Joe Biden: ‘Nothing We Can Do’ to Change Pandemic’s Trajectory for ‘Several Months’
President Joe Biden on Friday lowered expectations of his administration’s ability to affect the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in the coming months.
“If we fail to act, there will be a wave of evictions and foreclosures in the coming months as this pandemic rages on,” Biden said. “There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”
.@JoeBiden: “There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.” pic.twitter.com/t3NEs1Enwf
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) January 22, 2021
Biden’s remark comes after the president signed an order mandating both masks and social distancing on federal property — a directive he and members of his family appear to have violated shortly after enacting it. On the day of his inauguration, Biden, first lady Jill Biden, along with several family members took photos with masks — and one without.
I love how they took a picture with their masks on and off as if that would be any better pic.twitter.com/RfAak5wQRI
— Caleb Hull (I'm With the CCP Don't Ban Me) (@CalebJHull) January 22, 2021
Earlier Wednesday, Biden said, “Wearing masks isn’t a partisan issue — it’s a patriotic act that can save countless lives.” When asked Thursday why the Biden family went maskless for a photo, White House press secretary Jen Psaki replied dismissively.
“He was surrounded by his family, we take a number of precautions but I think we have bigger issues to worry about at this moment in time,” Psaki explained. “I think he was celebrating in the evening of a historic day in our country and certainly he signed the mask mandate because it’s a way to send a message to the American public about the importance of wearing masks.”
When pressed on why Biden did not lead by the “power of his example” regarding masks, Paski shot back, “The power of his example is also the message he sends by signing 25 executive orders, including almost half of them related to COVID.”
Biden claims “there is nothing we can do” to halt mass death from coronavirus
In the three days that included Trump’s last day in office, the inauguration, and Biden’s first full day as the 46th president of the United States, over 11,000 Americans perished from complications of their COVID-19 infection. The seat of power has exchanged hands, but the suffering remains the same.
Biden has predicted that the national death toll from COVID-19 would exceed more than a half-million by next month. Refusing to call for a nationwide lockdown to stem the continuing surge in infections and death, he and his administration will bear the responsibility for a significant proportion of this misery.
Biden declared yesterday that “there is nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.” This is a blatant lie, and an assertion that would meet with even Donald Trump’s approval.
While his 200-page pandemic response strategy is touted as a roadmap to exiting the crisis, the proposal’s main objective is to deceive the public with the claim that, by employing science and federal initiatives, lives can be saved, while at the same time restoring full economic activity. In this regard, the reopening of schools is foremost on their agenda.
The immediate goal is to see most K-8 schools open in the next 100 days. Additionally, the executive order issued seeks to appropriate funding from Congress to assist federal and state institutions with the necessary resources to see the complete reopening of all secondary schools, as well as colleges and universities.
Top Biden officials have made clear that their drive to reopen schools is aimed at making it possible for them to force workers back to work.
The ruling elites see this as the price of doing business in a pandemic. However, the most recent science demonstrates the critical role children and students have played as vectors for community transmission.
Despite the rosy tone of the proposal, President Biden offered his own sober assessment of the situation. “The brutal truth is it’s going to take months before we can get the majority of Americans vaccinated,” he said, even though he has promised that 100 million vaccines will be administered in his first 100 days in office.
According to Bloomberg’s vaccination tracker, the US has been averaging approximately 940,000 doses per day, which means Biden has to do little more than wait to see his promise come true.
Only 49 percent of all the vaccines that have been distributed to the states have actually been administered. Even the New York Times has taken Biden to task on this issue. “But that is actually aiming low,” it wrote. “Over that period, the number of available doses should be enough for 200 million injections.”
Still, vaccine manufacturing capacity remains relatively limited in the immediate future. As the Times noted, even after the Trump administration invoked the Defense Production Act to increase the production of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines domestically and globally, “there was little space left to secure more production.”
