Monday, March 15, 2021

THE NEO-FASCIST KINGDOM OF BIDEN CRONY MARK ZUCKERBERG - Project Veritas: Facebook Global Planning Lead Admits Zuckerberg Has More Power Than Any King in History

 

Project Veritas: Facebook Global Planning Lead Admits Zuckerberg Has More Power Than Any King in History

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg closeup
Anthony Quintano/Flickr
3:18

In its latest exposé, the investigative journalism group Project Veritas has revealed footage of Facebook Global Planning Lead Benny Thomas highlighting the need for the government to break up Facebook. Thomas adds, “No king in the history of the world has been the ruler of two billion people, but Mark Zuckerberg is — and he’s 36.”

In a recent report, Project Veritas published undercover footage of Facebook Global Planning Lead, Benny Thomas, revealing that he believes that it is imperative that the government break Facebook up and expresses his worries about the power wielded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In an undercover video released by Project Veritas, Thomas can be heard stating: “I would break up Facebook, which means I would make less money probably — but I don’t care. Like that’s what needs to be done. Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Oculus, WhatsApp — they all need to be separate companies. It’s too much power when they’re all one together.”

Discussing the power that Mark Zuckerberg wields, Thomas stated:  “No king in the history of the world has been the ruler of two billion people, but Mark Zuckerberg is — and he’s 36. That’s too much for a 36-year-old. You should not have power over two billion people. I just think that’s wrong.”

Thomas added that Facebook manages to get away with so much as most people lack a general understanding of how the company operates: “Most people don’t understand these things and most people don’t think about them — which is why a lot of shit goes down because a lot of people aren’t paying attention.”

Discussing the issue of algorithmic bias, Thomas stated: “There’s always built-in [algorithmic] bias…Guess what? Human beings wrote that code.” He explained why this issue has persisted for so long, stating: “We’re re-looking at the algorithms, but it’s such a massive and complicated thing that it takes time to fix it. Honestly, I think we need to bite the bullet and do it quicker, but you lose a lot of money as well if you do that.”

Thomas also stated that he believes Facebook’s voter registration drive is one of the reasons that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, stating: “One of the things I worked on, which made me happy, was a voter registration drive. These are the kinds of things — this is the good side of Facebook. This is the kind of thing that you can only do with a company that has the sheer scale and reach of Facebook. We set ourselves a goal of registering four million new people and we went over that target, we did 4.5 [million]”

The Project Veritas journalist states: “Wow. Registering 4.5 million voters,” to which Thomas replied: “It’s a lot.” The journalist then mentioned Biden, asking: “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he [Biden] won that way. What do you think?” Thomas replied: “Exactly, I think so too.”

Read the full report and watch the undercover video at Project Veritas 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

WATCH: Clay Travis, Glenn Greenwald Attack Big Tech-Mainstream Media Collusion

House Judiciary Committee
Volume 90%
5:20

Clay Travis of Outkick and independent journalist Glenn Greenwald warned Congress on Friday that Big Tech had too much power to censor viewpoints, and that the mainstream media had labeled truth as “disinformation,” and vice versa.

Travis and Greenwald were testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law, which had taken up a bill called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA).

The JCPA seeks to create an antitrust exemption for media companies to allow them to bargain collectively with Big Tech companies to charge social media giants for news content. The ostensible goal is to protect small local news organizations.

However, as Breitbart News’ Allum Bokhari warned Thursday, the JCPA could entrench the power of mainstream media giants, which could exclude smaller media companies, and allow government to define what qualifies as journalism.

Travis and Greenwald were responding to questions from Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL), who noted that Big Tech and the mainstream media had allowed the false “Russia collusion” story to circulate for years.

After Stubbe asked about the challenge of creating a “fair playing field” that promotes free speech without suppressing alternative views, Travis noted the power of Big Tech to crush alternative views. He noted Big Tech’s collusion to shut down the New York Post‘s Twitter account after published a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which turned out to be true.

