“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology.
The tech billionaires, not content to simply cough up untold millions in direct political contributions, are also funding massive voter drives, promoting mail-in balloting, creating divisive partisan news sites, aiding and designing the Democrat party’s digital campaigns and unabashedly censoring the social media accounts of the Trump campaign and innumerable conservatives.
I was reminded of that observation after reading an article describing the 131 billionaires who are pouring millions into the coffers of the Democrat party and Joe Biden’s campaign in their mindless obsession to defeat President Trump in November. Among the prominent names are Jeff Skoll, a founder of eBay who has contributed $4.5 million; Laurene Powell Jobs of Apple and owner of The Atlantic magazine has donated $1.2 million, and Josh Bekenstein, Chairman of Bain Capital (co-founded by Mitt Romney), $5 million.
Did Mark Zuckerberg Buy the Oval Office for Joe Biden?
Last week, a study by Dr. William Doyle, from the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute, that appeared in The Federalist presented some startling discoveries pertaining to the presidential election of 2020.
The study revealed that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated nearly $419 million to nonprofit originations that aided in the administration and infrastructure of the 2020 election.
These donations were specifically made to The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR).
These organizations claimed to be both non-partisan and non-profit. However, there is a lot more here than meets the eye.
How did the CTCL and CEIR use their funds?
To begin with, the CTCL actively lobbied for the promotion of universal mail-in voting and extending deadlines that favored mail-in over in-person voting using COVID-19 as a reason.
This probably contributed to most states changing their rules around voting, with nine states and the District of Columbia sending mail-in ballots to all active registered voters.
In the end, a record-breaking 64 million Americans cast their ballots by mail during the 2020 presidential election.
Mail-in ballots inherently compromise the confidentiality and integrity of votes.
Federal laws clearly restrict partisans and activists from making overt political displays or indulging in coercion or intimidation, or even asking voters whom they voted for, anywhere near polling stations on Election Day.
However, these laws do not apply to mail-in ballots.
This is where CTCL and CEIR saw an enormous window of opportunity.
CTCL/CEIR funded activists in Wisconsin, who euphemistically called themselves "vote navigators." Their job was to "assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions, to assist in ballot curing and witness absentee ballot signatures." Wisconsin went to Biden by a narrow margin.
They also funded a temporary staffing agency affiliated with Stacey Abrams called "Happy Faces" to assist in counting votes amid the election-night chaos in Fulton County, Georgia. Georgia also went to Biden by a narrow margin.
CTCL also promoted the practice of unmonitored private drop boxes for ballots, which are vulnerable to myriad fraudulent practices such as ballot-stuffing. They also allowed the inclusion of numerous questionable post–Election Day ballots.
CTCL increased funding for temporary staffing and poll workers all over the country, which led to Democrat activists infiltrating election offices and vote-counting stations.
In the end, all of this yielded huge benefits for the Democrats.
CTCL funded 25 cities and counties with $1 million or higher grants in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia, totaling $87.5million in grants. Biden won 23 of those jurisdictions in the election.
It is amply clear that battleground states, specific cities, and counties across the country were surgically targeted to affect the results of the election.
The study also showed that counties that Biden won were three times more likely to get funding from the above organizations than Trump ones.
It is now perfectly obvious why Biden's handlers chose to keep him in his basement. They knew that their proxies were working tirelessly to rig the outcome such that he didn't need to shed a drop of sweat.
U.S. elections already have very serious issues pertaining to campaign financing.
It is legal for private individuals and organizations to donate millions of dollars to finance electoral campaigns. This functions as a legal form of bribery.
NASCAR drivers with endorsement stickers attached all over them is a symbolic representation of an elected candidate funded by big donors. The elected representative obviously fulfills obligations to his big donors first, including voting for certain bills and endorsing certain projects. The consequences of his actions may be disastrous for his voters, who pay his salary with their tax money. But the candidate is more concerned about the same big donors funding his re-election campaign.
This grave problem was compounded when, for the first time, private donations were made and accepted for government-run election administration and infrastructure.
We therefore have private individuals who are not content merely buying candidates; they also want to buy the entire electoral process.
