WHEN BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA WAS OPERATING HIS BANKSTER REGIME WITH ERIC HOLDER, JOE BIDEN WAS GETTING FREE RENT AND MAKING HIMSELF RICHER. HILLARY CLINTON WAS USING HER POSITION AS SEC. OF STATE TO OPERATE A PAY-TO-PLAY SCAM THAT FUNDED HER PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION FAMILY SLUSH FUND AND DIANNE FEINSTEIN WAS WORKING ON HER MULTIPLE FORTUNES AS WAR PROFITEER, AND SERVANT OF RED CHINA.
Hunter Biden’s Magical Moscow Laptop
The only Russian disinformation operation here is the one being waged by the media.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
There are only so many ways that media and social media companies can avoid saying, “We refuse to run this story or allow it to be seen by any human being because it might hurt Biden.”
First they claimed that it was unverified, a problem that never troubled the same papers and news networks which had spent years claiming that President Trump was a Russian agent.
After arguing that the story is unethical because it contains stolen materials, a scruple that the media had never previously exercised when it gleefully rushed to dig through everything from Sarah Palin’s email account to President Trump’s tax returns, they defaulted to Russia.
Hunter Biden’s laptop is, the media and social media companies insist, a Russian operation.
What’s the evidence for the Biden laptop being a Russian operation? About the same as the evidence that Trump is a Russian agent. Or, as the media might politely call it, “unverified”.
“Clearly, the origins of this whole smear are from the Kremlin, and the president is only happy to have Kremlin help in trying to amplify it,” Rep. Adam Schiff claimed, “I think we know who the driving force behind this smear has been all along, and it’s been the president and the Kremlin. The Kremlin has an obvious interest in denigrating Joe Biden."
Clearly, if you say “Kremlin” three times, the claim becomes magically verified.
“They want Donald Trump to win,” Schiff argued. “He’s been the gift that doesn’t stop giving for the Kremlin, so clearly, they want to help him, so they want to denigrate the vice president.”
In President Trump’s latest gift to the Kremlin, he turned down Putin’s request to extend the START treaty, while Biden has committed to a five-year extension with no preconditions.
The Kremlin is terrified of Joe “I’ll Give You Everything You Want With No Preconditions” Biden.
"The Democratic Party is traditionally closer to the so-called liberal values, closer to social democratic ideas. And it was from the social democratic environment that the Communist Party evolved," Putin recently said. "This can be seen as an ideological basis for developing contacts with the Democratic representative." Or, to translate that into English, we’re all Commies here.
But forget the evidence. When it comes to Russia and Trump (or any scandalous accusation and Trump), the media has the same evidentiary standards as a witch hunter with a barrel.
Let’s do something so simple and obvious that the media’s fact checkers, who are trained to consult anonymous Estonian intelligence analysts and their grandmas, would never think of it.
Look at a calendar.
John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer repair store owner who got the laptop, claimed that he came into possession of it on April 12, 2019.
Biden only announced his candidacy in late April.
That would mean that the Russians had launched their disinformation operation against Biden before he was even running with the aim of preemptively knocking him out of the primaries.
Moscow must have been terrified of the guy who wanted to send $200 million to Iran after 9/11.
But let’s say Isaac was in on it.
In September, someone Isaac was in contact with, reached out to the FBI. And on December 17, 2019, the FBI took the laptop into custody, and then did nothing with it.
In December, Biden was leading a three-way race between him, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. While Biden had a lead, the race was still open, and most Democrats were undecided.
Assuming that the contents of the laptop in the custody of the FBI match the released materials, then the latest that a hypothetical Russian operation could have been launched is December.
If Democrats want to claim that the laptop was a Russian disinformation operation, then they have to argue that the Russians weren’t trying to interfere in the presidential election, but in the Democrat presidential primaries. That’s a credible argument considering Bernie’s Russian connection and that the DNC email hacks were pretty obviously meant to help Bernie’s people take over the Democrats while having no impact on the race between Trump and Hillary.