Travis then continued:

Think about how crazy it is that all of the tech companies, in concert, whether you agree or disagree — and I come to this from a completely non-partisan issue — whether you agree or disagree with what the President of the United States at the time Donald Trump was doing on social media, everyone out there should be terrified of how quickly everyone shut him down. Listen to this: in January of this year, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Spotify, Snapchat, Instagram, Shopify, Reddit, Twitch, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest all either banned or restricted the democratically elected President of the United States from speaking to the country on their platforms. Right now, Donald Trump may be the focus, but Big Tech has set the precedent that if they want to shut anyone down, even the most powerful person in all of democracy can be shut down. So how do you regulate the power that Big Tech has grabbed? I think the question that you’re asking is probably the most central and important question that confronts our country today, because Trump will not be the last figure to have this happen to him. That’s my concern.

Greenwald then added that “professional journalists” were often part of the problem, either through hiding the truth from the public or reporting things that were not true:

There are representatives of my industry, my profession, here with me testifying, and often what we hear is, “Well, we’re professional journalists. We’re here to combat disinformation and ensure free and diverse viewpoints that are aired.” But so often, the reverse is true. If you look, for example, at what happened in that Hunter Biden banning by Twitter and Facebook, the argument that was — that was advanced by those companies to justify it was that the materials reported by the New York Post were, quote, “Russian disinformation.” That came from news media outlets saying that, and everyone now knows that that is untrue. Even the FBI acknowledges Russia played no role in that, and that the documents were genuine. So often, the most damaging conspiracy theories and disinformation come from the most prestigious news outlets, obviously the most destructive case being the claims that were made that led to, the country to invade Iraq. And so I think that the concern I have is that if we adopt this narrative that the reason media outlets is failing is only because of Google and Facebook, we allow this industry that needs so much self-examination to essentially be off the hook. And if you allow the biggest players — the New York Times, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post — to be at that table and give them an antitrust exemption, you’re essentially creating two consortiums instead of eliminating the one at the root of all of the problems.

Greenwald said he favored an approach that gave small publishers more power. He later added, in response to questions from Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT): “Big media, the largest media corporations in the United States, are not opposed to the censorious behavior of Big Tech. Quite the contrary: they’re the ones who have agitated for it most aggressively.”

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). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. 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.

Biden's amnesty bill dramatically raises the $$ incentive for Fortune 500 CEOs to NOT hire American graduates.

It is a giveaway to the many CEOs & investors who prefer compliant, no-rights, foreign graduate contract-workers.

Bloomberg: White-Collar Visa Workers Take 2/3 of New Tech Jobs Each Year

H1-B Visa Workers
MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty
8:14

Two-thirds of entry-level tech jobs go to compliant foreign guest-workers, not to the young American professionals who may create a new wave of establishment-shaking companies, according to a report from Bloomberg.

In 2018, “the U.S. had between 96,000 and 143,000 openings in IT occupa­tions that typically went to candidates with a bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science or engineering,” said the March 10 report, headlined “STEM Graduates Deserve a Better Path to Good Jobs.”

But the government each year provides “Occupational Practical Training” (OPT) work permits to hundreds of thousands of foreigners who have paid tuition to American universities. It also invites roughly 85,000 foreign graduates on H-1B work visas, the report says.

“So, OPT participants accounted for anywhere from one-third to one-half of new hires. If you add H-1B candidates, up to two-thirds of openings went to guest workers,” said the report, which relies heavily on Hal Salzman, an expert on high-tech employment at Rutgers University.

Few of the OPT workers are high-skilled, Bloomberg acknowledged: “More than 70% of nonresident computer science master’s degrees awarded in 2018 came from unranked programs, or those ranked 50 and lower by U.S. News and World Report. Just 17% came from schools ranked in the top 25. [universities]”

Breitbart News has extensively reported on the fraud-ridden OPT program — and its sister program, the Curricular Practical Training program — which provides Fortune 500 companies with roughly 400,000 cheap foreign workers each year.

