Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event. (Photo credit: JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
Americans across the country are working overtime, covering shifts, and manning multiple positions to pick up the slack during our worker shortage crisis. Prices are going up. It’s getting harder to keep gas in the tank and put food on the table. Many Americans are tired and at the end of their rope.
And what is President Joe Biden’s response? He’s taking more money out of their pockets and giving it to wealthy left-wing lawyers to fund a barrage of frivolous lawsuits supporting the growing list of welfare programs American workers are already forced to finance — the very programs keeping their former colleagues at home.
Given the Biden Administration’s recent unprecedented and unlawful expansion of welfare, it’s not surprising that the president has announced the creation of yet another welfare benefit: civil legal services.
This new policy will lead to a wave of costly lawsuits conveniently attacking states with whom the president is at odds, and benefiting only the current administration and its lackeys while harming those it claims to help.
President Ronald Reagan said, “we should measure welfare’s success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many people are added.” Yet the current administration seems set on adding as many people as possible and fighting anyone who stands in the way.
Under the guise of “expanding access to justice,” a group co-chaired by Attorney General Merrick Garland and White House Counsel Dana Remus has been created. They have already released a new report titled, “Access to Justice in the Age of COVID-19 .” The report outlines their plan to increase access to taxpayer-funded attorneys to help address what the administration characterizes as “major national challenges.”
The title of the report is telling.
In the eyes of the current administration, we are in “the Age of COVID-19,” a new reality with no clear end in sight. One can only hope that the “COVID Age” won’t outlast the other ages that have come before it — the Bronze Age lasted 1,500 years.
As many Americans are seeing firsthand, one of the most pressing COVID-19 challenges in America today is the plummeting labor force participation rate — that is, folks in the work force. That rate is now the lowest it has been in 45 years. And you can be certain that free government lawyers charged with keeping people on welfare isn’t going to fix that problem. It’s going to make it worse.
Governors and state legislatures across the country, recognizing the economic harms caused by lockdowns, mandates, and other draconian measures, will need to step up even more to halt the handouts where they can. States like Florida, under the leadership of Governor DeSantis, have experienced firsthand the economic benefits of helping people return to work .
In response to a slew of court decisions that have begun to push back against the administration’s unilateral welfare expansion efforts and unconstitutional overreach, the president will raise an army of federally funded, left-wing lawyers to wage battle in the courts.
Here’s how the president’s plan will work. Federal taxpayer dollars will be directed by the Biden Administration to legal aid groups aligned with the president with instructions to use those funds to bring lawsuits against states, and even landlords and employers, to strongarm them into providing welfare benefits they would otherwise deny. According to the group’s report, these benefits will include more stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, rental and mortgage assistance, consumer debt relief, and more.
But his plan raises serious concerns.
From where will the funding needed to pay for this plan come, and with which groups, specifically, will the Biden Administration “strategically” collaborate? What other “major national challenges” will the administration task this new army of lawyers to tackle through costly litigation?
The answers to these questions remain unclear.
As Americans grapple with the challenges of inflation and a worker shortage crisis, the Biden Administration continues to find ways to make matters worse. If President Reagan was right, that the proper measure for the success of a welfare program is the number of people the program helps to free from government dependence, then President Biden’s newest welfare benefit is a clear, dismal failure.
Stewart Whitson is a legal affairs fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability.
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 (LAWYER), 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
JOHN BINDER
30 Nov 2020 316
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
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.”
Bloomberg, Migration Lawyers, Merge Advocacy AFP/Getty Images 5:20
Mike Bloomberg’s pro-migration advocacy group is merging with the advocacy spinoff of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
The merger spotlights the close alliance between the stock-market investors who fund advocacy for mass migration, and the hourly-rate professionals who facilitate the population transfer, responded Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Individual immigration lawyers may well rationalize their defense of individual immigrants as being unrelated to the broader push by the wealthy to pry open the borders. But each individual snowflake in an avalanche isn’t intending any harm either … [so] even pro-bono immigration lawyers trying to obstruct the deportation of an illegal immigrant are, objectively speaking, serving the interests of Michael Bloomberg.
‘This is a class issue and the advocates for mass immigration are, objectively speaking, agents of the upper class,” he added.
The merger was announced December 6 by Jeremy Robbins, the long-standing director of Bloomberg’s pro-business New American Economy lobbying group:
I’m Jeremy Robbins, and I’m so pleased to announce that at the end of this year, the American Immigration Council [AIC] and New American Economy will merge. Together, we’ll create something unique and critical for the immigration movement — an organization that will empower newcomers to America. From the moment they arrive to the moment they become American citizens, promoting full belonging for immigrants, and making America as a whole a more successful, more resilient, and more dynamic country.
America’s history is laid clear, investing in newcomers is an investment in America as a whole. There are many obstacles to realizing our vision of a more welcoming country, but together with your support, we’re better prepared than we’ve ever been to make progress on behalf of immigrants on behalf of America as a whole.
Notably, Robbins did not try to argue that immigration is good for individual Americans but instead claims that immigration is good for “America as a whole. ”
That phrase hides the reality that mass migration is good for investors, government, employers, and migrants, but bad for the many sidelined Americans who are pushed into unemployment and homelessness by the flood of imported migrants.
The American Immigration Council is an advocacy group created in 1987 by the immigration lawyers’ association.
Bloomberg founded the NAE group in 2013 to help push the “Gang of Eight” amnesty through Congress. His partners included Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and a battalion of Democratic and GOP politicians. The group was checkmated by GOP voters in 2014, and put on the defensive by the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the White House.
The group also rallied for Bloomberg when he ran for the Democratic nomination to the presidency in 2020.
Breitbart News has extensively covered Bloomberg’s effort to import more consumers, renters, and workers . “This country needs more immigrants and we should be out looking for immigrants,” regardless of Americans’ needs, Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune on January 5.:
For those who need an oboe player for a symphony, we want the best one. We need a striker for a soccer team, we want to get the best one. We want a farmworker, we want to get the best one. A computer programmer, we want to get the best one. So we should be out looking for more immigrants.
Bloomberg’s group also worked closely with FWD.us , an advocacy group funded by Mark Zuckerberg’s money, which also funds many supposedly grass-roots advocacy groups. Other wealthy investors, such as George Soros, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Microsoft president Brad Smith also spend much of their wealth on advocacy for more migration.
The NAE-AIC merger “takes away the pretense of separate interests” between investors and migration lawyers, Krikorian said, adding:
This is something that the broader public, and specifically lawmakers and media, need to understand — that broadly the [political] left and the corporate right are allied on immigration.
This is not really a right/left issue. This is an up/down issue, and those pushing for high immigration and loose enforcement are servants of [Wall Street] capital.
The federal government’s support for migration is an economic policy. It moves wealth from employees to employers , from families to investors , from young to old , from children to their parents , from homebuyers to investors , from technology to stoop labor .
The extraction migration pulls young people from poor countries and settles them in the major coastal states. That population shift moves wealth from heartland red states to the coastal blue states , and within large states, it also helps move wealth and status from GOP rural districts to Democrat cities .
