“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”
Karen McQuillan
New York Times Compares Big Tech’s Domination to the Railroads
In a recent article, the New York Times outlines how a shrinking economy and the world in turmoil due to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic has actually helped Silicon Valley tech giants to further amass their wealth and influence.
In a recent article titled “Big Tech’s Domination of Business Reaches New Heights,” New York Times reporters Peter Eavis and Steve Lohr outline how Silicon Valley tech giants have benefited greatly from an unstable economy and a worldwide pandemic in recent months. According to the Times, the Masters of the Universe are in a “position to dominate American business in a way unseen since the days of railroads.”
Eavis and Lohr write in their article:
A rally in technology stocks elevated the S&P 500 stock index to a record high on Tuesday even as the pandemic crushes the broader economy. The stocks of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook, the five largest publicly traded companies in America, rose 37 percent in the first seven months this year, while all the other stocks in the S&P 500 fell a combined 6 percent, according to Credit Suisse.
Those five companies now constitute 20 percent of the stock market’s total worth, a level not seen from a single industry in at least 70 years. Apple’s stock market value, the highest of the bunch, is nearly $2 trillion — double what it was just 21 weeks ago.
The tech companies’ dominance of the stock market is propelled by their unprecedented reach into our lives, shaping how we work, communicate, shop and relax. That has only deepened during the pandemic, and as people shop more frequently on Amazon, click on a Google or Facebook ad or pay up for an iPhone, the companies receive a greater share of spending in the economy and earn ever larger profits. This is why investors have flocked to those stocks this year at the expense of the scores of companies struggling in the health crisis, and are betting that their position will be unassailable for years.
Thomas Philippon, a professor of finance at New York University, told the NYT: “Covid was the perfect positive storm for these guys.” Daily visits to platforms such as Facebook and YouTube increased drastically in March, right when stay-at-home orders went into effect. Facebook saw a usage increase of 15 percent while YouTube saw a 10 percent increase according to online data provider SimilarWeb.
Amazon’s stock is up over 50 percent from its pre-pandemic price showing how much investors believe they have benefited from the disruption of regular retail chains. Jonathan Welburn, a lead author on the RAND study, commented that during the pandemic web users may work via Slack, call people via Zoom, order food on DoorDash, and watch a movie on Netflix.
What these companies have in common is that they all run on Amazon Web Services. “Amazon is a very central digital hub, and it epitomizes the direction our economy has taken,” Welburn said. Cloud computing has become vital in the work-from-home age, global spending on cloud technology rose 33 percent to more than $30 billion in the second quarter of 2020 according to Synergy Research.
Eavis and Lohr ended their article commenting on what the future may hold as these tech firms grow in power and influence:
Of course, the searing rally in the stocks could be the result of excessive optimism and the stocks could fall. But if the Big Five keep reporting huge profits, they should still make up an outsize share of the overall market. In the 12 months through the end of June, they earned nearly $500 million a day in net income combined.
“The stock market has the great advantage that it’s looking at the stream of future profits,” Mr. Philippon said. “They think they are high today — and going to remain very high in the future.”
Read the full article at the New York Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the
creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open
borders.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/em-cadwaladr-impending-death-of.html
“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 BINDERThe
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.”
Tucker
Carlson Slamming Conservative Inc. for Defending Big Tech
Tucker Calls Out
-Kochs
-Heritage Foundation
-American Conservative Union
-AEI
"Big Tech Companies silence Conservatives, Conservative Non-Profits try to
prevent the government from doing anything about it."
2,315
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.
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.
In 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.
No 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.
After 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 controlled 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.
It’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 states, 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.
Sen Kamala Harris is a product of Silicon Valley's billionaires and will enforce their agenda in DC.
Eg, she's an author of the S.386 bill that allows the Fortune 500 to hire more white-collar workers from India for jobs needed by America's college grads https://t.co/gKCuD9DH5z
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 12, 2020
2020 ElectionImmigrationPoliticsH-1B VisasJ-1L-1Mike PompeoOutsourcingU.S-India Outsourcing Economyvisa workers
Silicon Valley Donors ‘Happiest’ with Pro-Big Tech Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s Running Mate
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s selection of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) sparked enthusiasm for the ticket in Silicon Valley as Harris has kept a close relationship with big tech and done little to obstruct the industry during her tenure in office.
