Americans Souring on Biden -- and Washington
By Patrick J. Buchanan | September 17, 2021 | 7:12am EDT
The California recall election turned out well for the Democrats.
With Gov. Gavin Newsom sinking in the summer polls, the party had been staring starkly at the prospect of losing the nation's largest state and seeing its governor replaced by talk-show host Larry Elder, who had vaulted into the lead among the 46 candidates seeking to replace Newsom.
Elder had rallied Republicans and started to surge, which terrified the Democrats. Not only might they lose Newsom, but they could get in the governor's mansion in Sacramento what leftists took to calling "the black face of white supremacy."
Result: A panicked Democratic Party defeated the recall by nearly 2-1, with Californians voting to retain Newsom in roughly the same percentages as they had voted to elect Joe Biden president almost a year ago.
That leaves California securely in Democrat control.
Not in 15 years has a Republican won statewide office. Every elected governor and U.S. senator after 2006, every lieutenant governor and attorney general, has been a Democrat.
The Congressional delegation has 53 members, and the Democrats outnumber Republicans 42-11. Democrats also have 3-1 majorities in both houses of the state legislature.
Richard Nixon carried his home state on all five presidential tickets on which he ran, and Ronald Reagan never lost California. But the era that began when Barry Goldwater won the June 1964 primary against liberal Gov. Nelson Rockefeller is history.
Yet, everything is not coming up roses for Biden.
An Economist poll finds his approval rating underwater, with 49% disapproving of Biden's performance in office to 46% in approval.
The latest Quinnipiac poll, out Tuesday, is more ominous. It has 50% of the country disapproving of the Biden presidency, with only 42% approving, the first time Biden's rating has fallen into negative territory. More worrisome: Independents disapprove of Biden by 52-34.
When broken down by issues, the news is no better.
On his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Biden's rating has plunged from 53-40 approval in August to 48% approving and 49% disapproving now. Fifty-five percent disapprove of his handling of his duties as commander in chief.
His mastery of foreign policy was supposed to be his strong suit. But here the numbers are even worse. Only a third of the nation, 34%, approves of his handling of foreign policy, while 59% disapprove.
On the economy, Biden also gets a negative rating, with 42% of the country approving of the job he is doing to 52% against.
With Biden's numbers underwater overall and on the three major issues — the economy, foreign policy and his handling of the coronavirus — Democrats have to be looking nervously at November 2022.
"If there ever was a honeymoon for President Biden, it is clearly over," says Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy. "This is, with few exceptions, a poll full of troubling negatives ... from overall job approval, to foreign policy, to the economy."
What makes this especially ominous for Democrats is that the recent negative news is likely to continue on many fronts, while the possibilities of positive achievements appear limited.
Biden conceivably could pull off twin victories this fall in Congress — with passage of both the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package and the $3.5 trillion family infrastructure bill. If so, this would put him in the history books as a transformative president alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.
But Biden faces problems on many fronts.
First among them is the return of inflation. The soaring price of food and fuel is beginning to be felt. There is new skittishness in the markets. And the jobs picture is not as rosy as was anticipated this summer.
While the country credits the president for ending America's longest war, the future news out of Afghanistan is likely to be filled with stories of the Americans left behind and Afghan allies facing executions.
The invasion across our southern border is now producing 220,000 border crossers every month.
We are still in the fourth wave of the coronavirus, with the number of American dead, already over 670,000, rising at a rate of 2,000 a day.
If the wave does not break, this will depress the mood of a country that believed, just a few months back, that the worst was behind us and brighter days lay ahead.
And the poll numbers are not only the worst Biden has received. They are not all that good for the nation either.
Seventy percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the USA. The president's disapproval exceeds his approval rating by eight points, just eight months in office. Republicans and Democrats in Congress both get negative ratings from the American people. And only 37% of registered voters approve of the Supreme Court's handling of its role. Half the country disapproves.
If all three branches of the U.S. government have lost or are losing the confidence of their countrymen, what does that suggest is the future for our democratic republic?
(Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
THE LOOT STASHED AWAY BE FEINSTEIN, THE OBOMBS, THE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY AND THE CRIME DUAL OF HILLARY AND BILLARY NEARS HALF A BILLION DOLLARS!
The form that this transfer is taking is a plan to increase the already outrageous $7,500 taxpayer-funded credit for electric car purchases to a $12,500 credit.
Chris Hedges & Richard Wolff | Infrastructure & Pandemic Relief Are BLATANT SCAMS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqCDmLdy5jY
Chris Hedges & Richard Wolff | America's OBVIOUS DECLINE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGQT69IuP4U
Chris Hedges & Richard Wolff | Billionares PROFITED FROM PANDEMIC!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJR5g_mcnoo
What Happened To The American Middle Class? | Financial Crash Documentary | Business Stories
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbTlq7A-wVs
Don’t be fooled by Joe Biden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCqc5Ozrh6c
Chris Hedges | NAFTA, Clinton, and Obama BETRAYED Americans... and Joe Biden was right there with the worst of them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qryblALiqOI
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
Democrats are again planning to pay rich people to buy expensive cars
As part of their appalling, budget-busting $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill, Democrats are insisting upon a vast transfer of wealth from less affluent taxpayers to the very rich. The form that this transfer is taking is a plan to increase the already outrageous $7,500 taxpayer-funded credit for electric car purchases to a $12,500 credit.
Just The News has the story:
House Republicans are arguing against a Democratic proposal to increase the $7,500 taxpayer-funded credit for electric car purchases to as much as $12,500, arguing that it would disproportionately help wealthy Americans who can afford to buy pricey electric vehicles.
Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee have proposed increasing the credit as part of their party’s filibuster-proof $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill, which includes new social programs and billions for electric vehicle infrastructure.
Electric cars “can cost anywhere from 10 percent to over 40 percent more than a similar gasoline-only model,” a Consumer Reports analysis found last year (although the study argued that estimated savings on things like fuel and repairs offset the higher purchase prices over time).
As an extra bonus, the credit is also a payoff to unions, since the credit would apply only to union-made vehicles assembled in the U.S.:
Tesla purchases would not be eligible for the new credit since the company’s workforce is not unionized. Automakers such as Toyota and Honda are speaking out against the Democrats’ proposal, given that their workforce is not unionized either.
Putting aside the fact that electric cars aren’t as green as promised, given their filthy batteries created using materials associated with brutal child labor* and the fact that they often just transfer pollution from the gas tank to the fossil-fuel-burning electric plant, the incentives are nothing more than money for rich people. That’s not just me saying that. That’s also what a National Bureau of Economic Research paper said in 2015 (and I doubt much has changed since then, especially in these inflationary times):
Since 2006, U.S. households have received more than $18 billion in federal income tax credits for weatherizing their homes, installing solar panels, buying hybrid and electric vehicles, and other "clean energy" investments. We use tax return data to examine the socioeconomic characteristics of program recipients. We find that these tax expenditures have gone predominantly to higher-income Americans. The bottom three income quintiles have received about 10% of all credits, while the top quintile has received about 60%. The most extreme is the program aimed at electric vehicles, where we find that the top income quintile has received about 90% of all credits. By comparing to previous work on the distributional consequences of pricing greenhouse gas emissions, we conclude that tax credits are likely to be much less attractive on distributional grounds than market mechanisms to reduce GHGs. (Emphasis mine.)
It's true, of course, that roughly half of the American population isn’t paying any federal income taxes and that the rich are paying a vastly disproportionate share of taxes. One could say that those rich people who buy electric cars because of the credit are just getting a form of tax refund. That point, however, ignores that there are lots of people who aren’t rich who nevertheless turn a healthy chunk of their income over to the bloated federal government every year. It’s unconscionable that these people subsidize affluent Americans buying their virtue-signaling electric vehicles.
The problem for leftists is that electric cars, despite being zippy, have lots of problems that make them incapable of competing in the marketplace. If you’re on a road trip and you run low on electricity, you can’t bop into a gas station, fill up, and be on the road five minutes later. Instead, plan for an hour sitting there, waiting for the car to charge—and that’s assuming there’s no line. The cars can also lose up to 40% of their range in cold weather, something that’s common in large parts of the U.S.
Moreover, even if you’re not paying for gasoline, you’re still paying for electricity, something that’s shot up thanks to Biden’s policies. In the San Francisco Bay Area, one of America’s most aggressively virtue-signaling communities, electricity jumped by 9.3% in one month. Apartment dwellers may also find it difficult to charge their car at night because there’s no convenient electric outlet.
These are all practical problems, though, and the Democrats don’t have time for that. They’re out to save the world from a nonexistent crisis and, if they have to rob working-class people to get the rich to buy impractical cars—by God! They’re going to do it.
__________________
* Of course, the computers and phones without which we can’t function also depend on that same child slave labor. The whole modern battery issue is a situation from which too many people benefit.
Image: A Tesla broken down on a German roadside (and electric cars also need special roadside assistance). Copyright by Ralf Roletschek / roletschek.at. Used with permission.
As Democrats shield wealth of billionaires, Biden pleads with super-rich to pay their “fair share”
On Thursday, President Joe Biden made a demagogic speech from the White House presenting his “Build Back Better” budget plan as a historic reversal of the decades-long enrichment of the corporate elite at the expense of working people.