Global demand for these lifesaving therapeutics is further escalating geopolitical tensions as vaccine nationalism—rather than international coordination—is determining who receives them. Presently, approximately 5.6 doses have been administered for every 100 people in the United States. However, less than one per 100 have completed the two-dose vaccine regimen. Only Israel, the Arab Emirates, the UK and Bahrain are having some success in the vaccine rollout. Europe’s initiatives have proceeded at a snail’s pace. In South Africa, outside of clinical trials, the population has yet to see the vaccine.
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization, in his opening remarks to the Executive Board on pandemic preparedness, warned that the world was on the brink of “catastrophic moral failure.” He stated, “The price of this failing will be paid with lives and livelihood in the world’s poorest countries. It’s not right that younger, healthier adults in rich countries are vaccinated before health workers and older people in poorer countries.”
The uncontrolled spread of the virus is driving a slew of new worrisome mutations. Already a California variant of the virus, CAL.20C, has been identified to have become the dominant strain accounting for half of the virus sequenced in Los Angeles.
Jasmine Plummer, a research scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, told the New York Times, “We had our own problem that didn’t cross over from Europe. It really originated here, and it had the chance to start to emerge and surge over the holiday.” The rapid resurgence of several more transmissible variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in multiple countries has raised deep concerns in scientific communities.
Even more troubling has been evidence that some of these mutations, such as seen in the South African variant known as 501Y.v2 and the Manaus, Brazil, strain named P.1, can evade immune responses triggered by vaccines and previous infections.
Even epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci has had to acknowledge these findings despite providing an optimistic spin on developments, which implicitly indicate his agreement with Biden and the Democratic Party’s efforts to see the US open for business.
In a just released study from the UK-based New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) on the severity of the B.1.1.7 version of the virus (UK variant), revised estimates found those infected with this variant have increased disease severity compared to those infected with the original variant. The relative hazard of death within 28 days was 1.35, which translates to an average 35 percent increased risk of death.
Though the absolute risk of death remains low, as the article notes, they write that “based on these analyses, there is a realistic probability that infection with B.1.1.7 is associated with an increased risk of death compared to infection with non-VOC (non-variant of concern).” Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention remarked that B.1.1.7 could become the dominant strain in the US.
In contrast to the musings provided by the Biden administration and the media to lull the population to sleep in the face of the pandemic, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and appointed coronavirus adviser to President Biden, offered his harsh assessment:
“We’re going to suddenly see these variants come to play that based on the experience we’ve seen in Europe, in particular, South Africa, these variants can substantially increase the number of cases. I worry desperately in the next six to 12 weeks we’re going to see a situation with this pandemic unlike anything we’ve seen yet to date. And that is really a challenge that I don’t think most people realize yet… The difference is going to be, are we going to react now or later? The question is how soon will we do it? Do we put the brakes on after the cars wrapped around the tree, or do we try to put the brakes on before we leave the intersection? That’s the challenge. I just don’t know if we’re really prepared to even have that discussion yet.”
To halt the spread of the virus, workers must intervene to enforce emergency action. This includes the immediate shutdown of all nonessential production, along with schools and universities, with full income to all workers.
Pollak: Biden Kills Up to 70,000 Jobs on First Day in Office
President Joe Biden’s first day in office may have been historic in more ways than one: he may have set a single-day record for the number of jobs killed by an American president.
Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, as promised. In so doing, he killed some 11,000 direct jobs that the pipeline’s construction was to have created, and an estimated 60,000 indirect jobs in secondary, related industries.
Over 1,000 workers already on the job — mostly union workers — will be laid off as a result of the decision, even if it is litigated, as many expect it will be, in the courts.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) confronted Secretary of Transportation nominee Pete Buttigieg over the Keystone XL decision on Thursday morning, during Buttigieg’s confirmation hearing. If the administration was serious about infrastructure, Cruz asked, why was it killing an infrastructure project with “good, paying union jobs”?