To put things in perspective, Zuckerberg's contributions nearly matched the federal and state funding for COVID-19-related election expenses, which totaled $479.5 million during the 2020 election.
A perfect example is the state of Wisconsin, which Biden won, where the Legislature gave the city of Green Bay, a Democrat-heavy area, roughly $7 per voter to manage the election. But CTCL boosted resources in Green Bay to $47 per voter.
Similar disparities were found in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Flint, Dallas, and Houston, all of which received large grants from CTCL.
Funding and managing elections must strictly be a government function because government employees are, at least on paper, subject to accountability and transparency. If matters go awry, they are compelled to submit themselves for investigations and hearings.
Private individuals or enterprises have no such obligations. They donate and leave it to their proxies to do the dirty work.
The conducting of free and fair elections trusted by every citizen is the hallmark and the foundation of a thriving democracy.
The fact that Zuckerberg's donations were not rejected by government bodies is proof that democratic values are gradually eroding and are being replaced by a subtle form of totalitarianism.
There will be elections, and you will be able to vote, but the outcome will have been decided already by a few wealthy and powerful individuals. They bend rules and regulations to facilitate the desired outcome.
Conducting audits of these votes may not lead to the discovery of many discrepancies because the votes are probably genuine. It is just that the circumstances that led to the choice are compromised.
With so much time, money, and effort involved, it isn't beyond the realm of possibility that master forgers may also be employed to make it impossible to differentiate between real and bogus votes.
This story should have hit headlines across newspapers and should have been debated on each and every TV news show.
When the government is compromised, it is the media that should be the watchdog and make enough noise to compel the government to take action.
The current mainstream media are not compromised. They are instead a department of the Democrat party.
When they see a story such as this, they either spin it or disparage it and dismiss it as a "right-wing conspiracy theory." Finally, they bury it. Since most people are casual consumers of the news, they probably never discover these shocking facts.
It is left to the Republicans to fix the situation. Thus far, they have made all the right noises. "Are our elections for sale? Did Zuckerberg purchase the Wisconsin presidential election?" asked Kentucky senator Rand Paul. Florida governor Ron DeSantis blasted Zuckerberg and touted new election laws he recently signed into law as a ban on "Zuckerbucks" in Florida. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said: "I continue to question whether Mark Zuckerberg's highly partisan 2020 election spending was even legal."
The question is, will these words be backed by actions to investigate the extent of voter fraud and to prevent it from ever occurring again? We must be cautiously optimistic!
Image: Anthony Quintaine via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
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
Big Tech Writes Its Ticket to the White House
Silicon Valley's allies are filling up the Biden administration. A big payoff is sure to follow.
Washington Free Beacon Editors - DECEMBER 23, 2020 6:10 PM
Silicon Valley played an integral role in propelling Joe Biden to the White House. He raked in uncounted millions from liberal tech billionaires such as Netflix's Reed Hastings, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, and Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs; their employees shelled out $5 million more.
As Biden takes office, the techies want what they paid for. Reuters reports that executives at top firms like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are gunning for jobs at the Departments of Defense, State, Justice, and Commerce and also eyeing influential posts at the Federal Trade Commission and beyond.
They want two things: lucrative federal contracts and less scrutiny than they’ve gotten over the past four years, as President Donald Trump has made their bias against conservatives front-page news. The Department of Justice's antitrust inquiry into big tech has already garnered bipartisan backing, including from a group of state attorneys general who have filed their own suit.
A Biden administration could make all of that go away. And it could ignore altogether these firms' obsequious dealings with Communist China.
That explains the rush to fill seats: It’s unlikely that the techies moving into the Biden administration will check their business relationships at the door. Each hire is another pressure point for Silicon Valley’s most powerful to exploit.
This is hardly a problem unique to Democrats—you just hear about it less when they’re in the White House. This sort of revolving door was considered outrageous in the George W. Bush administration, when Democrats and the media harped relentlessly on Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton and charged that he was in the pocket of Big Oil. They raised the same ruckus when Trump appointed Exxon chief Rex Tillerson as his first secretary of state.
