'A Shocking Act of Depraved Persons Far Removed from Humanity'
The persecution of Christians at the hands of Islam in just one month.
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Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This report was first published by the Gatestone Institute.
The following are among the abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of April, 2021:
The Slaughter of Christians
Egypt: In a video released on April 17, Muslims connected to the Islamic State in Sinai executed 62-year-old Nabil Habashi Salama, a Christian. Salama appears on his knees in the video, with three men holding rifles standing behind him. The one in the middle launches into a typical jihadi diatribe: “All praise to Allah, who ordered his slaves [Muslims] to fight and who assigned humiliation onto the infidels” — this latter part was said as the terrorist contemptuously pointed at the kneeling Christian before him — “until they pay the jizya while feeling utterly subdued.” This is a paraphrasing of Koran 9:29, which commands Muslims to “fight the people of the book,” understood as meaning Christians and Jews, “until they pay the jizya (monetary tribute) with willing submissiveness and feel themselves utterly subdued.” The middle speaker continued by threatening “all the crusaders of the world” — a reference to Christians in the West — while singling out the countrymen of the one about to be slain: “as for you Christians of Egypt, this is the price of your support for the Egyptian army.” The speaker then points his rifle at the back of the Christian’s head —as chants of “jihad! jihad! jihad!” blare out — and fires at point-blank range, killing him. It is unclear when the video was made — Salama was abducted at gunpoint over five months earlier for helping to build the only church in the area. “He kept the faith till the moment he was killed,” the group Sinai Province said of the slain Copt in a statement. During the months of his captivity, several Egyptian activists accused the authorities of indifference in not being able to locate and secure the release of Salama, which they say could easily have been done. Ironically, the Egyptian government released a statement the day after the video was released saying that they had located and killed the same three terrorists that had executed the Copt—without offering any specifics—a claim that was met with skepticism.
In a separate incident, that occurred on April 3 in the streets of Minya, a Muslim man butchered a Christian woman and her toddler son with a machete—“as if he were slaughtering chickens,” said eyewitnesses. The name of the murderer, a tuk-tuk driver, is Abu Muhammad al-Harami; his victims were Mary Sa‘d and her six-year-old son Karas. When their paths crossed in the streets, he made threatening and derogatory comments to the mother; she responded by saying that she would report him to police—at which point Abu Muhammad leapt on Mary with his machete, butchering her and her son. Although Egyptian media and authorities claimed, as they always do, that the man’s motives appear not to have been religious, the fact is every once in a while such “random” attacks on Egypt’s Christians occur. In late December 2020, for example, two Muslim brothers went on a stabbing spree against Christians, killing one and critically injuring two others. Authorities said the brothers were in mourning and upset, because their mother had died earlier that day. But as a local Christian clergyman said, “what does the death [of the murderous Muslims’ mother] and the Copts have to do with each other?” That same year, on January 12, 2020, a Muslim man crept up behind a Coptic woman walking home with groceries, pulled her head back with a hand full of hair, and slit her throat with a knife in his other hand. Catherine Ramzi was rushed to a nearby medical center, where her throat was sewn with 63 stitches; doctors told her she came within an inch of dying. It is believed that he may have identified her as a Christian for not wearing a hijab around her hair or for having a cross tattoo on her wrist.
Nigeria: On Sunday, April 25, Islamic herdsmen launched a lethal terror attack on a Baptist church: “The Fulani herdsmen came to our village as the church service was going on,” Jacob Bala, a church member explained. “They surrounded the church and started shooting. They came at about 9 a.m., and they rode on motorcycles. They shot at us randomly and at anyone they sighted.” Jacob’s uncle, Zakaria, a medical doctor, was shot dead, and five worshippers—including Jacob’s sister-in-law, stepmother, and niece—were kidnapped. Samuel Aruwan, state commissioner for internal security denounced the attack “as a shocking act of depraved persons far-removed from humanity…. [A]ttacking innocent worshipers who were exercising their natural and lawful right to assemble in worship represented the worst kind of evil.”
In a separate but similar incident, Muslim herdsmen attacked the congregation of an Anglican church; eight people were killed and four women abducted. “The abduction of the Anglican Church members,” the April 7 report adds, “came 12 days after their counterparts from the Redeemed Christian Church of God were abducted on the same road.
According to a separate April 28 report, over the course of several attacks in Benue State alone, Fulani slaughtered 33 other Christians in just one week, many of whom had earlier been displaced by the same terrorists and were living in a refugee camp.
Germany: A Muslim mother is being tried for killing her toddler son, allegedly over fears that he would eventually grow up in Germany to be a Christian. According to the April 13 report, the 40-year-old mother “killed her four-year-old son: she deliberately threw him from a bridge in Rotenburg into the Wümme, said [the] public prosecutor... The child drowned in the river. The charge is manslaughter.” Earlier, in November 2020, the boy was sent to a medical facility “with severe burns. He had to be operated three times. The mother, who is Turkish, said that she accidentally scalded him with hot water while washing, the prosecutor said.” The report continues:
“The employees in the hospital found the injuries suspicious, [and] they wanted to call in the youth welfare office. The mother then took her child out of the clinic. ‘The defendant feared that her custody would be withdrawn,’ said Geisler [the prosecutor]. In the imagination of women, this also meant that the boy would grow up not as a Muslim but as a Christian. That's why she threw her son over the railing of the bridge into the water to kill him. She then wanted to commit suicide, but did not succeed. Hours later, the police in Rotenburg picked up the distraught woman. The body of the drowned child was found in a nightly search. The mother was first placed in a psychiatric hospital and later in custody.”