Recode wrote on Tuesday that Biden has struggled, until recently, to “excite the wealthiest and most powerful tech moguls,” whereas Harris will bring “superfans” from the Silicon Valley billionaire class to help out the Democrat presidential ticket.
Biden’s selection of Harris, as opposed to anti-tech big tech Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-CA), signals that a Biden-Harris administration would likely take a lax attitude toward big tech regulation, and likely stray away from regulating it or pursuing antitrust solutions for allegedly anti-competitive behavior.
Cooper Teboe, a top Democrat fundraiser in Silicon Valley, said that roughly one-third of the donors he’s spoken to believe Harris would serve as one of the most big tech-friendly vice presidential candidates.
Harris “is the safest pick for the donor community. She will be the pick that the California, Silicon Valley donor community — who are worried about things like tech and repatriation and taxes and so on and so forth — she is the pick that they will be happiest with,” Teboe said.
Big tech billionaires have even developed deep admiration for and friendships with Harris.
Salesforce founder Marc Benioff told Recode that Harris is “one of the highest integrity people I have ever met.”
Former Facebook President Sean Parker invited Harris to his wedding.
Billionaire Democrat donors such as Reid Hoffman and John Doerr donated to Harris’s short-lived presidential bid.
Tony West, Harris’s brother-in-law, is the general counsel of Uber; Harris’s niece worked at Uber.
Laurene Powell Jobs, Apple founder Steve Job’s widow, wrote when Biden announced Harris as his vice presidential nominee, “Joe Biden you made a great choice!”
Joe Biden you made a great choice!
— Laurene Powell Jobs (@laurenepowell) August 11, 2020
Harris also developed a deep friendship with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, which included helping Sandberg market her book Lean In.
Two days after Californians elected Harris to the Senate, Sandberg congratulated Harris, writing:
Kamala,
CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!! We need you now more than ever.
I just did a Facebook post about you and all the women.
Cheering you on!
Sheryl
While many could claim that Harris has a tight relationship with Silicon Valley, Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley investor, said that Harris could create a “Nixon-to-China” moment to push regulations due to her relationship with big tech.
“As senator from California, Kamala Harris was understandably aligned with Big Tech,” McNamee claimed. “As vice president, she has an opportunity to stand up for all Americans.”
When it comes to her time in the Senate and on the presidential campaign trail, Harris has had a mixed record in regards to her attitude towards big tech.
While she has grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for the company’s alleged misuse of Americans’ private data, she has waffled over how she would address calls for using antitrust against America’s largest technology companies. She has also dodged questions over whether the federal government should break up big tech companies, only to suggest that “we have to seriously take a look at that.”
Sen. @KamalaHarris: "Facebook has experienced massive growth and has prioritized its growth over the best interests of its consumers."
"We need to seriously take a look" at breaking up Facebook, "it is essentially a utility that has gone unregulated." #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/ywbJk6gxvC
— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) May 12, 2019
“The tech companies have got to be regulated in a way that we can ensure and the American consumer can be certain that their privacy is not being compromised,” Harris told the New York Times.
When asked about breaking up big tech companies, she said, And, when asked about breaking up, “My first priority is going to be that we ensure that privacy is something that is intact.”
However, Sally Hubbard, a director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, said, “All of the problems with Facebook all come down to two things. “Its business model and the fact that it’s a monopoly power. You can’t fix that with better privacy standards alone.”
In one instance, she did call on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to ban President Donald Trump’s Twitter account over the president’s questioning of the legitimacy of the intelligence officer “whistleblower,” used to launch an impeachment inquiry against Trump.
Big tech donations helped launch her into the Senate after her time as the attorney general of California. Harris received $214,000 in donations from big tech to help get her elected to become the junior senator from California, which included maximum contributions from Sandberg.