But the Democrats would rather eat Hunter’s laptop then concede that the drunk half-naked Castro-loving socialist singing Communist songs in a sauna might be compromised by Moscow.
And yet that’s the only way that the Russian disinformation operation claim could work.
If Isaac is a Russian patsy, then the Russians sent the Biden laptop to the FBI in the fall of 2019. If Isaac isn’t a Russian stooge, then the Russians deployed the operation in April 2019.
Both are really bad for the media conspiracy theory that Russia was behind the laptop.
If Isaac was working for the Russians, then Moscow, for some incomprehensible reason, created the laptop in the fall of 2019, when Biden could easily lose, sent it to the FBI, and then did nothing for a year. That makes even less sense than reading the Steele Dossier backward.
There is literally nothing about this scenario that holds together in any way whatsoever.
Were the Russians under the impression that the same FBI that had investigated and undermined Trump would jump at the opportunity to publish photos of Hunter with a crack pipe?
And what were they trying to accomplish during the primaries, except help Bernie?
But, alternatively, the Russians created the laptop in the spring of 2019, before Biden was even running, and then cunningly dropped it off with a partially blind repairman in a small computer shop in Delaware, understanding that he would be bound to search through it and make its contents public at the precise time that they wanted it made public. How? Magic. Obviously.
And this whole entire Russian operation to rig the election depended on a small computer repair shop owner deciding not to switch from Trump to Biden during a heated election year.
That’s a hell of a plan.
Despite going to all this trouble, the Russians didn’t bother including anything truly and irrevocably damning about Joe Biden. Maybe their photoshop people just got too caught up depicting Hunter Biden’s drug use to bother photoshopping Joe snorting cocaine off rubles.
That the Russian disinformation operation talking point doesn’t pass the simplest common sense tests doesn’t bother the media. There’s a reason why they keep blaming it all on Moscow.
The best conspiracy theories can’t be disproven. And any conspiracy theory involving a foreign intelligence operation, especially one that, like the Russians, enjoys taking credit for things it had nothing to do with to boost its image and influence, is essentially impossible to disprove.
Conspiracy theories can never be disproven to the enthusiastic conspiracy theorist. Everything you do to show it makes no sense just proves how cunning the conspirators are and how likely it is that you’re working with them. So the Russian disinformation operation can’t be disproven.
But it can be proven.
The origin of the media’s obsession with Russian disinformation operations came from the Steele Dossier, a piece of opposition research from the Clinton campaign, farmed out to a foreign intelligence operative who assembled it using unpaid Russian sources. These Russian sources, with supposed access to prime intelligence, were just happy to give this stuff away.
Steele's primary sub-source for the dossier had been deemed a likely Russian agent.
The media, which spent the next four years raving about Russian disinformation operations and which is now whining about unverified information, accepted the contents of the Steele Dossier, with zero verification. It showed absolutely no interest in whom Steele was working for. And it took extensive digging to learn that it was the Clinton campaign, even as the media dismissed that as completely irrelevant to the credibility of the unverified dossier it had been relying on.
Democrats and the media fought every attempt to learn about the Steele Dossier and to question its contents. They suggested that doing so might even get some people killed.
And they happily disregarded the blatantly false and inconsistent elements of the Dossier.
The Russian disinformation operation was embedded into the DOJ and the FBI, was used to discredit the intelligence community, and create the perception of an omnipotent Russia.
In short, it worked brilliantly.
The media claims that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a Russian disinformation operation being used as opposition research. But their obsession with Russian disinformation operations is itself the product of a Russian disinformation operation aimed at defeating President Trump in 2016.
Ever since, Democrats have casually thrown around claims of Russian disinformation operations to stifle, censor, and suppress their political opponents. Moscow would approve.
From Russian Facebook ads to Cambridge Analytica, every media attempt to marginalize their political opponents as Russian fronts has fallen apart very badly. But the media isn’t stopping.
Their constant claims of Russian disinformation operations are a disinformation operation.
The documents in the Hunter Biden laptop deserve at least as much review as Hillary Clinton’s campaign serving up claims of urinating Russian prostitutes from Russian intelligence sources. The only Russian disinformation operation here is the one being waged by the media for Biden.