These unseemly connections aren’t new for Democrats. Google employees averaged a meeting a week with that Obama White House, influencing a president who "routinely pushed policy that pleased the tech-savvy."
Now think what happens with those same lobbyists running the show. After rolling out transition teams free of connections to big tech, Team Biden added several Facebook executives over the Thanksgiving holiday. The transition team "has already stacked its agency review teams with more tech executives than tech critics," Reuters notes, including "several officials from Big Tech companies, which emerged as top donors to the campaign."
Their influence doesn’t stop there. Biden on Tuesday named as an economic adviser Joelle Gamble, who last worked as an investor under eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, funneling funding to outfits run by other Biden appointees. Others may soon follow, like Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy chief and former Kamala Harris aide Mike Troncoso.
For just one example of how a problematic connection, consider WestExec, the consultancy cofounded by secretary of state nominee Tony Blinken. The firm helped Google win contracts from the Defense Department and advised Google cofounder Eric Schmidt's philanthropy. Now, Reuters says, Schmidt is making recommendations for personnel in the Biden Defense Department, a textbook example of business relationships shaping government policy.
That’s just the start of the coming horse trading, hidden behind the Obama-era pretext that the White House is merely cultivating a relationship with the smartest people. But if personnel is policy, the Biden White House will be doing everything it can to comfort Silicon Valley’s most comfortable.
Big Tech Writes Its Ticket to the White House
Silicon Valley's allies are filling up the Biden administration. A big payoff is sure to follow.
Washington Free Beacon Editors - DECEMBER 23, 2020 6:10 PM
Silicon Valley played an integral role in propelling Joe Biden to the White House. He raked in uncounted millions from liberal tech billionaires such as Netflix's Reed Hastings, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, and Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs; their employees shelled out $5 million more.
As Biden takes office, the techies want what they paid for. Reuters reports that executives at top firms like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are gunning for jobs at the Departments of Defense, State, Justice, and Commerce and also eyeing influential posts at the Federal Trade Commission and beyond.
They want two things: lucrative federal contracts and less scrutiny than they’ve gotten over the past four years, as President Donald Trump has made their bias against conservatives front-page news. The Department of Justice's antitrust inquiry into big tech has already garnered bipartisan backing, including from a group of state attorneys general who have filed their own suit.
A Biden administration could make all of that go away. And it could ignore altogether these firms' obsequious dealings with Communist China.
That explains the rush to fill seats: It’s unlikely that the techies moving into the Biden administration will check their business relationships at the door. Each hire is another pressure point for Silicon Valley’s most powerful to exploit.
This is hardly a problem unique to Democrats—you just hear about it less when they’re in the White House. This sort of revolving door was considered outrageous in the George W. Bush administration, when Democrats and the media harped relentlessly on Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton and charged that he was in the pocket of Big Oil. They raised the same ruckus when Trump appointed Exxon chief Rex Tillerson as his first secretary of state.
These unseemly connections aren’t new for Democrats. Google employees averaged a meeting a week with that Obama White House, influencing a president who "routinely pushed policy that pleased the tech-savvy."
Now think what happens with those same lobbyists running the show. After rolling out transition teams free of connections to big tech, Team Biden added several Facebook executives over the Thanksgiving holiday. The transition team "has already stacked its agency review teams with more tech executives than tech critics," Reuters notes, including "several officials from Big Tech companies, which emerged as top donors to the campaign."
Their influence doesn’t stop there. Biden on Tuesday named as an economic adviser Joelle Gamble, who last worked as an investor under eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, funneling funding to outfits run by other Biden appointees. Others may soon follow, like Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy chief and former Kamala Harris aide Mike Troncoso.
For just one example of how a problematic connection, consider WestExec, the consultancy cofounded by secretary of state nominee Tony Blinken. The firm helped Google win contracts from the Defense Department and advised Google cofounder Eric Schmidt's philanthropy. Now, Reuters says, Schmidt is making recommendations for personnel in the Biden Defense Department, a textbook example of business relationships shaping government policy.
That’s just the start of the coming horse trading, hidden behind the Obama-era pretext that the White House is merely cultivating a relationship with the smartest people. But if personnel is policy, the Biden White House will be doing everything it can to comfort Silicon Valley’s most comfortable.