“As a senator, Harris has been mostly quiet on policy-making issues that carry implications for Facebook and Google,” HuffPost wrote.
Harris remained quiet on the 2018 sex-trafficking bill, which carried considerable implications for Google and Facebook. She only became a cosponsor of the legislation when it became apparent that it would pass through the Senate.
Big tech remains one of her largest donors over her career in Congress.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, donated $161,137 to Harris over time in the Senate.
Apple donated $81,329 during her time in Congress.
Silver Lake Partners, a private equity firm that focuses on technology startups, donated $69,722.
Joel Kotkin in the City Journal noted that Harris is “Silicon Valley’s dream of political control.”
“Harris is also the favored candidate of the tech and media oligarchy now almost uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party,” Kotkin wrote in 2019.
He continued:
Given the media’s obsession with style, race, and gender, we would do well to understand what agenda lurks behind Harris’s atmospherics. The reality: if she wins, the tech oligarchy — titans of today’s Gilded Age — will have achieved commanding influence, not just in the information business and the media, but in the White House as well.
Kotkin also explained that Harris did little to prevent the rise of controlled power amongst the Silicon Valley companies. He wrote:
Harris has not called for curbs on, let alone for breaking up, the tech giants. As California’s attorney general, she did little to prevent the agglomeration of economic power that has increasingly turned California into a semi-feudal state dominated by a handful of large tech firms.
“Her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, was a managing partner with Venable Partners, whose clients include Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, and trade associations opposing strict Internet regulations,” he added.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
Big Tech Joins Chamber of Commerce Lawsuit to Import Foreign Workers While 26M Americans Jobless
Giant tech corporations have joined a Chamber of Commerce lawsuit that seeks to overturn President Trump’s executive order halting visa programs to prioritize unemployed Americans for scarcely available jobs.
Giant tech corporations have joined a Chamber of Commerce lawsuit that seeks to overturn President Trump’s executive order halting visa programs to prioritize unemployed Americans for scarcely available jobs.
Last month, the Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit against Trump’s expanded executive order, signed in June, that halts the H-1B, H-4, H-2B, L-1, and J-1 visa programs to reduce foreign competition against millions of unemployed Americans.
Today, there are 26 million Americans who are jobless — 7.7 million of whom are out of the workforce altogether and about two million who have been out of work for months but want full-time employment. Another 8.4 million Americans are working part-time but want full-time jobs.
Now, CEOs for the largest tech corporations in the world have signed onto the lawsuit in an amicus brief. Tech corporations such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Netflix, Zillow, and PayPal have all signed on to fight Trump’s order.
The full list of those supporting the Chamber of Commerce lawsuit include:
1. Adobe Inc.
2. Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers
3. Amazon.com, Inc.
4. Apple Inc.
5. Atlassian, Inc.
6. Autodesk, Inc.
7. Bates White, LLC
8. Box, Inc.
9. BSA Business Software Alliance, Inc.
10. Consumer Technology Association
11. Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce
12. Dropbox, Inc.
13. Facebook, Inc.
14. FWD.us Education Fund
15. GitHub, Inc.
16. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company
17. HP Inc.
18. HR Policy Association
19. Information Technology Industry Council
20. Institute of International Bankers
21. Intel Corp.
22. Internet Association
23. Juniper Networks, Inc.
24. LinkedIn Corporation
25. Metro Atlanta Chamber
26. Microsoft Corporation
27. Netflix, Inc.
28. New Imagitas, Inc.
29. North Texas Commission
30. Partnership for a New American Economy Research Fund
31. PayPal, Inc.
32. Plaid Inc.
33. Postmates Inc.
34. Reddit, Inc.
35. salesforce.com, inc.