Immigration radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture , allows elites to ignore major political dilemmas, and also to forget about despairing Americans at the bottom of society .
Joe Biden didn’t do anything wrong? A time-honored method of taking bribes is having them paid to a family member, usually in exchange for nominal or nonexistent services. It is comical to watch “reporters” pretend not to understand this.
Joe Biden Reads the Words ‘End of Message’ Off of His Notes During Bob Dole Eulogy 1:22
President Joe Biden accidentally read the words “end of message” from his notes during his eulogy for former Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) on Capitol Hill Thursday.
Reading off of his notes, the president quoted Dole on the importance of “principles over party.”
Here is what Biden said, according to the transcript :
And I quote Bob Dole:
‘I cannot pretend that I have not been a loyal champion [of] my party, but [I’ve] always served my country best when I did [it] so first and foremost as an American.’
“When we prioritize principles over party and humanity over personal legacy’ — when we do that, we ‘accomplish far more as a nation. By leading with shared faith in each other, we become America at its best.’ He went on to say, ‘a beacon of hope, a source of comfort in crisis, a shield against those who threaten freedom.’
‘Our nation has certainly faced periods of division. But at the end of the day, we have always found ways to come together. We can find that unity again.’
Biden continued, “And then the message said, end of message.”
The president did not correct himself but continued speaking from his notes as he concluded the eulogy
JOE BIDEN KNOWS HE WILL SURVIVE 50 YEARS OF BRIBES SUCKING AS THE SYSTEM IS SIMPLY TOO CORRUPT NOT TO PROTECT HIM AS THEY HAVE HILLARY, BILLARY, KAMALA, FEINSTEIN AND BRIBES SUCKING MAXINE WATERS!
THESE PEOPLE ARE WITTINGLY DESTROYING THE NATION AND FILLING THEIR POCKETS AS THEY DO!
NPR Poll: Just 16 Percent of Americans Strongly Approve of Joe Biden’s Job Performance Charlie Riedel / ASSOCIATED PRESS 1:35
Just 16 percent of American adults strongly approve of President Biden’s job performance, a Thursday NPR/Marist poll revealed .
The polling number is worrisome for the president. More than double the number of people strongly disapprove of Biden’s job performance than strongly approve of it.
Respondents indicated 38 percent strongly disapprove of Biden’s job performance, 22 points greater than those who strongly support Biden’s job performance.
Biden has fallen flat with independents. Only 10 percent of independents strongly approve of the president’s performance, while a whopping 38 percent strongly disapprove — a 28 point difference.
Moreover, more Democrats (5 percent) strongly disapprove of Biden’s job performance than Republicans strongly approve (2 percent).
Among white college graduates, a key voting bloc for Democrats, 35 percent strongly disapprove of Biden’s performance, while just 20 percent strongly approve.
People under the age of 45 also give the president low marks: Only 8 percent strongly approve of his performance, while 33 percent strongly disapprove.
The poll sampled 1,172 adults November 30 through December 6. The margin of error is 3.8 percentage points.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø
SIPHONING OFF 'CAMPAIGN CONTRI BUTIONS' BRIBES THROUGH FAMILY MEMBERS IS AN OLD DEM PARTY DEVICE. DIANNE FEINSTEIN HAS RAKED IN MULTIPLE FORTUNES DOING THIS AS DID FORMER SENATOR BARBARA BOXER. PELOSI HAS SIPHONED OFF BRIBES TO HER HUSBAND THIS WAS AS DID FORMER CA GOV GRAY DAVIS. FAT MOUTH REP. MAXINE WATERS HAS SIPHONED OFF MORE THAN A MILLION TO HER DAUGHTER.
AND THEN WE HAVE THE CASE OF GAMER LAWYERS JOE, HUNTER AND JAMES BIDEN. THE FIGURES ALSO GET TO THE TENS OF MILLIONS OF BRIBES FOR VOTES THESE UNCONVICTED GAMER LAWYERS HAVE PERPETRATED ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
Joe Biden didn’t do anything wrong? A time-honored method of taking bribes is having them paid to a family member, usually in exchange for nominal or nonexistent services. It is comical to watch “reporters” pretend not to understand this. MONICA SHOWALTER
Who is the autocratic president, again, overstepping his authority?
Judges, throughout the country, are correctly ruling that President Biden and OSHA don’t have the Constitutional authority to require everyone to get vaccines.
Therefore, shouldn’t it have been unconstitutional for the Democrats to require an individual mandate for everyone to buy health insurance?
They not only required everyone to have a policy, but everything the policy must have.
Chief John Justice Roberts, instead of interpreting Obamacare as written, essentially rewrote the law by calling the individual mandate penalty "a tax," in order to pretend the law was Constitutional.
As with the Build Back Better bill, where Democrats are misleading the public that universal day care and universal pre-K paid by the government would lower costs, they continually lied that Obamacare would reduce costs.
Obamacare, with all its mandates and taxes, took away freedom of choice and the price of insurance and co-pays skyrocketed. Obamacare reduced competition and large insurance companies had a captive audience. When day care and preschool providers know they have a captive audience and the government will take care of much of the bill, there will be no incentive to control costs and prices will skyrocket. The middle class will be hammered.
Prices finally stabilized after Trump took away the individual mandates and allowed people the freedom of choice.
For four years, as Trump was transferring freedom and power back to the people as fast as possible, the media described Trump as a dictator and an autocrat to intentionally mislead the public.
As Biden rules by executive orders and mandates, the media pretends that he is not autocratic.
The New York Times loves Biden's policies and campaigns for them every day. They continually imply that Biden is moderate and competent. They blame his failures on politics and Republicans for blocking his glorious policies. Of course, they never blamed Democrats for blocking Trump's policies no matter how well they worked.
The problem with Biden and the Democrats is that their radical leftist policies are unpopular and Biden, Harris and others in his administration are the most incompetent people I have seen in my lifetime. They are seeking to destroy America and our way of life as fast as they can.
On Politics: Joe Biden and the political limits of competence
For eight years, the media campaigned for Obama and Biden policies including Obamacare. Ben Rhodes admitted that the Obama administration used compliant reporters to spread lies about the disastrous Iran deal.
Then for four years, the media peddled lies, including the known lies about Russian collusion to destroy Trump.
For the entire campaign of Biden, and his first 11 months in office we have been treated to reports of how great and popular his policies are.
Now, some are peddling lies that Biden is getting worse coverage than Trump did despite the media essentially promoting Biden’s radical policies every day.
White House, CNN promote Washington Post column claiming Biden is getting 'worse' media coverage than Trump
There is a good reason that only 7% of U.S adults have a great deal of trust in the media. Journalists have earned that exceptionally low rating. Much of what is reported as news, are essentially Democrat talking points pushing an agenda and seeking to destroy Republicans. They are an arm of the Democrat party. It is a shame that journalists don’t have to report their daily contributions to the FEC.
Americans' trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four percentage points since last year to 36%, making this year's reading the second lowest in Gallup's trend.
In all, 7% of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" and 29% "a fair amount" of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting –
Partisans' trust in the media continues to be sharply polarized. Currently, 68% of Democrats, 11% of Republicans and 31% of independents say they trust the media a great deal or fair amount.