Biden Taps Liberal Billionaire’s Acolyte for Top Econ. Job
Incoming Biden adviser's last project said capitalism 'fundamentally broken'
President-elect Joe Biden announced Monday that he will appoint Joelle Gamble, who previously worked as a principal at the social-change investment firm funded by liberal billionaire Pierre Omidyar, as a top economic adviser.
Gamble, who left her role at the Omidyar Network (ON) to work on domestic economic policy for the Biden-Harris transition team, will serve as special assistant to the president for economic policy, a job on the National Economic Council.
That role may be informed by her previous work as a principal at the network's "reimagining capitalism" project, an Elizabeth Warren-esque endeavor that maintains that "capitalism can still be a powerful force for good" but that "the current form of capitalism is fundamentally broken."
Gamble's appointment means that an economic progressive will have the president's ear as he seeks to revitalize the post-COVID economy. It also forges a connection between the Biden administration and Omidyar, who has funneled millions to left-leaning activist groups, including those run by other Biden appointees, and is a major funder of groups opposed to President Donald Trump.
Neither the Biden Transition Team nor the Omidyar Network responded to requests for comment.
Gamble joined the Omidyar Network last June, following her graduation from Princeton's graduate program in economics. In that role, she was a frequent public commentator on what she saw as the injustices and inequities of capitalism, writing in the left-wing magazine Dissent, for example, that "our measure of economic security is based on white economic security." Reporting her involvement with the Biden transition in October, the Washington Examiner described her as "represent[ing] the left wing of the Democratic Party within Biden's economic team."
She honed those positions at ON, a social-change investor that operates as both an LLC and a 501(c)3 nonprofit, allowing it to invest in both for-profit and non-profit ventures.
ON operates several major projects across its portfolio of over $100 million in outstanding grants. That includes Gamble's "reimagining capitalism," which aims to restructure capitalist society around principles that include "an explicitly anti-racist and inclusive economy" and "rebalanc[ing] the relationship between markets, governments, and communities."
Under that aegis, "reimagining capitalism" has given grants to a number of influential left-leaning groups, including those with connections to the incoming administration. Contributions include $500,000 to the Roosevelt Institute, where Gamble worked for five years before matriculating at Princeton, as well as $700,000 to the Center for American Progress, run by Biden OMB nominee Neera Tanden, and $1.5 million to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, led by Heather Boushey, a Biden nominee to serve on the Council of Economic Advisers.
The whole affair is funded by eBay cofounder Pierre Omidyar, whose net worth Forbes estimates to be in excess of $20 billion. Omidyar is one of a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who have increasingly flexed their financial muscle in the political arena since Donald Trump's ascent to the presidency.
ON is not Omidyar's only charitable venture. Through Democracy Fund Voice, he has given extensively to activist groups including the Proteus Action League, Sixteen Thirty Fund, and the Tides Foundation, the primary sponsor of Black Lives Matter. He also has a history of financial support for Democrats, including generous donations to the DSCC and DCCC in the early 2000s and contributions to both Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and then-senator Harry Reid (D., Nev.) in 2008. His media company, First Look Media, is the primary backer of the left-wing investigative outlet The Intercept.
Omidyar has also been a generous backer specifically of opponents of Trump. He was the primary funder of NeverTrump PAC, later Never Means Never PAC, dropping $250,000 over the 2016 cycle. He also backed the anti-Trump "Not Who We Are" PAC, alongside fellow Silicon Valley billionaires Dustin Moskovitz, Cari Tuna, and Christopher Hughes. Through Democracy Fund Voice, he has given over half-a-million dollars to support Stand Up Republic, a group that organizes Republicans critical of the president.
Techies like Omidyar have flocked to Biden, with a Wired investigation finding that 95 percent of contributions from tech employees went to the Democratic nominee. They are in turn already enjoying outsized influence in the transition, which has drawn on Silicon Valley to staff its teams. Gamble's appointment extends these connections from the office to the network of charitable groups funded by top tech execs, further entwining the Biden administration with their wealth.
