Wednesday, June 30, 2021

MARK ZUCKERBERG'S MASSIVE PROPAGANDA MACHINE IN OPERATION - Didn't Zuckerberg elect Joe Biden in part by censoring info on Hunter Biden's nefarious doings?

 

Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times?

Under the cover of launching a little-known feature, the social media giant has been funneling money to America’s biggest news organizations—and hanging the rest of the press out to dry.

Over the past two decades, as Big Tech has boomed, news organizations have been going bust. Between 2004 and 2019, one in every four U.S. newspapers shut down, and almost all the rest cut staff, for a total of 36,000 jobs lost between 2008 and 2019 alone. Local newspapers have been particularly devastated, making it ever more difficult for people to know what is happening in their communities.

Many factors contributed to this economic collapse, but none more so than the cornering of the digital advertising market by the duopoly of Facebook and Google. Facebook’s threat to a free press—and, by extension, to democracy—is especially pernicious. The social media company is financially asphyxiating the news industry even as it gives oxygen to conspiracy theories and lies. As a result of its many roles in degrading our democracy, it faces mounting scrutiny by politicians and regulators.

Facebook has responded to the negative attention by creating a highly sophisticated public relations effort, which includes becoming the number one corporate spender on federal lobbying and engaging in a massive advertising blitz aimed at the D.C. policy audience. Less well known, and potentially far more dangerous, is a secretive, multimillion-dollar-a-year payout scheme aimed at the most influential news outlets in America. Under the cover of launching a feature called Facebook News, Facebook has been funneling money to The New York TimesThe Washington PostThe Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Bloomberg, and other select paid partners since late 2019.

Participating in Facebook News doesn’t appear to deliver many new readers to outlets; the feature is very difficult to find, and it is not integrated into individuals’ newsfeeds. What Facebook News does deliver—though to only a handful of high-profile news organizations of its choosing—is serious amounts of cash. The exact terms of these deals remain secret, because Facebook insisted on nondisclosure and the news organizations agreed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreements were worth as much as $3 million a year, and a Facebook spokesperson told me that number is “not too far off at all.” But in at least one instance, the numbers are evidently much larger. In an interview last month, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said the Times is getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year—“very much so.”

Facebook has responded to negative attention by creating a highly sophisticated public relations effort, which includes becoming the number one corporate spender on federal lobbying and engaging in a massive advertising blitz aimed at the D.C. policy audience.

For The New York Times, whose net income was $100 million in 2020, getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year with essentially no associated cost is significant. And once news outlets take any amount of money from Facebook, it becomes difficult for them to let it go, notes Mathew Ingram, chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. “It creates a hole in your balance sheet. You’re kind of beholden to them.” It’s not exactly payola, Ingram told me, searching for the right metaphor. Nor is it a protection racket. “It’s like you’re a kept person,” he said. “You’re Facebook’s mistress.”

There’s no evidence that the deal directly affects coverage in either the news or editorial departments. Before the Facebook News deal, the Times famously published an op-ed titled “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook,” by Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook turned critic. And since the deal, columns from Tim Wu and Kara Swisher, among others, have been similarly critical. In December, the editorial board welcomed a lawsuit calling for Facebook to be broken up.

And Facebook and Google money is, admittedly, all over journalism already. Virtually every major media nonprofit receives direct or indirect funding from Silicon Valley, including this one. When the Monthly gets grants from do-good organizations like NewsMatch, some of the funds originate with Facebook.

But these three points are beyond dispute.

First, the deals are a serious breach of traditional ethics. In the pre-internet days, independent newspapers wouldn’t have considered accepting gifts or sweetheart deals from entities they covered, under any circumstance. The Washington Post under the editor Leonard Downie Jr., for instance, wouldn’t even accept grants from nonprofits to underwrite reporting projects, for fear of losing the appearance of independence. Facebook, which took in $86 billion in revenue last year, is a hugely controversial behemoth having profound, highly newsworthy, and negative effects on society. Accepting money from them creates a conflict of interest.

Even for trusted news organizations whose audiences believe they can’t be bought outright, “it might come across as hypocrisy to heavily criticize an industry while also collaborating with them,” says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Agreeing to keep the terms of the deal confidential is also a mistake, Nielsen told me. “This sort of opacity I don’t think builds trust.”