It all seems pretty obvious.
The book, titled Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite. , lays out how Hunter Biden and his business partners, in addition to his numerous Rosemont-branded entities and ventures, was deeply involved with an entity called the Burnham Financial Group.
With Biden in the White House, President Trump predicted, China would “ own the United States .” There’s also something to Trump’s charge that the Bidens are an “ organized crime family .” LLOYD BILLINGSLEY
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden , especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
Hunter Met With Chinese State Oil Exec To Talk ‘Highly Strategic’ African Land Grab Biden knew the company had ties to countries under US sanctions, emails show
Hunter Biden, an unidentified man, and then-vice president Joe Biden in China in 2013 / edited from Getty Images Chuck Ross • December 8, 2021 3:00 pm
Hunter Biden tried to help a Chinese oil executive purchase an African oil field as part of China's drive to buy up natural resources, even after he was warned the company had ties to countries under U.S. sanctions.
Biden and his business partner in 2011 met at least twice with Ge Aiji, an executive with China National Petroleum Corporation, according to emails from Biden's abandoned laptop. Ge sought the Biden consortium's help on brokering a deal to buy an equity stake in the Jubilee oil field off the coast of Ghana. China at the time was in the process of diversifying its oil sources and worked with Iran, Sudan, Libya, and other sanctioned countries.
Ge, who was director of new ventures at China National Petroleum Corporation, sent a letter to Biden and his partner Devon Archer on April 18, 2011, saying the Jubilee field represented a "highly strategic opportunity" for the state-owned corporation because of its quality and size. Biden and Archer days later met with Ge in Beijing, according to previously unreported emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon .
While the Jubilee stake was ultimately not sold to China National Petroleum Corporation, the emails provide another example of Biden's willingness to forge business deals that stood to benefit the Chinese government. China over the past decade has snatched up oil, minerals, and precious metals around the globe, stoking concerns that the Communist regime is seeking a strategic advantage over the United States. China's foray in Africa has been of more recent concern amid reports that it is seeking to build a military base in Equatorial Guinea, which is near the Jubilee field.
Biden and Archer formed a joint venture, BHR Partners, that in 2016 brokered the sale of a Congolese cobalt mine to the state-owned China Molybdenum Co. The deal gave China control over one of the world's largest supplies of the precious metal, which is used to make batteries for electric cars. BHR also brokered the sale of Michigan-based Henniges Automotive to a Chinese defense contractor that has since been blacklisted by the U.S. government. The deal required approval from the Obama administration because it involved technology that could be used for military purposes.
Biden's meeting with China National Petroleum Corporation is not his first effort to help a Chinese company that seeks African oil. CEFC China Energy, a conglomerate linked to the Communist Party, in 2017 paid Biden more than $6 million to find energy investments for the company. CEFC paid Biden another $1 million to represent executive Patrick Ho after he was indicted for offering bribes to officials from Chad and Uganda in exchange for oil drilling rights. Biden at the time was working on a deal for CEFC to buy a liquified natural gas company in the Gulf of Mexico. That deal fell apart after CEFC chairman Ye Jianming disappeared following his arrest on fraud charges in China in 2018.
Gabriel Zinny, a representative of the Democratic consulting firm Blue Star Strategies, first contacted Biden and Archer in early 2011 about China National Petroleum Corporation's interest in Ghana's Jubilee oil field, the emails show. Zinny represented Argentine businessman José Luis Manzano, who was looking to partner with China National Petroleum Corporation to bid on Jubilee. Manzano has partnered on other ventures with Hunter Biden's uncle, Jim Biden.
Mike Muldoon, an employee at Biden and Archer's firm Rosemont Seneca, told the pair in early 2011 about China National Petroleum Corporation's history of working in Sudan, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, and Venezuela, all which were under U.S. sanctions.
"Things we need to keep on the radar as we move forward," Muldoon wrote in the Jan. 12, 2011, email.
The warning flag did not deter Biden and his partners, who met with Ge Aiji at least twice in the following months.
Biden and Archer were forwarded a letter from Ge prior to their second meeting in Beijing. Ge—to whom the Biden consortium referred in emails as "Madame Ge"—said the corporation wanted Biden and Archer's help with conducting due diligence on Kosmos Energy, the Dallas-based exploration company that discovered Jubilee in 2007.
Emails suggest Biden and Archer met Ge on March 18, 2011, in Beijing and on April 21, 2011.
"We had a really nice dinner," Archer wrote following his and Biden's Beijing meeting with Ge. He said that Ge asked him "to keep bringing her projects" and that he planned to do so.
An attorney for Biden and the China National Petroleum Corporation did not respond to requests for comment.
'Lied To Us': GOP Senator Accuses Biden, Democrats Of Lying
Biden’s approval rating, too, continues to dive. According to the poll, Americans’ approval of Biden’s job performance has decreased two percentage points each month for the last four months. Biden’s current job approval rating is at 40 percent.
The poll was conducted from December 2 to 6, 2021, with 808 adults in the United States. The margin of error is 3.5 percent.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø
Biden is, and has always been, a pathological liar of the worst kind, the kind who lies to boost his own ego no matter how easy it is to prove his dishonesty. MONICA SHOWALTER
As the months of his administration slip by, it becomes clearer and clearer that he is something of a sociopath . Nick Arama agrees. He is congenitally unable to care. As for Americans still stranded in Afghanistan, he blamed them – for not getting to the airport, for being “dual citizens” as if that makes them less worthy of rescue.
PATRICIA McCARTHY
Biden’s defense of his actions was predictably sleazy. He wrote to the law school faculty asking that he not be expelled, claiming: “My intent was not to deceive anyone. For if it were, I would not have been so blatant.” He added: “If I had intended to cheat, would I have been so stupid?” Well, why not, Joe? ROBERT SPENCER
Biden even served up an early form of his “my word as a Biden” routine : “I value my word above all else. This is a fact which is known to all those who are or have been acquainted with my character.” Yes, he really wrote that. He even had the audacity to claim that as a law student who had already obtained an undergraduate degree, he “had misunderstood the rules of citation and footnoting.”
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. MARK CHRISTIAN
Will America Become China's Vassal? The dire cost of Biden taking the White House.
Fri Dec 11, 2020
Gary Gindler On election day, Fox News betrayed President Trump, and this has puzzled many patriots. The confusion vanishes if one assumes that this episode could be just a small part of the process of China's colonization of America. China has already colonized some countries in the Pacific region, South America, and Africa for all practical purposes. Add to this list the de facto colonization of northern Italy and a large part of Russia in Eastern Siberia. Also, communist China greedily devours real estate and businesses in the United States.
Therefore, the 2020 presidential election should be seen as an integral part of this process.
From this perspective, Trump and Biden symbolize two diametrically opposed approaches to America's future. If Biden made it clear that he was ready to swear allegiance to the new master, Trump is fighting for America's economic and political independence. Biden is helped not only by the so-called "Democrats" and numerous anti-Trump Republicans but also by the world socialist movement.