Attacks on Churches
Germany: Three young Muslim migrants disrupted a church during Easter Sunday service, including by hollering Islamic slogans, in the town of Nidda. They initially entered the church and stood in a corner videotaping the worshippers, which naturally made the latter uncomfortable. When the pastor confronted them, they loudly declared the shahada—the Muslim profession of faith, “there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger”—followed by takbirs (chants of “Allahu Akbar”) and other Islamic slogans. Although the pastor and others managed to drive the invaders off, the remainder of the Easter service was ruined, the April 12 report notes, as the “horror” of the men’s “threatening behavior” persisted for some time among the church. This, the report adds, is the second year in a row that the Nidda church has been interrupted under similar circumstances during Easter worship service.
Separately, a church in a Gelsenkirchen, which holds a large Muslim migrant population, was torched on April 5, the day after Easter celebrations. Although police would not confirm if arson caused the fire, witnesses saw a group of migrant youths running away from the church just before it caught ablaze. Police have been, moreover, twice before deployed to the church over similar disruptions.
In another incident, unknown persons entered a church, defecated near its Bibles and urinated on its walls, before setting a fire in the premises. This was just the most recent of many attacks on the church in Oberschopfheim. According to the April 21 report,
“Almost exactly two years ago on April 8th, the toilet facility in the parish hall was destroyed. Above all, the extent of the brutality with which the strangers acted caused horror. At that time, damage of several thousand euros was incurred. Windows were smashed, toilets torn from their anchoring or sinks torn from the wall. Gutters were smashed and shutters on the parish hall were smashed. The toilet facility was out of order for several months.”
Greece: Muslim migrants entered into and completely ransacked a small church; they also videotaped portions of the incident and uploaded it on TikTok (available here). It shows a topless migrant dancing to rap music as he walks towards and inside the church. The next clip shows the aftermath: devastation inside the church, with smashed icons and altar overthrown. Discussing this incident, an April 12 Greek City Times report says,
“We should remember that Greece spent 400 years under Turkish Islamic rule and that the fight for freedom was bloody. With that in mind it is even more dramatic seeing these images of fighting age migrants desecrating Greek holy places and having no respect for the country they are allegedly seeking refuge in. It reminds us that the only solution to this sort of escalation is closing the border and imposing a strict deportation campaign.”
Cyprus: A group of young Turks held a techno party inside the historical Sourp Magar Monastery (named after the Coptic Saint Makarious), the only Armenian monastery left in Cyprus; unfortunately for it, it is also located in the illegally occupied Turkish zone, hence the disregard and desecration. Responding to this incident, the U.S. ambassador to Cyprus, Judith Garber, said in an April 7 tweet:
“The U.S. Embassy strongly condemns the misuse of Saint Magar Armenian Monastery. Freedom of worship is a fundamental value, and we echo the call from religious leaders that all places of worship, in use or not, be protected against misuse, vandalism, and desecration.”
France: On April 8, prosecutors said they would file charges against a Muslim woman “accused of plotting a jihadist attack on a church over the Easter weekend.” The 18-year-old woman “was arrested over the weekend [of April 2-4] at her home in Beziers. She was arrested as part of an anti-terrorist investigation into a suspected attack plot targeting the city of Montpellier.” In a statement, the anti-terror prosecution team said that an investigation was “opened following intelligence concerning the threat of an attack on a church over the Easter weekend.” During the raid on her home, police found a map of the church and “even found an image of Samuel Paty, the schoolteacher who was killed in October 2020 after showing his class cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.”
Attacks on Apostates and Blasphemers
Uganda: A sword-waving Muslim man attacked and seriously injured his wife and mother of seven children on the premises of a church on Eastern Sunday. Three days earlier, Salimati Naibira, 37, had converted to Christianity, and this was her first time inside a church; but then, from a church window “I saw my husband,” she later explained, “and some family members enter the church gate shouting ‘Allah Akbar.’ The church members took off from church worship to save their lives.” The Muslims stormed into the church with sticks and other weapons; her husband came wielding what is known as a “Somali sword.” Although the pastor and others tried to protect her, her Muslim relatives overpowered them, seized the apostate woman, forced her into a van and drove to a wooded area. “They started beating me with sticks, then my husband cut me with the Somali sword at the thigh and the back” At that point she fainted. “I regained consciousness only after several hours,” when a passerby found her lying in a pool of her own blood and took her to a clinic. As of this writing, a female Christian friend has taken Naibira into her custody in an undisclosed location, where she is recovering from wounds to her face, thigh, and back. She fears that she will be unable to gain custody of her seven children, who range in age from 4 to 17: “I hope my children are safe,” she said.
Pakistan: On April 9, medical professionals attacked two Christian nurses—one with a knife—after a Muslim nurse accused them of scratching a sticker of a Koran verse from off a cupboard. Although the two young nurses, named Maryam Lal and Navish Arooj, were acting on their supervisors orders to remove all stickers, they were subsequently arrested and charged under Section 295-B of the Pakistan Penal Code, which outlaws and punishes any desecration of the Koran, or “extract therefrom,” with life in prison. Before police could arrive, a furious mob had gathered outside the hospital crying “death to blasphemers” (video here). Due to ongoing threats, both women’s families have gone into hiding. According to one report,
“A video circulated over social media shows an employee of the hospital [later identified as Muhammad Waqas] calling Mariam vulgar names and telling a room full of other employees that she tore down a sticker, which contained a Muslim prayer, from the medicine cabinet. He further said in the video that ‘our’ Muslim nurse called Rukhsana saw it and snatched the torn sticker from Mariam’s hand so that it’s not further defiled or thrown on the ground. Then he said that when he found out about it, he confronted the Christian nurse Mariam. He said, ‘I am a Muslim; how can a Muslim sit quietly over blasphemy of his Prophet.’ Then he proudly told the employees gathered in the room that he attacked Mariam with a knife, but failed when the blade broke, only injuring her arm.”