When Buttigieg said the idea was that “net” jobs created in more climate-friendly industries would be positive, Cruz retorted that that was little comfort to the Keystone XL workers who were being laid off: “So for those workers, the answer is somebody else will get a job?”
The Association of Oil Pipe Lines complained, as did the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters — though the union may only have itself to blame: it endorsed Biden in August, after he had promised to kill the pipeline in May.
Biden also halted the construction of the border wall on the U.S.-Mexico boundary on Wednesday. While the projections for jobs there are somewhat unclear, one analysis (by an opponent of the wall) in 2017 estimated that the wall, if fully constructed, would create 10,500 jobs.
Moreover, on Thursday, the Biden Administration announced that it had suspended oil and gas permits on federal land Wednesday. It is unclear how many jobs that will cost — but the outlook is not good.
Most presidents promise to create jobs. Biden killed up to 70,000 jobs in his first 24 hours — and the true total may be even higher.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South Africa. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Democrats Expose Dynamics of the Oligarchy
A legal, democratic recall election is now a “coup” attempt by extremists.
“This recall effort, which really ought to be called ‘the California coup,’ is being led by right-wing conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, anti-vaxxers and groups who encourage violence on our democratic institutions.”
That was California Democratic Party chair Rusty Hicks, in a January 12 press conference, joined by Fresno city councilman Nelson Esparza who called the recall “treasonous.” That language prompted Ben Christopher of CalMatters to clarify the matter.
“Unlike a coup, which is an illegal seizure of power,” Christopher wrote, “a recall campaign is a democratic mechanism written into the California constitution that allows voters to remove an elected official by popular vote.” This legal, democratic mechanism is what the California Democrats call “treasonous,” and it models what national Democrats have been deploying since 2016.
The “composite character” David Garrow charted in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, whose Dreams from My Father was a novel, transformed a democratic nation into an authoritarian arrangement where the outgoing president picks his successor and deploys the DOJ and FBI to support her and attack her opponent. The overconfident Hillary Clinton failed to campaign in key states and vilified Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Trump campaigned tirelessly and the people elected him president.
“The central fact to appreciate about Donald Trump,” Roger Kimball explains, “is that he was elected without the permission, and over the incredulous objections, of the woke oligarchy that governs us.” As in California, Democrats regarded a democratic mechanism for choosing the president as illegitimate. By the time of Trump’s inauguration, the coup attempt was already in progress and for the next three years on full display in the Russia and Ukraine hoaxes. The 2020 election is best seen as the continuation of the Democrat coup attempt.
“Every honest person knows the 2020 election was rigged,” writes Kimball, who cites William Briggs on how the “woke oligarchy” works. The party that cheats is also in charge of investigating the accusations of cheating. The media calls cheating a conspiracy theory, and rulers move to expel or cancel those who even question the cheating. According to Briggs, “That party will win by virtue of its power. This is the way power works.” For his part, Kimball shows what our particular form of oligarchy means in practice.
The people do have a voice, “but it is a voice that is everywhere pressured, cajoled, shaped and bullied.” The people have a choice, says Kimball, but “only among a roster of approved candidates.”
In 2016 the Democrat candidate should have been Bernie Sanders, but “the way power works” brought in Hillary Clinton. In 2020, the party was responsible for counting the votes is in charge of investigating the accusations of cheating, so the nation gets addled retread Joe Biden, choice of the oligarchy. In similar style, the DOJ and FBI, which spearheaded the coup attempt against President Trump, are responsible for investigating the coup, so there will be no criminal charges against Comey, Strzok, McCabe, Ohr et al.
For Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, there was no treason and no crime, only “a massive system failure by senior leadership,” in the DOJ and FBI. For the oligarchy and its collaborators, the real problem is the power of the people to remove politicians from office by legal means.
In 2003, Californians of all parties recalled Democrat Gov. Gray Davis, who couldn’t even keep the lights on. Current Gov. Gavin Newsom is basically Davis plus an emergency order that empowered him to govern as a full-on autocrat. Among other actions, Newsom locked down the state, brought back the blackouts, spent $1 billion on masks from a Chinese company, and looked the other way as convicts scammed the unemployment system for $2 billion.