REMEMBER WHEN BRIBES SUCKING LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS SAID OL' JOE'S FINANCES WERE ENTIRELY 'TRANSPARENT'?
This Is How the Left's Power Structure Collapses
Weeks ago, Rush Limbaugh mentioned that the issues defining the election had not come forward yet. He was correct. Not entirely, because all the issues coming out right now have existed. In plain sight.
They just weren't distilled yet.
It's now here, served up on a silver platter. No, not Hunter Biden. This Hunter Biden laptop story simply leads us to the issue. The word. One word that rules them all, and in the darkness binds them.
Corruption.
There it is. That's the issue. To begin, you have the corrupt family Biden. They've been scamming us and our system well for almost fifty years. The man is supposedly worth over 250 million dollars. How is this possible on his salary? It's not. So where did his wealth come from? Not from being a brilliant businessman.
Enter Hunter's laptop. We now know that this is a family steeped in crime and corruption. Ole Corn Pop appears to be awash in money kicked back to him by his family members who have grifted off his reputation for years. Hunter's laptop has betrayed all this and more. Much like Al Capone's bookkeeper. Who would have thought Capone would have been destroyed so completely by a set of crooked books? Such delicious irony. And who would have known that this would become the October surprise of all October surprises?
Corruption. Full grown. Oozing its way into America. It's everywhere on the left. The Biden family. Clintons. The Democratic Party. The FBI. The CIA. The mainstream media. The tech giants. It's a full-out plague, aided and abetted by their demonic philosophy, all of them gone astray.
All of them corrupt.
The New York Post story has been there for about a week now. The Democrat-media complex has ignored it entirely; the tech giants went into overdrive removing all evidence from their platforms. Google. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. The whole lot of them. Covering up a story that deserved universal distribution and condemnation. Instead, they covered up the most damning story to their side, their chosen side. All of them colluded to bury this mounting evidence of wrongdoing.
How far the mighty have fallen. And are falling.
What's the word for a media establishment that won't report this story?
What's the word for the FBI having this laptop for almost a year, watching dispassionately as the Democrats impeached Trump with hard evidence in their hands of his innocence and the Bidens' guilt?
What's the word for the above group of bad actors colluding to forward the Russia lies for almost three years?
What's the word for Director Wray's involvement?
What's the word for CIA director not releasing documents of the Russia hoax, documents that have been available for a long time?
What's the all-encompassing word that has been revealed at the heart of all these colluding to hide the truth from an America that deserves to know?
Corruption.
This is an issue that won't go away. All the attempts to deep-six the truth here are failing, and miserably at that. It's causing a slow-walk of information to drip out to the American public. First the stories of Ukraine. Drip-drip-drip. Then the stories of drugs. Then the sex problems. Then the Chinese stories. The story of kickbacks to Pop.
It's as if all the smartest people in the world colluded to destroy themselves. By purposefully and unanimously excluding all information concerning this story from the American public. The smartest people in the world actually believe they can be successful in spiking one of the biggest stories to pop up in any American election cycle. Their hubris is so advanced, so viral, so awful, that they can't see what they've done to themselves. They really believe they are going to keep a cork on this.
The derogatory phrase for the establishment has been "the swamp." How bad is this, how deep is this, how criminal is this, how horrifying is it to find out the vast amount of corruption and collusion in so many of our institutions and corporations?
It's staggering. It's infuriating.
These are the most powerful among us. All rich. All corrupt. All once respected by Americans of all stripes. And here, in one fell swoop, they reveal themselves to the average American. As arrogant bullies, as deceitful liars, as evil as anything we've seen in our generation. They have revealed themselves as the cabal of darkness. Terrible motives, terrible actions, virtually unforgiveable in what they have done, and yet failed to finish. And due to the hubris of the cabal, the exposé will be slow-walked until the election.
Today, Trump had an exchange with reporters, where he said, "Biden was a criminal."