The OPTs — and the many similar H-1B, L-12, J-1, and TN visa workers — fill many starter-jobs and mid-career white-collar jobs in a wide variety of industry sectors, including tech, healthcare, academia, accounting, and design.

Few of the OPT workers complain about their lower-wage jobs because their CEOs can fire them at will.

More importantly, the foreign OPT workers accept the low wages and long hours in exchange for the promise of green cards. This means that employers can pay foreign graduates with government-supplied free green cards — in contrast them paying American graduates with dollars subtracted from company profits, stock values, and executive bonuses.

Nationwide, at least 1 million foreigners are working in lower-wage, white-collar jobs in the hope of getting green cards. This huge “Green Card Workforce” helps lower many Americans’ salaries, diminish the importance of professional advice in business, and smother the future creation of innovative companies by experience and outspoken American graduates.

Jay Palmer closely monitors this layered hiring system in his role as a human rights advocate for migrants, visa workers, and trafficked workers.

U.S. college graduates owe so much in student loans that they have to work for at least $45,000 or $50,000, but the OPT worker “will come out and work for $30,000 because of the poverty levels back in their home country,” he told Breitbart News, adding:

They’ll work for 30 percent to 40 percent less than Americans can work and drive American salaries down and drive the [U.S.] college students out of work.

The [OPTs] will live very cheaply, sometimes five and seven and eight to a house. They will send their money back to their country, for example, India, Slovenia, Croatia, or China or Vietnam, Venezuela, or other countries. So it is not helping the economy because they’re not spending money here .. tax receipts decline, municipalities lose out.

And the [employers] are paying them on 1099s. The majority of them on 1099s never file their taxes. This is a huge scheme that I know that the State Department and Department of Labor is looking at. The Fortune 500 companies have their master services agreements with third-party contractors and are saying that they’re not liable for this.

If a company hires an American college graduate, the company has to pay employment tax, unemployment tax, Social Security taxes, pay their health care, all of the normal benefits. But if they hire an OPT worker, they’re hiring them through a third-party contractor, paying them on 1099s, without benefits or taxes. So their rate of return [per employee] is about 80 percent higher. They save up to 28 percent just by not paying benefits.

And the [subcontractor hourly] rates are lower. If the rate [paid by the Fortune 500 company to the subcontractor] is $50 an hour [per graduate], the workers probably end up maybe getting $20 an hour, and the subcontractors pocket the difference. That scheme is known as the layer system.

Palmer works with the Weiser Law Firm in Pennsylvania.

Over time, the mass of foreign tech workers are getting a greater share of careers — and wealth — from CEOs in the prestigious tech firms, as many American graduates into lesser jobs.

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Media interviews spotlight the foreign graduates’ sense of entitlement to Americans’ jobs. CNBC reported February 19:

Shantanu, 33, received his Ph.D. in structural biology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in December. His OPT application arrived on Nov. 17 and he didn’t receive a filing receipt until Feb. 11. He’s still waiting for work authorization and is unable to start his postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

“We invest a lot of time coming to the U.S., working in the U.S. and contributing to the U.S.,” said Shantanu, who asked to be identified only by his first name. “And after a while, when we are treated like this, it makes us wonder why we chose the U.S. in the first place.”

The Bloomberg article includes a few proposed reforms to the OPT program, but those reforms would not significantly reduce the number of American graduates who get sidelined by CEOs who prefer to pay compliant foreign workers with government-supplied green cards.

Bloomberg writes:

Shifting oversight from DHS to the Labor Department should be an obvious baseline, according to Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute and Ronil Hira of Howard University …  Costa and [Ronil] Hira have sensibly proposed that foreign students should be “paid according to U.S. wage standards.”

Eliminating the payroll tax advantage would also help ensure that merit rather than pay drives hiring … A carrot-and-stick approach, for example, could exempt employers from such taxes for two years when they hire new U.S. STEM graduates, and charge a 10% penalty for displacement when an OPT student is hired.

Finally, the U.S. should focus on attracting talent for jobs where a shortage truly exists. This involves ensuring visa holders have a legitimate job offer with a wage at or above specified levels, making a concerted effort to recruit U.S. workers and targeting the truly “best and brightest.”