The lawful process to recall the disastrous Newsom is a “California coup,” according to Rusty Hicks, who has an election back story of his own. Hicks became state Democrat Party boss after charges of sexual harassment forced former state party chair Eric Bauman to resign. Democrat staffer William Floyd charged that Bauman forcibly performed oral sex on him several times and sued Bauman over sexual harassment, assault, battery, negligence and civil rights violations.
Hicks won the state party post with support from 57 percent of delegates, which nixed prospects of a runoff with African American Kimberly Ellis. The Emerge California activist ran for Democrat Party chair in 2017, narrowly losing to Eric Bauman and contesting the results, “keeping the party friction alive for months and turning off some members of the party establishment,” as the Associated Press reported.
According to Politico, the Democrat Party “paid millions of dollars to settle sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits against Bauman.” The party conducted an investigation into Bauman’s conduct but last year approved candidate Rusty Hicks declined to release the results. Hicks’ effort to “deny the truth and hide the evidence,” party members charged in a letter, “sends the message that serial harassers and assailants are still welcome in the party.”
In 2008, Rusty Hicks served as California political director for the composite character formerly known as Barry Soetoro. In eight years, he transformed the nation into the oligarchy it has now become.
The FBI and DOJ are political players operating above the law. Voter fraud is standard practice. The truth counts for nothing and the voice of the people is bullied. The people must choose from a roster of approved candidates. And the people’s attempt to recall a politician by constitutional, democratic means becomes an attempted coup.
Leftist Policies and Soaring Crime Rates
All while the Dems continue their attack on the Second Amendment.
Progressives are consistently clueless. Taxes go up and productivity goes down. What’s that about? Give illegal aliens welfare benefits and more come. Don’t see the connection.
Cities burn and gun sales are at an all-time high. Can’t figure it out?
A January 14 story in The Boston Globe was headlined, “A more general anxiety: Gun Sales have soared in the past year.”
The paper discloses that, “demand for firearms skyrocketed in Massachusetts in 2020,” which it attributes to “the pandemic, coupled with racial equity protests and a divisive presidential election.”
“Racial equity protests,” what a charming way to describe riots in 130 cities, that led to blocks looking like Dresden after the bombing, assaults on the police and civilians, and murder. None of this was lost on Middle America, which saw elected officials unwilling or unable to protect the innocent.
It took President Biden three months to condemn the riots, and then in the most vague and general terms. Baring something unforeseen, Sheriff Joe and his posse will govern the country for the next four years. And they wonder why gun sales have gone through the ceiling.
Nationally, there were 21 million FBI background checks in 2020, breaking the 2016 record of 15.7 million. A gun store owner in Western Massachusetts told the Globe that he couldn’t keep his shelves stocked, and 40% of the purchasers were first-time buyers. Nationally, the number of black people buying guns jumped 60%. The number of women buying a gun almost doubled.
The rioters demanded defunding the police, and municipalities couldn’t wait to capitulate. Police in Minneapolis (where the George Floyd “racial equity protests” began – led by Marxists and anarchists) lost $1.1 million.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who David Boaz of the Cato Institute calls “America’s Marxist Mayor,” slashed $1 billion from the NYPD budget.
Los Angeles cut $150 million, Portland $15 million and Seattle $23 million. Everywhere, it was the same story: violent protests, followed by political equivocation, followed by cutting police budgets, followed by surging crime rates. Only a progressive could fail to connect the dots.
Chicago had 750 murders last year, 50% more than in 2019. New York had 437 homicides (up almost 40%), and Los Angeles saw a 30% increase in homicide.
Democratic mayors groveled nicely. De Blasio’s daughter joined the mob. When the rioting – forgive me, the racial equity protests -- started, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said he was waiting for the rampage to burn itself out. Four months later, he was still waiting.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot got tough – when it came to protecting her home, which at one point was guarded by 140 police officers.