He cited a number of indices of the wholesale looting of society by the corporations and the super-rich, including:
- US billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $1.8 trillion since the beginning of the pandemic.
- Fifty of the largest corporations in the US paid zero taxes in 2020, while collectively taking in over $40 billion in profits.
- The top 1 percent in the US evade an estimated $160 billion in taxes they owe every year.
“This is the moment to deal working people back into the economy. This is the moment to prove to the American people that the government works for them,” Biden declared.
But having made the case for the seizure of the wealth of what he referred to as the “pandemic profiteers,” he hastened to add: “I’m not out to punish anyone. I’m a capitalist. If you can make a million or a billion dollars, that’s great. God bless you. All I’m asking is you pay your fair share.”
Biden made his remarks one day after House Democrats assembled the various parts of the overall budget plan that had been drafted and approved by numerous House committees. The 26,000-page package purports to allocate $3.5 trillion over 10 years for social welfare measures, paid for in part by $2.1 trillion in tax hikes for large corporations and wealthy individuals.
The Senate is in the process of assembling its own version of the budget. What ultimately emerges from the process of internal horse-trading between various factions of the Democratic Party, manipulated by a massive corporate lobbying campaign to block any serious incursions into the profits and the personal fortunes of the ruling oligarchy, will be far more modest than even the timid measures contained in the current House proposal.
The Democrats narrowly control both chambers, and the Republican Party is 100 percent opposed to the administration’s budget plan and pledged to vote against it. In order to circumvent a filibuster in the evenly divided Senate, the Democrats are seeking to pass their budget under the budget reconciliation procedure, which requires only a majority vote in the upper chamber, 50 Democrats and the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris and cannot be filibustered.
That means Biden and the Democratic leadership cannot afford to lose a single Democratic vote. In the House, they cannot lose more than three Democratic votes. As a result, corporate interests are asserting their demands most directly via their bribed mouthpieces within the Democratic congressional caucuses.
In a concession to right-wing members of the House Democratic caucus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month agreed to bring the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by the Senate up for a vote in the House by September 27, dropping her previous insistence that no action be taken in the House on that bill until the Senate had passed the broader “human infrastructure” budget bill.
The entire process—a combination of back-room deal-making and political posturing—is dominated by the demands of the Democratic Party right wing. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a multimillionaire coal company owner, and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, whose idol is the late Republican reactionary and war hawk John McCain, have publicly declared their opposition to the $3.5 trillion price tag of the administration’s budget bill.
Manchin has let it be known he is prepared to accept a bill costing around half that amount. He has proposed imposing means testing and work requirements for extended child tax credits, child care and pre-kindergarten subsidies, tuition-free community college and other social measures included in the bill. He is dead set against provisions that promote clean energy and infringe on the fossil fuel industry, from which he has received $400,000 in campaign cash since 2017, making him the industry’s top recipient.
Last week Manchin appeared on several of the Sunday morning television interview programs to push for the House passage of the corporate-backed physical infrastructure bill and argue there was no “urgency” for the social relief and anti-climate change measures in the Biden budget plan.
This was under conditions of the Delta-variant-driven fourth wave of the pandemic, overwhelming hospitals and infecting record numbers of children in reopened schools, the termination of federal unemployment benefits and the moratorium on evictions, threatening millions with homelessness and destitution, and climate change-driven hurricanes and wildfires that have devastated millions from California to the Gulf Coast to New York City.
In the House, three right-wing Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee—Reps. Scott Peters (Calif.), Kathleen Rice (N.Y.) and Kurt Schrader (Ore.)—on Tuesday voted against the leadership’s proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate hundreds of prescription drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies, using international prices, generally half of those in the US, as the standard. The Biden administration and Pelosi estimate this would save the government $700 billion, which they propose to use to extend Medicare coverage to include dental, vision and hearing. The three Democratic “no” votes prevented the committee from including the provision in its portion of the overall bill.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the top industry contributor to Peters’ campaign war chest in 2021-2022 is pharmaceuticals/health products, which has donated $88,550. His top contributors are Pfizer ($10,800), Eli Lilly ($10,500), Amgen ($7,900) and Gilead Sciences ($7,750).
Schrader’s top industry contributor is oil & gas ($34,000), followed by pharmaceuticals/health products ($24,000).
The second highest industry contributor to Rice’s campaign is insurance.
Biden and the Democratic congressional leadership have bent over backwards to accommodate and placate these forces. On Wednesday, Biden met separately with Manchin and Sinema. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said the $3.5 trillion package could be scaled back by cutting back the size of some of the programs or reducing their duration.
The House budget package as it currently stands raises the top individual income tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent (where it was prior to Trump’s 2017 tax windfall for the rich). It increases the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 26.5 percent, which is lower than Biden’s proposed 28 percent and far lower than the 35 percent rate prior to the 2017 Republican tax bill. It raises the capital gains tax rate from 20 percent to 25 percent—still a far lower rate than for the equivalent wage income and lower than Biden’s initial proposal.
More significant than the minor tax increases on the wealthy that are contained in the House bill is what is omitted. The bill addresses only income, not the wealth hoarded by America’s oligarchs. Income comprises only a negligible portion of the fortunes of the billionaires. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, in 2020 received a salary from Amazon of only $81,840. Their money comes from stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets that are largely untaxed.
The House bill drops a proposal in Biden’s original plan that would close a loophole allowing the wealthy to pass accumulated assets down to their heirs without ever paying taxes on the rise in the value of those assets from the time of their initial purchase. It also leaves in place so-called “carried interest,” the loophole that treats the money taken in by hedge fund managers as a capital gain, rather than normal income, which is taxed at a far higher rate.
The Wall Street Journal gloated over the Democrats’ failure to challenge this notorious gift to hedge fund billionaires, publishing an editorial headlined “Democrats Blink on Carried Interest.”
None of this prevented Biden from giving his full endorsement to the House bill.
The Washington Post cited Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, as saying: “If the [House] Ways and Means plan was enacted as is, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would still pay an effective rate of $0 on most of their income if they pass their assets onto their heirs.”
REMEMBER WHEN BRIBES SUCKING LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS SAID OL' JOE'S FINANCES WERE ENTIRELY 'TRANSPARENT'?
This Is How the Left's Power Structure Collapses
Weeks ago, Rush Limbaugh mentioned that the issues defining the election had not come forward yet. He was correct. Not entirely, because all the issues coming out right now have existed. In plain sight.
They just weren't distilled yet.
It's now here, served up on a silver platter. No, not Hunter Biden. This Hunter Biden laptop story simply leads us to the issue. The word. One word that rules them all, and in the darkness binds them.
Corruption.
There it is. That's the issue. To begin, you have the corrupt family Biden. They've been scamming us and our system well for almost fifty years. The man is supposedly worth over 250 million dollars. How is this possible on his salary? It's not. So where did his wealth come from? Not from being a brilliant businessman.
Enter Hunter's laptop. We now know that this is a family steeped in crime and corruption. Ole Corn Pop appears to be awash in money kicked back to him by his family members who have grifted off his reputation for years. Hunter's laptop has betrayed all this and more. Much like Al Capone's bookkeeper. Who would have thought Capone would have been destroyed so completely by a set of crooked books? Such delicious irony. And who would have known that this would become the October surprise of all October surprises?
Corruption. Full grown. Oozing its way into America. It's everywhere on the left. The Biden family. Clintons. The Democratic Party. The FBI. The CIA. The mainstream media. The tech giants. It's a full-out plague, aided and abetted by their demonic philosophy, all of them gone astray.
All of them corrupt.
The New York Post story has been there for about a week now. The Democrat-media complex has ignored it entirely; the tech giants went into overdrive removing all evidence from their platforms. Google. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. The whole lot of them. Covering up a story that deserved universal distribution and condemnation. Instead, they covered up the most damning story to their side, their chosen side. All of them colluded to bury this mounting evidence of wrongdoing.
How far the mighty have fallen. And are falling.
What's the word for a media establishment that won't report this story?
What's the word for the FBI having this laptop for almost a year, watching dispassionately as the Democrats impeached Trump with hard evidence in their hands of his innocence and the Bidens' guilt?
What's the word for the above group of bad actors colluding to forward the Russia lies for almost three years?
What's the word for Director Wray's involvement?
What's the word for CIA director not releasing documents of the Russia hoax, documents that have been available for a long time?
What's the all-encompassing word that has been revealed at the heart of all these colluding to hide the truth from an America that deserves to know?
Corruption.
This is an issue that won't go away. All the attempts to deep-six the truth here are failing, and miserably at that. It's causing a slow-walk of information to drip out to the American public. First the stories of Ukraine. Drip-drip-drip. Then the stories of drugs. Then the sex problems. Then the Chinese stories. The story of kickbacks to Pop.
It's as if all the smartest people in the world colluded to destroy themselves. By purposefully and unanimously excluding all information concerning this story from the American public. The smartest people in the world actually believe they can be successful in spiking one of the biggest stories to pop up in any American election cycle. Their hubris is so advanced, so viral, so awful, that they can't see what they've done to themselves. They really believe they are going to keep a cork on this.