36. SAP SE
37. Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA)
38. ServiceNow, Inc.
39. Shutterstock, Inc.
40. Silicon Valley Bank
41. Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)
42. Splunk Inc.
43. Square, Inc.
44. SurveyMonkey Inc.
45. Twitter, Inc.
46. Uber Technologies, Inc.
47. Upwork Inc.
48. Vail Valley Partnership
49. VMware, Inc.
50. Workday, Inc.
51. Xylem Inc.
52. Zillow Group, Inc.
The corporate lobbying effort to reopen pipelines of foreign workers to take U.S. jobs comes as companies are cutting Information Technology (IT) jobs, about 134,000 in July, due to economic shutdowns spurred by the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Across all sectors, job postings in IT fell to roughly 235,000 in July, down from nearly 269,000 in June and about 358,000 in March. The sectors with the most tech-job postings in July were professional and technical services with 39,956 postings, finance and insurance at 18,756, and manufacturing at 17,473. [Emphasis added]
Tech CEOs like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Tim Cook signing onto the lawsuit is significant because of their tremendous sway in the Washington, D.C. beltway, particularly when it comes to labor and immigration policy.
In July, the Trump administration clarified that foreign nationals taking online courses with American colleges and universities would not be eligible for F-1 student visas. A lawsuit was quickly filed with the support of tech executives.
Weeks later, the administration dropped the policy. A Yahoo Finance report admitted that the tech executives signing onto the lawsuit had “underscored the power wielded by tech companies, who have lots of money and political influence at their disposal.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
DHS Recycles 14,500 H-1B Visas for Fortune 500 Employers
The Department of Homeland Security is recycling 14,500 unused H-1B visas to employers after worried companies declined to accept the work visas they had won in the annual lottery.
The redistributed visas will be used to import foreign workers to fill the Fortune 500 jobs that will appear when the economy recovers, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, a group of white-collar professionals who oppose the Fortune 500’s visa workers programs that damage their careers.
Those jobs are needed by the hundreds of thousands of skilled young Americans who are graduating this year and by the hundreds of thousands of American professionals who have lost their jobs in the coronavirus crash, he said, adding:
Our immigration system is on autopilot. It is not flexible, it does not make allowances for how the economy is doing, what the true labor needs are to make sure immigration is working for American employees … We need employment-visa reform that doesn’t allow for Americans to be displaced.
In April of each year, companies enter an annual lottery for 85,000 H-1B visas. The lottery allows new H-1B workers to arrive each October, so joining a growing population of at least 600,000 resident H-1B workers, many of whom are working as powerless gig-workers for subcontractors in Fortune 500 companies. Non-profits — including hospitals, research centers, and universities — can import as many H-1Bs as they wish.
In an August 14 statement to Breitbart News, the DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau declined to say how many H-1B visas are being recycled from companies that no longer want the visas they won in the Spring:
Recently, USCIS determined that additional registrations needed to be selected to reach the numerical allocations. A selection of previously submitted electronic registrations was completed on Aug. 11. The petition filing period based on registrations selected on Aug. 11 will begin on Aug. 17 and close on Nov. 16.
Companies can apply for the visas under “existing statutory and regulatory requirements,” the USCIS statement said.
The unused visas are being reallocated 81 days before the election, and two days after the Department of State gutted President Donald Trump’s June 22 Executive Order barring the entry of H-1B visa workers until at least January.
The news was cheered by the immigration lawyers who bring in the white-collar workers for the Fortune 500 companies:
And, new H-1B selections flutter into the email, like snowflakes from the winter sky. Of course, @USCIS notified no one publicly it was reopening the H-1B lottery b/c not enough applications were submitted to reach the cap. Nor have the said how many new apps will be accepted.
— Charles Kuck (@ckuck) August 14, 2020
Yes we also are seeing those
— Helena S. Younossi (@helenayounossi) August 14, 2020
The recycled visas will be used by CEOs to replace innovative Americans with imported and compliant foreign workers, said Lynn. CEOs “want to build a serf economy — where workers work for less and accept worse conditions,” usually in the hope of getting a green card from the government, he said.
The new welcome for H-1B and other visa workers is an apparent reversal from policies Trump announced in June and early August –and from the promises that candidate Trump made in 2016.
On June 22, Trump blocked the inflow of roughly 90,000 H-1B workers until at least January 1, and he directed his deputies to rewrite the regulations to prevent H-1Bs from cutting white-collar salaries.