Second, these deals help Facebook maintain the public appearance of legitimacy. Journalists, critics, and congressional investigators have amply documented how Facebook has become a vector of disinformation and hate speech that routinely invades our privacy and undermines our democracy. For The New York Times and other pillars of American journalism to effectively partner with Facebook creates the impression that Facebook is a normal, legitimate business rather than a monopolistic rogue corporation.

Finally, these agreements undermine industry-wide efforts that would help the smaller, ethnic, and local news organizations that are most desperately in need of help. One such effort would allow the industry to bargain collectively with Facebook and other tech giants by withholding content from the platforms unless they received a fair price for it. But for that to work, small newsrooms would need the biggest and most influential companies to sign on. With those organizations receiving millions of dollars from Facebook through their own side deals, the smaller publications could be left stranded and defenseless.

If Facebook’s intent were to save American journalism, it would be making generous offers to smaller, local news organizations that do original reporting, Damon Kiesow, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, told me. By contrast, Facebook News “doesn’t really help anyone in the industry except for the small select group of outlets that get paid,” he said. “These efforts are all flavored with a strong dose of crisis communication and regulation avoidance.”

If any major figure in the American media was going to say no to Mark Zuckerberg, it was Mark Thompson.

For most of his eight-year tenure as chief executive officer of the New York Times Company, Thompson was one of the industry’s most thoughtful, eloquent, and persuasive critics of Facebook and the danger it presents to journalism’s business models and essential role in a democracy.

“It makes my blood run cold, the idea of Facebook as a publisher,” he said at a June 2018 event convened by the Open Markets Institute. At a panel sponsored by the Tow Center later that month, he described that same affect when Zuckerberg “starts talking about how he thinks about community, and about what we trust.” Zuckerberg, he said, has a “terrifyingly naive perspective on news.”

During the OMI event, Thompson warned darkly about the “sinister” prospect “that Facebook’s catalog of missteps with data and extreme and hateful content” will lead it to try to “set itself up as the digital world’s editor in chief, prioritizing and presumably downgrading and rejecting content on a survey- and data-driven assessment of whether the provider of the content is ‘broadly trusted’ or not.”

In an exclusive interview, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said the Times is getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year in payouts from Facebook—“very much so.”

Here was actual humility from the CEO of the paper of record: “Democracy depends in part on unbounded competition between different journalistic perspectives and the clash of different judgments and opinions,” he said. “History suggests that mainstream news organizations frequently get it right, but also that, not infrequently, it is the outliers who should be listened to.”

And he knew what needed to be done. An essential preliminary step was for Facebook and others to “engage with the collective industry bodies of the news business to arrive at shared principles both on the presentation and choice of news content, and on its monetization.” He called for “consistency and comparability in the treatment of news providers.”

This was not the language of shakedown. It was an impassioned and impressive philosophical argument about the survival of news—and democracy.

But then, all of a sudden, The New York Times and Facebook were making deals together. In October 2019, Facebook announced the launch of Facebook News, with The New York Times as a marquee paid partner, getting prime placement in a new vertical designated for “trusted” news sources.

What changed for Thompson between June 2018 and October 2019, such that the idea of Facebook picking which “trusted” news sources to pay went from sinister to “Sign here”?

“We always reserved our rights to do what we needed to do for our own business and to continue to fund our journalism in the interim,” Thompson insisted in a phone interview in March. “I’m a sort of pragmatist,” he said. “I don’t really see this as a conflict of interest or an issue of principle, it’s the real world.” He rejected the depiction of the payments as a gift or a payoff. “As far as I’m concerned, we were paid by a platform for access to our content.” Facebook, of course, does not pay The New York Times for access to its content when it is shared on regular newsfeeds.

And Thompson said that while he still thinks it would be sinister for Facebook to be making its own editorial decisions on a story-by-story basis, “Facebook making it easier for people to identify The New York Times and making it easier to access The New York Times is a good thing.”

What about his devotion to collective rather than individual action? It remains—in theory. “As it happens, I’m still very much in favor of broader agreements,” he told me. “Ideally,” he continued, such payments would be “not just available . . . to the handful of big players but broadly, in particular to local and regional journalism.”

So taking the deal wasn’t a betrayal of his principles, Thompson insisted. “I still fundamentally believe everything I said.” With any collective agreement years away at best, he said, “I don’t accept that our reaching it made it harder for the other publishers to get it—on the contrary . . . I don’t think you’ve got any evidence that a refusal to engage . . . would have helped them at all.” It actually sets a good precedent, he suggested. “It’s brilliant to have got a big digital platform to pay for the use of our content.”