“This is not the first incident of this kind,” said Nasir Saeed, a Pakistani human rights activist in the UK:
“[I]n the past, we have seen how people use this law to settle their personal grudges or punish their rivals. I still remember 2009 when a Lahore Muslim factory owner was accused of committing blasphemy for removing an old calendar inscribed with holy Quranic verses from a wall. A factory worker killed him and two other men, and the enraged mob also assaulted management employees and set the factory on fire.”
Three months before this incident, another Christian nurse and gospel singer in Pakistan, Tabitha Gill, was slapped, spit on, locked in a hospital room and “tied up and tortured” by her Muslim colleagues, after one of them with a grudge against Gill falsely accused her of blaspheming against the Muslim prophet Muhammad, which is punishable by death. Although police initially cleared her of the charge, when an angry Muslim mob descended on their station, they reinstituted it.
In a separate incident, police illegally kept a Christian man in custody for more than two months, during which time they tortured him into confessing to a false blasphemy charge against Islam. Two months earlier, on Feb. 13, after Muslims heard Salamat Masih reading from the Bible in a park with his friend, they accused them of blaspheming against Muhamad. Although police arrested him that same day—the friend had hid in time—Salamat was not presented before a judge until April. According to Aneeqa Maria, Salamat Masih’s attorney,
“During this period, he was kept in at least three different police stations and illegal torture cells, where he was mentally and physically tortured to confess to the baseless accusation…. [P]olice repeatedly threatened to kill him... Family members were not allowed to meet him, and his mother and siblings saw him for the first time in two months when the police brought him to jail after his appearance before a judge. Even then police did not let them talk to Masih... The police investigators forced him to admit to blasphemy. They also tortured him into naming other members of the Bible study circle… This is a serious human rights violation, yet no one seems to be bothered about it.”
General Abuse of Christians
India: An angry Muslim mob beat and forced a Christian farmer to eat the raw meat he was selling at a market in Kerala, because it was not halal—meaning not prepared according to Muslim ritual; they also torched the delivery trucks carrying the impure meat. (A separate report says several Christian farmers suffered the same treatment.)
“I can’t figure out what is their problem?” the abused Christian, Shaji M Varghese, later said. “Those who want to smoke, let them smoke. Those who want to eat buffalo meat, let them eat. Those who like pork, let them eat. Those who do not like it, why are they indulging in physical attacks on us.” The April 6 report offers some answers:
“[A] farmer’s collective called Kisan Mitra, which has about 6,000 members in Kerala, had initiated the sale of fresh non-Halal meat on the occasion of Easter Sunday. This initiative is what irked the Islamic fundamentalists, as the low quality of Halal meat in Kerala is an open secret…. The Non-Halal meat has received quite a positive response from the general public in Kerala... Fearing the end of Halal meat dominance as people prefer non-Halal is allegedly the primary reason behind the attack….The main coordinator behind Kisan Mitra, Manoj Cherian, has received death threats from Islamists. Islamists have threatened to hack him to pieces if Cherian sells pork, which according to the Islamists is ‘haram.’”
Pakistan: Members of an Islamic extremist political party forcibly converted a mentally challenged Christian man, and, last reported, were pressuring his entire family to renounce their faith and embrace Islam. On April 14, Adnan Bashir, who had been undergoing medical treatment since being diagnosed with a mental illness in 2018, wandered out of his home. Before long he saw his former boss, who was at what seemed to be a social gathering, beckoning for him to come and drink some sherbet. Adnan went, not realizing that the gathering was a protest by the radical Muslim group, Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP). Once there, according to Adnan’s brother, Fayyaz, “Ahmed [his former boss] and some others forced him to publicly recite the Kalima (proclamation of Muhammad’s prophethood, signaling conversion to Islam) and converted him to Islam.” Once surrounded by the radicals, the brother clarified, Ahmed “used the opportunity to force my brother to say the Kalima in the presence of the charged mobs.” They also renamed him “Khadim Hussain”—further suggestive of their malicious motives, as khadim means “servant.” To his way of thinking, Adnan still rejects the idea that he has renounced Christianity and embraced Islam. Last reported, he and his family were under threat: “Our lives have become miserable due to the threats and surveillance by TLP activists,” Fayyaz said. “Our children keep asking what will happen to them, as their Muslim friends keep raising this issue. We can neither seek help from the police or any other government or religious leader…”
Germany: Critics accused the Muslim mayor of Hanover of intentionally manipulating COVID-19 restrictions in a way that punishes Easter-observant Christians and rewards Ramadan-observant Muslims. An April 4 report explains:
“In the Hanover region, curfew restrictions are in place from 10 pm to 5 am due to high Corona infection rates. From April 1 to April 12, citizens are only allowed to leave their flats and houses for a valid reason. There is also an extension of the compulsory wearing of masks in public spaces. Thus, the Christian Easter falls under these restrictions, but not the Muslim Ramadan. Ramadan begins on April 12 [the same day the restrictions are lifted]. What makes the timing so suspicious is that the Lord Mayor of Hanover is a Muslim of Turkish origin named Belit Onay from the Green Party. He is responsible for the scheduling.”
Biden Admin Can’t Guarantee Taxpayer Aid Won’t Enrich Hamas
State Department's allocation of $100 million in Palestinian aid prompts concerns
As the Biden administration allocates more than $100 million in U.S. taxpayer aid to the Palestinian government and aid groups, critics are raising concerns that the State Department cannot ensure this aid won't reach the Iranian-backed terror group Hamas.