President Donald Trump missed the opportunity to make himself a champion for white-collar workers in the 2020 election, largely because a few of his top aides simply favored the major donors and the Fortune 500 companies.

But according to Bloomberg, Biden may grab the political prize by forcing pro-employee changes to the visa-worker programs:

This is where Biden has an opening. Many American workers who voted for Trump were lifelong Democrats. They bought into his agenda only because it seemed like someone was finally hearing them. Biden, the ultimate empath, has built a political brand on listening.

“His personal grief has become a synecdoche for a nation of suffering, be it Covid-related loss or diminishing job opportunities or opioid addiction,” the article concluded.

10 House Republicans Declare Support for Amnesty, Visa Worker Bill

In this Tuesday, May 10, 2011 file photo, a field worker empties a bucket of vidalia onions into a waiting truck in Lyons, Ga. (David Goldman/AP Photo)
David Goldman/AP Photo
4:55

Ten GOP representatives joined the Democrat farmworker amnesty bill, even though the bill would push many of their own voters out of jobs and their own districts, critics assert.

Republican Washington state farmer Rep. Dan Newhouse leads the ten GOP cosponsors on H.R.1603.

They include Reps. Elisa Stefanik (NY), Mark Amodei (NV), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), Doug LaMalfa (CA), Cathy McMorris Rogers (WA), Mike Simpson (ID), Fred Upton (MI), David Valadao (CA),  and Jefferson Van Drew (NJ).

Additional legislators may be trying to dodge criticism from voters by hiding their support for H.R. 1603, titled “To amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide for terms and conditions for nonimmigrant workers performing agricultural labor or services, and for other purposes.” The bill is expected to come to the floor for a vote next week.

“Congress should not debate nor vote on any further significant legislation while American citizens are cut off from their representatives and staffers by armed troops and a pandemic,” William Gheen, the founder of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC grassroots group, stated in a press release.

“President Biden and lawmakers who promote or try to advance Amnesty legislation for illegals during this pandemic are causing a dangerous surge on our borders when we already have 17 million Americans out of work and illegals with COVID-19 being released by the Biden administration,” Gheen asserted.

The bill “will attract more illegal immigration into America while making future border or immigration law enforcement impossible by giving the Democratic Party millions of new voters to mobilize in exchange for government jobs, welfare, benefits, and incentives,” ALIPAC stated.

The H.R. 1603 legislation is a March 8 version of the H.R. 1537 amnesty bill, which was introduced on March 3 and had only one GOP supporter: Dan Newhouse.

The amnesty bill would devastate rural towns by giving employers an unlimited supply of cheap H-2A visa workers, Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA, said. She told Breitbart News:

Once you give them amnesty, the [current illegal] farmworkers are going to leave agriculture. So the growers are going to have to replace that labor force. If the borders are open, they’ll just do it with more illegals. But if they have to use E-Verify [to ensure legal hiring], they’ll hire H-2As and pay them less.

So all wages across the industry will go down, or at least be stagnant, and the farm communities will basically empty out more than what has already happened. Towns will dry up because local wages for Americans will decline — and the visa workers will send most of their wages back to their home countries.

It will basically be the exacerbation of the rural-to-urban population shift that we’ve already been seeing [nationwide]. Businesses in those [rural] communities will shut down because there won’t be enough consumers. It means that [private-sector] services will diminish because there won’t be enough consumers. Tax receipts will tank, which is why [government-provided] services will decline. Drug use will increase.

In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Rob Law, Center for Immigration Studies legislative and regulatory director and former policy chief of President Donald Trump’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, said agriculture amnesty “is a special interest handout … it’s government-sanctioned serfdom.”