But organizations that are favored by Facebook will obviously have different incentives going forward than those that are not. Unfavored outlets, if begging doesn’t work, may want to play hardball with Facebook to get their due—while the Timesand others will inevitably have qualms before blowing a hole in their budgets.

The Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha declined to address a long list of questions about the specifics of the relationship with Facebook, responding instead with general comments. “Quality journalism is expensive to produce and we believe quality publishers should be fairly compensated for creating valuable journalism,” she wrote in an email. The Times “does not disclose licensing and advertising terms,” she wrote, and “our licensing agreement with Facebook has no impact on our newsroom.”

Once news outlets take any amount of money from Facebook, it becomes difficult for them to let it go, notes Mathew Ingram, chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. “It creates a hole in your balance sheet.

Thompson stepped down as CEO in July 2020 and was replaced by his protégé, Meredith Kopit Levien, who may be even more committed to the deal than Thompson was. A few months after she took over, Levien expressed enthusiasm that Facebook had promised to create a space “for a particular level of quality news providers,” to pay the Times “a fair amount,” and to “feed your funnel.”

The Facebook News deal isn’t Facebook’s only, or first, inroad at the Times. The company already had a seat at the table—literally. The publisher and chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. installed the Facebook executive Rebecca Van Dyck on his 12-member board of directors in 2015. Van Dyck, who was Facebook’s global head of consumer and brand marketing at the time, now runs marketing for Facebook’s augmented and virtual reality labs.

Indeed, the Facebook News bounty might even be dwarfed by the undisclosed sum that Facebook is pouring into the Times’s new augmented reality efforts. The newsroom’s new “AR Lab,” a collaboration between Facebook and the Times, builds augmented reality filters and camera effects distributed on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram.

There are likely even more ties the public doesn’t know about. BuzzFeed News recently discovered that the Times columnist David Brooks had written a pro-Facebook blog post while on salary for a nonprofit partially funded by Facebook and hadn’t disclosed it to his current Times bosses or the readers.

Thompson would have been very much alone among his U.S. peers had he resisted Facebook’s inducements. He was also hardly the most enthusiastic Facebook partner—that would be News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson, who, after years of vituperative attacks on Big Tech, was grinning at Zuckerberg’s side at the Facebook News launch event and announcing a “new dawn” for journalists.

The rollout was undeniably a huge win for Facebook public relations. The Times story was headlined “Facebook Calls Truce With Publishers as It Unveils Facebook News.” What few negative headlines ensued were related to Facebook’s decision to include Breitbart, the far-right website known for spreading white-supremacist disinformation, among its cadre of “trusted” news sources—although, in Breitbart’s case, an unpaid one.

Months later, Joshua Benton, the director of the Neiman Journalism Lab, described the big downside: The Facebook News deal, he wrote, “lets them (1) pick the publishers they want to pay, (2) pick the amount of money they want to pay them, (3) get publishers to stop complaining, at least hopefully, and (4) get headlines like ‘Facebook Offers News Outlets Millions of Dollars a Year,’ in the hopes that they can stave off government regulation or taxation.” Facebook isn’t spending the money “because they think News Tab will be profitable,” Benton wrote. “It’s a way to solve a PR and policy problem.” The vaunted new product, he noted, consists of “a new tab buried so deep in Facebook’s interface you need a spelunker’s headlamp to find it.”

To collectively bargain with Facebook, small newsrooms will need the biggest ones to sign on. With those larger organizations receiving millions of dollars from the social media giant through side deals, the smaller publications could be left stranded and defenseless.

Facebook News only links to approved outlets, while in the actual News Feed, the algorithm spews out non-reputable clickbait based on what’s enticing the people, pages, and groups a user engages with the most. “The most notable thing about Facebook News is that it includes almost none of the stories that do well on the rest of Facebook,” observed the Nieman Journalism Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen.

Facebook is suspiciously evasive about how many people use Facebook News and how much traffic it generates for publishers, refusing to provide any indication of its scale at all. “We don’t have hard numbers,” the Facebook News spokesperson, Mari Melguizo, said when I asked for data on its performance. “It’s definitely grown and continues to grow. It is on an upward trajectory.”