State Department officials have thus far declined to outline what mechanisms, if any, it has put in place to stop a tranche of aid money from reaching Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and is responsible for initiating a deadly conflict with Israel this month. The State Department admitted this week that it could not guarantee the tranche of money will be kept from Hamas.
"As we've seen in life, as we all know in life, there are no guarantees," a senior department official said.
U.S. aid money has reached Hamas and Palestinian terrorists in the past, prompting the Trump administration to stop sending aid in 2018. One of Secretary of State Antony Blinken's first moves after taking office was to resume the aid without preconditions. That appears to be the case again as the administration commits millions more to the Gaza Strip and United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which allows Hamas to use its facilities. Multiple Republican foreign policy leaders and a top former Trump administration official described the moves as reckless. They said the State Department's first priority should be putting stringent barriers in place to ensure no aid money gets to Hamas and its affiliated militant groups.
"The Biden Administration has a fundamental obligation to do whatever it can to prevent American taxpayer dollars from winding up in the bank accounts of terrorists. It is in no way acceptable for the State Department to flippantly offer that this is all a matter of fate well beyond their control," Rep. Darrell Issa (R. Calif.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Washington Free Beacon.
Issa also called out the administration for declining to provide further explanation about its "no guarantees" remark.
"This reinforces the imperative of Congress' core oversight function, and I hope that the White House provides quick clarification and commits to redoubling all its efforts to ensure that American aid is never handed over to those who would use it to take other people's lives," Issa said.
Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the Treasury Department and the vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that most established aid channels are rife with corruption and in need of serious reform. The Biden administration can ensure money does not reach terrorists only if it sets out to wholly reform organizations, such as UNRWA, that work alongside the notoriously corrupt Palestinian authority.
"There needs to be approved aid organizations that are trusted by all sides. This probably means that new organizations should be created, with strong oversight mechanisms to prevent what has happened for more than a decade. The current channels have clearly failed," Schanzer said. "But the real problem is not the aid channels: The real problem here is Hamas's control of Gaza. As long as this Iran-backed terrorist group retains its iron grip, it will be extremely difficult to help the population without inadvertently funding Hamas."
Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who led efforts to stop American aid dollars from reaching Palestinian terrorists, told the Free Beacon that "America should not be funding problems we’d like to solve." Hamas and UNRWA, she said, "are big problems that make Middle East peace harder. Biden will end up funding both and get less peace."
Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, described the Biden administration's admission as "very disturbing" and said officials should immediately and "unequivocally tell us that American aid won't go to terrorists."
"The State Department needs to safeguard taxpayer dollars and make sure we're not funding a war against Israel," Banks said.
Blinken just wrapped up a multi-stop tour through the Middle East to promote a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and announce $110 million in U.S. aid to the Palestinians. This aid includes $5.5 million in immediate disaster relief funding for the Gaza Strip and another $75 million throughout the year. More than $32 million will be awarded to UNRWA.
Blinken, in remarks earlier this week, said the administration is pursuing a "coordinated international effort to ensure immediate assistance reaches Gaza in a way that benefits the people there and not Hamas." He did not describe how the administration would uphold this pledge.
The White House National Security Council declined to comment.
On closer examination, the origins of these drug cartels themselves lie in the relations between the US and Mexican governments. Before becoming Los Zetas, the original members of the violent drug cartel were a special forces unit of the Mexican Army trained in the United States at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. If HSBC is found guilty of providing material “means and resources” to these terrorist organizations then it seems there should be ample evidence and grounds to also indict the US government as well.
Texas Attorney General: Biden Giving Economic Stimulus to Cartels Through Immigration Policy
(CNSNews.com) – Despite what DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress on Wednesday, the border is not closed, and there are almost triple the number of illegals coming across the border than there were a year ago, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Thursday.
“You and I were down there a month ago, and I just was in Laredo two days ago. It’s nowhere near closed. The numbers are almost triple those coming across that they were just a year ago. So we know the border is not closed. It is a massive influx of immigrants that have been invited here and really to the benefit of the cartels,” Paxton told Fox Business’s “Mornings with Maria Bartiromo.”
“As you saw, the cartels are the really the only ones absolutely benefiting. They are charging in Laredo actually more than they’re charging where you and I were - about double, about $8,000 per person. The numbers are amazing, and the incentives that Biden is giving the cartels to bring more people, it's just hard to believe,” he said.
The attorney general said that Customs and Border Patrol officers told him it costs $729 per child per day to house unaccompanied minors at the CBP facility in Donna, Texas.
“You may be the only one that’s actually gotten into the Donna facility, the only reporter, and you saw it,” Paxton told host Maria Bartiromo. “We asked the question while I was there, what’s this costing us, and they told us $729 per day per kid. There’s 1500 kids. That’s $400 million just for that one facility.
“I can’t imagine the Ritz-Carlton costing that much, and as you noticed, it wasn't quite the Ritz-Carlton. It was a tent with bunk beds and a few TVs. It’s hard to imagine it cost that much, so I can see why the Biden administration is asking for more money. That’s just one facility,” he said.
“We have them in Texas in Midland. We have them in San Antonio. We have them in Dallas. They’re all over the country, so they need more money. They should be spending money on the border, and yet that's not where the money is going,” the attorney general said.
Paxton said he asked CBP officers where the unaccompanied children are sent to, and they said that 80 percent of them are sent to relatives who live in the United States, but the attorney general doesn’t believe that. He thinks the Biden administration is purposely sending migrant kids to states led by Republican governors so that they will have to cover the costs of taking care of them.
“When we were there together, Maria, I was trying to ask them where do the kids go. They said 80% of them have family members to go with. I don't believe that. That's hard to believe these Central American kids that we saw, 80% of them have relatives here that are close enough to take,” the attorney general said.