The policy was a late and partial implementation of Trump’s 2016 campaign trail promise, “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions,” Trump said in March 2016.
On August 3, President Donald Trump met with a group of Americans whose jobs at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) were being transferred to H-1B workers. Trump said:
It doesn’t work that way. As we speak, we’re finalizing H1-B regulations so that no American worker is replaced ever again. H1-Bs should be used for top, highly paid talent to create American jobs, not as inexpensive labor program to destroy American jobs.
“The H-1B visa is sort of a Trojan horse to bring in folks who cannibalize our own workforce and ultimately take any number of intellectual property secrets, or proprietary information, back to their home countries,” White House adviser Theo Wold told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow. He continued:
That cuts [Americans’] wages, not only for the American workers they replace. It also has as a cascading effect on related sectors of the economy [and] on overall wage-growth in the country writ large.
So, the Swamp, the tech sector, the Silicon Valley barons, the big banks, all of these folks, love the idea of being able to import cheap labor.
I think the main thing your listeners need to know on the H-1B visa is, ultimately, it just perpetuates the lie — and it is a lie — that Americans lack the talent, the ability, or the credentials to fill these jobs.
The visa worker pipelines are fiercely defended by Fortune 500 companies and their subcontractors, by investors, Silicon Valley CEOs, and the nations’ universities.
The resident population of at least 1.3 million foreign contract workers allows the CEOs to cut salaries, boost stock values, and curb the creation of rival technologies by innovative American professionals. The fierce defense also minimizes media coverage and suppresses social media debate over the harm caused by the visa worker programs.
In addition to DHS’s second lottery of H-1 visas, officials from other agencies are opening the door to tens of thousands of excluded H-1Bs during the few months before the election.
On August 12, the three agencies responsible for approving, selecting, and admitting visa workers “gutted” Trump’s June 22 policy by creating numerous exemptions for favored H-1B, L-1, and J-1 visa workers. “You can drive a Mack truck through this,” Lynn said as he read the exemptions. “The exemptions basically cover anyone on an H-IB or a J-1 or an L-1 …. Boom! They’re in. … With all the exemptions, there is no EO — they’ve eliminated the EO through the exemptions.”
Lynn worked to highlight the TVA outsourcing and helped bring about the August 3 meeting of Trump and the TVA workers.
For years, the White House has used exemptions to defang lawsuits and media sob-stories. For example, the L-1a exemptions are engineered to minimize problems for the senior managers of foreign-owned auto factories.
But pro-migration lawyers welcomed the breadth of the exemptions:
There's more there than just cheap labor. It could be tax evasion, indentured servitude, spying or something else. In addition, there is widespread hacking, sabotaging data stealing and complete incompetence throughout the Indian takeover of IT in America and the world.
— Arthur Rosalind *** this account has been blocked (@arthur_oslund) August 14, 2020
So far, the White House has not announced a response to the nullified rules.
In a statement to Breitbart News, the Department of State stressed that its exemption policy was developed with DHS and the Department of Labor:
One important thing to note is this line … “Such exceptions …. were developed in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor as directed in the proclamation.
The state department also noted that the number of H-1B “issuances” in 2020 had declined by roughly 60,000 for the March 1 to July 31 period, compared to 2019. The agency did not explain if the reduced number of “issuances” opened up H-1B jobs to Americans.
The State Dept. has nullified Pres Trump's popular visa-worker Executive Order.
An agency memo provides easy workarounds for CEOs to import #H1B, J-1, etc, workers for the Fortune 500 jobs needed by US grads, despite protections in Trump's June 22 rulehttps://t.co/Uk3YFmBwSK— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 13, 2020
State Dept. ‘Guts’ Donald Trump’s Curbs on Fortune 500’s Visa Workers
13 Aug 2020160
7:25
The state department is allowing Fortune 500 companies to freely import H-1B visa workers for jobs needed by American voters, despite President Donald Trump’s June 22 Executive Order barring nearly all visa workers.
