Our Ship of State Looks Like the Titanic
“Full speed ahead!”
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Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The “ship of state” metaphor first appears in the works of the late 7th century BC poet Alcaeus. An aristocrat from the important Greek city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Alcaeus’s metaphor of a ship endangered by a storm represents the political upheavals caused by a succession of tyrants vying for control of the city––the surges and waves of civic violence, political turmoil, and tyranny that have damaged the ship’s hull, sails, and tackle, and threaten to sink it.
Though tired after 2600 years, the metaphor is still useful. We also are in the midst of political storms––political violence, the “soft despotism” of federal overregulation, the illiberal “wokeism” attacking our unalienable rights, and the serial damage to the Constitutional institutions that have kept us sailing free for over 200 years. But a variation of the metaphor more telling for our predicament is the sinking of the Titanic, the “unsinkable” ocean liner that fatally struck an iceberg in 1912. However, rather than one iceberg likely concealed from the Titanic’s watchmen by a nighttime optical illusion, we are confronted in broad daylight with an archipelago of icebergs that have been visible for decades now.
Take the looming federal debt, deficits, and unfunded liabilities. Our national debt has reached $28.43 trillion, 133% of GDP; annual budget deficits hover around $3 trillion; and there are $162 trillion in unfunded liabilities, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security––all relentlessly growing without any serious effort to reform the “big three” entitlement programs that eat up half the annual budget. More ominously, these frightening numbers have occurred during a time of anomalously low interest rates. Just a one percent rise in rates would swell interest payments to $530 billion a year––more than we spend on Medicaid.
Yet despite decades of warnings about the approaching fiscal calamity, both parties cannot summon the political will to turn the ship away from disaster. At best, we have one party occasionally trying to slow it down. Worse, the covid panic last year added to the debt $4 trillion in mitigation spending. Biden so far this year has added just under a trillion more, and another $1.9 trillion––$4.6 trillion if its provisions are extended for 10 years––in the pork-laden “bipartisan infrastructure” bill. And instead of slowing down, he’s angling for yet another $5 trillion in spending of money we don’t have.
It’s as though the captain of the Titanic ordered “Full speed ahead!” when warned about the iceberg.
Abroad, multiple threats to our ship of state are relentlessly drawing near. The disastrous, hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan has damaged our country’s interests and prestige, just as Jimmy Carter’s feckless handling of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis emboldened not just jihadists like Osama bin Laden, but a nuclear-armed rival, the Soviet Union, which went on a geopolitical rampage during Carter’s tenure. Today Russia is partnering with China to check America’s influence in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, the latter the great repository of fossil-fuel reserves. Oil is now up to $80 a barrel, gas prices have doubled in some states, natural gas supplies, especially in Europe, are low, and the president of the most powerful military in history is reduced to begging Middle East petrocrats to increase production. As we saw in the Seventies, growing inflation and rising gas prices are omens of economic and social storms.
Meanwhile, Russia is amassing troops on Ukraine’s eastern border, an ominous harbinger of annexation similar to Putin’s seizure of Crimea, and his occupation of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, and Georgia’s disputed territories Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He’s also using the energy weapon to intimidate and control Europe’s foreign policy. We should have known long ago that Russia, like Germany in 1919, hasn’t accepted the Free West’s victory in the Cold War, what Putin called “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the century.” Flush with increased energy revenues, and supported by China, Putin may calculate that the time is right for recovering Russia’s “near abroad” empire lost in the collapse of the USSR.
For its part, China, emboldened by the public displays of weakness by our president and diplomats, is threatening Taiwan and our other allies like Japan and the Philippines. Its publicly professed aim is to replace the U.S. as the regional hegemon in the South China Sea, and weaken our chain of island allies that comprise a barrier to China’s control of the region’s vital sea-lanes. China’s ambitions have also been empowered by the corporate globalists’ “money doesn’t stink” strategies for colluding with the communist overlords to increase profits. A flashing sign of their amoral worship of the bottom line is the upcoming Beijing Olympics. Our corporate sports plutocrats, with the exception of the Women’s Tennis Association, have no interest in punishing China with a boycott for its brutal treatment of the Uighur minority, or its destruction of Hong Kong’s democracy.