The derogatory phrase for the establishment has been "the swamp." How bad is this, how deep is this, how criminal is this, how horrifying is it to find out the vast amount of corruption and collusion in so many of our institutions and corporations?
It's staggering. It's infuriating.
These are the most powerful among us. All rich. All corrupt. All once respected by Americans of all stripes. And here, in one fell swoop, they reveal themselves to the average American. As arrogant bullies, as deceitful liars, as evil as anything we've seen in our generation. They have revealed themselves as the cabal of darkness. Terrible motives, terrible actions, virtually unforgiveable in what they have done, and yet failed to finish. And due to the hubris of the cabal, the exposé will be slow-walked until the election.
Today, Trump had an exchange with reporters, where he said, "Biden was a criminal."
This shocked the corrupt media. Reverberations rocked the corrupto-sphere. The lion had roared. There is no way the corrupto-sphere keeps this lid on. There is also no way all these corrupt actors go back on their solemn pledge to one another. They are bound together. They're stuck with each other. And it will overwhelm them.
As this careens into the debate, as this careens into voting, as this careens into Election Day, the ultimate narrative will be set. The doomsday clock will start. All the corrupt actors will be pointed out. All of them will rue the day they couldn't get rid of Donald Trump. He, above most anyone, knows just how corrupt these people are. He above anyone knows how to handle them. He, above all, knows what's all coming out in the next weeks.
It's going to be an avalanche of material. It's going to be a number of fires even Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the DNC, the Bidens, the media, the corrupt government officials, the whole shooting match, will not be able to handle. If they all overtly held emergency meetings with each other, they'd never stop the flood. When Trump roared, you know he had one of his famous moments, that moment when he knows how and when to bring this to a head. Trump the narrative-builder, Trump the destroyer will be unleashing hell on these people.
Anyone who has seen him operate knows. This is his time. This is how the beginning of the end of the swamp, or should I say the sewer, begins. This is the kind of chaos these smartest people in the world, ever, haven't seen before. Algorithms will not help them. Censorship will not help them. It will be a rushing mighty wind, coming to destroy all those who didn't understand that their corruption could be turned on them.
This is going to be epic. Corruption will be their end; it's just a matter of time. And Trump will have four years to finish their corruption.
‘10% Joe’ – From Grandfather to Godfather
By David Isaac
We thought Joe Biden was the grandfather. It turns out he’s more like the godfather.
It’s the big reveal in the Hunter Biden story.
Until now, we thought Hunter, the “f—ked up addict that can’t be trusted” (in his own words) who sent not one but three laptops full of incriminating material in for repairs – an act so stupid that even crack can’t be blamed – was the one taking advantage of his father’s position to enrich himself.
(Compounding the idiocy, despite repeated notifications, he failed to pay the $85 bill to reclaim the one salvageable laptop, so that after 90 days it became the legal property of the repair shop.)
What we learn from the laptop is that Joe (referred to as “the big guy”) was to get a 10% cut of the loot from a deal with a now defunct Chinese energy company with strong ties to the Chinese government (the email outlines an equity split including “20 for H” and “10 held by H for the big guy.” That makes “10% Joe” analogous to the Godfather, the capo dei capi, the boss due his share of the family’s enterprises.
So Biden is getting “his beak wet,” as former NYC Mayor and current Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani points out in a damning video describing the “Biden crime family’s payoff scheme.”
There’s more. Hunter tells his daughter Naomi in a 2018 text-message exchange: “I hope you all can do what I did, and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years and it has been tough. It’s really hard but don’t worry, unlike Pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
It would take some real mental gymnastics to convince any normal person – that is, anyone not marinating in Democratic talking points - that “Pop” wasn’t referring to Joe Biden.
Did Biden really get half? It sounds more like Hunter is complaining that he had to give his dad anything.
The amount really doesn’t matter. It puts paid to Joe’s claims that “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” It should lead to a federal investigation, starting with subpoenas to Hunter’s banks.
Other emails are equally damning when it comes to Joe’s claims to know nothing of his son’s business affairs. There’s the email from Burisma board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi thanking Hunter for setting up a meeting with then Vice President Biden.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.
Up to now the worst that was usually said of Biden is that he wasn’t up to the job. He was a kindly grandfather who was cognitively slipping. To Trump opponents, it didn’t matter. What was important was that Biden would return the country to “normalcy.” Peggy Noonan wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 8):
“If Joe Biden wins big, part of the reason, maybe a big part, will be simply that he is normal. Not ‘he’s such an accomplished legislator,’ not ‘he’s the man of the future’ or ‘charismatic’ or ‘warm’ or ‘has such a moving back story.’ No. He is normal. And people miss normal so much.”
BLOG EDITOR: SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN AND HILLARY CLINTON HAS MADE VAST WEALTH SERVICING FOREIGN COUNTRIES.
A family business raking in millions for access to U.S. policy makers is “normal”?
Still less excusable than Noonan’s silly remarks are those of U.S. Adm. (ret.) William McRaven, who extols Biden in the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 20), well after the scandal broke: “We need a leader of integrity whose decency and sense of respect reflects the values we expect from our president.”
We hope McRaven was a better admiral than he is a judge of character.
And the response of mainstream media to the Post’s revelations?
In what may be the most blatant example of media censorship in U.S. history, the story has been buried by Big Tech and blackballed/denied by the media giants.
Facebook and Twitter, in the tank for Biden, both blocked the link to the Post story. Twitter blocked the Trump campaign’s official account and also that of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. The major news outlets have rushed in unison to label the Post scoop “Russian disinformation.” Their response was so monolithic that John Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence felt impelled to intervene, assuring there was “no intelligence that supports that.”
The hard drive is full of pictures of the Biden family, Hunter (sometimes in compromising positions) and over 11,000 emails, most of them harmless. And why, as Giuliani points out, did Hunter Biden’s lawyers repeatedly demand his computer be returned (once they realized the disaster that was brewing)? Seems like a strange approach if you think it’s all Russian disinformation, and not Hunter’s computer at all.
David Isaac is managing editor of World Israel News.
The Biden crime family faced no scrutiny and their grift continues to this day with Hunter’s ongoing Chinese investments, willful ignorance of his laptop contents, and his art project selling maybe million-dollar paintings in exchange for political access.
This is the “extreme left” of official American politics, whose perspective is to attend galas with billionaires in order to bring them “into the conversation.” Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance was widely and justly ridiculed, driving home to millions of people how completely disenfranchised America’s working class is.
The Met Gala: America’s elite celebrates death and destitution
The annual Metropolitan Museum Gala took place on Monday, with seats starting at $30,000. A procession of celebrities and billionaires, led by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman marched up the red-carpeted staircase of New York’s Met to hold a secret party, with no cell phones or recording devices allowed.
The week before, 9 million people lost unemployment benefits and another 3 million had their benefits slashed by a Congress and a White House that claimed that cutting benefits would “encourage” the jobless to find work. Throughout the United States, sheriffs were knocking on doors to evict families behind in their rent after the end of the eviction moratorium.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 680,000 people have lost their lives, and more than 1,500 people are dying every day. Throughout the South, hospitals are at capacity, and critically ill patients are being turned away.
For years, the Met Gala has embodied the interlocking pathologies of social inequality and celebrity worship, showcasing the ignorance and backwardness of the rich and famous.
Former US President Donald Trump proposed to his wife, Melania Trump, at the Gala in 2004, showing off a 10-carat diamond that Trump reportedly bought for over a million dollars. Musk made his debut with his girlfriend, the pop singer Grimes, at the 2018 Gala.
Year after year, the media fawns over the increasingly extravagant and garish costumes worn by the various celebrities, usually promoting a pet cause in a show of self-congratulation. US politicians would keep a distance from the tasteless event, with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio refusing an invitation in 2018, saying, “This is the kind of place where the elite goes and likes to be with each other.”
But this year, de Blasio was in attendance, in his words, to send a “message.” Together with the reopening of Broadway shows and in-person schooling this week, de Blasio said his aim was to ensure the world knows that New York City is “open.”
The Met Gala, the mayor said, showcased an “Amazing, amazing group of performers and leaders gathered together who love New York City, who were really doing this in large measure to send the message that the city is coming back strong.”
He continued, “And speaking of our bright future, yesterday morning one of the most important things that's going to happen in all of 2021, our kids coming back to school.”
In the name of “economic recovery,” all measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 are being abandoned. As pediatric COVID-19 cases hit the highest levels ever, children are being warehoused in schools as their parents lose unemployment benefits.
The celebrities and oligarchs assembled at the Met were, according to de Blasio, there to send a “message” to the working population of the city and the world about the new reality of living with COVID-19.
The 2020 Met Gala was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, the 7-day average of new COVID-19 cases was 36,000, and 739 people were dying each day. Today, there are four times more daily cases and twice as many deaths. But the annual party proceeded regardless, the attendees conspicuously maskless.
Many of the pop stars, actresses, and other celebrities in attendance are too stupid and self-centered to know that attending a $300,000-a-table gala funded by two massive media corporations—Facebook and Conde Nast—during a pandemic and mass economic dislocation is, to say the least, inappropriate.
But whether or not they consciously sought to help send de Blasio’s “message” that COVID-19 will be allowed to spread unchecked, they know that if they or their families get sick, they will be given the best medical care, provided for by concierge medical services, often costing hundreds of thousands a year.