“My guess is they’re just being dropped off in red states, and the goal is to destabilize our states by making those costs ours, because as you've said, there's law enforcement costs, and I think a lot of the kids are tied to the cartels. They’re identified with the cartels. They’re brought here by the cartels and they’re moved around by the cartels,” he said.
“So they are tied to them, which means more crime, but then we also have cost of education, health care, just all kinds of costs to the state that we will not be helped on, and I think that's part of what Biden is trying to do, Paxton added.
The attorney general said if you polled the cartels, “they would be 100% in favor” of Biden’s immigration policy, “because this is economic stimulus – which I know Joe Biden likes, but he’s giving it to the cartels.”
He said he’s “not surprised” that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris don’t want to go to the border, “because they do not want to highlight what's going on.”
“They do not want to talk to Border Patrol. They do not want to talk to the sheriffs. They do not want to talk to state police. They do not want to talk to local city officials from Laredo, because they will all say the same things,” Paxton said.
“The policies that Trump implemented - whether it was stay in Mexico, whether it was stop the catch and release, whether it was building the wall - they worked. None of these policies work. They match what Obama did four years ago, and they are unsuccessful, not in terms of actually stopping illegal immigration,” he added.
THESE PARAISTE BANKSTERS DID MIGHTY WELL UNDER THE BANKSTER REGIME OF LAWYER BARACK OBAMA, LAWYER JOE BIDEN AND THE BANKSTERS' RENT BOY, LAWYER ERIC HOLDER.
THEY LOOTED A TRILLION DOLLARS FROM HOME VALUES AND NOT ONE WENT TO PRISON!
Moody’s Analytics and Goldman Sachs reports to investors have sought to boost Biden’s chances against Trump by cheering a potential “blue wave” on election day. Biden has reportedly promised Wall Street donors, behind closed doors, a return to a globalized, economic status quo that has forced working and middle-class American communities into a managed decline for decades.
“According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”
Overall, the Biden amnesty would likely bring more than 37.3 million foreign nationals to the U.S. — a boon for Wall Street and other corporate interests looking to inflate the U.S. labor market, reduce the cost of labor, invest in more necessary housing while adding as many consumers to the market as possible.
HILLARY CLINTON: The woman
who fought Barack Obama to be
America's first dictator.
In the days of the Cold War, the narrative of the arch-reactionaries and anticommunists revolved around a conspiracy theory according to which the United States had been infiltrated at the highest levels by agents of the Soviet Union.
In the early 1950s, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy led the anti-Soviet campaign, alleging that Russian spies occupied top positions in the government, in universities, in Hollywood and even in the military. According to McCarthy, “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man” implicated not only the Soviet Union but was also responsible for the “loss of China” in the 1949 Chinese Revolution.
The “Red Menace” was the pretext for attacking and delegitimizing all manifestations of social and political opposition, including the Civil Rights movement, as the work of “outside agitators” who received their orders from Moscow. It was Martin Dies, the Democratic congressman from Texas and initiator of the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, who declared in his 1940 book The Trojan Horse in America that Moscow had “envisioned an unusual opportunity to create racial hatred between the white and Negro citizens of the United States.”
In the late 1950s, after the heyday of McCarthy, the political thread was taken up by the John Birch Society, founded in 1958 by Massachusetts businessman Robert Welch, who notoriously declared that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”
In 1964, Welch backed the ultra-right Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, whose failed presidential campaign was heavily influenced by John Stormer’s book None Dare Call It Treason. “Will America continue to aid the communist enemy,” Stormer asked, “to disarm in the face of danger, to bow before communist dictators in every corner of the earth? The decision is yours.”
Nothing is dead in politics. The legacy of McCarthyism is now being revived by the campaign led by the Democratic Party and summed up in a hysterical screed published Wednesday in the Washington Post by Hillary Clinton, the self-professed former “Goldwater girl,” under the headline, “Mueller documented a serious crime against all Americans. Here’s how to respond.”
According to Clinton, “Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and security violated. This is the definitive conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.” The perpetrator again is Russia, which Clinton, citing the Mueller report, claims has carried out a “sweeping and systematic” attack on the United States.
The Clinton narrative, which is the official line of the Democratic Party, is a monumental lie. Responsibility for Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 elections is attributed entirely to the operations of Russian bots and “Guccifer 2.0,” the persona of the individual who supposedly hacked Democratic Party emails. Her campaign, Clinton writes, was the “target of a Russian plot,” directed by President Vladimir Putin, who “seeks to weaken our country.”
And what did this new “conspiracy so immense” actually involve? According to the Mueller report itself, organizations associated with Russia allegedly spent $100,000 on Facebook ads. This is 0.12 percent of the $81 million spent by the Democratic and Republican election campaigns themselves on Facebook ads, in a campaign dominated by the $5 billion spent by the billionaire backers of the two parties to buy the election.
As for the release of Democratic Party emails, even if one accepts the unsubstantiated claim that it was Russian operatives who turned them over to WikiLeaks, what the emails revealed were true facts about the operations of Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)—facts that the electorate had every right to know. Among the documents released were Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs and other banks, for which she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other leaked emails exposed the corrupt efforts of the DNC to rig the primaries against Bernie Sanders.
Clinton lost in the 2016 elections because the Democratic Party, in line with the class interests it represents, made a calculated decision not to raise any social issues or make any appeal to the working class in its campaign against Trump. Do Clinton and company really expect the public to believe that Facebook ads put out by Russian agents were behind the collapse in voter turnout in working-class areas of Michigan, Wisconsin and other states?
The victory of the billionaire demagogue Trump was the result of widespread disillusionment with the Democratic Party after eight years of the Obama administration, which broke every campaign promise and exposed as lies the empty prattle about “hope” and “change.” Obama focused his
energies on bailing out Wall Street and shoring
up the wealth of the corporate and financial
elite.