This shocked the corrupt media. Reverberations rocked the corrupto-sphere. The lion had roared. There is no way the corrupto-sphere keeps this lid on. There is also no way all these corrupt actors go back on their solemn pledge to one another. They are bound together. They're stuck with each other. And it will overwhelm them.
As this careens into the debate, as this careens into voting, as this careens into Election Day, the ultimate narrative will be set. The doomsday clock will start. All the corrupt actors will be pointed out. All of them will rue the day they couldn't get rid of Donald Trump. He, above most anyone, knows just how corrupt these people are. He above anyone knows how to handle them. He, above all, knows what's all coming out in the next weeks.
It's going to be an avalanche of material. It's going to be a number of fires even Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the DNC, the Bidens, the media, the corrupt government officials, the whole shooting match, will not be able to handle. If they all overtly held emergency meetings with each other, they'd never stop the flood. When Trump roared, you know he had one of his famous moments, that moment when he knows how and when to bring this to a head. Trump the narrative-builder, Trump the destroyer will be unleashing hell on these people.
Anyone who has seen him operate knows. This is his time. This is how the beginning of the end of the swamp, or should I say the sewer, begins. This is the kind of chaos these smartest people in the world, ever, haven't seen before. Algorithms will not help them. Censorship will not help them. It will be a rushing mighty wind, coming to destroy all those who didn't understand that their corruption could be turned on them.
This is going to be epic. Corruption will be their end; it's just a matter of time. And Trump will have four years to finish their corruption.
The best-case scenario is that she’s a progressive who repeatedly violated her own principles so that she could promote her career. In the worst-case scenario, she’s just another corrupt, rotten, regressive prosecutor.
JESSER HOROWITZ
Kamala Harris Failed to Investigate Client of Husband’s Law Firm as California Attorney General
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-bribes-suckers-senator-dianne.html
Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) failed as California’s attorney general declined to investigate faulty advertising claims against one of the nation’s leading nutritional supplement companies, which also happened to be a client of her husband’s law firm.
As California’s chief law enforcement officer between 2011 and 2017, Harris racked up a record as a tough on crime prosecutor. From cracking down on school truancy to opposing marijuana legalization—with more than 1900 people being prosecuted for possession of the drug under her tenure—Harris was California’s self-acknowledged “top cop.”
That record, however, did not extend to clients of Venable LLP, the law firm where Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, was a high-profile partner. Harris, in particular, failed on numerous occasions to investigate the nutritional supplement giant Herbalife. At the time, Herbalife was a high-profile client of Venable, paying the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars for its legal services every year.
Kamala Harris: ‘Joe Biden Has
Been Incredibly Transparent’
with His Money
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7 Oct 2020130
2:33
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) claimed during Wednesday’s vice presidential debate in Salt Lake City, UT, that Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden has been “incredibly transparent” about his personal finances.
Harris described Biden as “forthright” with his finances in response to a question posed to her and Vice President Mike Pence about the health of Biden and President Donald Trump given their ages – 77 and 74, respectively.
Peter Schweizer, president of the Government accountability Institute and author Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, has reported on Biden’s family’s financial ties to foreign governments and oligarchs. Weeks ago, he called for Senate Republicans to subpoena Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s second son, to investigate financial dealings with foreign interests.
Schweizer has repeatedly outlined how the Biden family monetized the political influence of Joe Biden in his previous capacities as a senator and vice president.
Harris praised the New York Times‘s allegations that Trunp paid $750 in federal income taxes in both 2015 and 2016 as “great investigative journalism.” She specifically defined “in debt” as if the audience needed an explanation of indebtedness:
We now know, because of great investigative journalism, that Donald Trump paid $750 in taxes. When I first heard about it, I literally said, You mean $750,000?’, and it was like, ‘No, $750.’ We now know Donald Trump owes and is in debt for $400 million dollars, and just so everyone is clear when when we say in debt, it means you owe money to somebody.
And it’d be really good to know who the President of the United States — the commander-in-chief — owes money to, because the American people have a right to know what is influencing the president’s decisions, and is he making those decisions on the best interest of the American people — of you — or self-interest.