And, after all, why not celebrate? Schwarzman, Musk and the world’s other billionaires saw their wealth increase by 54 percent since the start of the pandemic, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. This wealth came about as a result of the unsafe reopening of factories and workplaces, which led to the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
If there were a prize for cynicism and hypocrisy awarded at the Gala, it would have gone to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who attended wearing a designer dress emblazoned with the slogan “tax the rich.”
Ocasio-Cortez said she participated in the event to bring America’s financial oligarchy into the “conversation” of addressing social inequality. She told reporters, “When we talk about supporting working families, and we talk about having a fair tax code, oftentimes this conversation is among working and middle-class people amongst themselves, and I think it’s time to bring all classes into the conversation.”
This is the “extreme left” of official American politics, whose perspective is to attend galas with billionaires in order to bring them “into the conversation.” Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance was widely and justly ridiculed, driving home to millions of people how completely disenfranchised America’s working class is.
This year’s Met Gala shows where social revolutions come from. The American oligarchy and affluentsia, with greed, self-absorption and cluelessness feeding upon each other, use the occasion of mass death and economic destitution to throw a celebration of wealth and privilege. As Sophocles wrote long ago, “Evil appears as good in the minds of those whom the gods lead to destruction.”
Biden, long known as Delaware’s “senator from DuPont,” Biden served on committees that were most sensitive to the interests of the ruling class, including the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He supported the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a milestone in the deregulation of the banks, and other right-wing measures. After nearly four decades in the Senate, Biden became Obama’s vice president, helping to oversee the massive bailout of Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent restructuring of class relations to benefit the rich. That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.
The Biden crime family faced no scrutiny and their grift continues to this day with Hunter’s ongoing Chinese investments, willful ignorance of his laptop contents, and his art project selling maybe million-dollar paintings in exchange for political access.
Joe Biden's Betrayal of American Values Must be Our Call to Action
John Stossel
Corporate Welfare
President Reagan once said that “The world must see an America that is morally strong with a creed and a vision. This is what has led us to dare and achieve. For us, values count.”
If America’s exceptionalism under President Biden is measured by this standard, Joe Biden is failing our country. Biden promised that America would “build back better,” but his disastrous foreign policy, out-of-control spending, and unconstitutional government overreach point to decline.
With his haphazard exit from Afghanistan, Joe Biden stranded American citizens and Afghan allies and has made the Taliban the world’s largest weapons dealer. Now, Biden entrusts the protection of these innocent lives to the same Taliban terrorists who harbored Al-Qaeda, reducing two decades of American sacrifice to an epic disaster that demands investigation and accountability.
At home, Biden promised unity and a competence that experience is meant to bring, but he divides our country and grossly mishandles his duties – while shamelessly blaming anyone but himself. Imagine being the President of the United States and acting powerless and beholden – but now we don’t have to imagine it. Yet, with control of the House and Senate, Biden and the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.
Open-borders Biden has allowed thousands of COVID-positive illegal immigrants, many victims of trafficking, to flood our frontier while placing exclusive blame on conservatives for the recent coronavirus surge. He’s managed to politicize our health response to the pandemic in a way only previously imagined in novels.
Biden has blamed congressional Republicans for failing to support his socialist government takeover of the economy, which forces trillions of dollars in wasteful spending for “infrastructure” down the throats of working-class Americans, saddling generations with debt and lost opportunity.
He even blamed his failure to advance the federal takeover of elections on Republicans fighting to restore faith in elections, launching a failed misinformation campaign with Stacey Abrams that cost Georgians a $100-million opportunity.
While Biden promised unity, we now live in the most divisive political environments in our lifetime. Thanks to his relentless pursuit to placate the woke mob and keep up with the latest demands of a far-left that despises America. Biden said he would be the most progressive president in American history – likely a true statement, but to what end? His extreme agenda has little to do with the country that he swore to serve and protect and everything to do with politics and retribution.
Accountability, honesty and integrity are foreign phrases for Biden. This behavior comes as no surprise from a career politician who has spent five decades in Washington, using his power and influence to enrich himself and his family from his comfortable perch. As president, Biden dismisses serious inquiries into his policies – turns his back, walks away, and ignores them altogether. Meanwhile, the media runs interference for Biden and labels serious questions about the president’s fitness to serve as “conspiracies."
Biden’s actions have proven that he is more beholden to special interests, blue-state billionaires, and coastal elites rather than hard working Americans in need. Instead of providing access and opportunity to success for all, Biden shamelessly promotes cradle-to-grave government dependency and villainizes those who work hard and make an honest living.
We cannot stand by as Joe Biden and Washington radicals dismantle the American Dream. Now is the time to get vocal, get active, and get involved – which is exactly what we are doing at Greater Georgia, a conservative voter registration and mobilization organization in the biggest battleground state in the country. We are pushing back on the liberals’ far-left agenda and advocating for the pro-freedom, pro-America values that uplift all communities. These are the values that unite our country and make us strong, and these are the values we must always fight to defend because, as President Reagan said, “values count.”
To join the fight for American values, visit www.greatergeorgia.com/volunteer today.
PIG STEPHEN A SCHWARZMAN IS A MAJOR OWNER OF THE SOOCIOPATH LYING LAWYER JOE BIDEN. TENS OF MILLIONS WERE PUMPED INTO BIDEN FROM BLACKROCK TO MAKE SURE OBAMANOMICS TO PROTECT RICH CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WOULD CONTINUE AND NO BANKSTER ENDS UP IN JAIL.
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=83&t=33s
BlackRock (BIDEN CRONY) & Wall Street: US Housing Market TAKEOVER (Fact or Fiction?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCHS4IW0LBo
David Sirota: Blackrock (BIDEN CRONY), Koch ROBBING Future Homeowners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFjxvrJvWwQ
BlackRock (BIDEN CRONY)- The company that owns the world?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4foal20UTA
How BlackRock (BIDEN CRONY) exploited the COVID-19 pandemic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96sAffLWy_8
AREN'T WE FABULOUS? AND YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE HOW MANY PEOPLE WE STOLE IT FROM!
This year’s Met Gala shows where social revolutions come from. The American oligarchy and affluentia, with greed, self-absorption and cluelessness feeding upon each other, use the occasion of mass death and economic destitution to throw a celebration of wealth and privilege. As Sophocles wrote long ago, “Evil appears as good in the minds of those whom the gods lead to destruction.”
The Met Gala: America’s elite celebrates death and destitution
The annual Metropolitan Museum Gala took place on Monday, with seats starting at $30,000. A procession of celebrities and billionaires, led by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman marched up the red-carpeted staircase of New York’s Met to hold a secret party, with no cell phones or recording devices allowed.
The week before, 9 million people lost unemployment benefits and another 3 million had their benefits slashed by a Congress and a White House that claimed that cutting benefits would “encourage” the jobless to find work. Throughout the United States, sheriffs were knocking on doors to evict families behind in their rent after the end of the eviction moratorium.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 680,000 people have lost their lives, and more than 1,500 people are dying every day. Throughout the South, hospitals are at capacity, and critically ill patients are being turned away.
For years, the Met Gala has embodied the interlocking pathologies of social inequality and celebrity worship, showcasing the ignorance and backwardness of the rich and famous.
Former US President Donald Trump proposed to his wife, Melania Trump, at the Gala in 2004, showing off a 10-carat diamond that Trump reportedly bought for over a million dollars. Musk made his debut with his girlfriend, the pop singer Grimes, at the 2018 Gala.
Year after year, the media fawns over the increasingly extravagant and garish costumes worn by the various celebrities, usually promoting a pet cause in a show of self-congratulation. US politicians would keep a distance from the tasteless event, with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio refusing an invitation in 2018, saying, “This is the kind of place where the elite goes and likes to be with each other.”
But this year, de Blasio was in attendance, in his words, to send a “message.” Together with the reopening of Broadway shows and in-person schooling this week, de Blasio said his aim was to ensure the world knows that New York City is “open.”
The Met Gala, the mayor said, showcased an “Amazing, amazing group of performers and leaders gathered together who love New York City, who were really doing this in large measure to send the message that the city is coming back strong.”
He continued, “And speaking of our bright future, yesterday morning one of the most important things that's going to happen in all of 2021, our kids coming back to school.”
In the name of “economic recovery,” all measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 are being abandoned. As pediatric COVID-19 cases hit the highest levels ever, children are being warehoused in schools as their parents lose unemployment benefits.
The celebrities and oligarchs assembled at the Met were, according to de Blasio, there to send a “message” to the working population of the city and the world about the new reality of living with COVID-19.
The 2020 Met Gala was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, the 7-day average of new COVID-19 cases was 36,000, and 739 people were dying each day. Today, there are four times more daily cases and twice as many deaths. But the annual party proceeded regardless, the attendees conspicuously maskless.
Many of the pop stars, actresses, and other celebrities in attendance are too stupid and self-centered to know that attending a $300,000-a-table gala funded by two massive media corporations—Facebook and Conde Nast—during a pandemic and mass economic dislocation is, to say the least, inappropriate.