Finally, the current administration’s groveling eagerness to resurrect the feckless Iran nuclear deal has given new life to that country’s fanatically brutal regime. Now we hear that Iran is very close to manufacturing at least one nuclear weapon. When that happens, Israel, which Iran has vowed to “wipe off the map,” will be confronted with an existential decision. Other enemies of Iran in the region will scramble to acquire their own nuclear weapons as well. It’s one thing when liberal democracies ruled by law and accountable to their peoples, like the U.S., France, England, and Israel, possess nuclear weapons. But unaccountable tyrannies like North Korea and potentially Iran dangerously elevate the risk-level. Just one nuclear attack would be the mother of all icebergs.
Again, all these dangers are the consequence of appeasement and a failure of nerve. Most important have been the ossified foreign policy paradigms that shape our strategies and decisions, and that give cover to actions that originate in short-sighted partisan and economic interests. The delusion of a “rules-based international order,” the idea that transnational laws and institutions can keep the peace and protect our security and interests, have camouflaged decisions that originate in one faction’s self-interest.
The World Trade Organization, for example, benefits large corporations with multinational interests. The globalists lobbied for the inclusion of China, with its huge market and opportunities for lucrative investment, into the WTO. Though for twenty years China’s cheating and gaming of the WTO’s rules have been obvious, no one has been interested in holding the CCP to account. Human rights violations like forced labor, torture and organ-harvesting of political prisoners, and the slow-motion genocide of the Uighurs, have drawn a shrug at best, and some feeble diplospeak bereft of any actual consequence other than very selective economic sanctions. The result has been the swift growth of the Chinese iceberg.
Or consider the EU’s volunteering to subject its energy needs to Putin and his geopolitical machinations. The same threat that European NATO members used to berate Donald Trump is now holding the energy trump card Putin can play whenever he needs to. But the Biden administration is doing something similar to the feckless Europeans by waging war on carbon and pushing “renewable” energy like wind and solar. As a result, we’ve gone from energy independence to begging the Saudis to pump more oil––all to gratify the anticapitalist Left’s desire to weaken our economy, even as “clean-energy” grifters rake in billions.
Most important are the dangers that have arisen from changes in our culture and politics. The transformation of both that started in the Sixties has reached critical mass, with illiberal Leftist and progressive ideas and policies on sex identity, race, the economy, and the American social-political order dominating schools, universities, popular culture, media, corporate boards, sports, and entertainment. Tolerance for diverse views, ideas, and opinions has been eroded, riots and looting are used to intimidate political enemies, “cancel culture” destroys lives and careers, and anti-American Orwellian history infects the schools, popular culture, and media.
The aspiring new political-social order, moreover, enshrines unsettled scientific questions–– such as human influence on global warming, the existence of “systemic racism,” or the notion of multiple optional sex identities––as infallible truths to which all must make obeisance or face ostracism and persecution.
These fancies and hallucinations of the cultural Left have been eagerly adopted by the ruling progressive elite, for they create crises to be exploited, and leverage over their political rivals. The technocratic administrative state provides the muscle for these changes, and furthers the long progressive aim of dismantling the Constitutional order of unalienable rights, divided and separated powers, and a federalism that empowers the true diversity of the citizens inhabiting the fifty states. Just like the tyrants who endangered Mytilene, our new technocratic tyrants are driving our ship of state deeper into the perfect storm.
Storms and icebergs are beyond our control. But the dysfunction of our culture and politics are the bitter fruit of bad choices, the passion for power, and selfish interests. Thus our response to this looming catastrophe must be like Alcaeus’ advice to his troubled city:
Let us strengthen the ship’s sides
As fast as we can and hurry into a safe harbor.
Let no weak hesitation take anyone.
For a great contest is clearly before us.
Recall your previous toil.
Today, let every man be dedicated.
And may we never cause shame
To our noble parents who lie beneath the earth.
The greatest historical champion of freedom deserves no less from its people.