Harris stated, “So, Susan, I’m glad you asked about transparency, because it has to be across the board. Joe has been incredibly transparent over many, many years. The one thing we all know about Joe, he puts it all out there. He is honest, he is forthright, but Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been about covering up everything.”
Joe Biden: Unfit for Office
Never in American history has a major political party nominated two candidates for president and vice-president who are so manifestly unfit for the elective offices they seek.
Joe Biden, the corrupt, unaccomplished 47-year career politician, with a reputation of having been a proud segregationist, an unabashed plagiarist and liar, a resolute tale-teller, and a serial flip-flopper, is pretending to head up a radical social-democratic ticket for President of the United States that includes as his running mate the ambitious, disagreeable junior senator from California: Kamala Harris.
Biden, Obama’s vice-presidential lackey for eight years (a period of unprecedented corruption and personal enrichment for both men), has always craved power and attention. But unfortunately for Joe, his mouth, hands, and nose have consistently undermined his presidential ambitions.
This year, courtesy of an international pandemic, unprecedented social unrest, an obsequious leftist media, and the customary DNC shenanigans, Biden miraculously emerged from the basement as the last Democrat candidate standing -- figuratively speaking, of course.
Touted as the most acceptable contender in a general election, the ever-manipulative DNC, with assists from Majority Whip James Clyburn, foisted the 77-year old empty suit on the Democrat voters, despite an interminable career of incompetence and uncontrollable pervy conduct around women and young girls, including a credible allegation of sexual assault.
Joe Biden is the DNC’s so-called “empathy candidate,” and “restorer of America’s soul.” Uncle Joe -- the perpetual advocate of blue-collar, lunch-bucket workers, friend of the common man, and supposed champion of every solution destined to restore calm to the country and dignity to the White House -- is the candidate that cares about you. Not like the brash, egotistical, illegitimate, and unrefined President Trump.
And yet, despite a lethargic, uninspiring campaign, and a shocking dearth of mental competence and physical vivacity on Joe’s part, Biden stands incredibly today, at the pinnacle of his political career; anointed as the Democrat Party’s nominee for president, despite two prior, failed attempts, including one in the last century.
Joe’s good fortune, however, is based on a lie; a political mythology, as it were, deviously by the elite power brokers, that Joe was, and still is, a moderate and is therefore, the most electable Democrat out there. It cannot be based on the candidate’s unifying, optimistic, and patriotic vision for the future, because there is none. There are no reasonable, practical, and substantive ideas being proffered regarding freedom, liberty, prosperity, and security for the American people. On the contrary, the Harris-Biden candidacy is distinguished by a dark, overtly divisive, and destructive agenda, masked most days by shameless untruths and unrelenting criticism of President Trump. So much for empathy and unity.
In his effort to bamboozle the American voter, Biden has effectively embraced the anti-American, Marxist policies of Obama, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez while still pretending to be a moderate. The treasonous fake news media and propaganda arm of the DNC have enthusiastically aided and abetted Biden as they shamelessly promote the centrist lie.
Sadly, this dishonest and extremely corrosive strategy, if successful, will only serve to hasten the destruction of the America as we know it. Socialist-Marxist policies implemented by a radical Harris-Biden administration will undoubtedly diminish our freedoms, our liberty, threaten our security, and severely impact our daily pursuit of happiness and prosperity. We would be on the fast-track to Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America.
It’s not the radical, anti-American policies that make Joe Biden unfit for office, however. Rather it is the indisputable fact that Joe is not all there. Joe Biden is a hollow man. He is incredibly low energy, with obviously declining faculties. Joe Biden is physically and mentally incapable of performing the duties and responsibilities of the most difficult job in the world. Joe Biden does not have the cognitive abilities to string coherent sentences together without the use of notes or teleprompter, let alone make critical decisions. Physically and mentally, Biden is a shell of his former self.
The prospect of a 78-year-old man of such diminished capacities in the White House is terrifying, to say the least. Coupled with his unprincipled embrace of hard-left policies, a Biden presidency would pose an unprecedented danger to the country. A President Biden on the national and international stage would be an embarrassment to America and would confer way too much power and influence on Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett (Obama’s brain), and the ambitious, “harpy in waiting,” Kamala Harris.