“This immigration bill is far more harmful [to rural communities] than any other provision Congress would ever give our rural communities,” he said, adding:

It completely forecloses on job opportunities for rural Americans. Are they supposed to learn how to code or build solar panels? Their livelihood is in the rural community, and the importation of a permanent foreign workforce will shut them out entirely. The [rural] towns will eventually collapse. The tax base of citizens will be depleted, while the schools, hospitals, and other public facilities will get overrun by the needs of the foreign-born workforce. Americans will leave, further straining the very limited resources in those communities.

The Democratic Party has made it abundantly clear that they are the party of immigration lawlessness, mass legal and illegal immigration, and do not care about the impacts on working Americans. With that being their platform, you would think that every Republican would look very suspiciously upon any immigration proposal that was put forward by the Democrat Party.


FNC’s Carlson: ‘Professional Class’ Democrats, Media Don’t Track Illegal Immigration Because It ‘Means Cheaper, Low-End Labor for Them’

12:45

Monday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson speculated on the reasons why Democrats, including President Joe Biden and Biden’s allies in the mainstream media, do not track illegal immigration.

Carlson argued there were benefits for that group within the so-called “professional class” from getting an influx of illegal immigrants.

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: Ten days before the last election, the 2020 election, a reporter for The Texas Tribune came across a very strange sight in Starr County, Texas. Starr County sits on the border right across from Mexico. It’s one of the poorest places in the country. Not a lot of people visit Starr County, Texas. But this reporter did and he watched as more than 70 vehicles with Trump flags drove in parade formation from the little town of Roma, Texas to Rio Grande City.

“All aboard the Trump train,” read one sign.

It was a convoy and was organized by a man called Raul Reyes, even Reyes couldn’t believe the turnout. “I was expecting 15 to 20 cars max,” he told the reporter. And the reason he wasn’t expecting more cars is because Starr County is not exactly a Republican stronghold. In fact, just four years before in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in Starr County, Texas by 60 points. That’s definitive.

But things changed and they changed fast. In the span of just four years, Starr County, Texas moved from deep blue to almost red. Donald Trump finished within just five points of Joe Biden. That’s a swing of over 50 points.

And the numbers are even more dramatic in nearby Zapata County. Donald Trump lost Zapata County in 2016 by 33 points, but last November, he easily beat Joe Biden. These are big changes. And you’re seeing them all along the Rio Grande Valley, the southern border with Mexico.

Now to the geniuses looking at these numbers in Washington trying to figure out what they mean, the most amazing thing, the things that leaps out of them immediately is that Starr and Zapata Counties are overwhelmingly Hispanic. Starr County is 96 percent Hispanic, Zapata is 85 percent.

So how could Hispanics support Donald Trump in numbers like that? They must be QAnon people.

And not only were those two counties non-white, they are very poor, legitimately, as we said, some of the poorest places in the United States. Nearly a third of the residents of Starr County, Texas live in poverty, the median household income in both those counties, Starr and Zapata, is under $35,000.00 a year, but they are voting for Trump.

What the hell is going on?

Well, a lot of things are going on probably, but uncontrolled illegal immigration, definitely is one of them, probably the main one. And that’s completely baffling to people in D.C.

If you’re a Yale educated bureaucrat or a nonprofit executive living in Bethesda, of course, you see everything through the lens of identity politics, you’ve been told to do that. And needless to say, you obey, you always obey.

Most illegal aliens are Hispanic, so you assume that most Hispanics support illegal immigration. That’s just how you think. The problem is, you’re an idiot. You have no idea what you’re talking about, but you have no clue how ignorant you are. How could you know, you never leave Bethesda.

Congressman Henry Cuellar is a Democrat, but he doesn’t live in Bethesda. He lives in Texas. Cuellar represents both Starr and Zapata Counties. Cuellar sees what’s happening. He can’t ignore it.

On Saturday, he told FOX News that his constituents are being overwhelmed by an influx of migrants from Latin America, and the Biden administration is doing nothing to stop it. In fact, they’re lying about it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. HENRY CUELLAR (D-TX): It might have started under Trump, but when you’re the President, you own the situation, whether it’s a success or not a success, it’s going to own that.