But whether or not they consciously sought to help send de Blasio’s “message” that COVID-19 will be allowed to spread unchecked, they know that if they or their families get sick, they will be given the best medical care, provided for by concierge medical services, often costing hundreds of thousands a year.
And, after all, why not celebrate? Schwarzman, Musk and the world’s other billionaires saw their wealth increase by 54 percent since the start of the pandemic, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. This wealth came about as a result of the unsafe reopening of factories and workplaces, which led to the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
If there were a prize for cynicism and hypocrisy awarded at the Gala, it would have gone to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who attended wearing a designer dress emblazoned with the slogan “tax the rich.”
Ocasio-Cortez said she participated in the event to bring America’s financial oligarchy into the “conversation” of addressing social inequality. She told reporters, “When we talk about supporting working families, and we talk about having a fair tax code, oftentimes this conversation is among working and middle-class people amongst themselves, and I think it’s time to bring all classes into the conversation.”
This is the “extreme left” of official American politics, whose perspective is to attend galas with billionaires in order to bring them “into the conversation.” Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance was widely and justly ridiculed, driving home to millions of people how completely disenfranchised America’s working class is.
This year’s Met Gala shows where social revolutions come from. The American oligarchy and affluentia, with greed, self-absorption and cluelessness feeding upon each other, use the occasion of mass death and economic destitution to throw a celebration of wealth and privilege. As Sophocles wrote long ago, “Evil appears as good in the minds of those whom the gods lead to destruction.”
THERE IS NO BANKSTER TUCKING MORE STOLEN MONEY INTO THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY JOB BIDEN’S POCKETS THAN BLACKROCK’S LARRY FINK.
IF YOU’VE WONDERED IF JOE BIDEN, THE CLOWN WHO STAGES HIMSELF AS A BLUE COLLAR POPULIST, IS ANYTHING BUT BOUGHT AND OWNED BY WALL STREET’S BIGGEST CRIMINAL BANKSTERS, LOOK AGAIN! JOE WILL BE BAILING THEM OUT FIRST!!!
The closeness of the relationship between Blackrock and the financial and economic arms of the state, the US Treasury and the Fed, were highlighted in a comment by William Birdthistle, of the Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of a book on funds, cited in the article.
He said Blackrock was “about as close to a government arm as you can be, without being the Federal Reserve.”
SHOCKING! OR IS IT? BIDEN HAS BEEN THE SAME BRIBES SUCKING LAWYER FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS!
Chris Hedges | Voting BIDEN was WRONG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RjnohdjH5E
Chris Hedges: The Ruthless Corporate destruction of our Nation, Culture and Ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eQV0IuYQ2U&list=WL&index=12
LOW DOWN ON BIDEN'S REAL PAYMASTERS - JOE RECIEVED MORE THAN $76 MILLION DOLLARS FROM WALL STREET'S BIGGEST CRIMINALS. THE BIGGEST PART OF THAT CAME FROM BLACKROCK. HERE'S MORE:
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=83&t=33s
BlackRock & Wall Street: US Housing Market TAKEOVER (Fact or Fiction?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCHS4IW0LBo
David Sirota: Blackrock, Koch ROBBING Future Homeowners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFjxvrJvWwQ
BlackRock - The company that owns the world?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4foal20UTA
How BlackRock exploited the COVID-19 pandemic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96sAffLWy_8
"Along with Obama (LAWYER) Biden (LAWYER), Pelosi and Schumer (LAWYER) are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the eight years of that administration." PATRICIA McCARTHY
Add the Banksters’ rent boy Eric Holder (LAWYER) and the up and coming Swamp Empress Kamala Harris (LAWYER)…but keep counting….(LAWYER) Brian Deese, Obama-Biden’s loot-for-Wall Street guy.
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.
BLOG EDITOR: WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT THE PARASITE LAWYERS?!?
“But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.”
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.
It doesn’t help matters that, today, tech giants are distrusted by conservatives and progressives alike. Firms that were run out of Palo Alto garages now chafe at antitrust laws like the railroad companies of a century ago.
And like those companies, they know how to use their influence. In 2019 alone, two of the biggest and most influential technology firms — Amazon and Facebook — each spent $17 million on “government affairs,” better known as lobbying.
Ocasio-Cortez’s reference to Uber may have been a subtle warning to the incoming administration: The brother-in-law of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is Tony West, who worked for the Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton and is now the chief counsel at Uber. Jake Sullivan, another top Biden adviser, also worked for Uber.
The company recently won a major victory in California with Proposition 22, a successful response to legal efforts to make Uber drivers and other “gig workers” employees, not contractors. That’s exactly the kind of labor policy, Ocasio-Cortez says, the Biden administration must avoid.
Many top Obama staffers went to Silicon Valley in 2017. They could be returning to Washington with a new appreciation for free market capitalism at a time when “socialism” is no longer a dirty word.
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology.
That’s exactly what worries Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks what Trump has called, without much affection, “the swamp.” He notes that the transition team for the Office of Management and Budget appears to have borrowed rather avidly from Silicon Valley, with team members hailing from Lyft, Airbnb and Amazon.
The budget office wields an “enormous amount of power,” says Hauser, including in both how congressionally appropriated money is doled out and how certain rules are implemented. Though it had a supporting role in Trump’s impeachment drama over foreign aid, OMB is otherwise obscure, making it a perfect site for covert exercises of federal power.
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.
Watching the transition, Gray, the former Sanders adviser, recalled an old saying: “The fish rots from the head.” The head, in this case, is Joe Biden, of whom Gray has long been a skeptic.
“He’s a fundamentally conservative man,” Gray says. She reasons that if Biden was “unmoved by the largest protest movement in American history” to endorse Medicare for All, he can’t be trusted to do much for conservative causes like a $15 minimum wage and the Green New Deal.
Still, she believes that Biden can be made to hear the voices of progressives — if, Gray says, they are loud enough. She points out that there is widespread support for progressive legislation like the $15 minimum wage in Florida, even though Trump won the state.
Biden easily won Oregon, but a push to legalize small amounts of drugs, known as Measure 110, was even more popular than he was.
She sees that as evidence that progressive ideas are more popular than Biden himself. “Progressives should never stop screaming that reality from the rooftops,” Gray told Yahoo News. And she vowed to keep fighting, even with Trump gone and a Democratic president in the Oval Office once again.
“I don’t accept resignation,” she said.
Cover thumbnail photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
THE LONG HISTORY OF OBAMA-BIDENomics:
The “managed bankruptcy” of GM and Chrysler ordered by the Obama administration set into motion the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs, including 35,000 GM production jobs in the US alone, the shuttering of dozens of assembly and parts plants and the closing of more than 1,000 car dealerships. Obama worked with the United Auto Workers to slash the wages of new hires in half, abolish the eight-hour day, ban strikes for six years and relieve the corporations of retiree health care obligations by handing the provision and cutting of retiree medical benefits to the UAW.
The executive from the giant investment firm BlackRock played a leading role in the destruction of autoworkers’ jobs and living standards during the 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler.
Who is Biden’s top economic adviser Brian Deese?
·
·
President-elect Joe Biden has reportedly selected Brian Deese, an executive at the Wall Street investment firm BlackRock, as director of the National Economic Council, according to several major news outlets. “In his new post, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation, Mr. Deese will play a lead role in implementing Mr. Biden’s economic agenda,” the Wall Street Journal wrote Monday.
While Deese was not among those Biden introduced Tuesday as his “economic team,” an announcement is expected soon. Deese, the Global Head of Sustainable Investment at BlackRock, would be the second executive chosen by the incoming administration from the world’s largest asset manager, which controls $7 trillion in assets and is a major shareholder in Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, Apple, Microsoft and other global corporate giants.
On Tuesday, Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, a former chief of staff to BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink, was named top deputy to Janet Yellen, the former Federal Reserve Chairwoman who Biden picked for Secretary of the Treasury. Tom Donilon, chairman of BlackRock Investment Institute and brother of Biden’s chief campaign political strategist, had been considered for the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, but the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Donilon decided to stay in the “private sector.”
Brian Deese (Source: BlackRock)
The selection of Deese and Adeyemo—who both previously served in the Obama administration—exemplifies the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, DC, which operates constantly, regardless of which party controls the White House.
It is a further signal to the financial oligarchy that a Biden administration will dispense with its rhetoric about raising taxes on the wealthy and continue funneling trillions into the stock markets. “By picking folks with deep ties to large asset managers,” Tyler Gellasch, executive director of investor trade group Healthy Markets Association, told the Journal, “the administration can help assuage financial executives’ concerns. It sends a clear signal to the industry to breathe easier: They can plan for stability without likely facing massive new regulatory or tax risks.”
After working on Obama’s 2008 election campaign, Deese was appointed Special Assistant to the President for economic policy and served on the National Economic Council as Obama took over the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) from the outgoing George Bush administration, and pumped massive resources into the same banks and financial institutions whose criminal activities had crashed the economy.
Deese, who had no formal training as an economist, then made a name for himself for being the most aggressive advocate of throwing General Motors and Chrysler Corp. into bankruptcy in 2009.
In a May 2009 New York Times article, headlined “The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M.,” David Sanger wrote, “It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.
BLOG EDITOR: WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT THE PARASITE LAWYERS?!?