Prior to Facebook News, the company had repeatedly proved to be an unreliable partner for news publishers. As Sarah Perez detailed for TechCrunch, the platform established an “Instant Articles” feature in 2015 that “restricted advertising, subscriptions and the recirculation modules publishers relied on” in exchange for a better user experience. It was a bad bargain, and, as a result, many outlets abandoned the feature. Facebook promoted a “shift to video” in 2016, but inflated its video use metrics and then refused to pay publishers. This prompted layoffs at many companies, including Vox, Vice, and Mic. Shortly before Facebook News launched, Joanne Lipman, a former editor in chief of USA Today, warned her colleagues that they had “been at the beck and call of these behemoths” for too long.

“I think it’s a dangerous situation for news organizations to count on anything when it comes to Facebook,” the Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy says. To Kennedy, Facebook lost any pretense of morality when, having tweaked its algorithms after the November 2020 election to favor authoritative news sources in the News Feed, it switched back—presumably to boost engagement, to placate right-wing publishers, or both. “You pull all this together, and Facebook is just the worst possible partner,” Kennedy says.

The world watched an extraordinary exercise of Facebook’s massive power in February when it stymied an Australian government attempt to force it to pay to link to news. First, Facebook temporarily banned Australian news sites from its platform. Then it did an end run around the regulators by agreeing to arrange multimillion-dollar deals with major news providers—on its terms, not the government’s. Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, described it as “an agreement that will allow us to support the publishers we choose to.” In Australia, the biggest recipient by far of Facebook’s largesse will be Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns most of the country’s newspapers. News Corp also heavily lobbied for the new legislation. Facebook didn’t pay the country’s smaller outlets.

“In the end, Google & Facebook have a big bucket of baksheesh that will go to old proprietors and their shareholders,” Jeff Jarvis, the director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York, tweeted in February.

As Facebook News continued to roll out across the globe in 2020 and 2021, someone did finally tell Facebook no. The German media giant Axel Springer rejected Facebook’s offer, describing it as both unseemly and insufficiently lucrative: “We consider the efforts of several platforms to become news brands themselves while at the same time compensating some publishers with inappropriately low remuneration for their content as problematic,” a spokesperson said. The company is now holding out for the passage of new copyright laws in Europe that it hopes will create revenue-sharing agreements “in which all publishers can transparently participate and receive reasonable compensation.”

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Facebook’s need for allies in the press has taken on a particular urgency. In October 2020, a House judiciary subcommittee released a bold, agenda-setting report, alleging wide-ranging antitrust violations by Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. In December, the Federal Trade Commission and 46 state attorneys general, as well as the attorneys general for D.C. and Guam, brought an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the company is illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct.

Congress is currently holding hearings on the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2021, which would give news organizations of all shapes and sizes the ability to negotiate collectively with the big platforms. At a March 12 hearing, News Media Alliance CEO David Chavern noted that the larger media companies already have leverage with Facebook and others. “The ones most in need of collective action are small and community publishers, including most particularly publishers of color, who are suffering deeply in this broken marketplace for real quality journalism,” he said.

HD Media, which owns several West Virginia newspapers, filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Google and Facebook in January, seeking damages from the duopoly. The suit charges that Google’s monopolistic control of digital advertising, along with a secret deal with Facebook not to compete against it, had strangled their source of revenue.

In the long run, reformers say, it will be necessary to break up the giant platforms, end their stranglehold on advertising dollars, and ban algorithms that incite outrage or even violence. In the nearer term, however, some observers support the idea of an independent journalistic fund, financed by Big Tech but operating at arm’s length, that could reward news organizations according to the resources they put into their reporting and the value they contribute to their communities.

Some sort of trusted intermediary or collective agreement seems necessary, because it’s hard to see direct handouts as anything more than a corrupt stopgap measure—especially when they’re mostly given to the news organizations that need the money the least. As Doug Reynolds, the managing partner for the West Virginia newspapers suing Facebook and Google for damages, told me, “If the future of this industry is that we’re dependent on their goodwill, then we don’t have an independent press anymore.”