Bernie Sanders Silent as Corporations Look to Explicitly Grow Profit Margins via Limitless Immigration
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a self-described Socialist, has remained silent as corporate special interests seek to dramatically shift the nation’s legal immigration system for their benefit.
Last month, House Democrats passed President Joe Biden’s filibuster-proof “Build Back Better Act” reconciliation package, which would blow the lid off legal immigration levels — explicitly to provide an unlimited pipeline of foreign workers to multinational corporations.
Specifically, the reconciliation package would allow corporations to utilize an expanded foreign worker pipeline through the employment-based green card system even as hundreds of thousands of American professionals and graduates seek jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) jobs.
In late October, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) urged Sanders, who is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, to oppose the reconciliation package for its “corporate carve-out for unlimited foreign labor” that includes “several breathtaking immigration provisions that have long been the crown jewel of corporate lobbying.”
Sanders has been silent, Hagerty told Breitbart News in an exclusive statement.
“It’s been over five weeks since I wrote to Senator Sanders about the corporate carve-out in the so-called ‘Build Back Better’ legislation that benefits Big Tech and harms American workers, and we still haven’t heard a single word of defense from him,” Hagerty said.
“If Senator Sanders is serious about supporting American workers like he proclaims, he should soundly reject this dangerous, hidden provision that would create an unending pipeline of foreign labor for Silicon Valley giants to lower wages and displace aspiring Americans,” he continued.
Sanders did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.
Breitbart News has reviewed lobbying records that detail the lobbying campaign from corporate giants like Amazon, Facebook, Intuit Inc, AT&T, Verizon, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Alphabet, Deloitte, the Microsoft Corporation, IBM, Accenture, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and the Intel Corporation — all of whom would benefit significantly from the expanded foreign worker pipeline.
The corporations, as listed, file thousands of petitions to the federal government every year to secure employment-based green cards for their foreign visa workers who, more often than not, arrive in the U.S. through the H-1B visa program that has been used to replace American workers with cheaper foreign workers.
Amazon, this year alone, petitioned for nearly 3,000 employment-based green cards for their foreign visa workers and foreign nationals seeking to take high-paying white collar jobs. Microsoft and Google, likewise, petitioned for more than 3,300 employment-based green cards.
More than one million white-collar American jobs today are held by foreign visa workers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Watchdog Accuses Silicon Valley Giants of Dodging $100 Billion in Taxes
Six of the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe have been accused of dodging $100 billion in taxes by a British tax watchdog.
CNBC reports that six major Silicon Valley tech firms have been accused of having a combined “tax gap” of $100 billion over the past ten years according to an analysis by a British tax organization. Fair Tax Mark, a British organization that certifies businesses for proper tax conduct, examined the global tax payments of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft from 2010 to 2019.
The research analyzed the company’s 10-K filings submitted to the U.S. government by the tech giants. Fair Tax Mark looked at tax provisions, which is the amount that companies set aside in their financial reports to pay taxes, and compared these with the amount of money that the companies actually paid to the government, called cash taxes. Researchers found that over the past ten years, the gap between the tax provision set out by the tech firms and the taxes they actually paid was approximately $100.2 billion.
The report also claimed that the profits were “shifted to tax havens, especially Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.” The researchers noted that most of the tax shortfall “almost certainly arose outside the United States,” with tax charges from countries outside the United States coming to 8.4 percent of the companies’ profits overseas.
Paul Monaghan, CEO of Fair Tax Mark, discussed the report with CNBC stating: “The amount of tax being paid by these businesses is $100 billion less than reported in their accounts.” The report noted that Amazon was the worst offender of the six tech firms. The report alleged that Amazon paid $3.4 billion in income taxes since 2010, noting that the cash tax paid by Amazon amounted to 12.7 percent of its profit for the decade despite the corporate tax rate being set at 35 percent for seven of the past ten years. President Donald Trump cut the corporate tax rate to 21 percent in 2017.