In her column, Clinton goes on to call for an alliance between the Democratic Party and the Republicans. The situation calls for “clear-eyed patriotism, not reflexive partisanship,” she writes. She urges Republicans to work with Democrats in an intensified campaign against Russia—with or without the Trump administration. She writes: “It’s up to members of both parties to see where that road map [provided by the Mueller report] leads—to the eventual filing of articles of impeachment, or not. Either way, the nation’s interests will be best served by putting party and political considerations aside and being deliberate, fair and fearless.”
Clinton wants a bipartisan foreign policy that is “fearless” in its aggression against not only Russia, but also China. “Unless checked, the Russians will interfere again in 2020, and possibly other adversaries, such as China or North Korea, will as well,” she warns. Unless Trump is “held accountable, the president will likely redouble his efforts to advance Putin’s agenda, including rolling back sanctions, weakening NATO and undermining the European Union.”
Changing what needs to be changed, such words could have been penned by Robert Welch himself. Confronting a fascistic president, the Democrats have managed to frame their entire opposition around a right-wing narrative. If the Democrats had their way and Trump were removed—to be replaced, don’t forget, by the ultra-right Vice President Mike Pence—it is almost certain that the immediate consequence would be war with nuclear-armed Russia.
Inextricably connected to the conflicts over foreign policy is the escalation of the attack on democratic rights within the United States. Reprising the ravings of Dies, social discontent is attributed to the nefarious efforts of Russia to “sow discord” within the United States.
Significantly, Clinton cites as a model the actions of the ruling class after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when “Congress established an independent, bipartisan commission to recommend steps that would help guard against future attacks.” She concludes, “We need a similar commission to help protect our elections.”
The September 11 attacks—a terrorist atrocity that killed nearly 3,000 people—were followed by the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Department, the Northern Command, domestic spying, Guantanamo Bay, the institution of torture and drone assassinations as government policy, and other crimes. The campaign of the Democrats over the Russian “attack”—a lie fashioned from whole cloth—has been accompanied by far-reaching moves to censor the internet under the guise of combating “fake news.”
The Democrats’ warmongering and attack on democratic rights come together in the persecution of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, whose enduring contribution to the population of the world was the exposure of the crimes of American imperialism. For this, Assange is currently imprisoned in Britain, facing imminent rendition to the United States. The courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning is in jail for refusing to testify against him.
Such is Clinton’s defense of “our democracy.”
All of this further demonstrates that in the conflict between Trump and the Democratic Party there is no progressive or democratic faction. The anti-Russia narrative has not been challenged by any section of the Democratic Party, including Bernie Sanders, who is again seeking to cover up this warmongering party with a thin veneer of social reforms that it has no intention of implementing.
The conflict between the Democrats and the Trump administration is a conflict between two reactionary factions of the ruling class. All those political organizations and groups that are seeking to direct social opposition behind the Democratic Party are playing the most criminal role. They are no less terrified than Trump and the Democrats of the development of a genuine socialist movement of the working class, which will oppose American capitalism and its wars.
GRIFTER AND PHONY CHARITY FOUNDATION FRAUDSTER HILLARY CLINTON’S LONG SERVICE TO AMERICA’S MOST EVIL BANKSTERS
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-democrat-party-grifter-and-pay-to.html
The judge found these releases, together with the publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she pledged to be their representative, were “matters of the highest public concern.” They “allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election.”
“Clinton also failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after his presidential tenure to make themselves multimillionaires, in part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street bankers.”
CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS TIGHTER WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?
The Clinton White House famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.
Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.
Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self – a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.
It may well be true that Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation before even taking office: the political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her infinitely corrupt machine. J.R. Dunn
"Hillary will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."
There is evidence that HSBC and other major banks stepped up their money laundering for drug cartels and other criminal outfits in response to the financial crisis that began to emerge in earnest in 2007 and exploded in September of 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
HSBC laundered hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE AS PRESIDENT, BARACK OBAMA HAD ALREADY SUCKED OFF MORE BANKSTER BRIBES THAN ANY PRESIDENT IN HISTORY. WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW THAT THE REST OF US DID NOT?
The Republican staff of the US House Committee on Financial Services released a report Monday presenting its findings on why the Obama Justice Department and then-Attorney General Eric Holder chose not to prosecute the British-based HSBC bank for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
Last June, when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie
Dimon testified before the Senate on unreported
losses of at least $5 billion, sitting behind him was
the bank’s chief counsel, Stephen Cutler, who had
graduated to that post after serving as SEC
enforcement chief.
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing
wealth are those who profited from his
presidency. A number of his public speeches
have been given to big Wall Street firms and
investors. Obama has given at least nine
speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large
investment and commercial real estate firm, and
other high-end corporations. According to
records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a
clip.
“Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations—and the banks play a key role. ‘Some of these people in crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,’ said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.’”
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
“Judicial Watch’s records request is designed to expose how California state legislators are wasting tax dollars to take care of another corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the guise of resisting the rule of law on immigration and other matters,” stated Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “His record at the Clinton and Obama Justice Departments demonstrates a willingness to bend the law in order to protect his political patrons.”
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when
the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out,
Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall
Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the
status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a
staggering white-collar crime spree.
RYAN COOPER
“The Obama/Biden was the most corrupt, criminal
administration any of us has ever seen, yet the media cheered
or covered up all the abuse of power, obstruction of
Justice and other crimes. “ JACK HELLNER
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and
outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09
financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His
administration oversaw the largest redistribution of
wealth in history from the bottom to the top one
percent, spearheading the attack on the living
standards of teachers and autoworkers.