MUSLIM OMAR - 'I FOUGHT AGAINST VOTER ID LAWS. WE DON'T NEED RESTRICTIONS THAT COULD KEEP JOE BIDEN'S INVADING ILLEGALS OUT OF THE VOTING BOOTHS

 

Rep. Omar: ‘I Fought Against Voter ID Laws,’ We Don’t Need ‘Restrictions’

By Elisabeth Nieshalla | June 30, 2021 | 12:53pm EDT

 
 
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)   (Getty images)
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) (Getty images)

(CNS News) -- When asked whether a person should be required to show an ID in order to vote, as is usually required to purchase alcohol, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said there should be no “restrictions or qualifications in regards to people who are registering to vote.”

At the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, CNS News asked the representative, “Should someone be required to show an ID to buy alcohol?”

Rep. Omar said, “That is the law.”

In a follow-up question, CNS News asked, “And what about to vote?”

“That is not the law,” said Rep. Omar.

She continued: “I fought against voter ID laws in Minnesota because I don’t think that we should be creating any restrictions or qualifications in regards to people who are registering to vote.”

When asked whether she is concerned about how eliminating voter ID would impact the security of the country’s elections, Rep. Omar said, “It does not” affect the elections.

“We have not had security problems in Minnesota, and we haven’t had voter ID,” she said.

(Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

Through their sweeping electoral change legislation, the For the People Act, which was filibustered in the Senate last week, Democrats sought to expand federal power over elections and undercut state voter ID laws. Although the legislation is going nowhere now, Democrats are pushing alternative bills.

On June 25, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, “[I]n the first five months of this year alone, nearly 400 voter restriction bills have been introduced across 48 states [by Republicans].  This voter suppression campaign, deepened by vicious gerrymandering and a torrent of secret special interest money, cannot go unanswered.”

“Congress will continue the fight to pass H.R. 1, which would secure the ballot for voters now,” said Pelosi.  “As we do, we must also secure the ballot for the future, and so we will continue to advance H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.”

The Republican National Committee has denounced the Democrats’ efforts, saying, “Democrats are currently attempting a partisan power grab with their radical H.R. 1/S. 1 'For The Politicians Act.' This bill, filibustered for the time-being, “is a federal takeover of state elections that would eviscerate commonsense state voter ID laws currently in place in many states, force states to allow ballot harvesting, and make taxpayers fund the campaigns of career politicians.”  


ALL LAWYERS ARE GAMERS OF THE LAW. LAWS SIMPLY DO NOT APPLY TO THE LAWLESS LAWYER CLASS.


DHS Mayorkas Is Inviting Deported Migrants Back into the U.S.

EL FLORIDO, GUATEMALA - JANUARY 16: Migrants enter Guatemala after breaking a police barricade at the border checkpoint on January 16, 2021 in El Florido, Guatemala. The caravan departed from Honduras to walk across Guatemala and Mexico to eventually reach the United States. Central Americans expect to receive asylum and …
Josue Decavele/Getty Images
8:43

President Joe Biden’s deputies are trying to bring back many deported migrants regardless of the damage to ordinary Americans, according to official statements given to the pro-migration Marshall Project website.

“We’re eager to bring people back in who shouldn’t have been removed in the first place,” an official told the website for a June 29 article, adding:

The officials say that many deportations, especially under President Trump, were unduly harsh, with little law enforcement benefit. They are working to devise a system to reconsider cases of immigrants who were removed despite strong ties to the United States.

The article suggests that Biden’s deputies will exclude violent and criminal migrants but are eager to welcome deported migrants who violated laws barring illegal entry or illegal employment.

“They have complete and utter disregard for Americans, for the rule of law, the American way of life, for Americans jobs, for American wages, for all of the things that we have as Americans have said that we want,” responded Rosemary Jenks, the policy director at NumbersUSA. “They also have total disregard and disdain for us as taxpayers, because we have to pay for all of this,” she added.

The Biden push spotlights the pro-migration officials’ disregard of the laws which guarantee Americans’ right to their national labor market. Those laws — although often violated or ignored by companies and agencies — exclude foreign migrants and require CEOs to compete for Americans’ labor. The bargaining is described in a June 27 article in the New York Times:

Amy Barber Terschluse, the owner of three [Express Employment Professionals] franchises in St. Louis, handles mostly [hiring for] manufacturing, distribution and administrative jobs. Wages, hours and a short commute are what matter most to job seekers, she said, and few would work for less than $14 an hour.

Ms. Terschluse said she had also had to educate employers, who have gotten used to low wages and the ability to dictate schedules and other conditions. Some employers, she said, have also gotten into “a vicious cycle of replace, replace, replace.”