The report stated: “The company is growing its market domination across the globe on the back of revenues that are largely untaxed and can unfairly undercut local businesses that take a more responsible approach.” A spokesperson for Amazon told CNBC in a statement:
Amazon represents about 1% of global retail, with larger competitors everywhere we operate, and had a 24% effective tax rate on profits from 2010-2018. Amazon is primarily a retailer where profit margins are low, so comparisons to technology companies with operating profit margins of closer to 50% is not rational. Governments write the tax laws and Amazon is doing the very thing they encourage companies to do — paying all taxes due while also investing many billions in creating jobs and infrastructure. Coupled with low margins, this investment will naturally result in a lower cash tax rate.
Facebook had the second-biggest tax gap with the cash tax it paid representing 10.2 percent of the profit it made over the decade. A spokesperson for Facebook told CNBC:
In 2018 we paid $3.8 billion in corporation tax globally and our effective tax rate over the last five years is more than 20%. Under current rules we pay the vast majority of the tax we owe in the U.S. as that is where the bulk of our functions, assets and risks are located. Ultimately these are decisions for governments and we support the OECD process which is looking at new international tax rules for the digital economy.
Google ranked third with its taxes amounting to 15.8 percent of its profits with its foreign tax charge amounting to 7.1 percent. A Google spokesperson told CNBC that the report form Fair Tax Mark “ignores the reality of today’s complicated international tax system and distorts the facts documented in our regulatory filings.”
The company added: “Like other multinational companies, we pay the vast majority — more than 80% — of our corporate income tax in our home country. As we have said before, we strongly support the OECD’s work to end the current uncertainty and develop new tax principles.”
Netflix ranked fourth in the list handing over 15.8 percent of its profit while Apple ranked fifth with a tax rate of 17.1 percent. Apple told CNBC in a statement:
As the largest taxpayer in the world, we know the important role tax payments play in society. We pay all that we owe according to tax laws and local customs wherever we operate, and since 2008 Apple’s corporate taxes alone have totaled over $100 billion.
Microsoft paid the highest tax rate of 16.8 percent with a spokesperson telling CNBC: “Microsoft is fully compliant with all local laws and regulations in every country in which we operate. We serve customers in countries all over the world and our tax structure reflects that global footprint.”
Read more about the report at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
BIDENOMICS: AND THE RICH GET MUCH, MUCH RICHER!
The downward trend for Biden follows a string of issues concerning the American people, including the economy, as inflation hits hard and food and gas prices skyrocket this holiday season.
A Holiday Crisis is Imminent as Retailers Face Bankruptcy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RLH4Jd_7a0
Jim Banks Calls to Oppose Funding Bills that Do Not Address Inflation, Border Crisis
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) said in a statement Monday that Republicans should oppose any funding bill that fails to address President Joe Biden’s crises, such as inflation, open borders, and the soaring debt.
“The border crisis, the inflation crisis, the supply chain crisis and the government debt crisis—each of the crises facing our nation today can be traced back to specific policies pursued by Democrats. We can’t give Biden a green light to continue on this destructive path,” Banks, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), said as the House will likely vote by the end of the week.
The Hoosier conservative contended that voting for a continuing resolution (CR) to extend government funding would only continue to further the Biden agenda.
“Republicans should stand up for working American families and oppose any funding bills that don’t include measures to reverse these man-made crises,” Banks remarked “A vote on the continuing resolution is a vote for the Biden agenda.”
Congress faces increasing government deadlines ahead of the new year.
Biden’s Democrat-led majority must pass a government funding bill, a bill to address the debt ceiling, pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), pass the $1.7 trillion Build Back Better, among other issues.
The must-pass items such as passing a CR before the December 3 deadline and the government funding bill could likely stall momentum for the Build Back Better Act, which passed through the House recently.
House Democrats will likely pass legislation to fund the government through late January, potentially January 21 or 28.
Banks has also slammed the Democrats for passing the Build Back Better Act.
He said in a statement after the November 19 vote, “Republicans should stand up for working American families and oppose any funding bills that don’t include measures to reverse these man-made crises. A vote on the continuing resolution is a vote for the Biden agenda.”
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
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