“But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.”
Deese was part of the White House Auto Task Force, which was made up of Wall Street asset strippers, including billionaire investor and Democratic Party fundraiser Steven Rattner and Ron Bloom, another Wall Street “turnaround specialist” with a long history of collaborating with the unions during the bankruptcy restructuring of the airline and steel industry.
While publicly claiming that they wanted to avoid bankruptcy, court document would show that Deese and others in Obama’s inner circle were determined to force the auto companies into a forced restructuring from the earliest days of the new administration.
After Rick Wagoner, GM’s former chief executive, said publicly that bankruptcy was not a viable option, the administration would fire him and threaten to withhold any further money from GM unless it imposed far more “painful” cuts than outlined in its initial plan, which called for the elimination of 47,000 jobs worldwide, including 21,000 hourly workers in the US.
The “managed bankruptcy” of GM and Chrysler ordered by the Obama administration set into motion the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs, including 35,000 GM production jobs in the US alone, the shuttering of dozens of assembly and parts plants and the closing of more than 1,000 car dealerships. Obama worked with the United Auto Workers to slash the wages of new hires in half, abolish the eight-hour day, ban strikes for six years and relieve the corporations of retiree health care obligations by handing the provision and cutting of retiree medical benefits to the UAW.
As the wrote at the time, “Obama’s Auto Task Force has focused on one thing from the beginning: how to exploit the crisis of the auto industry to create conditions for Wall Street to reap huge profits. Its leading figures—Secretary Treasurer Timothy Geithner and White House economic [adviser] Lawrence Summers—played a key role in the Wall Street bailout, opposing the slightest restrictions on compensation paid to banking executives receiving public money. When it has come to the auto industry, however, they have demanded the most brutal job cuts and wage and benefit concessions from autoworkers.
“The outcome of the dismantling of the auto industry,” the continued, “will mean that the industrial base of the US will shrink even more and the economy will be further dominated by the type of reckless and socially destructive speculation that is responsible for the worst economic and social crisis since the 1930s.”
A year after the forced bankruptcies, Citi Investment Research analyst Itay Michaeli boasted that GM’s fixed cost per vehicle would drop from $10,400 in 2009 to $7,280 in 2010 and fall to $5,772 by 2012. In the five years following, labor costs at GM and Chrysler—which declared bankruptcy on April 30, 2009—were predicted to be lower than any Japanese automaker operating nonunion plants in the US, making it profitable for the company to build small cars in the US, rather than in Mexico.
The auto restructuring became a template for the decimation of wages throughout the working class during the eight years of the Obama administration, which oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to top in US history up until today.
Deese’s “success” during the auto restructuring earned him a rapid set of promotions in the Obama White House. He was soon named deputy direct of the National Economic Council and then the deputy director and acting director of the Office of Management and Budget. In 2015, he helped negotiate the 2015 Bipartisan Budget Act.
After finding limitless funds to bail out Wall Street, the Obama administration would insist there was no money to bail out states and municipalities, which had laid off hundreds of thousands of educators and other public employees during the Great Recession.
When Biden introduced his economic team Tuesday, he claimed that “help was on the way” to the tens of millions of workers, small business owners and unemployed who are facing an unprecedented economic and social catastrophe. But his selection of Deese, Yellen, Adeyemo and others directly from Wall Street make it clear that a Biden administration will be committed to austerity and back-to-work campaign aimed at forcing workers to pay for the corporate bailout no matter how many lives are needlessly lost to the pandemic.
At the time, Delphi employed nearly 50,000 Americans, who earned about $30 an hour on the assembly line. Now, workers in Mexico for the company earn about $1 an hour.
Joe Biden’s Pick for Economic
Adviser Tied to Delphi
Pension-Slashing Scheme
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
30 Nov 2020316
4:35
Democrat Joe Biden’s pick to be his top economic adviser in the White House served on the Obama-appointed team that helped slash pensions for roughly 20,000 Americans in the auto bailout.
This week, Biden announced that Obama alum Brian Deese, now an executive at the investment management firm BlackRock, will serve as his top economic adviser should he enter the White House.
Deese previously served as a special assistant to Obama for economic policy and played a role in the administration’s bailout of the auto industry, which ultimately led to slashed pensions for 20,000 non-union workers at the Delphi Corporation, an auto parts supplier to General Motors (GM).
In 2009, as part of the Obama-Biden administration’s taxpayer-funded bailout of GM, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) terminated the pension plans of non-unionized Delphi workers. In some cases, workers had their pensions gutted by as much as 75 percent.
A federal report in 2013 detailed that the Delphi workers would likely have their pensions cut by an estimated $440 million. Meanwhile, GM topped off unionized Delphi workers’ pensions at a cost of about $1 billion.
Deese, along with agency heads like Timothy Geithner and top advisers like Ron Bloom, was named in that federal report, having had been involved in multiple conversations about the Delphi pensions:
In July 2009, internal Government emails between the Auto Team and Advisor to the President Brian Deese discussed GM’s need to address issues with Delphi’s “splinter unions.” Auto Team officials did not recall details related to the emails. When Senator Charles Schumer took a position that GM should assume the Delphi salaried retiree pensions, Mr. Deese emailed Mr. Rattner this “may complicate the optics of doing anything for the splinters.” Other emails from Mr. Deese stated, “We will continue to face intense scrutiny on this issue. The politics of terminations is quite intense” and “we need to work on a clear rationale for the outcomes we’re moving toward, as well as an explanation of respective roles.” Mr. Rattner emailed members of the Auto Team that he had spoken with Fritz Henderson about “our logic on the splinters, which he [Henderson] was fine with. [Auto Team Analyst] Sadiq [Malik] should speak to Janice [Uhlig] about the details, particularly how the reallocation of the $417mm would work.” Auto Team member Feldman emailed members of the Auto Team about health care/pension benefit changes for IUE and USW employees, and Mr. Deese responded that the company’s organizing principle was parity between GM salaried and non-UAW hourlies. Mr. Deese referenced a discussion about health care costs and the “credible fairness arguments to augment the hourlies’ recovery based on the pension disparity, but that for all the reasons we discussed that would not be possible. However, I think the logic of that conclusion strongly counsels in favor of bringing the top-up through. Otherwise, we’re moving in the opposite direction from a position that we all agreed was itself on the edge of fairness.”
In October, President Trump signed a memorandum to devise a plan to restore the pensions of the Delphi workers. Biden has not said if he supports the memorandum.
Former Delphi workers told Breitbart News in interviews how the pension-slashing scheme uprooted their livelihoods. One retiree said she lost her home, and her retirement plans to move to the Florida coast have been squashed.
Another retiree said his wife died in the process, as he was forced to find work in order to pay for her medical bills. He had assumed that after 30 years at Delphi, he and his wife would have a good healthcare plan in their retirement. That ended when his pension was cut by about 30 percent.
Delphi, which has since split into Aptiv and Delphi Technologies, announced in 2006 that it would shutter 21 of its 29 plants in the United States — offshoring some 20,000 U.S. jobs to Mexico, China, and other foreign countries.
At the time, Delphi employed nearly 50,000 Americans, who earned about $30 an hour on the assembly line. Now, workers in Mexico for the company earn about $1 an hour.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
YOU WONDERED WHY BIDEN HAS VOTED FOR EVERY WAR FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS???
JOE BIDEN'S GLOBAL WAR MACHINE TO BE RUN BY WALL STREET CRONIES
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/biden-names-national-security-team-of.html
Biden names national security team of right-wing militarists
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
Amazon is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and local police.
Hostile Takeover: Wall Street Assumes Command of Joe Biden Transition Team
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-i-need-secretary-of-treasury.html
Wall Street and the biggest U.S. banks, after spending a fortune to unseat President Trump, are getting key spots in Democrat Joe Biden’s transition team that he has devised before the presidential election is certified.
Many of the big banks with links to Biden transition team members were major donors to the former vice president.
JOE BIDEN SAYS MUCK PROGRESSIVES, I MADE MY DIRTY MONEY SERVING WALL STREET!
“Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.”
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-bidens-america-to-be-ruled-by-wall.html
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology.”
“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.”
“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.”
KAMALA HARRIS - I CAN CON THEM! I'M A LAWYER, IT'S WHAT I HAVE DONE MY ENTIRE BRIBES SUCKING LEGAL CAREER!
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/09/kamala-harrs-i-can-con-them-im-lawyer.html
All of this is, if we can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class. The Wall Street Journal wrote last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry professionals and their most trusted law firms.
*
There is something fitting in the selection of Harris to co-lead the Democrats’ ticket. The response of the Democrats to the mass multi-racial and multi-ethnic protests against police violence that erupted earlier this year was to divert them into the politics of racial division, using the reactionary and false claim that what was involved was a conflict between “white America” and “black America,” rather than a conflict between the working class and capitalism.
THE LOOTING OF AMERICA
KAMALA HARRIS AND HER GOLDMAN SACHS BANKSTER STEVEN MNUCHIN
A tidy corrupt partnership
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-looting-of-america-kamala-harris.html
She also declined to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500 to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated $2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=19
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
World’s largest asset management firm was “front and center” of Fed’s Wall Street bailout
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
According to the article, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset management firm, was “in frequent touch” with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Fed chair Jerome Powell “in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency programs were announced in late March.”
Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
The extent of the collaboration is revealed in new emails obtain by the newspaper together with information that has been previously made public.
In one newly obtained email, Fink refers to planning for the rescue measures as “the project” that he and the Fed were “working on together.”
As the article notes, “America’s top economic officials were in constant contact with a Wall Street executive whose firm stood to benefit financially from the rescue,” showing “how intertwined Blackrock has become with the federal government.”
Blackrock’s close collaboration with the Fed and Treasury came at a crucial point in the development of a crisis in financial markets which began with the onset of the pandemic in March and fears in corporate circles over the response in the working class amid walkouts by workers insisting that safety measures be out in place.
The Fed responded to the initial turbulence in the markets by cutting interest rates. But these measures proved to be insufficient and the potential for a major meltdown in the markets emerged in the week ending March 20 when the $21 trillion US Treasury bond market—the bedrock of the US and global financial system—froze.
Instead of providing a “safe haven” for investors it moved to the centre of the crisis as Treasuries were sold off and no buyers could be found as the sell-off extended to all areas of the financial system.
Faced with a disaster when the markets re-opened, Mnuchin, Powell and Fink were engaged in a series of discussions over the weekend of March 21–22 to devise a rescue package. According to the Times report, Mnuchin spoke to Fink five times over the two days, more than anyone else, other than Powell with whom he spoke nine times.
One of the most significant features of the rescue measures announced on Monday March 23 was the decision by the Fed, for the first time ever, to buy corporate bonds which, as the Times noted, “were becoming nearly impossible to sell as investors sprinted to convert their holdings to cash.”
Blackrock had already closely collaborated with the Fed developing its response to the 2008 financial crisis was thereby set to play a key role in the March intervention.
The article pointed out that, while Blackrock signed a non-disclosure agreement on March 22 restricting officials from sharing information about the upcoming measures, the way in which the rescue package was devised “mattered to Blackrock.”
The decision of the Fed to buy corporate bonds and provide an underpinning for the market was significant and involved two key areas of Blackrock’s operations. One of the ways it makes profit is by managing money for clients charging a preset fee. But assets under management were contracting as investors went for cash and its business model was under threat.
Blackrock is also a major player in the short-term debt markets which were coming “under intense stress” as investors moved their holdings to cash.
Electronic Traded Funds (ETFs), which track market indexes but which trade like a stock, were also severely impacted.
In the words of the Times article: “Corporate bonds were difficult to trade and near impossible to issue in mid-March 2020. Prices on some high-grade corporate ETFs, including one of Blackrock’s, were out of whack relative to the value of the underlying assets.”
As Gregg Gelenzis, associate director for economic policy at the Center for American Progress told the Times: “This was the first time that ETFs came under stress in a really systemic way.”
In the rescue package the Fed committed itself to buying already existing debt as well as new bonds and also decided it would purchase ETFs with the result that the “bond market and fund recovery was nearly instant.”
As the Times article notes, while practically all of Wall Street benefited from the Fed’s intervention, and other financial firms were “consulted” apart from Blackrock “no other company was as front and center.”
The closeness of the relationship between Blackrock and the financial and economic arms of the state, the US Treasury and the Fed, were highlighted in a comment by William Birdthistle, of the Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of a book on funds, cited in the article.
He said Blackrock was “about as close to a government arm as you can be, without being the Federal Reserve.”
The Fed makes every effort to cover up that relationship in order to try to preserve the fiction that it is not beholden to Wall Street and operates as an independent public authority concerned above all with the state of the economy and the welfare of the population.
The Times article recalled a news conference in July 2020 in which Powell was asked about the discussions with Fink.
“I can’t recall exactly what those conversations were,” he said, “but they would have been about what he is seeing in the market and things like that.
He said there were not “very many” conversations and that the Blackrock chief was “typically trying to make sure that we are getting good service from the company he founded the leads.”
Powell’s claim that, in the midst of the most significant crisis since the meltdown of 2008—with a potential to go even further, as the freeze in the Treasury market showed—he could not recall those conversations simply does not pass muster.
The value of every crisis, it has been rightly said, is that it reveals the real relations that are obscured and covered over in “normal” times.
And that is the case here. The economic arms of the capitalist state are not some independent authority but function every day in the interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy, servicing its needs and interests above all else.
Coal Miners Protest Wall Street’s BlackRock: ‘Invest in the American People!’
28 Jul 2021244
4:08
Coal miners from across Alabama, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania protested outside the Wall Street firms like BlackRock, the biggest shareholder in Warrior Met Coal, on Wednesday in a fight for better union contracts.
For nearly five months, about 1,100 coal miners with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) have been on strike against Warrior Met Coal demanding a better contract.
In 2016, Warrior Met Coal filed for bankruptcy and in order to keep the company afloat, the UMWA agreed to pay cuts, fewer healthcare benefits, and less time off for coal miners with the promise that they would be rewarded once the company climbed its way out of the bankruptcy.
UMWA representatives, though, said upper-level management was paid bonuses even as the coal miners accepted pay cuts. Now, after the agreement saved Warrior Coal Met $1.1 billion over the last five years along with $4.3 billion in profits, the coal miners are asking for a contract that rewards them for helping the company’s finances get back in order.
“You have sacrificed enough, you have made this company profitable,” a union representative said outside of BlackRock, Warrior Met Coal’s biggest shareholder. “And when they sit at the table and they tell you ‘The price is too high,’ I tell them that the cost is too much to bear for your families and your communities and for you not to get the contract that you deserve.”
“If they don’t like us in these streets, then they need to get us a contract, you hear that BlackRock,” another union representative said:
Get us a fair contract and we’ll go back to work in those coal mines where we should be. We road up here on buses to tell you your investment needs to be put to use in these guys’ salaries, in these guys’ benefits, these guys that have earned you profits that you’re making from these coal mines.
The union representative continued:
Every time America gets in a war, they come down to a coalfield to get people to fight those wars. In Vietnam, more West Virginians lost their lives per capita than any other state in the union. America owes a great deal to coal miners. We fought in World War I, World War II, Korea, the Middle East, Vietnam. Whenever America called on us, we answered. It is now time for our government to stand up for coal miners. [Emphasis added]
Actress Susan Sarandon spoke at the protest, slamming BlackRock as a “horrible smear on the vision of the United States.”
“I know what it’s like to be a union person who is struggling for what’s right, for what is owed to you,” Sarandon said:
Striking Alabama Coal Miners Protest at BlackRock Offices in New York City on July 28, 2021. Credit: Rainmaker Photos/MediaPunch /IPX
Striking Alabama Coal Miners Protest at BlackRock Offices in New York City on July 28, 2021. Credit: Rainmaker Photos/MediaPunch /IPX
Striking Alabama Coal Miners Protest at BlackRock Offices in New York City on July 28, 2021. Credit: Rainmaker Photos/MediaPunch /IPX
Will Attig with the Union Veterans Council said Warrior Coal Met “has stolen a billion dollars from each” coal miner, their community, and the “mom and pop shops that we’re supposed to be supporting” over the last five years.
“Right now, we see those politicians and CEOs taking those opportunities from our workers to pull themselves up and they’re cutting the bootstraps off before they can even tie them,” Attig said:
It is time for use to send these CEOs, conglomerates, and millionaires back to where they need to go — they need to come to the table. They need to say ‘We’re willing to fight for our country, we’re willing to fight for the workers in our communities, we’re willing to give this company a fair shake and a fair contract. That’s what they need to do … we’re calling on them to invest in the American people that they talk about.
One UMWA member called on the coal miners to pray, saying “We can’t do this without Jesus … cause it’s all about him. Whether you know it or not, it’s all about him.”
While on strike, the UMWA has been paying coal miners benefits and covering healthcare expenses through the union’s Strike Aid Fund. In the first three months of the strike, the union distributed $4.3 million to coal miners, including $3.1 million in benefits and $700,000 in healthcare expenses.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
If everything is a giant trap to be sprung on Democrats and the deep state, what are they waiting for? Biden is digging America into a hole that will be difficult or impossible for us to climb out of, especially as time goes on.
Because They Are Evil
There are a great many things coming from Biden, Fauci, the CDC, the State Department, the military, the Justice Department, and basically the Deep State that make no sense. From Biden and the Deep State, we are getting executive orders, mandates, guidelines, decisions, policies, and edicts that just do not make any sort of intellectual sense. It is not just a difference of opinion. It is not just different politics or a different point of view. Decisions, guidelines, policies, and proposed laws are coming out of Washington D.C., Biden, and the Deep State that one just can't figure out in an intellectual, factual, common-sense sort of way. The only way to explain what is coming from the placeholder at the White House and the Deep State elites is that they are just evil. They are doing what they’re doing because they are evil. No other answer makes sense.
- Why would Biden declare a federal vaccine mandate for every American even though two previous Supreme Court decisions says his federal vaccine mandate is unconstitutional...? Because he is evil.
- Why would Biden declare that all Americans must be vaccinated but illegal immigrants crossing our border illegally do not have to be vaccinated...? Because he is evil.