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Big Banks Throw Support Behind Joe Biden’s Big Amnesty for Illegal Aliens
Six of the United States’ biggest banks signaled support for President Joe Biden’s massive amnesty plan that would put roughly 11 to 22 million illegal aliens on a path to securing American citizenship while doubling legal immigration levels.
During a Senate Banking Committee hearing, the chief executives of Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley suggested that Biden’s amnesty plan “would ultimately help us build a more robust, stronger economy” in a line of questioning from Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ).
Menendez, in a post online, touted Wall Street’s support for the Biden amnesty plan:
Biden’s amnesty plan, introduced in the Senate by Menendez, would import a foreign-born population nearly the size of California by 2031 as nearly 12 million illegal aliens would have taken advantage of the amnesty provisions by then, previous analysis has found.
Overall, the Biden amnesty would likely bring more than 37.3 million foreign nationals to the U.S. — a boon for Wall Street and other corporate interests looking to inflate the U.S. labor market, reduce the cost of labor, invest in more necessary housing while adding as many consumers to the market as possible.
Wall Street is only the latest special interest to join an amnesty coalition that is currently being spearheaded by Biden and former President George W. Bush.
Others lobbying Republican lawmakers to back the massive amnesty include the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Bloomberg-funded New American Economy, the Texas Association of Business, and taxpayer-funded refugee contractors.
Every year more than 1.2 million legal immigrants are awarded green cards, another 1.4 million foreign nationals are given visas, and hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens are added to the U.S. population. Aside from Wall Street, the big business lobby and Big Tech have lobbied for years for an amnesty and an increase in legal immigration levels to boost their profit margins by cutting labor costs through U.S. job outsourcing.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best & Brightest
By Michelle Malkin and John Miano
Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms are from India.
Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has more than 30 business executives on his donor list that have connections to Wall Street.
Analysis of Biden’s more than 800 big donors, those who have bundled contributions for his presidential bid against President Trump, found that more than 30 of the executives listed have ties to Wall Street.
CNBC reports:
CNBC reviewed a new list of more than 800 Biden bundlers who raised at least $100,000 for the campaign, and found that several of them had links to financial firms. A few had been mentioned on the initial list of Biden fundraisers that was released in 2019 during the Democratic primary contests. [Emphasis added]
…
Beyond those from Wall Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]
Those executives with ties to Wall Street funding Biden’s campaign include:
Frank Baker, Brett Barth, Jim Chanos, Mark Chorazak, David Clunie, William Derrough, Roger Altman, Blair Effron, Jon Feigelson, Mark Gallogly, John Rogers, Jon Gray, Tony James, Jon Henes, Sonny Kalsi, Orin Kramer, Brad Krap, Brian Kreiter, Marc Lasry, Nate Loewenthall, Eric Mindich, Kara Moore, Charles Myers, Alan Patricof, Deven Parekh, Robert Rubin, Evan Roth, Faiza Saeed, Rajen Shah, Jay Snyder, Rob Stavis, and Jeff Zients.
As Breitbart News reported, Biden’s campaign
is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on
Wall Street, according to CNN analysis, and
Wall Street executives and employees have
donated more than $74 million to elect the
former vice president.
Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from financial firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted from Wall Street.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
In a post on Sunday, Biden wrote that “Donald Trump sees the world from Park Avenue,” whereas he sees the world “from where I came from: Scranton, Pennsylvania.” In fact, Biden has raised over $1 million from wealthy Park Avenue donors, more than eight times the less than $130,000 that Trump has taken from Park Avenue residents.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter
Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden
transition teams, tempering progressive hopes
Alexander Nazaryan administration takes office in January.
WASHINGTON — For six years, Brandon Belford worked as an economic policy adviser to President Barack Obama in the White House and federal agencies. He moved to the Bay Area when Donald Trump became president, part of a massive flight of Obama officials from Washington to Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood. He took high-ranking positions with Apple and then Lyft, where he is currently the ride-sharing company’s chief of staff.
Now Belford is back, as part of one of the “transition teams” named by President-elect Joe Biden to restock a federal government that has been battered after four years of Trump by hiring new officials and advising the incoming administration on what its first governing steps should be.
Those steps could be timid, judging by the composition of those teams, where Obama-era centrism prevails. That has some progressives worried that Biden represents nothing more than a return to normal, at a time when many of them believe the nation is ready to embrace policy ideas well to the left of center.
“The status quo is killing us,” says former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, who now hosts a podcast called “Bad Faith.”
Belford is joined by dozens of other Democratic operatives who have spent the past four years working at prestigious law firms and think tanks. On these “agency review teams” are high-ranking executives from Amazon, partners at white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling and enough experts from D.C. center-left think tanks — including six from the Brookings Institution alone — to fill a center-left think tank.
Progressives knew this was coming. “I am very concerned about the role Uber executives would play in this administration,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y., told Yahoo News. Even though she also effusively praised the appointment of Ron Klain as the incoming White House chief of staff, Ocasio-Cortez vowed that corporate America would not “pull the wool over our eyes” when it came to crafting the Biden presidency.
Some have put it less bluntly. “Biden’s transition team is full of wealthy corporate executives who are completely disconnected from the struggles of the working class,” complains left-leaning activist Ryan Knight, whose Twitter handle is @ProudSocialist.
App-based drivers from Uber and Lyft protest in a caravan in front of City Hall in Los Angeles on October 22, 2020 where elected leaders hold a conference urging voters to reject on the November 3 election, Proposition 22, that would classify app-based drivers as independent contractors and not employees or agents. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)More
He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.