“They have totally eviscerated the requirements” of Trump’s E.O., said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Reform Law Institute. “There is no doubt about it — whoever created this is thumbing their noses at President Trump,” he said, adding, “you can bet that the guys who did this are voting for [Joe] Biden.”
‘This is an insult to the President of the United States, it is an insult to working men and women of the United States,” said Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. Tech Workers.
There are less than 90 days to go in the election. How can he persuade Americans he’s keeping any of this 2016 promises if he allows the State Department to nullify and gut the E.O. he signed to protect Americans from [outsourcing by Fortune 500 companies]? More than that — I think it is beginning to make Trump look stupid in front of the voters. He needs to call in Pompeo and talk to him about his job prospects because [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo does not seem to give a hoot about Americans’ job prospects.
The exemptions are “expansive,” admitted Greg Siskind, a lawyer who is working to widen the pipelines of foreign doctors into U.S. hospital chains. “They are backing off … that could be good news for thousands of you guys,” he told his clients.
On August 3, Trump met with Lynn and several employees of the Tennesee Valley Authority to announce he would block the outsourcing of their jobs to H-1B workers imported by three staffing companies. Trump said:
It doesn’t work that way. As we speak, we’re finalizing H1-B regulations so that no American worker is replaced ever again. H1-Bs should be used for top, highly paid talent to create American jobs, not as inexpensive labor program to destroy American jobs.
On June 22, Trump signed another Executive Order to close down the pipeline of white-collar H-1B, J-1, and L-1 workers, as well as the pipeline of H-2B manual laborers. The E.O. is expected to temporarily bar the arrival of perhaps 80,000 H-1Bs, plus thousands of J-1s and L-1s, while hundreds of thousands of new graduates and fired professionals look for jobs. Trump also directed his agency deputies to write new regulations that would reduce the Fortune 500’s widespread use of visa workers as cheap labor replacements for American voters.
Trump’s intervention to save U.S. white collar jobs is very popular among millions of American voters whose futures are threatened by the Fortune 500’s preference for docile and cheap visa workers. The CEO’s workforce policy keeps at least 1.3 million foreign graduates in U.S. jobs, even amid the dramatic economic crash caused by China’s coronavirus.
The official unemployment rate for U.S. tech grads has jumped to 4.4 percent, according to an industry association. But the calculation does not count the many U.S. tech grads who were forced into lesser careers by the many visa workers in the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.
But the State Department’s June 12 bulletin provides a long list of many easy exemptions for Fortune 500 companies and their Indian staffing subcontractor. The document says Trump’s directions:
… include exceptions, including an exception for individuals whose travel would be in the national interest, as determined by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or their respective designees. The list below is a non-exclusive list of the types of travel that may be considered to be in the national interest, based on determinations made by the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, exercising the authority delegated to him by the Secretary of State.
Pompeo is the Secretary of State. Carl Risch is the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs.
The list of exemptions is very wide:
Travel by technical specialists, senior level managers, and other workers whose travel is necessary to facilitate the immediate and continued economic recovery of the United States … The petitioning employer has a continued need for the services or labor to be performed by the H-1B nonimmigrant in the United States.
Miano is an expert on visa worker laws and studied the long list of exemptions:
The first one on the list is what they needed to do to get the visas in the first place … Number 2, any of them can do that, no problem … Number 3 is totally meaningless — anyone can do that … ‘Financial Hardship’ for an employer is so loosey goosy that anyone can meet that … ‘Critical Infrastructure’ is basically anything.
Lynn was less formal;
This is effing b….. Who the f… came up with these exceptions? … You can drive a Mack truck through this …. The exemptions basically cover anyone on an H-IB or a J-1 or an L-1 …. Boom! They’re in … with all the exemptions, there is no EO — they’ve eliminated the EO through the exemptions.”
One of the most notable exemptions are for visa workers who have jobs at government agencies, usually via Indian-run staffing companies:
… individuals, identified by the Department of Defense or another U.S. government agency, performing research, providing IT support/services, or engaging other similar projects essential to a U.S. government agency.