The current leading force of palace intrigues in China is Xi Jinping's group of supporters of Soviet methods: "Xi Jinping belongs to the faction long forgotten in China, which at one time was aligned with the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin." When this group came to power, a wave of repressions swept across China, like two drops of water similar to Stalin's repressions of the 30s and 40s. China's economic policy is generally reminiscent of the Soviet one. For example, foreign companies' penetration into Chinese markets is only possible if joint ventures with China are established, and all the know-how is transferred to the Chinese side.
Donald Trump, of course, is fighting for the presidency. Nevertheless, for Trump, the presidency is only part of a more significant challenge. Trump seeks not only to win these elections but to destroy once and for all the leftist movements in general. Obviously, it includes China and the so-called "Democrats." That is a much more important goal, and it looks like Trump would prevail. What if Trump loses? In this case, all his actions will be aimed at ensuring that by the next electoral cycle – in 2022 – no one in his or her right mind would even think to vote for (D)ecadence.
Trump must win Americans' sympathy to achieve his goal. There is no doubt that the Trump team is acting in this direction. Numerous hearings in state legislatures, sensational statements by witnesses, mathematical and computer experts, and court hearings, of course, show a horrid picture of election fraud by "Democrats."
Election Day has been transformed into Election Months; however, more and more Americans are convinced of the "Democrat" fraud every day. More and more Americans switch to alternative sources of information every day and thus deprive propaganda outlets of their material base. Every day more and more Americans are beginning to understand which Republican is an anti-Trumpist rooting for China and which one is a Conservative. Finally, more and more Americans are beginning to guess where the command center that issued an order to stop counting votes simultaneously in six battleground states at 2 a.m. on November 4, 2020, was located.
Trump understands that America, unfortunately, has been dozing for the past hundred years. While we were sleeping, our Constitution was undermined. We have lost control of the Washington swamp dwellers because they prefer to be controlled by Chinese interests rather than American citizens. We just lived our lives and watched football until the international leftist movement attempted to steal our America out from under our noses.
Trump's strategic goal is an America, which is not sleeping at the wheel.
There is now every sign that America's sleeping giant is awake. Thanks to China – the elections they most likely helped to steal could be the Chinese equivalent of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Thanks to the "Democratic" fraudsters and their leader Joe "Yuan" Biden – the 2020 elections were the last straw.
In 1776 we did not want to be vassals to the British king, and in 2020 we do not want to be vassals of the communists.
China communists and their distant ideological cousins on the Left – the American "Democrats," of course, went for broke. They have in their arsenal not only economic and political methods. A very extraordinary direction of China's expansion is that the communists began to transfer their enterprises to the United States, considering our country as one of the offshore destinations for money laundering . Based on our knowledge of communists' methods, the most probable course of action by the Politburo of the Communist Party of China would be outright buying of politicians. It seems they calculated (quite correctly) that they need to buy a limited number – no more than a few thousand – key politicians worldwide to carry out their expansion plans. This path seems to them to be quicker and economically more feasible.
The massive importation of drugs into the United States was one of the main activities of the Soviet KGB, for which numerous drug cartels were created (have you ever wondered why most drug cartels are in countries with strong left-wing traditions?) It was the Chinese comrades who did what the Soviet comrades could not achieve – flood America with fentanyl.
China's espionage has reached a level that the Soviet KGB could only dream of. Under Bush and Obama, China's cyber attacks, like Operation Titan Rain , were incredibly successful. Consider the 2013 attack , when China took over the personal files of 21 million US government employees. China uses widespread blackmail and bribes to lobby her interests in Washington.
In 2020, communist China used artificial intelligence algorithms to identify Americans who could participate in the Antifa and Black Lives Matter pogroms (of course, the Chinese communists favor only left-wing organizations). Once identified, these Americans were sent instructions (including well-crafted videos) on organizing riots via social media. As we now know, American "Democrats" enthusiastically participated in this orgy. Finally, everybody has noticed that numerous concentration camps sprung up worldwide as a precursor to CoronaGulag.
Trump has swung not only at the Chinese communists, not only at the "Democrats" as traditional rivals of the American conservatives, and not only at the Washington swamp. All the above suggests that Donald Trump is an historical figure on a much larger scale than it seems at first glance.
Trump is fighting a global communist Utopia, also known as the "Global Gulag."
The "Democrats," if they do win this battle with China's help, will find themselves in a completely new, redefined reality – the majority of the country's population will regard them as usurpers, deceitful and dishonest people. If an infirm old marionette settles in the White House, it will be a classic Pyrrhic victory, where winning a battle leads to losing the war.
Donald Trump has been compared with Winston Churchill more than once, and these comparisons, of course, have a good reason. They are based on the similarity of the circumstances these leaders had to face. Churchill, too, found himself in a situation where he and his country were single-handedly fighting both German Socialists' horde and the numerous National Socialism and International Socialism supporters among the British establishment.
If the socialists come to power despite Trump's actual landslide victory, then the political suicide of the "Democrats" will enter the final phase. Moreover, the American patriots who feel down in the dumps should remember one of the quotes commonly attributed to Churchill: "Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."
Gary Gindler, Ph.D., is a conservative columnist at Gary Gindler Chronicles and the founder of a new science: Politiphysics. Follow him on Twitter and Quodverum .
Biden Whistleblower Emails: Chinese Energy Company Gave $5 Million Non-Secured, Forgivable Loan to Biden ‘Family’
MATTHEW BOYLE
A 2017 email from a top official with a Chinese energy firm, provided by a whistleblower to U.S. Senate investigators, demonstrates the terms of an agreement included officials with the firm giving a $5 million non-secured, forgivable loan to the Biden “family.”
The email, sent to SinoHawk Holdings CEO Tony Bobulinski, shows how a top official with CEFC Energy — a now bankrupt and defunct energy company based in China — offered to wire $10 million into an account to begin operations, $5 million worth of which would be a non-secured forgivable loan to the “BD Family,” which means the Biden family.
Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer spent four and a half hours with Bobulinski before he went public, and discussed these communications in particular regarding this loan during that meeting. According to Schweizer, the Chinese energy company officials were going to put $10 million into an account, $5 million of which was designated as a non-secured forgivable loan to the Biden family. Schweizer said this would constitute significant leverage the Chinese energy company officials would have over the Biden family.
“In a way, this would give CEFC greater leverage over the Biden family than simply giving them a gift or bribe because if they were dissatisfied with what the Bidens were doing they could ask for their money back,” Schweizer told Breitbart News when asked about the arrangement upon the public release of Bobulinski’s emails.
The email also says that $5 million loan is “interest free” and asks how that $5 million would be used, and if used up, whether CEFC should lend more money to the Biden family.
This email further fleshes out details surrounding the controversial arrangement first uncovered by U.S. Senate investigators in a recent Homeland Security Committee report, and later further uncovered by a bombshell New York Post story on emails retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Bobulinski’s new emails add to the story by including terms of the financial arrangement behind the wire transfer that CEFC officials made into a firm aligned with the Bidens that then made significant payments to Hunter Biden’s own firm, a wire transfer and financial payments that were first exposed by Senate investigators. The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop emails added more information to this questionable arrangement by revealing emails that showed how Biden associates intended to divvy up the cash from the Chinese investors.