Valley Insiders Added to Biden Transition Team
ALLUM BOKHARI
After an election year in which the tech giants repeatedly interfered in the election against President Donald Trump, Joe Biden is now rewarding Silicon Valley by appointing insiders to a range of roles in his transition team.
Shortly after election night, the Financial Times reported that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is being considered to lead a key tech task force inside the White House.
As Politico recently reported, four more Google and Facebook emp
Further, the dubious choice of Kamala Harris a
s the vice presidential nominee was made solely to placate and reassure Wall Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to the mega-rich class based on her days in California.
Biden’s Billionaires
By Steve McCann
Many years ago, while participating in a voter registration drive, I came upon a grizzled and disheveled old man sitting in the overgrown and weed-infested yard of his paint-starved house calming smoking his pipe. Despite his gruff demeanor, Ully (Ulysses) was very pleasant and loquacious as we talked for over an hour on topics ranging from the weather to the innate foibles of mankind. It turned out that he had to leave school after the fourth grade in order to work in the fields to help support his family and had toiled in a variety of menial and labor-intensive jobs ever since. Yet, he had a deep and thorough insight into human nature. Among his comments about the rich and ostensibly well-educated was: “All the money in the world cain’t buy a fool a lick of common sense.”
I was reminded of that observation after reading an article describing the 131 billionaires who are pouring millions into the coffers of the Democrat party and Joe Biden’s campaign in their mindless obsession to defeat President Trump in November. Among the prominent names are Jeff Skoll, a founder of eBay who has contributed $4.5 million; Laurene Powell Jobs of Apple and owner of The Atlantic magazine has donated $1.2 million, and Josh Bekenstein, Chairman of Bain Capital (co-founded by Mitt Romney), $5 million.
Far more Wall Street financers have also jumped on the Biden/Democrat party bandwagon than are supporting Donald Trump, whose policies have overwhelmingly revived the economy after the stagnation of the Obama-Biden years. The tech billionaires, not content to simply cough up untold millions in direct political contributions, are also funding massive voter drives, promoting mail-in balloting, creating divisive partisan news sites, aiding and designing the Democrat party’s digital campaigns and unabashedly censoring the social media accounts of the Trump campaign and innumerable conservatives.
The political party they are gleefully underwriting in order to oust Trump is no longer the party of the middle and working class (which is now one and the same) but a two-tier assemblage in which the prey is sleeping with the predator. The witless wealthy and socially aware are in bed with the avowed socialists and militant Marxists. What is holding this marriage of convenience together is a mutual hatred of Donald Trump and the undoable promises made by Joe Biden and the Democrat party hierarchy.
In a 2019 meeting with 100 super-wealthy potential donors, Biden assured the gathering that he would not demonize the rich and would only increase their taxes slightly while ensuring that their standard of living would not be affected by any of his policies. He also stated: “I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 Billionaires are the reason why we are in trouble”. Further, he unabashedly emphasized that the wealthy are not the reason for income inequality and “If I win this nomination. I won’t let you down. I promise you.”
Further, the dubious choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely to placate and reassure Wall Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to the mega-rich class based on her days in California.
When the time came to deal with the Marxist/socialist wing of the Democrat party’s anti-Trump coalition, policy commitments, many diametrically opposite of what was promised the wealthy donors, were also guaranteed with a non-verbal pledge of we won’t let you down.
The first step was a de facto party platform. The 110-page Biden-Sanders Manifesto which includes, among other commitments, a massive job killing $2+ trillion climate agenda to phase out fossil fuel usage within 15 years, the elimination of cash bail, redirecting (i.e. cutting) funding for the police, dismantling all border protections, legalizing virtually all illegal immigrants and massively raising corporate and individual tax rates on the wealthy. This manifesto is a socialist screed that would destroy the middle class and permanently neuter the economy and nation.
An effusive Bernie Sanders proclaimed to the world that Biden and the Democrats have embraced his socialist agenda and that Biden would be the most progressive president since FDR. Sanders exposed not only the behind the scenes reality of today’s Democrat party but Biden’s figurehead role.