I think in February, we’re going to get about 100,000. And again, I don’t care what we call it, but I can tell you this, those numbers of people that are being released, they are purposely withholding that information. They’ve been told not to withhold that information.

I now know that they’re bringing people from McAllen over to Laredo, processing them in Laredo, and they’re going to release them in my community.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Those numbers of people being released says Henry Cuellar, the Biden administration is purposely withholding that information. Now, why would they do that?

How bad is it? Well, again, this is an elected Democrat admitting that he has no idea how many people are flooding into his community every day because the Biden administration is hiding that information.

He is supposed to be representing this country, but he has no idea how many of these people compete for his constituents for jobs. He has no clue how many of them are criminals. He has no idea how many of them have COVID.

No one knows the situation there is that out of control. And it’s not just Henry Cuellar who is upset about it.

Another Democrat from Texas, State Senator Chuy Hinojosa from McAllen has charged the Biden administration is encouraging illegal aliens to come which obviously, they are. Quote, “It’s gotten worse,” Hinojosa said, “I don’t think quite frankly the Biden administration was aware of what’s happening on the ground here, which you can understand because they’re just coming in and trying to get people up to speed with what’s happening. But I don’t think they were aware that there were that many coming across. The Border Patrol is overwhelmed, they’re throwing up their hands because they don’t know what to do.”

Now, that’s not a problem if you’re Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s cool. But if you actually live there, and you’re poor, it’s a huge problem, and you shouldn’t be surprised by this.

Our policymakers realized a long time ago that they could simply hide most of the relevant data on illegal immigration, and no one would bother to look into it.

Case in point is the total number of illegal immigrants living in the United States, it’s been 11 million officially for decades. Everybody repeats that. They keep repeating that number, even when all available evidence contradicted that number. That number is a complete lie.

There is some research out there, some good research, totally nonpartisan, and the best research suggests that there are at least twice that number of people living here illegally, and possibly many more, quite possibly more than 30 million.

But journalists and the politicians they protect don’t get to the bottom of because it doesn’t bother them, because they’re all part of one class. They’re the professional class. They run the Democratic Party, and more illegal immigration means cheaper, low-end labor for them.

It doesn’t really matter what effect it has on the country. It doesn’t really matter what more crowding does to the natural environment. We’ve got about 100 million more people living in the United States than we had 30 years ago. What does that do to the environment? No one cares.

Who does it hurt? They don’t care.

Of course, if you are being hurt, you do care. If you’re living in poverty in the Rio Grande Valley, none of this is an abstraction. The actual numbers matter very much to you.

FOX’s Casey Stegall recently did what most journalists are refusing to do, he went down to the border to try to understand, on foot, with a camera, the scope of the illegal immigration surge that has intensified since Joe Biden became President.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CASEY STEGALL, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): The wave of migrants currently flooding America’s southern border runs the gamut from entire families to children all alone. And now once again, larger packs traveling together.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Huge groups are coming in, because they know that they’re going to be let go.

STEGALL (voice over): U.S. Border Patrol agents say it’s not at all uncommon to encounter clusters of 20, 30, 50, sometimes even groups of more than a hundred migrants wandering the desert and surrendering, as the overall apprehension numbers keep ticking up.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are between 700 and a thousand daily.

STEGALL (voice over): Which translates into a shortage of detention beds and space, even as additional temporary overflow facilities are brought online.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CARLSON: This is obviously humanitarian crisis, mostly for Americans, but not just for Americans, for the migrants themselves.

Whatever happened to “those kids in cages”? All those unaccompanied minors? Maybe some of them don’t have their parents with them. Nobody cares anymore.

It’s hypocrisy. Yes. But it’s so in your face, you have to conclude the hypocrisy itself is the point. They humiliate you and wear you down by ignoring their own previous statements and blowing right past you with their new agenda.

As Congressman Cuellar pointed out, all of this is intentional from the way they’re hiding the data to the complete 180 on the child overflow facilities.

People living in Starr and Zapata Counties voted the way they did for a reason. Is it surprising to you that they are being punished for it now? It shouldn’t be.