In industries like hospitality and warehousing, annual turnover rates can surpass 100 percent, which can pare overall growth. Mary C. Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said good job matches between employers and workers produced the most productivity and engagement.

Biden’s invited migration provided employers with roughly 100,000 job-seekers in May. If continued, it will flood the labor market and wreck Americans’ ability to bargain for the higher wages they need for their families and housing.

Biden’s deputies are putting the interests of migrants and employers ahead of working Americans, including many millions of Americans who voted for Joe Biden. “Issues of [migrants’] dignity are foremost in our efforts,” said Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s zealously pro-migration chief of the Department of Homeland Security.

According to the Marshall Project’s article:

The Department of Homeland Security “is committed to reviewing the cases of individuals whose removals under the prior administration failed to live up to our highest values,” said Marsha Espinosa, a spokeswoman for the agency. She confirmed officials are developing “a rigorous, systematic approach” to conduct the reviews and “an orderly process” for deported people to present their claims.

The DHS officials say they may cancel deportations for migrants who did not get into the ‘DACA’ work permit program, for foreign-born veterans deported for crimes, for illegal-migrant pro-migration activists, and for migrants who have close relatives who are Americans. The report said:

The reviews will proceed on a painstaking case-by case basis, officials said. At least initially, only a very small fraction — perhaps thousands — of more than 900,000 formal deportations under Trump could be reversed. But eventually, if the review system is effective, many more people could apply.

The returns may be stopped by lawsuits that show Mayorkas is abusing his power to “parole” foreigners into the United States.

This move is just one of many measures that Mayorkas is taking to expand the damaging migration into the United States, even though he is a former immigrant who Americans welcomed at an early age into the United States.

The damage “could be unwitting if they’re idiots, but it’s actively harming Americans and America, and it’s being done at our expense,” said Jenks. “We’re paying Mayorkas’ salary, and we’re paying for all of these people to be brought back into the United States — after we’ve already paid for them to go through a removal process and be removed.”

“How about corporate America pays for some of this?” Jenks added:

They should be paying Mayorkas’ salary since he obviously works for them. They should be paying all of the expenses for all of these people they want to bring back after going through removal proceedings, and they should reimburse us for the removal proceedings.

The GOP will gain by spotlighting Biden’s policies, she said:

I don’t think you need to spin this. You need to just tell people the facts. Americans realize that they’re competing for jobs, they realize that that tight labor market helps their wages and a loose labor market hurts their wages. They realize that there’s a shortage of housing. They realize that the elites don’t give a damn about them. So just tell them the truth.

Polling shows that the GOP’s current, donor-friendly talking points are winning over less than half of the swing voters who dislike Biden’s migration policies.

The Marshall Project’s article spotlights a few sympathetic cases, such as a truck driver whose foreign-born wife is barred from reentry for prior violations of the nation’s border laws. It does not mention the damage inflicted on Americans and their families by the pro-migration progressives.

The pro-migration Marshall Project is part-owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, a billionaire who is spending heavily to expand migration into Americans’ workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, society, and politics.

The push for the return of migrants is being fronted by the National Immigration Law Center, according to the Marshall Project article. The center is run by and for lawyers who gain professionally from greater immigration. But the group’s board also includes representatives from corporations that profit from imported labor and consumers. Those lawyers work for McDonald’s, Boeing, Amazon, Abbott Laboratories, and the Levy food-service company.

The lavishly-funded center opposes criminal penalties for illegal migration, saying, “Migration-related prosecutions are also used to make felons out of long-time U.S. community members for merely violating immigration laws.”

Each year, four million young Americans enter the workforce. They are forced by their government to compete against a growing population of illegal migrants, against one million new legal immigrants, and the resident workforce of roughly two million temporary guest workers.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

This opposition is multiracialcross-sexnon-racistclass-basedbipartisanrationalpersistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.

The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal immigration, visa workers, and illegal migration undermine democratic self-government, fracture Americans’ society, move money away from Americans’ pocketbooks, and worsen living costs for American families.

Migration moves wealth from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.