Democrats had stock responses to the mayhem – “mostly peaceful protests,” “what about ‘police violence?’” and “Antifa is an ‘idea’ not a movement.” (Did you ever get beaten unconscious and left bleeding in the street by an idea?) Black Lives Matter, whose co-founder described herself as a “trained Marxist,” was heralded as the successor to Martin Luther King and the Freedom Riders.
Blacks and whites, men and women, witnessed the carnage, heard the rhetoric, saw the response and flocked to the nearest gun store.
While Democrats defended the rioters and cut police funding, Biden is making it easier to import gang members, drug dealers and career criminals. A caravan of 9,000 from Honduras is headed for the border.
“Not another foot” of border wall will he build, Joe of the Jungle told the Washington Post this summer. Trump’s policies have been largely successful at stemming illegal immigration. His successor will fight the crisis at our southern border by offering free health care and amnesties to illegals – the lifeblood of the Democrat Party.
Gun prohibition is on the horizon. Good Democrat crime-buster that he is, Biden will fight soaring crime rates with tighter gun control that includes outright confiscation.
The man who once told us that there were 150 million gun deaths between 2007 and 2018, which would be close to half the total population of the United States (the actual number is 148,000, including acts of self-defense), is putting in charge of his anti-gun initiatives the man who loudly proclaimed, “Hell yes, we’re coming for your AR-15s and AK-47s.” Beto O’Rourke can’t even tell the difference between a semi-automatic and fully-automatic rifle. (Come on, man, they’re all “military-style assault weapons.”) Joe and Beto -- Sergeant York meets Yosemite Sam.
Biden’s candidate for Secretary of Health and Human Services says “gun violence” should be treated as a public health issue. Mandatory buy-back programs might be the vaccine.
So, to recapitulate, Democrats watched the cities burn last summer, crime rates are soaring, if you call 9-11 you’ll listen to a pre-recorded message or, perhaps, be switched to a prayer line. With Biden in office, the border will be wide open to alien predators and your Second Amendment rights will be under constant attack.
And progressives can’t figure out why people are buying guns in record numbers.
Another 900,000 file for unemployment, record jobless claims continue amid mass death from pandemic
Weekly adjusted unemployment claims topped 900,000, according to the latest weekly jobs report from the Department of Labor, the last such report of Donald Trump’s presidency. This was a slight reduction from the previous week’s revised total of 926,000, but still nearly four times the pre-pandemic average of 225,000. The actual number of unadjusted claims, not based on seasonal fluctuations, totaled 960,668 for the week ending January 16.
In addition to state claims, 47 states reported 423,734 unemployment claims made under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which was created as part of the CARES Act for so-called “gig workers,” contractors, the self-employed and others not typically covered under traditional unemployment. Overall, the total number of jobless claims was 1.4 million, one of the highest totals recorded since August. Overall, nearly 16 million Americans are on some form of unemployment.
More job losses are likely in the coming weeks. The Department of Labor report revealed that combined PUA and initial claims increased by 113,000 compared to the week prior, signifying that no “recovery” has begun for the estimated 26.8 million workers (15.8 percent of the workforce) who have lost work, dropped out of the labor force or had their hours reduced since the pandemic, according to figures from the Economic Policy Institute.
The ongoing record unemployment claims point to the fact that large companies and small businesses alike are continuing with layoffs amidst the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19. The day of President Joe Biden’s inauguration, which saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average rise to over 31,000, some 4,200 people died from the coronavirus. Overall, the death toll in the US is fast approaching 420,000.
Due to the delay in the passage and signing of the $900 billion December “relief” bill, which extended federal supplemental jobless benefits for only 11 additional weeks until March 14, 2021, several states’ unemployment programs had to be reconfigured, causing further delays for the millions of workers attempting to file for benefits.