But this is a bigger story than just South Texas. It’s not just affecting border towns in the Rio Grande Valley. What you’re seeing is an attack on an entire social class, an attack on working people, the ones who’ve been hurt the most by COVID, the ones who saw their lives destroyed after a year of incoherent health mandates from incompetents posing as experts.

And just to rub it in, in case you missed the point, the administration is demanding that American citizens, unless you’re Gavin Newsom, but the rest, remain under Corona law forever.

Meanwhile, foreign nationals living here illegally can do essentially whatever they want.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice over): Officials with the City of Brownsville, Texas report at least 108 migrants tested positive for COVID since the end of January, more than six percent of everyone they screen.

A city spokesperson tells FOX News, they don’t have the authority to detain those people and prevent them from getting on buses and traveling elsewhere.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So the illegal immigrants, some infected with coronavirus get on a bus and just take off. Who knows where they’re going? No one knows where they’re going. No one is checking. That would be racism.

Meanwhile, a mom in Ohio dares to watch her son’s football game sitting alone in the stands, and for doing that she gets Tasered, wrestled to the ground, arrested all for not wearing an obedience mask.

It’s awful on every level and a functioning media would expose it. But instead our media create diversion so that you won’t notice it is happening in the first place.

Watch the race lady on MSNBC, Harvard educated, but totally oppressed tell you that you have no moral right to worry about COVID.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: You know who the absolute worst is? Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Yes, he’s a repeat offender. He’s deflecting criticism by dishing out anti-immigrant xenophobia.

GOV. GREG ABBOTT (R-TX): The Biden administration was releasing illegal immigrants — illegal immigrants into our communities who had COVID. The Biden administration was spreading COVID in South Texas yesterday because of their lack of constraint of testing and quarantining people who had come across the border illegally.

REID: So for that absurdly racist claim, Governor Abbott is the absolute worst, for the second time this week.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: “An absurdly racist claim,” says the race lady from Harvard. So taking precautions against COVID is racist.

Just the other day, they were telling us exactly the opposite. Tomorrow, they will tell us something completely different again. They don’t mean any of it. Maybe we should ignore them.

What actually matters is keeping our country from falling apart, and right now, effectively, we have no southern border. That’s a much bigger problem than COVID.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

 

Nearly 10 million US jobs lost one year after start of the pandemic

With the one-year anniversary since the start of the economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic fast approaching, new claims for unemployment benefits continued for yet another week at the historically unprecedented level of over 700,000.

Meanwhile, new infections and deaths remain at alarming levels while uncoordinated and incompetent vaccine rollouts leave the vast majority of populations unprotected even as governments absurdly talk of a return to “normalcy.”

People wait in line for help with unemployment benefits at the One-Stop Career Center in Las Vegas in May 2020. (AP)

The US economy has recovered only a little over one-half of the 22 million jobs lost during the pandemic. The official unemployment rate is 6.2 percent, but the real rate is closer to 10 percent when the 4 million people who have dropped out of the labor force, so-called discouraged workers, are counted. There are still over 20 million workers receiving jobless relief of some kind, including 4 million receiving traditional state unemployment benefits and others on emergency pandemic aid authorized by Congress.

New claims for unemployment benefits fell to 712,000 for the week ending March 6, a drop of 42,000 from the previous week, but still a very high number compared to a typical week in 2019 when between 200,000 and 300,000 would apply.

For the past year new weekly unemployment claims have exceeded the high point of the Great Recession of 2008–2009. In addition, there were also 478,000 new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance for the week, a increase of 42,000 over the previous week. PUA was an emergency program enacted by Congress to help the self-employed and others not covered by regular state unemployment benefits.

While 379,000 new jobs were added in February, most of these were in the low-wage leisure and hospitality sector, reflecting the reckless reopening policy of the ruling class. Other sectors such as education and construction showed continued declines.

The weekly unemployment claims report came just as President Biden signed into law the coronavirus relief bill, which calls for an additional $300 per person weekly supplement to unemployment benefits and a one-time $1,400 payment to most US residents.