Rep. Chip Roy’s Amendment Diverts $5.7B from Transportation Bill to Fund Border Wall

Construction crews work on dismantling Trump's Border Wall near Del Rio, Texas in June 2021. (Photo: Bob Price/Breitbart Texas)
Photo: Bob Price/Breitbart Texas
3:25

U.S. Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) submitted an amendment to the INVEST in America Act to divert $5.7 billion in member-designated projects, commonly known as earmarks, to establish a border wall fund in the U.S. Treasury.

“Democrats included nearly $5.7 billion in corrupt earmarks in the surface transportation measure that is expected to receive a vote this week in the House,” Congressman Roy said in a written statement. “Instead of using federal taxpayer dollars to fund pet projects like electric vehicle charging networks in California and million-dollar sidewalk expansions in Connecticut, Congress should redirect these funds to address the ongoing and very real crisis at our southern border.”

Roy pointed out that only 771 miles of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico Border are secured by primary and secondary physical barriers.

“Currently, primary and secondary barriers cover only 771 miles of our nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico, and the Rio Grande Valley sector – the busiest migrant crossing area – is wide open with only 76 miles of border wall to cover the river,” the San Antonio-area congressman added. “My amendment would strike every single earmark from this legislation and instead authorize a $5.7 billion Border Wall Fund in Treasury to support the completion of a border wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.”

In Roy’s amendment to the INVEST in America Act, he proposed, “Obligation authority made available under this paragraph shall remain available until September 30, 2025; and be in addition to the amount of any limitation imposed on obligations for Federal-aid highway and highway safety construction programs for fiscal year 2022 under section 102 or future fiscal years under any other provision of law.”

“There is established a fund in the Treasury to be known as the ‘Border Wall Fund,’” the amendment continues. “Funds provided into the Border Wall Fund may be used for the sole purpose of completing a border wall on the United States Mexico border.”

Congressman Roy’s amendment would strip out the $5.7 billion in congressional earmarks proposed by Democrats and move those funds to the creation of the border wall fund.

On his first day in office, President Joe Biden canceled border wall projects proposed and funded during the Trump administration, Breitbart Texas reported in January. The action taken by the new president killed 5,000 construction jobs, former CBP Acting-Commissioner Mark Morgan said in an exclusive interview.

Breitbart’s Randy Clark, a retired 32-year Border Patrol agent, reported the cost to U.S. taxpayers of Biden’s cancellation of border wall projects is about $6 million per day, according to a confidential source in U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s Sunday-morning talk show, What’s Your Point? Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX, Parler @BobPrice, and Facebook.

Panamanian Official: Terrorists Blending With Migrants from Outside Americas Trying to Reach U.S.

Haitian migrants cross the Chucunaque River by boat to the Temporary Station of Humanitarian Assistance (ETAH) in La Penita village, Darien province, Panama on May 23, 2019. - Migrants mainly from Haiti, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Cameroon, Bangladesh and Angola cross the border between Colombia and Panama through …
LUIS ACOSTA/AFP via Getty Images
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Panamanian authorities have detected terrorists trying to blend in with the unprecedented number of migrants from Haiti, Cuba, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East attempting to reach the U.S. and Canada through the Central American country, the country’s top diplomat warned.

Erika Mouynes, the foreign minister in Panama, wrote an article published by Foreign Policy (FP) pleading for help from the U.S., where many of these migrants who escape apprehension intend to go, and the international community, describing the situation as a humanitarian crisis.

The Darien Gap, one of the last untapped tropical forests in the Americas, is a lawless and dense wilderness stretch straddling Colombia and Panama. Some analysts consider the region the most hazardous trail for migrants fleeing war, persecution, and poverty.

Migrants make their way into Panama by entering South America in places with lax visa rules, then make their way to Colombia.

Minister Mouynes urged Latin American countries to take steps to address the growing influx of migration transiting through their territory, first by strengthening their visa requirements background checks, adding:

A vast number of migrants crossing the Darién [jungle] started their journey in South America, arriving through ports of entry in countries where visa requirements are less strict. As a result, members of terrorist organizations and sanctioned parties have found their way into Panama, where they are not permitted to enter in the first place. Panama’s biometric identification measures have recognized and detained individuals linked to extremist groups attempting to pass through the country with migrants.

Second, the nations of the Americas must work collaboratively to control the flow of migration. Since 2016, the governments of Panama and Costa Rica have worked together to put in place a joint policy to secure safe passage of migrants through our territories based on each country’s ability to ensure migrants’ care and safety. Panama has also recently reached an information-sharing agreement with Colombia to monitor the flows of migrants headed for the Darién Gap. Currently, more than 1,000 migrants arrive in Panama every day from Colombia, and only 50 to 100 are allowed to proceed into Costa Rica. Needless to say, the situation is untenable.