These new emails from Bobulinski add more to the picture by showing that the agreement was that this payment would serve as a non-secured forgivable loan, and that the CEFC side of the arrangement understood that the then-forthcoming payment — which Senate investigators confirmed was made just two weeks after these discussions —would serve as a loan to the Biden “family,” not just to Hunter Biden.
An e-mail to Hunter Biden's partner from a top Chinese official on July 26, 2017 shows the Chinese energy company CEFC proposed a $5 million "interest-free" loan to the Biden family "based on their trust on [Biden] family[.]"
"Should CEFC keep lending more to the family?" pic.twitter.com/MGFizPqOdm
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) October 22, 2020
This email is part of a broader trove of documents that Bobulinski provided to U.S. Senate investigators with the Homeland Security and Finance Committees, and also to media outlets including Breitbart News. Other media outlets are reporting on the emails as well.
According to the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s recent report, $5 million was wired directly into the account in question two weeks later — and then Hunter Biden’s firm spent the next year wiring $4.8 million from there into his own firm’s account:
Less than two weeks later, on August 8, 2017, $5 million was wired from a CEFC-affiliated investment vehicle to a Delaware LLC, which spent the next year transfering nearly $4.8 million directly to Hunter Biden's firm, according to Senate investigators. https://t.co/Byyo3FNp3T pic.twitter.com/8XHHVTuFml
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) October 22, 2020
CEFC was a controversial energy company, as Breitbart News has reported. “The owner of CEFC, Ye Jianming, was among the most ambitious of Chinese tycoons before his business empire collapsed and he vanished into the Communist nation’s shadowy prison system,” Breitbart News’ John Hayward wrote earlier this week. “Ye was once portrayed as one of China’s greatest rags-to-riches stories, a humble park ranger who began making successful oil investments in his twenties and became a billionaire before he hit 40. He was marketed as an affable businessman foreigners could feel safe making deals with, well-connected but not an obvious tool of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
CEFC is at the center of the burgeoning Biden scandal. When Bobulinski went public on Wednesday night, he was the first source on one of the emails that the New York Post published from Hunter Biden’s laptop retrieved from a computer repair store in Delaware. One such story that the Post published was about Hunter Biden and the Biden family seeking a deal with CEFC, and in those original emails James Gilliar of J2cR emails Bobulinski about “remunerations packages” related to the CEFC deal.
“I am the recipient of the email published seven days ago by the New York Post which showed a copy to Hunter Biden and Rob Walker. That email is genuine,” Bobulinski said in his statement issued publicly.
Bobulinski had been, sources familiar with the matter told Breitbart News, cooperating with the Wall Street Journal for an investigation it is working on. But since the Journal has not published its story several days later after its staff had indicated it would, Bobulinski decided to go public on his own on Wednesday night — and made clear he is cooperating with Senate investigators.
In the original email, published by the New York Post, from Hunter Biden’s laptop, Gilliar references a breakdown of how money acquired would be distributed throughout the firm of which Bobulinski was CEO. The email says at one point that “10 held by H for the big guy.”
In his nearly 700-word statement, Bobulinski confirmed the authenticity of that email and further explained its meeting including that “the big guy” was a reference to former Vice President Joe Biden, the 2020 Democrat presidential nominee, himself.
“What I am outlining is fact. I know it is fact because I lived it. I am the CEO of Sinohawk Holdings which was a partnership between the Chinese operating through CEFC/Chairman Ye and the Biden family,” Bobulinski said. “I was brought into the company to be the CEO by James Gilliar and Hunter Biden. The reference to ‘the big guy’ in the much publicized May 13, 2017 email is in fact a reference to Joe Biden. The other ‘JB’ referenced in that email is Jim Biden, Joe’s brother. Hunter Biden called his dad ‘the Big Guy’ or ‘my Chairman,’ and frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals that we were discussing. I’ve seen Vice President Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business. I’ve seen firsthand that that’s not true, because it wasn’t just Hunter’s business, they said they were putting the Biden family name and its legacy on the line.”
Hunter Biden’s Firms Scored Reportedly Hundreds of Millions from Russians, Chinese, and Kazakhs AFP/Getty Images
KRISTINA WONG
Hunter Biden, son of 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden, has come under scrutiny for his business links to Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma while his father was vice president.
Now, a new book by author Peter Schweizer reveals Hunter Biden forged other business deals with individuals and entities tied with the governments of Russia, China, and Kazakhstan, that reportedly scored him hundreds of millions of dollars.
The book, titled Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite. , lays out how Hunter Biden and his business partners, in addition to his numerous Rosemont-branded entities and ventures, was deeply involved with an entity called the Burnham Financial Group.
Hunter and his business partner, Devon Archer, used Burnham to make foreign deals with governments and oligarchs, according to a copy of the book viewed by Breitbart News.
One of those oligarchs included Nurlan Abduov, the associate of another Kazakh oligarch, Kenges Rakishev. Rakishev is the son-in-law of the former vice prime minister of Kazakhstan, Imangali Tasmagambetov. Tasmagamvetov was also formerly the defense minister, and is now the Kazakh ambassador to Russia.
According to the book, an account Hunter regularly received funds from showed money arriving from a firm run by Rakishev in 2014:
A Morgan Stanley investment account from which Hunter regularly received funds shows money arriving from mysterious sources around the world. There is a $142,300 deposit in April 2014 from Kazakh oligarch–controlled Novatus Holdings. Kenges Rakishev, whose father-in-law is the former vice prime minister of Kazakhstan and a close ally of Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, runs the offshore firm.
While Burnham received funds from Kazakh oligarchs, Archer acted as a backchannel between Kazakhstan to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, according to the book. (Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz was a business partner with Biden and Archer in some of their ventures).
In a July 11, 2013, email, Kerry’s chief of staff David Wade wrote to Archer:
Devon: understand you spoke to the Secretary re having him call [Kazakh] Foreign Minister Idrisov today, can you let me know topics Idrisov wants to talk about/any requests he’ll have of the boss, so we can get paper prepared for a call. Hopefully, the situation on the home front will leave him time to do it.
Burnham also had business deals with two mysterious Chinese companies — Kirin Global Enterprses Limited and Harvest Global Investors, according to the book.
Kirin Global Enterprise Limited was an investment vehicle run by Xiangyao (or Yaojun) “Larry” Liu and Guo Jianfeng, according to Schweizer. “Very little is known about Kirin or its two principals, other than the fact that they invest heavily in mainland Chinese real estate,” he writes. Harvest Global Investors was a Chinese investment firm linked to the government in Beijing.
Burnham also had a financial relationship with Russian Oligarch Yelena Baturina, a billionaire with extensive political connections in Moscow and links to Russian organized crime, according to Schweizer. Archer said Baturina invested $200 million into “various investment funds” with which he was involved.
Burnham also got wrapped up in a $60 million fraudulent bond scheme to rip off union pension funds and the poorest Indian tribe in America, the Oglala Sioux, Schweizer writes.