The weekly supplement is only one-half the amount enacted under the Trump administration in March of last year and $100 less than the $400 initially proposed by the Democrats. The much-heralded gradual rise of the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour got stripped out of the relief bill when Democrats capitulated to a procedural challenge.

Even when one figures in the exemption Congress gave to tax payments on the first $10,200 of unemployment benefits and an expanded child tax credit, the COVID relief provided by Congress is far from adequate to make good the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the stimulus is being presented as a social reform of grand and unprecedented scope, most provisions are limited to less than one year. The pandemic relief package is aimed primarily at preventing a complete collapse in consumer spending and bankruptcy of state and local governments while the Biden administration pursues its deadly reopening agenda. This involves forcing workers back into unsafe factories with the help of the unions while forcing the reopening of schools, a measure that will facilitate the spread of the virus under conditions where new, more deadly variants are emerging.

Eventually the stimulus money will have to be repaid to Wall Street through an assault on the working class of unprecedented savagery, of which the Trump administration was only a foretaste. Indeed there are clear indications that the pandemic is already being used by corporations to restructure, continuing the elimination of relatively well-paid jobs and their replacement with low-wage and contingent employment.

The inadequacy of the stimulus package becomes evident when it is seen in the context of the raging social crisis that has been intensified by the pandemic.

In Nevada, one of the states hit hardest by the economic collapse, which devastated the state’s casino gambling industry, 45 percent of residents are behind on basic bills. The statewide unemployment rate hit 30.1 percent last April, the highest for any state on record for at least the last 44 years. It still stands at 9.2 percent.

A 32-year-old waitress from Las Vegas quoted by the New York Times reported, “I feel pretty scared every day, right now, whenever I think about my bills,” adding, “Basically every morning I wake up thinking about where my help is going to come from—is it here? Is it the government? I don’t really know who is looking out for people like me.”

Another woman told the Times, “Every morning I wake up thinking about where my help is going to come from.”


Larry Scott, the chief operating officer for Three Square Food Bank, the largest in Southern Nevada, told the Times, “Stimulus money shortens the line for food from a food pantry and when it evaporates, the lines get longer again.

“We’re going to have a protracted, long, long recovery here. What the politicians should be concentrating on is more than a short-term solution. Rather than a lot of money at a short time, we should have more money over a longer period of time.”

On March 9, hunger relief organization Feeding America released its initial projections for food insecurity in 2021. Despite various inadequate federal relief programs, the situation for tens of millions of US citizens, including children, remains dire. The organization projects that 42 million people, including 13 million children, that is one out of every six, will experience food insecurity in 2021. Included in that number are 15 million people and 4 million children who could experience reduced food intake and the disruption of eating patterns.

Pointing to the extended nature of the economic crisis, the report noted, “After the Great Recession of 2007, it took 10 years for food insecurity levels to recover to pre-Recession levels. It is likely to take time for food insecurity levels to recover from this recession as well.”

According to US Census Bureau data some 10 million people in the US were behind in their rent and at risk of eviction in the middle of January. An estimated 16 million renters had little to no confidence they could pay rent in February. According to Moody’s Analytics, nearly 12 million renters would have owed an average of $5,850 in back rent as of this past January, over 4 times the $1,400 one-time stimulus payment being issued by the government.

Approximately 1 in 5 renters said they were behind in their rent in January, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget Policies and Priorities, and some 36 percent of black renters say they are behind. However, the recently signed stimulus bill does not extend the federal ban on evictions, which is set to expire at the end of March.

While the stimulus package contained another $25 billion in rental assistance, it is not enough. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, renters owed as much as $70 billion in back rent through the end of December.

The recklessness, criminality and incompetence displayed by the ruling classes of all the major capitalist countries in response to the pandemic underscore the need for the working class to intervene based on its own program, prioritizing social need, not private profit. The giant industries, including health care and pharmaceuticals, must be placed under the democratic public ownership and control of the working class based on a scientific plan to confront the crisis.

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