Further confirmation of the radicalization of the Party came about unexpectedly as the militant Marxist faction of the Sanders coalition forced the issue. Impatient and unwilling to wait until after the 3rd of November, Antifa and Black Lives Matter used the death of George Floyd as a pretext to take to the streets and begin their long-hoped for revolution. They claimed that rioting, looting, committing arson and attacking law enforcement was a necessity as this was a systemically racist country. Yet, they openly demanded immediate changes rooted in their radical Marxist ideology of class warfare not so-called systemic racism. As two of their preferred chants and graffiti slogans “eat the rich” and “abolish capitalism now” confirms.
Biden, the Democrat party hierarchy as well as virtually all Democrat elected officials refused to address the violence and those responsible. Thus, they tacitly approved of the lawlessness and by doing so flashed a green light to continue the riots. When forced to acknowledge the reality on the streets of the nation’s cities, they instead blamed Trump, the police, white supremacists and even the Russians. Due to their spinelessness, the armies of anarchy and revolution Biden and the Democrats unleashed will never be defeated or mollified by them.
Considering the vast dichotomy in the litany of promises made and actions taken, it is inevitable that either the moneyed elite or the mob of passionate true believers will be betrayed. There is no middle ground. Who will prevail?
Will it be the elites whose only weapon is money and fleeting political influence or the passionate mob whose weapons are unconstrained violence and intimidation? Will it be those who believe a revolution could never happen here or those who are currently inciting revolution with the implicit blessing of a major political party? Will it be those who believe that Biden and the Democrats, if elected, will be able to forcefully deal with the insurgents or the insurgents who now know that riots and extortion causes Democrat politicians to cower in the corner?
Beginning with the French Revolution and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, history has recorded that passionate mobs always prevail when dealing with a feckless ruling class or party. And the first casualties have inevitably been the wealthy elites.
I can envision sitting with my old friend, Ully, and asking him if he thought the wealthy elites, indiscriminately tossing money at the Democrats for the sole purpose of defeating President Trump, understood the pitfalls involved. He would lean back, slowly exhale a puff of smoke from his well-worn pipe and with uncontrollable anger in his eyes would say: “Nope. Those damn fools ain’t got a lick of common sense.”
In today's election, yours is a choice between freedom and globalism
I know something about both freedom and globalism. What I know is that you cannot have both, which is why I immigrated to America, the world's last stronghold of freedom.
In the way of background, I grew up in a prominent Muslim family in Egypt and became an imam at an early age. Like Christianity, Islam is a global religion. Unlike Christianity, Islam imposes an imperial global vision on true believers and denies them freedom of thought and movement.
Progressive globalism does much the same. Although Islam and progressivism would seem to have nothing in common, they do share one overriding goal: the need to crush traditional American Christianity, the one obstacle to world dominance in either case. At some point, Islam and progressivism will part ways, but for now, they are content to "coexist."
Progressive leaders turn a blind eye to the slaughter of Christians at a church in France or the shooting of a priest in another church or the beheading of a French teacher for daring to show a picture of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. In countries like France, leftists have been responsible for as much church vandalism as Muslims, maybe more. For now, the left and Islam are allies. The result of the failed immigration policies and the rabid push of atheism by most European governments has made their combined mayhem possible.
The mayhem has been papered over with lies, which is why Joe Biden makes such a perfect front man for the global elites. Biden has lied about almost everything in his life. Where to begin?
Biden lied about his undergraduate degree and his majors, lied about his rank in law school, lied aboutscholarships and educational aid he had received, lied about his stance toward the Vietnam war while in college, lied about his plagiarism of other politician's writings and speeches, lied about the circumstances around his first wife's fatal accident, lied about how he met his second and current wife, and lied about the affair they were having when they were both married.
Joe Biden is the embodiment of the dark side of American politics.
When the Vietnam war ended, and our troops needed funding to evacuate gracefully, Joe Biden stood in the way. His obstruction led to Saigon's fall and the disgraceful flight of American troops and personnel off the American embassy's rooftop in Vietnam.
When President Ford pleaded with Congress to help the Vietnamese refugees, the ones who were aiding Americans during the war, Joe Biden stood in the way. Even though many of these refugees were orphan children, Joe Biden called them criminals and prostitutes on the Senate floor.