In May 2016, Archer was arrested in New York and charged with “orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors and a Native American tribal entity of tens of millions of dollars.”
Some of the targeted were government employee or labor union organizations that had supported Joe Biden in the past. Biden has long described himself as a “union man.”
Although Hunter Biden was not charged, Schweizer writes, “his fingerprints were all over Burnham.” The legitimacy that his name and political status as the vice president’s son lent to Burnham was brought up repeatedly during the trial, he writes.
That status was used as a means of both recruiting pension money into the scheme and alleviating investors’ concerns, he writes. In an August 2014 email, Jason Galanis, who was convicted in the bond scheme, agreed that Burnham had “value beyond capital” because of their political connections.
Hunter Biden had an office at Burnham’s New York City offices on Fifty-Seventh Street, and during the trial, numerous witnesses came forward describing Hunter’s involvement with the firm, according to the book.
Schweizer writes these deals have long been a pattern with the Biden family, to include Hunter Biden:
With the election of his father as vice president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused to his father’s power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue’s gallery of governments and oligarchs around the world. Sometimes he would hitch a prominent ride with his father aboard Air Force Two to visit a country where he was courting business. Other times, the deals would be done more discreetly. Always they involved foreign entities that appeared to be seeking something from his father. Often, the countries in question, including Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, had highly corrupt political cultures.
In short, Hunter Biden was not cutting business deals in Japan or Great Britain, where disclosure rules and corporate governance might require greater scrutiny. These were deals in the truly dark corners of the world.
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Nearly half of Americans believe President Joe Biden’s actions have hurt the United States, while only 25 percent say his actions have improved the nation, a Wednesday Monmouth Poll revealed.
In less than six months, Americans’ opinions have drastically soured on Biden’s performance amid inflation, the deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan, the supply chain crisis, and the border crisis.
In July, 31 percent said Biden’s actions were helping the country, a six percentage point advantage over December. Only 34 percent said Biden was hurting the country in July, 12 percentage points less than December.
Among the top concerns for Americans is the challenge of paying household bills and avoiding Biden’s thirty-year high inflation:
About 3 in 10 Americans name either everyday bills (15%) or inflation specifically (14%) as the biggest concern facing their family right now. This far outpaces Covid (18%) or any other single issue as the top kitchen table worry in the country.
This past summer, far fewer Americans named either rising prices or household bills as their biggest concern (16% in July 2021) and the amount of concern over household bills was even smaller just over a year ago (8% in August 2020).
The poll also indicated five of the top six concerns Americans face are economic, with coronavirus the outlier at number one. Everyday bills, inflation, job security, the economy, and health care costs rank in the top six in respective order after the virus.
The economic woes have given 66 percent of Americans reason to indicate America is on the wrong track, with only 30 percent suggesting America is headed in the right direction under Biden.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – OCTOBER 15: Empty shelves are seen at an IKEA store on October 15, 2021 in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn borough in New York City. Executives at IKEA have warned of supply chain disruption that could last into next year leaving some stores without certain items. Stores in North America are expected to be hardest hit by product shortages first and then followed by stores in Europe. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Biden Lies Again, Claims He Was Golda Meir’s Liaison During the Six-Day War Mendacious? In the grip of dementia? Or both?
Mon Dec 6, 2021 Old Joe Biden is a serial liar as well as an elderly man in the grip of dementia, and it was initially hard to tell which one was kicking in on Thursday when he claimed that he served as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s liaison to Egypt during the Six-Day War in 1967. Golda Meir wasn’t prime minister of Israel during the Six-Day War, and Biden was an unknown law student at the time, but Biden did meet with her in 1973, so maybe he was just mixing up the two. Apparently this is a case of both Biden lying yet again about his life experiences and also forgetting where he was and when.
“I was saying to a couple younger members of my staff before I came over,” Old Joe began, “about the many times I’ve been to Israel. And I said – and then all of a sudden I realized, ‘God, you’re gettin’ old, Biden – I have known every prime minister well since Golda Meir, including Golda Meir. And during the Six-Day War, I had an opportunity to, uh — she invited me to come over because I was going to be the liaison between she and the Egyptians about the Suez, and so on and so forth.”
Biden is an accomplished panderer; he said this at White House Hanukkah menorah lighting celebration, apparently to show the crowd how pro-Israel he is, despite his administration’s consistently anti-Israel stance . But there is no way it could be true: Biden was 25 in 1967, and was attending Syracuse University College of Law, from which he graduated 76th in a class of 85 in 1968. By 1967, when he supposedly talking to the Egyptian government on behalf of Golda Meir, he had already embarked upon his career of lying. A Syracuse College of Law faculty report on December 1, 1965 stated that Biden “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution,” and recommended that he fail a legal methods course because of his plagiarism.
Biden’s defense of his actions was predictably sleazy. He wrote to the law school faculty asking that he not be expelled, claiming: “My intent was not to deceive anyone. For if it were, I would not have been so blatant.” He added: “If I had intended to cheat, would I have been so stupid?” Well, why not, Joe?
Biden even served up an early form of his “my word as a Biden” routine : “I value my word above all else. This is a fact which is known to all those who are or have been acquainted with my character.” Yes, he really wrote that. He even had the audacity to claim that as a law student who had already obtained an undergraduate degree, he “had misunderstood the rules of citation and footnoting.”
And now Joe would have us believe that Golda Meir surveyed the wide world and fastened upon one dishonest, plagiarist law student to serve as her mouthpiece in high-level negotiations with a hostile government during wartime. To be sure, Joe did meet with Meir in 1973, when he was just beginning his lengthy career of corruption and deception in the U.S. Senate. He had just come from Egypt, although whether he was actually serving as Meir’s official liaison is unclear. A classified Israeli memo about their meeting shows that he was practically as anti-Israel then as he is now, warning Meir against “creeping annexation” of territories it captured during the Six-Day War and demanding that Israel make concessions to the hostile powers surrounding it. According to Israeli columnist Nadav Eyal , Biden was “full of respect to the PM yet his ‘enthusiasm as he spoke’ signaled his lack of experience in the diplomatic field.” Sounds as if Old Joe hasn’t changed all that much.
It’s bad enough that the president of the United States is a frequent, habitual liar with a record of dishonesty that extends back 56 years. It’s even worse that the sycophantic media doesn’t take any notice of his lies, and continues to do all it can to prop up his disastrous administration and make it appear as if it isn’t the dumpster fire that everyone can see that it is. The corruption of the American body politic is coming from the top; an unprincipled old ward-heeler and political hack such as Biden should never have gotten anywhere near the White House. The fact that his arrival there was greeted with hosannahs and sighs of relief by the international political and media elites bespeaks an even wider corruption. And be prepared: Biden isn’t even close to being through lying.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) , The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad . His latest book is The Critical Qur’an . Follow him on Twitter here . Like him on Facebook here .
Biden throws a tantrum By Patricia McCarthy
Our hapless president’s speech on Tuesday was not a speech at all. It was a full-blown childish tantrum. While he was ostensibly celebrating his massive “airlift” of thousands of mostly-Afghan refugees, from the beginning it was clear he is extremely angry. He almost shouted his claim that his catastrophic misadventure in Afghanistan has been a smashing success . This is a huge lie and everyone knows it, even those trying to spin this debacle as a win.