There can be no doubt, that a President Joe Biden would merely be a figurehead. A dithering and doddering Biden will be allowed to masquerade as POTUS until such time as the puppeteers find it expedient to wheel Joe and his security blanket out the White House door, replaced by Kamala Harris. Harris in fact, has publicly and accurately stated that the correct designation, is in fact, the “Harris-Biden ticket.” Kamala knows the plan, and apparently Joe is okay with his “second fiddle” status as he has recently confirmed the reality of a Harris-Biden ticket. The truth is that the Harris -Biden campaign is nothing more than a cynical manipulation of public opinion, with Biden being the empty vessel by which power is attained.
Joe Biden, the corrupt, unaccomplished 47-year career politician, with a reputation of having been a proud segregationist, an unabashed plagiarist and liar, a resolute tale-teller, and a serial flip-flopper, is pretending to head up a radical social-democratic ticket for President of the United States that includes as his running mate the ambitious, disagreeable junior senator from California: Kamala Harris.
THERE IS A REASON WHY WAR PROFITEER AND AGENT FOR RED CHINA, BANKSTER-OWNED SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN ENDORSED SENILE CROOK BIDEN!
If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take power, as they indicate in nearly every one of their actions and statements, it will be on an extremely right-wing, militarist and anti-working-class basis and program.
Further signs of the “devastating impact” of the pandemic on arts and artists: What are the implications?
The ongoing destruction of the jobs, incomes and aspirations of tens of thousands of artists of every kind in the US and elsewhere has implications that go beyond the immediate cultural sphere.
More astute bourgeois commentators are expressing concern. After all, what would it mean if this unemployed or under-employed, increasingly disaffected social grouping were to begin to think more critically about the economic structure of society, in short, to question capitalism? What would the consequences be if artists began in serious numbers “to hold … the mirror up to” contemporary American life?
The news reports and statistics remain stunning. In September, the co-authors of a Brookings Institution report, “Lost Art: Measuring COVID-19’s Devastating Impact on America’s Creative Economy,” published the month before and to which we will return, issued a further appeal, “We need all hands on deck to save America's arts and culture economy.”
Professors Richard Florida (University of Toronto) and Michael Seman (Colorado State University) observed in USA Today that the “COVID-19 pandemic has decimated arts and culture in America, wiping out as many as half of all jobs for performing artists and musicians, and nearly a third of jobs for all those who work in the creative economy broadly spanning arts, music, theater, design, entertainment and media.”
“From April through July,” they continued, “about 2.7 million jobs and $150 billion in revenue were lost. As the crisis took hold this spring, the average income of American artists and creatives plummeted to just about $14,000 a year.”
The two academics noted that as “brutal as the losses are in jobs and dollars, the longer-run costs to society are even more devastating.” Far too many of the “more than 100,000 community theaters, art galleries, music venues, performance spaces and arts organizations of all sorts have closed their doors already; many more will likely shutter before the crisis ends.”
Florida and Seman expressed the hope in their USA Today piece that a Biden-Harris administration, were it to become a reality, would “put together a modern-day version” of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs for artists, such as the Federal Art Project, the Federal Writers’ Project and the Federal Music Project, all initiatives of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Those programs collectively subsidized painters, photographers, writers and musicians, including Dorothea Lange, Jackson Pollock, Jacob Lawrence, John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston and others. The music project “not only supported professional musicians but also documented America’s indigenous music, from blues and work songs to folk, bluegrass and more.”
This is a delusional expectation. If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take power, as they indicate in nearly every one of their actions and statements, it will be on an extremely right-wing, militarist and anti-working-class basis and program. The possibility of social reform on the level of Roosevelt’s policies has been absolutely excluded by the deep-going and advanced crisis of American capitalism.