Most recently and dramatically, Biden lied about his knowledge of his son's shady dealings, lied about his own involvement in corruption and bribery, and lied about his current presidential agenda and what he wants to implement in regards to energy, fracking, court-packing, health care, education, and COVID among other issues.
Biden has lied about so much that I am not sure if he ever told the truth or is now even capable of doing so. Thanks to Big Tech's and Big Media's suppression of his record, he can present himself as a man of character and high morals. We must feel sorry for the multitude of gullible Americans who believe him.
Do not be a fool and believe for a second that the elites hate Trump because of his tweets or because he is allegedly a sexist, a rapist, a racist, or a foreign agent. Nor do they hate him because of the pandemic death toll.
In reality, the elites hate Trump because of "YOU," because you elected a man they did not nominate and could not control. I have never seen global anticipation for an American election like this one. The world is watching. The progressive and Islamic elites are pulling for Biden, but lovers of freedom all over the world are quietly cheering for Trump. If you have yet to vote, be sure to vote today and give them something to cheer about.
Image: Biden the globalist by Andrea Widburg.
Likewise, the Biden-Harris plan for national immigration policy — which seeks to drive up legal and illegal immigration levels to their highest levels in decades — offers a flooded labor market with low wages for U.S. workers and increased bargaining power for big business that has long been supported by Wall Street.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Arizona AG Demands Investigation into Facebook for Allegedly Aiding Illegal Migration
(CNS News) -- Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich called on the Department of Justice to investigate Facebook for allegedly facilitating illegal immigration into the United States by allowing people to post instructions on its platform about how to enter countries illegally.
As Brnovich explained in an Oct. 14 letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, “Our office wrote to Facebook to clarify its policies and procedures for preventing such misuse of its platform. On August 30, 2021, we were surprised to receive an in-depth response from the company stating that its platform ‘allow[s] people to share information about how to enter a country illegally or request information about how to be smuggled.’”
“It is the federal government’s duty to enforce its immigration and criminal laws, and specifically, the Department of Justice’s responsibility to investigate and prosecute these matters,” wrote Brnovich. “Therefore, our office requests that your Department investigate Facebook’s facilitation of human smuggling at Arizona’s southern border and stop its active encouragement and facilitation of illegal entry.”
Brnovich said his office was made aware of human smugglers and drug cartels using Facebook to reach a wider audience and advertise illegal services on the platform through myriad news reports.
The Tech Transparency Project (TTP), part of the Campaign for Accountability, identified dozens of Facebook pages that offered migrants passage across the U.S. Southern border in April. Since then, the TTP evaluated Facebook for these pages every few months.
“TTP easily identified an additional 40 Facebook pages and 17 Facebook groups that openly sell illegal border crossings,” the report read. “Prices and smuggling routes are posted for all to see.”
The TTP named a few of these groups to show how easily identifiable they should be to Facebook’s algorithms, and noted how much traffic each page is receiving.
“One group explicitly named ‘Coyotes Para Cruzar a Estado Unidos’ (‘Coyotes for crossing to the United States’), created on August 3, attracted 1,100 members in less than a month,” the article noted. “The group produces dozens of posts on a daily basis offering border crossings.”
These pages are continuing to gain traction on Facebook as migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border are at a 21-year high, according to the Pew Research Center.
“The U.S. Border Patrol reported nearly 200,000 encounters with migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in July, the highest monthly total in more than two decades,” reported Pew.
Attorney General Brnovich argued that allowing human smuggling to take place can create opportunities for human and sex trafficking to operate on Facebook as well. He stated that Arizona would take legal action against Facebook to hold them accountable.
“As a national leader in battling sex trafficking, our office is currently pursuing such investigations and prosecutions in every instance where they are warranted, based on ads or postings from Facebook,” Brnovich said.
“To the extent that Facebook is complicit in such activity, our office will pursue all legal means to hold the company accountable,” Brnovich continued. “We expect the Department of Justice to take an equally firm stance against Facebook’s facilitation of human and [alleged] sex trafficking.”
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