In fact, Biden’s surrender has probably set a genocide in motion just as our betrayal of the South Vietnamese gave birth to the killing fields . Women and girls are sure to be brutalized.
Biden had promised for days that no American would be left behind but of course hundreds, perhaps even thousands, have been left behind. Some even made it to the airport and were then denied flights home by US forces on the ground there. Thousands of those who escaped were rescued not by Biden’s forces but by retired vets and private organizations who set out to do what the government would not.
Biden is, and has always been, a pathological liar of the worst kind, the kind who lies to boost his own ego no matter how easy it is to prove his dishonesty. His seething, wretched defense of this massive failure will haunt this nation for decades to come. He has single-handedly created a fully-armed terrorist state, a state surrounded by enemies of the US – China, Iran and Pakistan. Those countries now have access to the $90b worth of American weapons, military vehicles and aircraft, not to mention Bagram Air Base.
Our NATO allies will no longer trust us. Biden will be forever known as the most destructive, the weakest and most gullible president in US history. A better man would resign but Biden is not even a decent man. As his mad rant on Tuesday proved, he will never take responsibility for his fatal errors in judgment.
Biden blamed President Trump, whose actual plan had stabilized the country and would have worked if implemented, and he blamed the Afghan army whom he betrayed by withdrawing their air support and their financial support. Of course, they fled. Biden betrayed them as cruelly as any leader in history has abandoned his troops and allies. He can claim his decision to withdraw as he did was successful from now to kingdom come, but it was the most egregious foreign policy error in American history.
The deaths of those thirteen young soldiers who died last Thursday is entirely his responsibility and yet he could not even bring himself to salute at their dignified transfer as their coffins passed by; he just kept checking his watch as if he had somewhere more important to be. The man is without heart and soul. The few parents who spoke with him were shocked that he only talked about his deceased son Beau. That’s his go-to default reply to anyone else’s loss; he makes it all about him.
As the months of his administration slip by, it becomes clearer and clearer that he is something of a sociopath . Nick Arama agrees. He is congenitally unable to care. As for Americans still stranded in Afghanistan, he blamed them – for not getting to the airport, for being “dual citizens” as if that makes them less worthy of rescue.
Of course, it is not just Biden that is to blame. Those military clowns, the ones who just weeks ago were telling us that Covid was the gravest threat we face (Austin) or that ‘white rage” is worth investigating (Milley) are to blame as well. Whoever was giving the orders on the ground in Kabul should also be fired.
Who thought it was a good idea to have those young soldiers do crowd control in a sea of panicked Afghans? Who decided those busloads of Americans had to be turned back in favor of unvetted refugees? Whose decision was it to let the highly trained military dogs who were brought safely to the airport be left behind, turned loose to face certain death on the streets of that benighted city?
Every leader who participated in this ill-timed, fateful attempt at withdrawal should resign or be fired. As many observers have noted, a high schooler could have managed it all better. But then maybe it was all by design, engineered by Biden’s paymaster, China. Biden has been bought and paid by a long list of influence purchasers for nearly all his years in Congress. “Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.” (Bill Watterson). Biden sold us out long ago.
Nancy Pelosi, a horrid woman equally as without heart and soul, on Tuesday refused to have the names of the thirteen soldiers killed in Kabul read out on the floor of the House . That should permanently indict her for being the wicked witch she is. She is more devious, more calculating than the irresponsible Biden but every bit as beyond redemption as he is. She will do anything to try to convince the American people, for whom she has only contempt, that whatever she and her party do is righteous no matter how loathsome and totalitarian.
Like the schoolyard thug he is, Biden will defend to the death the treacherous plan he put into motion so he could make a grand speech on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. He ignored the advice of some advisers, wanted Ghani to lie about the Taliban’s success in July ( transcript here ), all to mount a bit of theater with him in the starring role. No matter what he says, things did not go as he envisioned so like a spoiled child, he threw a tantrum from the podium at the White House. Shame on him a thousand times.
In today's election, yours is a choice between freedom and globalism
By Mark Christian
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 about scholarships 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.
China and the 2020 Election By Steve McCann
On April 25, 2019, Joe Biden declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Seven days later, on May 3, 2019, the Chinese sent a diplomatic cable to the Trump Administration blowing up a 150-page draft agreement that had taken many months to negotiate. The cable was riddled with reversals by China that undermined core U.S. demands. In each of the seven chapters of the trade deal, China had deleted its commitments to change laws to resolve core complaints that caused the United States to launch a trade war: theft of intellectual property and trade secrets; forced technology transfers; competition policy; access to financial services; and currency manipulation.
A coincidence or a premeditated scenario?
Joe Biden, in his days in the Senate, was very partial to China , as he voted against revoking China’s most-favored nation status and in 2007 opposed the idea of applying any tariffs on China despite their obvious unfair trade practices. However, it was as Vice President that he became wholly enamored with the country and its leadership.
For example, while in China, Biden, in August of 2011, defended and approved of China’s one-child policy which brutally used forced abortions to implement the law. In the same year Biden was given the assignment, by Barack Obama, to be the point man on China due his close personal relationship with Xi Jinping, then Vice-President and heir apparent to the Presidency. (Xi Jinping is currently President and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the most powerful figure in China’s political system).
Due solely to Joe Biden’s influence, in 2011, less than a year after starting Rosemont Seneca Partners, essentially a three-man investment firm with Chris Heinz (stepson of John Kerry), Biden’s son Hunter, who had no previous experience in private equity, was in China to explore business opportunities with Chinese state-owned enterprises. These meetings occurred just hours before Joe Biden met with the Chinese president in Washington. Later in the same year, Hunter had a second meeting with many of the same Chinese financial powerhouses -- just two weeks after his father, the Vice President, conducted U.S.-China strategic talks in Washington with Chinese officials.
Joe Biden and Xi Jinping dine at the State Department, Valentine's Day, 2012
(Official White House Photo by David Lienemann , croppped)
Meanwhile Joe Biden never missed an opportunity to downplay China’s threat to the United States. In May of 2013, during a commencement speech he assured those concerned the Chinese were “going to eat our lunch” that they had nothing to be alarmed about as China had immense problems and an inability to think differently . In May of 2014 Biden described China as a nation incapable of producing innovative products and ideas. (Two weeks after declaring his 2020 candidacy Biden, in Iowa, said , “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man…they can’t even figure out how to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.” After a massive backlash, he walked back some of those comments a few days later by saying “I don’t suggest China is not a problem.”
In December 2013, Biden flew to Beijing on Air Force Two with his son Hunter on an official trip ostensibly to discuss tensions over disputed territories in the East China Sea. Joe and Hunter were ushered into a red-carpet meeting with a delegation of various Chinese officials. Hunter remained with the delegation while his father met with President Xi Jinping. During these meetings Joe Biden struck an extremely conciliatory and friendly tone with the Chinese leadership -- much to the dismay of America’s allies in the region.