The Brookings Institution is a prominent establishment think tank. The reference to the New Deal reveals that the concerns of Florida and Seman, as they themselves point out, are not merely economic. The subsidization of artists and others during the Great Depression was part of the greater effort to attach professionals and intellectuals to existing institutions, including the Democratic Party, and generally slow or prevent the eruption of social convulsions. After all, as another Brookings Institution paper (“Want to reduce global fragility? Empower civil society”), also published in August, commented: “COVID-19 is acting as an accelerant for instability and unrest worldwide.”
Notwithstanding their perspective and agenda, Florida and Seman point to facts in their “Lost Art” report that are unprecedented. In addition to the figures cited above, the co-authors estimated that the “creative industries” would “sustain a loss of nearly a third (31 percent) of all employment and 9 percent of sales from April through July.” Florida and Seman calculated that the “hardest-hit sector” would be the fine and performing arts, which would “suffer estimated losses of almost 1.4 million jobs and $42.5 billion in sales. These losses represent 50 percent of all jobs and 27 percent of all sales in that sector.”
On September 10, the Art Newspaper carried this headline, “It is not just artists who are starving: how the US can rebuild its creative industry post-Covid.” The article points out that along with the “starving” artists, museum workers face “mounting job cuts as institutions and non-profits slash budgets.” And, on the commercial side of the art world, “event venues and galleries are whittling staff down to a core few as business remains limited or suspended. A UBS and Art Basel report published yesterday finds that one third of galleries surveyed downsized their staff in the first half of 2020, losing an average of four employees, with around half of the losses being full-time employees.”
Americans for the Arts reported last week that by mid-September “artists/creatives” were “among the most severely affected workers by the pandemic. 63 percent have become fully unemployed. They expect to lose an average of $22,000 each in creativity-based income in 2020 ($50.6 billion, nationally).”
Other findings by Americans for the Arts:
- 95 percent of artists report loss of income.
- 79 percent experienced a decrease in creative work that generated income (62 percent “drastic decrease”).
- 67 percent are unable to access the supplies, resources, spaces or people necessary for creative work.
- 78 percent have no post-pandemic financial recovery plan.
Additional snapshots:
The Wisconsin Policy Forum reports that government officials estimate that 33.9 percent of those employed in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector in the state filed initial claims for unemployment between March 15 and July 5, which was the third highest among all sectors, behind only accommodation and food services (39.1 percent) and manufacturing (37.1 percent). “On a per-capita basis, Wisconsin ranked last in the nation in state funding support [for the arts], at 13 cents in 2020.”
Musicians of the Metropolitan Opera, according to Slipped Disc, who have gone unpaid since April, “say 30 percent of their number can no longer afford to live in the New York area and are seeking new lives elsewhere. Peter Gelb, the Met general manager, has said he will only pay the musicians if they agree to radically reduced rates. Federal support for the musicians is non-existent.”
This picture of cultural devastation, with governments unable or unwilling to assist in any serious manner, will contribute to the radicalization and shift to the left by serious artists. There will be no return to “normal.”
Writing in 1938, Leon Trotsky explained that “the union of art and the bourgeoisie remained stable, even if not happy, only so long as the bourgeoisie itself took the initiative and was capable of maintaining a regime both politically and morally ‘democratic.’” Such a relationship existed “in the same historical plane” as “granting special privileges to the top layer of the working class, and of mastering and subduing the bureaucracy of the unions and workers’ parties.”
The decay of bourgeois society, Trotsky continued, meant “an intolerable exacerbation of social contradictions.” A crisis-ridden ruling class feared “superstitiously every new word, for it is no longer a matter of corrections and reforms for capitalism but of life and death.” All this has become very real and concrete in the US, along with the rest of the globe.
At the outset of the pandemic, in March 2020, we argued that the “ongoing and irreversible discrediting of capitalism will profoundly influence the further development of contemporary film, music, painting, literature and theater. Once again the naked drive for profit at any cost will provoke disgust and horror among artists, its underlying barbarism exposed for all those with eyes to see.
“It seems safe to predict that the attention of the best artists will swing in the direction of more critically examining the social and economic contradictions of the system in which they live, and which now endangers them and everyone else. The artists, along with the rest of the population, will want to know: How was this possible? Who is responsible? What can be done?”
This remains our view.
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