- Why would the Biden administration demand that all Americans be vaccinated, regardless of whether they have already acquired natural immunity since they have already had COVID...? Because they are evil.
- Why would the Biden administration declare a national vaccine mandate for all Americans, but exempt all of Congress, all the congressional aides, the postal service, the federal justice system, and the Supreme Court...? Because they are evil.
- Why would Biden and the militarily happily leave $85 billion worth of military weapon armaments to the terrorist Taliban, but at the same time try to disarm peaceful law-abiding American citizens of their 2A rights...? Because they are evil.
- Why would the Biden administration allow for open borders and unlimited illegal immigration, when they know that drug cartels and child traffickers use these openings to push the illegal drugs and the child trafficking into America...? Because they are evil.
- Why would the upper echelons of the FBI, CIA, and the NSA violate their own laws, laws within the Constitution, and their own standards of practice for five years against candidate Trump, president-elect Trump, and President Trump...? Because they are evil.
- Why would the Biden administration fight so hard against Texas and its pro-life law that protects babies inside the womb whose heart is already beating, but at the same time they federally protect the embryos and eggs of lizards, alligators, and snakes...? because they are evil.
- Why would the Justice Department keep the "mostly peaceful protesters" of January 6 locked up in solitary confinement as political prisoners when they actually committed no violent act...? Because they are evil.
- Why would the Deep State cabal "place" someone in the White House who obviously has diminished intellectual capacity, most likely suffering cognitively from old age, and appears from all accounts to be suffering from deteriorating mind-functioning skills, (he was hidden in the basement for most of the last six months of the controversial election)...? Because they are evil.
Why is Nancy Pelosi putting the fences and barricades back up around the Capitol dome, the people's building, keeping the people out...? Because she is evil.
- Why would Nancy Pelosi put on a "Stalinist Show Trial" concerning the events of January 6, when she ignored the violent and deadly riots all summer long in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles...? Because she is evil.
- Why did Attorney General Merrick Garland say that the Justice Department is looking at putting people in jail for civil rights violations if they continue to have state forensic auditing of the controversial 2020 presidential election...? Because he is evil.
- Why does Fauci continue to demand vaccinations for all, even including all K-12 students, when he knows the individuals that have had COVID are better naturally immunized than if they "take the jab"...? Because he is evil.
- Why would General Mark Milley evacuate all the soldiers first from Afghanistan and leave Bagram Air Base unattended, before he got out all the American citizens and all the Afghani interpreters...? Because he is evil.
- Why would Biden, the CDC, Fauci, and the Deep State be more angry at American citizens who refuse to take the experimental vaccine rather than focus their anger and retribution on China; the country that actually gave us COVID...? Because they are evil.
- Why does Biden, Fauci, and the CDC refuse to admit that the Wuhan COVID virus came from Wuhan, China...? Because they are evil.
- Why would Biden and the Deep State be more critical of and use more hateful words towards those Americans who believe in putting America First, rather than be critical of the globalist elite who hurt American interests both domestic and international...? Because they are evil.
- Why is General Milley driving many patriot soldiers (conservatives/Christians/constitutionalists) out of the military...? Because he is evil.
- Why is Biden and the Justice Department declaring that the unvaccinated have no constitutional right to travel from state-to-state...? Because they are evil.
- Why does the ACLU stay silent when books are burned, people are fired, citizens are threatened with bodily harm, academic freedom is squashed, and lives and employment are cancelled simply because of a political difference or a different political point of view...? Because they are evil.
- Why would the federal government and CDC close down schools and churches, but leave open alcohol and hemp stores...? Because they are evil.
When one analyzes these separate issues, it is obvious that it goes well beyond normal political difference. It is not just a difference of opinion, not just a different worldview. It is not just a political power play. It is not simply Democrats vs. Republicans nor conservatives vs. socialists. It is not just the rotten fruit of a fraudulent presidential election. These people are not dumb, not stupid, nor illiterate; that's not it. They know exactly what they are doing. The only thing that can explain these unexplainable decisions is...? evil. The answer of evil makes the only sense, nothing else does. I do wish there was a different answer. But there's not.
Image: Piqsels
'Nothing Can Stop What is Coming.' What If Nothing is Coming?
A popular catch-phrase among pro-Trump patriots is: “Nothing can stop what is coming.”
This is based on the theory that there are things quietly going on behind the scenes, that President Trump still has a hand in what is happening today.
Perhaps he is laying a giant trap for Democrats and the deep state establishment. Or perhaps the military is in control under the theory of devolution.
Or perhaps, this is all delusional wishful thinking.
YouTube screen grab
Devolution is an interesting concept of continuity of government plans. Its purpose is to maintain government leadership in the event that constitutional successors are incapable or incapacitated. A small and select group of military leaders would be in charge, running a shadow government behind the scenes in the event of some catastrophe.
This scenario would have kicked in if the military believed that the COVID pandemic and electoral fraud were acts of war against the U.S. by foreign and domestic actors. Some have written extensively about devolution, telling a compelling story, but that is all it is, a wishful thinking story in contradiction to what we are seeing around us. If it turns out to be true, this past year will have been the greatest show of all time. But I’m not holding my breath.
We have also seen predictions about President Trump being reinstated after the 2020 election was to be proven fraudulent. Trump was going to be reinstated as president on inauguration day, then in March, then in August, and probably many days in between.
The dream team of Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell, and Lin Wood were going to produce proof of a stolen election with grand predictions and more bravado than evidence, going from Trump’s holy trinity to the three stooges when they produced little more than sound bites and hype.
Attorney Sidney Powell was going to “release the Kraken” on electoral fraud but instead is fighting her own lawsuits over her electoral fraud claims. Mike Lindell’s August symposium left many viewers confused, discussing obscure concepts like PCAPS, but no solid evidence of a stolen election. Lin Wood leveled bizarre accusations against former Vice President Mike Pence and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, with nothing to back up his assertions, casting doubt on him and others rallying to Trump’s defense post-election.
Arizona’s election audit is dragging on, and “any day now” sufficient evidence of fraud will supposedly be released to overturn that state’s election results, triggering similar results in other states. Yet after ten months there is no end in sight, just pleas to be patient and wait.
And what if evidence of fraud or outside interference is produced? Then what? The media will ignore it and anyone who dares to discuss it will be labeled a QAnon domestic terrorist and attacked with the ferocity of someone recommending ivermectin for COVID.
Will state legislatures decertify their electoral college votes? Will Congress decertify the presidential election? Will the Supreme Court get involved? No, no, and no, based on common sense and their past performance.
There is much wishful thinking in the belief that “nothing can stop what is coming.” Maybe nothing is coming.
Was the election on the up and up? Did COVID provide the ideal excuse to change election laws at the last minute, against Constitutional provisions and the law, to facilitate fraud? If Biden really won 12 million more votes than Obama in 2012, why are we hearing chants of “F*** you Biden” at college football games, from college students who “turned out in droves” for Biden?
There were too many coincidences in late night vote-counting, stopping and starting, to say the election was fair and proper, but so what? This probably wasn’t the first dodgy election in America and certainly won’t be the last.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but until such evidence can be produced and acted upon, it’s all “hopium.”
There is no evidence of a Trump-led shadow government pulling the strings. Yet there are shadow websites like Real Raw News, telling us of arrests, tribunals, and executions of prominent people like James Comey, Tom Hanks, Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton, people who appear in public days after their supposed execution.
At the same time, the Durham investigation plods along, with hopes of a reckoning for Spygate conspirators. Five years have gone by with zero real punishment for anyone involved in weaponizing America’s intelligence, law enforcement, and justice agencies against a presidential candidate and subsequent administration.
Trump likes to say, “I caught them all” which provides hope, but who exactly has been caught and what is their reckoning? So far that’s been a big zero. Without signs to back up the words, it’s all just hopeful talk.
Durham is becoming a mythical figure like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Yet Trump still asks, “Where’s Durham?”
The Biden crime family faced no scrutiny and their grift continues to this day with Hunter’s ongoing Chinese investments, willful ignorance of his laptop contents, and his art project selling maybe million-dollar paintings in exchange for political access.
If everything is a giant trap to be sprung on Democrats and the deep state, what are they waiting for? Biden is digging America into a hole that will be difficult or impossible for us to climb out of, especially as time goes on.
How many new immigrants, mostly unvetted and illegal, are pouring into the country while Americans remain stranded and ignored in Afghanistan? Inflation is on the rise while America’s standing in the world in on the decline. Democrats want to spend the country into bankruptcy. COVID has divided America and is leading to a new type of apartheid and civil war.
Trump laid it out before the 2016 election in a powerful but little known speech where he said:
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People. There is nothing the political establishment will not do, and no lie they will not tell, to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense.
Yet here we are. Trump certainly tried, but it seems the “failed and corrupt political establishment” won, holding on to their “prestige and power”. It’s not for lack of trying but even the likes of Donald Trump as president was not enough to slay the deep state dragon as he was largely alone in his efforts in Washington D.C.
Maybe something is coming, maybe not. As America descends into Cloward-Piven chaos and a Marxist future, what will stop the disasters that keep coming and coming? It sure seems nothing can stop what is coming, but not in the way many of us hoped for.
Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a physician and writer. He is on sabbatical from social media.)
No comments:
Post a Comment