The document also provides exemptions to foreign workers who have taken jobs from Americans in “critical infrastructure,” such as the TVA jobs blocked by Trump:
The applicant’s proposed job duties or position within the petitioning company indicate the individual will provide significant and unique contributions to an employer meeting a critical infrastructure need. Critical infrastructure sectors are chemical, communications, dams, defense industrial base, emergency services, energy, financial services, food and agriculture, government facilities, healthcare and public health, information technology, nuclear reactors, transportation, and water systems.
“The people who are doing this are ignoring the president,” said Miano. “I can only guess at their motivations, but we can say it is Deep State acting independently.”
“In a close election, with time running out, with [2016] expectations not met … Trump needs things to go smoothly from now till November, and this list clearly he has people in the State Department sabotaging him,” said Miano.
“When word of this gets out to the public that every E.O. he writes is not worth the paper it is written on,” said Lynn. “Because through exceptions, they become get nullified by the Deep State, he loses the voters’ trust and confidence.”
He added: “What good is a State Department that becomes the tool of corporations that want to displace Americans, when tens of millions of Americans are under extreme financial duress?”
The State Department did not respond to emails from Breitbart News requesting comment.
Sen Kamala Harris is a product of Silicon Valley's billionaires and will enforce their agenda in DC.
Eg, she's an author of the S.386 bill that allows the Fortune 500 to hire more white-collar workers from India for jobs needed by America's college grads https://t.co/gKCuD9DH5z
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 12, 2020
2020 ElectionImmigrationPoliticsH-1B VisasJ-1L-1Mike PompeoOutsourcingU.S-India Outsourcing Economyvisa workers
Kamala Has Already Struck Out
Even before the Democrat presidential candidate, Joe Biden, named his choice for vice president, a group of Democrat Party activists released an unprecedented document outlining their "rules" for how the media could address issues surrounding the woman Biden ultimately chose. These guidelines made it abundantly clear that the media were "required" to handle Biden's choice with kid gloves. Questions were not to be probing; instead, this veep candidate, unlike the vicious coverage Sarah Palin endured years ago, was to be above questioning. With astounding hubris, the Democrats actually warned the media that they would "monitor coverage" of the female veep candidate and that anything even slightly critical would be condemned as "racist and sexist." Hollywood celebrities and the usual line-up of leftist women's groups (NARAL, Planned Parenthood, etc.) have promised Kamala, "We've got your back."
Bottom line: Biden is in hiding; Kamala is untouchable.
This mafia-style intimidation cannot be allowed to stand. The public needs to know that Kamala's quest, as in baseball, has already struck out. She has three strikes against her that are a death knell for her prospects. There is no way, after these strikes, she should be anywhere near a heartbeat or a brain flare away from the presidency of America.
1. Opportunistic Career Path — We are not supposed to have noticed (or it's not supposed to make a difference or matter), but Kamala Harris came into politics as a mistress under the patronage of the notoriously unethical speaker of the House in California, Willie Brown. Numerous public servants in government in California at the time noted that Kamala was a pretty twenty-something young woman that Brown, a married man in his 60s, regularly showed off as his mistress at political events. She received prestigious, powerful, and profitable political appointments in state government and moved on from there. Anyone who brings up this opportunism is against her "ambition" and is trying to keep her "in her place." In short, anyone raising these well documented facts is both misogynistic and racist.
Kamala is known as being "pragmatic, rather than principled." Some Democrat strategists claim to be happy with Kamala as a "messenger" (meaning she is good TV) but cringe at her inconsistent and problematic "messages" (meaning she is all over the map on any given issue).
Harris has flip-flopped on issue after issue, depending on what's politically expedient. She excuses this inconsistency by saying being a prosecutor is, by its very nature, "controversial." As a prosecutor, she defended capital punishment, but she ran for office on an "anti–death penalty" platform. Her truancy policies were a problem; also her drug programs. She opposed police body cameras, claiming they disadvantaged blacks and minorities. She was criticized for siding with police too often; now she is vocal about police "brutality." She is now very pro-LGBT and transgender issues and blames her previous inconsistency on staffers who disregarded her personal views. She was against decriminalization of "sex work" before she suddenly advocated for criminalization. Same with marijuana; she was against it before flippantly claiming that marijuana brings joy and "we need more joy in the world." She's taken both sides on whether a convicted terrorist should be able to vote from prison!