The agency review teams are not exactly settling into their cubicles just yet. For one, President Trump has not yet conceded the election, and the transition has been hindered in part by Republican operatives at the General Services Administration. And agency review is an enormously complex process, one that actually began months ago. The transition teams are supposed to ensure a “smooth transfer of power,” in large part by making sure that capable officials are ready to get to work in their respective agencies the moment Biden lifts his hand from the Lincoln Bible.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one member of the Biden campaign working on agency-related matters says teams were primarily tasked with surveying the landscape of the federal bureaucracy. She says that the transition teams would make some hiring recommendations, but only as a secondary function.
With a single exception, the agency review team members mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.
One with a typically impressive biography is that of Aneesh Chopra, who served as the U.S. chief technology officer for Obama before starting his own medical data logistics company, CareJourney. Now he is on the transition team for the U.S. Postal Service, where he will presumably work to undo the alleged damage by another logistics maven: Trump appointee Louis DeJoy.
Of course, most progressives are glad that there’s a Biden transition to speak of, instead of a second Trump term. But they also recognize their own role in the Democratic candidate’s victory.
“Everyone fell into line and did everything they could to get Joe Biden elected,” says Max Berger, a progressive activist who worked for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Justice Democrats, the group that helped elect Ocasio-Cortez to the House in 2018.
Berger recognizes that progressives will be a “junior partner” to the establishment Democrats with whom Biden has been ideologically and temperamentally aligned for a good half-century. They want to be partners all the same, not just the loyal opposition.
Many are cheered by some of the agency review teams. For one, they are notably more diverse, a stark contrast to Trump’s reliance on white males for so much of his advice. On the transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is Jedidah Isler, the Dartmouth professor who in 2014 became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in astrophysics from Yale. The transition team for the Small Business Administration includes Jorge Silva Puras, a political leader in Puerto Rico who also teaches entrepreneurship at a community college in the Bronx.
“The presence of labor officials throughout many of the groups is notable,” says David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect. In the Department of Education team, for example, are several executives from the American Federation of Teachers.
He called the Federal Reserve and Treasury teams “all-stars,” a sentiment shared by other progressives interviewed for this article. On the Treasury team is Mehrsa Baradaran, a progressive economist who has written on the racial wealth gap. She is also on the Federal Reserve team, along with Reena Aggarwal, a corporate governance expert.
Progressive strategist Elizabeth Spiers says the finance-related teams are not “not quite Elizabeth Warren levels of aggressiveness but also not stuffed with finance people.” Biden’s advisers appear to have learned the lessons of his former boss. During Obama’s first year, he relied on banking executives to help quell the financial crisis. They did so in ways that steered the new president away from progressive proposals, such as nationalizing those very same banks.
There is not a single current executive from Citibank or Goldman Sachs on any of the transition teams. Bank of America has also been shut out. JPMorgan can boast a single toehold in the agency review process: Lisa Sawyer of the Pentagon team. A spokesman for JPMorgan told Yahoo News that the bank was “following the appropriate election laws” and that Sawyer was “not on an agency review team that will touch any banking issues.”
“I think the Biden administration is going to be
surprising to progressives in some ways and
disappointing in others, and the agency review
teams reflect that,” Dayen says. During the
summer, the American Prospect published a
lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy
advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate
America. Many are set to return to the highest
echelons of official Washington.
“I have to be cautiously optimistic,” says Waleed Shahid, communications director for the Justice Democrats.
Relatively young progressives like Shahid are less likely to wax romantic about the way things were in Washington. They are less interested in experience than conviction. But for many in Biden’s camp, a lack of experience was among the several fatal flaws of the Trump years.
“Everyone — right or left — has made the mistaken assumption for years that governing is easy,” says “The Death of Expertise” author Tom Nichols, who teaches at the Naval War College and is an ardently anti-Trump Republican.
“After having a bunch of nitwits and cronies loose in the government,” Nichols wrote in an email, “I think a lot of people on the left are really giving in to the assumption that as long as you’re not Trump, or not a complete idiot, anyone can do it.”
Given the title and theme of his book, Nicholas cautioned against that approach. “It’s a childish and silly approach to government, but it’s a bipartisan problem,” he told Yahoo News.
While progressive may not see their stars like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren occupying the Treasury Department, they do very much hope that a Biden presidency amounts to more than a third Obama term. It was unaddressed economic inequality, they believe, that bred the populist resentment that gave Trump an opening in 2016. The coronavirus has only made that inequality worse. That will only increase populist resentment, they worry, to be exploited by a Trump acolyte — or perhaps Trump himself, again — in 2024.
Addressing that inequality, for now, falls to transition team officials like Mark Schwartz of Amazon and Ted Dean of Dropbox, as well as Arun Venkataraman of Visa and David Holmes of defense contractor Rebellion Defense, in which Eric Schmidt of Google is an investor. Many of these officials are veterans of the Obama administration or Democratic offices on the Hill.
“There is a lot of corporate influence there,” says Maurice Weeks, co-founder of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. “And that is troubling.” But he is encouraged by the presence of “hard-core progressives” like Sarah Miller, a former Treasury deputy who is both an anti-Facebook activist and the executive of the American Economic Liberties Project, which seeks to curb corporate power. She is now on the Treasury transition team.
In some ways, the difference is between former Obama officials who, like Miller, went on to become activists and those who moved on to become rich. The latter did only what many government officials had done before them. But at a time of mass unemployment, a stint at the corporate law firm Latham & Watkins (three transition team members) may not seem as impressive as it may have when Obama was president.
“We don’t just want to rewind the clock by four years,” Weeks says.
For many progressives, Trump was a singular threat to important institutions of the federal government, but rebuilding those institutions is simply not as important as rebuilding entire communities shattered by economic, social and racial inequalities.
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