This delay meant that only 47 states reported PUA claims in the last DOL report, with states such as Florida and Arkansas not reporting any claims filed. As has been common throughout the pandemic, desperate jobless workers attempting to file for unemployment have been met with website errors, circular phone trees, unanswered questions and contradictory solutions, leaving them frustrated and without the money they are owed.
In Arkansas, jobless workers have been trying since the beginning of the year to access the website in order to file their claims but have yet to get through. Thousands of workers have reported that no PUA claims have been paid out since the signing of the last relief bill on December 27. The official Arkansas Division of Workforce Services Twitter account informed jobless workers on January 19 that they are “currently updating the PUA system” and that it should be back up by “mid-February.”
Summing up the state of affairs millions of jobless find themselves in, one worker replied, “Now mid-February? People won’t survive until then, running on fumes now.”
A similar situation is unfolding in Virginia. The Virginia Employment Commission (VEC) announced on January 13 that workers will not be able to file PUA and PEUC claims until January 29. In an online petition demanding VEC be held accountable, one unemployed worker wrote that she was still waiting for benefits since filing in July 2020. However, even after reaching out to multiple state representatives who told her that “someone” would contact her within three businesses days, they still “haven’t called or emailed.”
Speaking to Vox, Elizabeth Pancotti, a policy adviser at Employ America, remarked that “there are probably millions of families waiting on two, three, four weeks of unemployment checks that aren’t getting them.”
The delays, disruptions and errors that are common to state unemployment systems are the result of deliberate policy decisions by Democratic and Republican governors alike as part of the drive by the ruling class to extract as much surplus value from the working class as possible. The archaic and outdated systems, which vary from state to state, are specifically designed to discourage jobless workers from trying to file for unemployment in the first place.
A recent article in the New York Times revealed that in 2019 on average, only 27 percent of unemployed workers received any benefits after applying. For those who managed to receive what is owed to them, the amount itself has been whittled down over the years as well. The Times notes that in 2019, on average, state unemployment systems only paid about 33 percent of prior wages, which represents about eight percentage points less than what unemployment paid in the 1940s.
The Times’ analysis also showed that the nation’s highest rate at which applicants received benefits was only 58 percent, in New Jersey. On the other end of the spectrum, only nine percent of North Carolinians received payments. This was followed closely by Florida at 11 percent, while South Dakota, Mississippi and Louisiana only accepted about 12 percent of applicants.
Despite the winnowing of benefits and uptick in states denying applicants, the unending drive by the ruling class to maximize their wealth above all other considerations has plunged several states’ unemployment systems into debt. The Times notes that currently 19 states owe the Treasury Department a total of $47 billion, or about a quarter of the wealth currently hoarded by the world’s richest man, Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The release of the DOL report prompted Biden’s National Economic Council Director Brian Deese to issue a statement on Wednesday that the sky-high jobless claims were “another stark reminder” that more help for the economy is needed. “We must act now to get this virus under control, stabilize the economy, and reduce the long-term scarring that will only worsen if bold action isn’t taken,” he added.
Despite Deese’s claims of urgent action being needed, Punchbowl News reported yesterday that the Democrats do not expect to have a relief bill on Biden’s desk until early March, despite controlling both chambers of Congress and the presidency.
Biden had previously unveiled a $1.9 trillion stimulus plan that raised unemployment benefits to a meager $400 per week from the present $300, included $1,400 stimulus checks, which is $600 less than the $2,000 many workers had been expecting based on campaign rhetoric in this month’s Senate election run-offs in Georgia from winning Democratic candidates Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
On Thursday, two of Biden’s “Republican colleagues,” Maine Senator Susan Collins and Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, came out in opposition to Biden’s proposal. Collins told Business Insider reporter Joseph Zeballos-Roig, “It’s hard for me to see when we just passed $900 billion of assistance why we would have a package that big.” Cassidy likewise said he would support more “targeted” aid and would need to hear the “justification” for additional spending. Right-wing Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has also stated that he is opposed to any new stimulus measures.
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