillo, director of communications at Caritas Internationalis , in an interview with Vatican News.
Curiously, however, it was Francis himself who said in late May that priority must to be given to persons rather than to the economy in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I make an appeal: that nobody lacks healthcare,” the pope said during his Regina Caeli message last May 31. “Care for people, instead of saving for the economy. Care for people, who are more important than the economy.”
“We people are temples of the Holy Spirit, the economy is not,” the pontiff insisted.
While the pope has more than one proposed a dichotomy between opting for people and opting for the economy, it is not immediately apparent how this clean differentiation works. The economy does not exist independently of people and when people lose their jobs and their savings, it is these real people and those who depend on them who suffer.
Disregarding the effects of lockdowns on the economy may have seemed to benefit people in the short term, but it has proven terribly destructive in the long term.
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the
creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open
borders.
“Open
border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are
a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion.
As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated,
and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then
granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s
economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way,
CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN
SPECTATOR
Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against
‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires
JOHN BINDER
The
Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against
“concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the
United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview
on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are
the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for
their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley
explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of
the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech
conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things
Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a
fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic
citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day,
we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying
to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech
billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from
government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested
in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our
democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these
businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States,
but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley
said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest
multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper
… moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have
here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have
bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors,
those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly
they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley
continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we
need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going
to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this
country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this
country.”
While multinational
corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and
middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before
the needs of American communities:
A free market is one
where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where
people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in
order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech
company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which
may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a
living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do
that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with
corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing
about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership
with big government. Big business and big government always get together,
always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for
instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between
big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s
something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free
trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat
Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with
hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to
China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this
country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even
make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain
up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result
of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News
reported, Hawley detailed in the interview
how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’
agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class,
the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as
much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of
wealthiest earners. A study released last month
revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than
all other Americans.
John Binder is a
reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
Tucker
Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding
Rich Polk/Getty
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives
for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker
Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of
establishment conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by
the establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in
Washington.
Tucker revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly
conservative group” controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to
stave off the closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook.
The ads targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were
investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate
Judiciary Committee with digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use
antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” reported
Carlson.
The Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly
“conservative” D.C. think tanks that take money from big tech, and often
advocate against regulating them over political bias or any other matter.
“In all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million
defending Silicon Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”
6:32 PM - Dec 20, 2019
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people are talking about this
“Google has given money to at least 22 right-leaning
institutions that are also funded by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those institutions include the American Conservative Union, the
American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson explained that this spending gets results.
“In September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and
three other groups funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to
the Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over
the DoJ’s plans to look into whether search engines and social media were
hurting competition and stifling speech.”
Carlson also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that
its shilling for big tech meant that it “no longer represents the interest of
conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”
“A recent paper by Heritage, entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is the Best Remedy For
Online Bias Concerns,’ defends the special privileges that
Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And if conservatives
don’t like it, Heritage says, well they can just start their own Google!”
Evidence of big tech’s efforts to co-opt establishment
conservatives has been accumulating for some time. In March, Breitbart
News published leaked audio from a senior director of public policy
at Google , talking about using funding of
conservative institutions to “steer” the movement. Another part of the leaked
audio transcript was also revealed on Tucker Carlson’s show at the same time.
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech against efforts to strip them of
their special legal privileges , which were given
to them by Congress in the 1990s and are enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the
foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council
after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact
that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other
tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at
your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com .
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at
Breitbart News.
In truth, the Golden
State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the
nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared
with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half
of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San
Francisco , which now has the highest property crime rate among major
cities.
Joel Kotkin
December 20, 2019
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s
still time to change course.
“We are the modern
equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the
ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future
. . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star
who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a
model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s
anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate , technology, gender, or
race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened
society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his
inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden
State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the
nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared
with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half
of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San
Francisco , which now has the highest property crime rate among major
cities. California
hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a
troubling direction.
This didn’t have to
happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike
the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late
industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel
than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In
the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of
progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive
water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network
of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing
people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler
J. Hector St. John de CrèvecÅ“ur described the American as “this new man,”
and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old
prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still
exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its
roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
I n the second half of the twentieth century, California’s
remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s
inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south
Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In fact, growth often favored
suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families, including
minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades,
the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class
growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and
electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity
prices have risen five
times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use
controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once
average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed
those of virtually every state . At the same time, California’s economy has shed
industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a
decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace,
finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from
the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of
its operations to Houston —have disappeared. Not a
single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century
California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the
press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and
high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay
Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has
created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A
remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost
half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley,
created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less
than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles
County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
N o state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than
California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University
of California , where professors are required to prove their service to “people
of color,” to the state’s high
school curricula , with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s
anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General Xavier
Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration policy
while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal
immigrants. So far, more than 1
million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify
for free
health care , too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants to vote
in local elections .
Such radical policies may
make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned
about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and
African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy
vanish. According to one United
Way study ,
over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes
long-time political consultant Mike
Madrid ,
“the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer
Californians could count on education to help them move up. But today’s
educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than results.
Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th
in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test
scores for
black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents,
especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley
poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher
percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians
and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest
demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth
culture ,
creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art,
music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful
wokeness and rebellion , but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From
2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew
from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation
years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every
age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44
cohort.
As families with children
leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the
remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate
has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging
50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech
firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain
West .
Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend,
with California millennials forced to rent,
with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest
metros lead
the nation in long-term owners . California is increasingly a greying refuge for
those who bought property when housing was affordable.
A fter Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive
environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors
have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently
told a
crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example.
The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon,
Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential
candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green
mantle.
Their policies have worsened
conditions for
many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens
ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in
affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without
disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the
state’s proclaimed goal of building more
than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts to
reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in already-crowded
coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities like San Francisco,
the cost of building
one unit for
a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though
experiencing population gains, keep losing state
funding for decrepit
highways in
favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated,
especially in greater
Los Angeles .
The state, nevertheless,
continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and
nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing
ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric
cars to
electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy
poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and
logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business
relocation expert Joe
Vranich notes
that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the
state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the
bottom tier of states ; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to
one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada,
and Florida.
Similarly, the high
energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer,
have far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield , capital of the state’s
once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will
cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid
jobs, even as the state continues to import
oil from Saudi Arabia .
California’s leaders
apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During
the California drought, Brown and his minions
blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility
for insufficient
water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and
reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made
to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters
in the
media have
blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as
much to do with green mandates against control led burns and brush
clearance than
anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens
and others in blocking such
sensible policies.
Few climate advocates
ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed,
California’s green policy, as one
paper demonstrates,
may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and
industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state
ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is
minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state
policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy
investments of tech
leaders ,
even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah
solar farm —fail
to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
I t’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, that progressive
politicians like Garcetti —who leads a city with
paralyzing traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge
rat infestation , and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about
becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting
itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current
regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment
to other state s, notably Texas , Tennessee , Nevada , Colorado , and Arizona . Economic-modeling
firm Emsi estimates that
several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech
employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in professional
and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in
the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee,
and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms
of contract
labor ,
reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft , the legislation also
extends to independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some point, as
even Brown noted, the
ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an
expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could
stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent
$100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies,
including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two
of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future
levels of taxation. More than two-thirds
of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health care and
other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension
debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe
Nation . U.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom,
42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some
Californians are waking up. A
recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians believe
that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55
percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the
state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump. Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43
percent ,
placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s governors. A conservative-led
campaign to
recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys reveal growing opposition
to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing concern about
the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a rebellion against
the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110
cities ,
with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in
California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of
Commerce and the three
most prominent ethnic chambers —African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have
joined this effort.
Californians need less
bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to
policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening
the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of
what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small
population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs.
Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are
beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change
course is now.
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