On June 3, Bloomberg News learned from Mouynes that the country was struggling to handle a five-fold increase in migrants from Africa, Asia, Cuba, and Haiti, entering the Central American country’s territory illegally through the Darien jungle. Migrants from Haiti and Cuba made up the bulk of the people trying to enter Panama illegally at the time.

It appears the migration flow has intensified in the last few weeks with Mouynes writing for FP:

The problem of uncontrolled migration is not isolated to Texas, California, New Mexico, or Arizona. Farther south, on the Panamanian border, a parallel crisis is unfolding as unprecedented numbers of migrants from Haiti, Cuba, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East attempt to cross the Darién Gap en route to Canada and the United States. The situation here is not a uniquely North American or Panamanian problem. It is an international humanitarian crisis that knows no borders and requires immediate collaboration. Panama, for our part, looks forward to working closely with the Biden administration to formulate an effective policy response.

An increase in illegal migrants entering Panama has served as a warning for a looming wave of people from outside the Americas heading to the U.S.

Mouynes wrote that her government agrees with the Biden administration’s policy to address the root causes of migration that drive people to leave their homes to solve the illegal migration problem, a task the U.S. president has assigned to his Vice President Kamala Harris.

However, the Panamanian official indicated that Harris has been silent about the surge of migrants in her country, potentially including some seeking to cause havoc in the United States.

Referring to VP Harris’s trip to Central America on June 7 and 8, she wrote:

Unfortunately, however, Panama was left off the itinerary of her two-day trip, which included stops in Guatemala and Mexico. This despite the unprecedented number of migrants attempting to cross our border through a treacherous area of jungle known as the Darien Gap.

Members from both parties, the White House, and many voters were dismayed at Harris’s performance during her trip early this month, her first as VP.

The foreign minister warned that the migrant issue would only compound absent any action from the international community, noting that its impact will reach beyond Panama’s borders.

Some critics have blamed President Joe Biden’s lenient border security policies for incentivizing migrants from all over the world to make their way to the U.S.

Migrant Surge Deepens in South Texas Ahead of Trump Border Visit

Migrants 2
Breitbart Texas/Randy Clark
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LA JOYA, Texas — On the eve of a visit and border tour by former President Donald Trump, the crisis is in full swing during the early morning hours in the Rio Grande Valley. Local Border Patrol agents faced a busy period typical for the epicenter of the current migrant surge.

One agent tells Breitbart Texas that more than 100 family unit members were apprehended after surrendering before daybreak. As residents walked around a community park for exercise, groups of single adult migrants could be seen running from a brushy area near the Rio Grande and into the nearby neighborhoods with hopes to elude apprehension.

Apolonio “Polo” Ramon, a lifetime local resident, frequents the park to “get some air” and film the migrant foot traffic in the immediate area. He says it has not been this busy in years.

“It was pretty busy last night … The immigrants were coming out near the park and the Border Patrol was loading them up all night,” Ramon said.

Polo, 70, refers to himself as a citizen observer: “I just come out and videotape whatever I see, my narrations are usually too colorful to be of use, but it helps kill time.”

He spoke for a while about life growing up in Starr County. “We used to run around the river all day in the sun and swim to Mexico just to go visit relatives and attend fiestas.” He says now it is too dangerous to cross due to recent cartel violence. He is sympathetic to the migrants crossing with children. “[They] don’t have a choice whether to cross or not, their parents bring them. That’s who I feel sorry for.”

He worries about the high temperatures and says he heard a migrant may have died from heat a few days before. “We need to do something, this is not good, but I don’t have the answers,” he said in a frustrated tone.

The Rio Grande Valley Sector in Texas leads the nation in apprehensions for migrant and narcotics smuggling. The sector is more than 400% busier than it was last year at the same time. Overall, the Border Patrol is expected to surpass one million migrant apprehensions for this fiscal year when official arrest totals are released in July.

Randy Clark
 is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol.  Prior to his retirement, he served as the Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations, directing operations for nine Border Patrol Stations within the Del Rio, Texas, Sector. Follow him on Twitter @RandyClarkBBTX.