2. Radical Woke Ideologies and Policies — Many analysts believe that Kamala Harris will be America's most radical left political candidate ever. She's consistently among the top two "most progressive" members of the Senate. She has been called one of the most radical-left politicians today; pick any pet woke cause, and Kamala will be farthest left! These policy positions are not only constitutionally problematic; they are also prohibitively expensive, with a price tag in the multiple billions of dollars!
Guns? Kamala supports extremist laws to restrict our 2nd Amendment rights. She advocates a wide array of increased gun control measures, including executive orders to implement problematic regulations.
Health care? Kamala co-sponsored Bernie Sanders's "Medicare for All" health insurance proposal. She wants to abolish all private health insurance, saying, "Let's eliminate all of that!" She strongly supports a single-payer system. Observers note that both her position and Biden's on the issue have solidified during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Education? Kamala attended all-white schools until she chose to attend Howard University. She passed the bar in 1990 and progressed as a prosecutor to become district attorney of San Francisco thanks to political muscle from her benefactor, Willie Brown. She advocates for free college and university education for all — especially for free tuition at historically black colleges and universities.
Immigration? Even as the daughter of (legal) immigrants from India and Jamaica, Kamala has repeatedly shown that she makes no distinction between the rights and privileges of a citizen and an illegal alien. Benefits, she claims, belong to citizens and non-citizens alike.
Environment? She joined forces with the socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to require additional regulations on environmental policies.
3. Kavanaugh Hearings Debacle — The final strike is the most disgraceful. The way Kamala Harris treated Brett Kavanaugh at the 2018 confirmation hearings was the most disrespectful and vicious of the senators. She stood out at the hearings for her deceitful questioning and the revolting tone of her accusations. She accepted the flimsiest of evidence in attacking Kavanaugh – for instance, the implausible and unsubstantiated accusation of gang rape — and praised an obviously "deceptively edited video" claiming that Kavanaugh opposed birth control, claiming that it was all about "punishing women."
Her extreme positions were so bad that she was actually called out by the left. Her attacks — called fear-invoking lies and possibly attempts at a presidential audition — were acknowledged as false and criticized by left-wing PolitiFact and her liberal hometown newspapers, The San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. As President Trump said, she was, indeed, "extraordinarily nasty" to Brett Kavanaugh.
Guy Benson, Townhall political editor, described her Kavanaugh performance as "particularly demagogic, cynical and abysmal." In their excellent book, Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court, Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino detailed all the egregious procedural maneuvers Harris tried in her efforts to get Kavanaugh to commit perjury, as well as the fawning media coverage.
In a normal election, the veep choice would be relatively irrelevant, but Joe Biden is not a normal presidential candidate. At 77, "Gaffe-Prone Joe" Biden has said he'd be a "transitional" president, and it is generally acknowledged that he is more likely than other previous candidates to become (sooner rather than later) incapacitated or unable to serve more than one term. Thus, Kamala must be viewed as a possible presidential contender. She fails on every measure — significantly! Leadership? She is obviously, much like Hillary, a ruthless opportunist willing to do or say whatever it takes to get ahead. Ideas/Policies? She can be swayed however the political winds are blowing at the time. Even her friends explain that she is "not ideological," meaning she doesn't take principled stances on important issues. Experience? She has dramatically failed upward! The media have frequently acknowledged her "history of flip flopping and deceit."
What Kamala Harris offers in the veepstakes is a promise to promote a grab bag of assorted radical goals of every oddball progressive from Bernie to AOC to Obama and be an advocate for special constituencies — pro-abortion voters, instigators of the BLM movement's racism, gun control activists, and illegal aliens.
Image: Mobilus In Mobili via Wikimedia Commons.
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