Ten day later, Hunter’s company, Rosemont Seneca, signed an exclusive $1 Billion (later expanded to $1.5 Billion) deal with the state-owned Bank of China, creating an investment fund called Bohai Harvest, with money guaranteed by the Chinese Government. As Peter Schweizer, who was the first to unveil these conflicts of interest, wrote in his book Secret Empires “the Chinese Government was literally funding a business that it co-owned along with the sons of two of America’s most powerful decision makers” Rarely has there been a more stark illustration of being “compromised by a foreign power.”
And in 2014, another arm of Hunter’s budding business empire, Rosemont Realty, began negotiating multi-billion dollar deals with Gemini Investments, a Chinese firm with ties to the China Ocean Shipping Company Ltd. which reportedly operates as an extension of the Chinese military and who eventually acquired 75% of Rosemont Realty in order to purchase commercial real estate in the United States.
Anyone who has dealt with the Chinese Government or the myriad of entities controlled by the government can attest: any foreign business transaction with China always has a requisite or implied quid pro quo that oftentimes does not involve monetary considerations. Once entangled in this web it is nearly impossible to escape. It would be naïve to believe that the Biden family, particularly Joe, are not embroiled in this labyrinth of expectations and demands.
In the years and months before he decided to throw his hat in the ring, it had to be obvious to Joe Biden and in particular those close to him that his mental acuity is rapidly failing, not to mention that his and Hunter’s questionable business activities in China and the Ukraine would be exposed on a grand scale. Why then would he willingly take on a grueling 18-month marathon of running for president? As the timing of Biden’s announcement and Chinese abrupt volte face on the trade agreement implies, one must, therefore, assume he was coerced into declaring his candidacy as a pawn in the chess game the Chinese are playing in order to defeat Donald Trump in 2020.
If Xi Jinping coerced his old friend Joe Biden into running, then he placed his prestige and fate on the line that China would be able to hold out in the ongoing trade war and achieve a favorable outcome in any negotiations with Biden at the helm. While Xi Jinping is powerful, he still is one of seven members of a standing committee of the Politburo (25 members) that can oust him. At this point Xi Jinping cannot be perceived as losing face by caving to Donald Trump and reinstituting the agreement made in the spring of 2019.
Therefore, while the threat of further escalation in the trade war will recede there is little chance of anything substantive happening as intransigence will be the rule the day between now and November 2020. However, China’s growing internal problems and failing economy will dramatically escalate, which could force the Politburo to either remove Xi Jinping, or accept, with clinched teeth and a renewed determination to defeat Donald Trump, the basic terms of the May 2019 trade agreement.
Joe Biden’s everyday performance on the campaign trail reinforces the reality that he will not be the Democratic Party presidential nominee. Thus, whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party will, by default, be backed by the Chinese -- who will do whatever is legal, illegal or unethical to defeat Donald Trump. The actions the Russians were falsely accused of in the 2016 election will be child’s play by comparison.
It appears that the Chinese may have made a major blunder in April and May of 2019. A blunder with potential major ramifications for China and, if Donald Trump is defeated in 2020, the United States.
Senate Finance Committee Probes Biden-Linked, Chinese Military-Boosting Tech Sale Tom Brenner/Getty Images
HARIS ALIC
15 Aug 2019 2,058
3:44
The Senate Finance Committee is probing the Obama administration’s 2015 decision to approve the sale of a U.S. company with insight into “military applications” to the Chinese government and an investment firm run by former Vice President Joe Biden’s youngest son, Hunter Biden. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the committee’s chairman, sent a letter to the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Thursday requesting documents relating to the sale of Henniges, a Michigan-based automotive company, to Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) and Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). The latter was formed in 2013 by a merger between a subsidiary of the Bank of China and Rosemont Seneca, a firm started by Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry.
Since AVIC was a subsidiary of the Chinese government and Henniges, the producer of “dual-use” anti-vibration technology with military application, the deal required approval from the Obama administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The panel — made up of representatives from 16 different federal bodies, including the departments of State, Treasury, and Defense — is required to review any transaction that could lead to a foreign person gaining control of an American business.
In question is whether CIFUS was influenced by Obama administration officials, most notedly Joe Biden and John Kerry, who had an interest in seeing the deal move forward.
“The direct involvement of Mr. Hunter Biden and Mr. Heinz in the acquisition of Henniges by the Chinese government creates a potential conflict of interest,” Grassley wrote.
The senator noted in his letter that AVIC’s bid for Henniges should have immediately set off alarm bells in the Obama White House. In 2007, AVIC “reportedly involved in stealing sensitive data regarding the Joint Strike Fighter program,” which it later “reportedly incorporated … into China’s J-20 and J 31 aircraft.”
Even more troubling, however, is that bid was facilitated at the same time China was staking out a more adversarial role in global affairs. At the time, Beijing was suspected of undermining U.S. cybersecurity by underwriting hackers stealing governmental data. There was also simmering tension over disputes in the South China Sea.
Despite the threat to national security, the $600 million deal was approved by CIFUS, with AVIC purchasing 51 percent of the company and BHR taking ownership of the other 49 percent. Upon purchase, an industry newsletter stated the deal was the “biggest Chinese investment into US automotive manufacturing assets to date.”
In his letter to Mnuchin, Grassley compared the deal to the Uranium One scandal, which arose when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved the sale of a Canadian mining company to Rosatom, the state-owned Russian nuclear energy conglomerate. It later emerged that both investors in the company and Russian energy officials had donated heavily to the Clinton Foundation.
“As with the Uranium One transaction, there is cause for concern that potential conflicts of interest could have influenced CFIUS’ approval of the Henniges transaction,” Grassley wrote. “Accordingly, Congress and the public must fully understand the decision-making process that led to the Henniges approval and the extent to which CFIUS fully considered the transaction’s national security risks.”
This is not the first time that Hunter Biden’s ties to China have caused grief for his father’s political career. As Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends , Hunter Biden signed the $1.5 billion deal creating BHR in 2013 only ten days after visiting China aboard Air Force Two with his father.
Eight Things to Know About the Biden Family’s Culture of Corruption The family of former Vice President Joe Biden has earned millions of dollars since the start of his political career, often from dealings with heavy political overtones. Biden, the frontrunner among 2020 Democrats, often touts his middle-class bonafides on the campaign trail. Although Biden did not become a multi-millionaire until he left the White House in 2017, the same cannot be said of his family. In fact, several members of the Biden clan became immensely wealthy over the span of the former vice president’s 40-year political career.
Breitbart News is providing an in-depth breakdown of a few instances in which Joe Biden’s political career and his family’s financial interests seemed to intersect.
1. Joe Biden’s younger brother, James Biden, secured generous bank loans.
In the wake of Joe Biden’s upset election to the U.S. Senate in 1972, his younger brother James was able to secure a series of generous bank loans to start a Delaware night club.
Although James Biden had no business experience and a net worth of less than $10,000 at the time, he was able to arrange more than $160,000 in start-up capital for the venture. When the nightclub proved to be unsuccessful, generating more than $500,000 of debt by 1975, James Biden and his business partners were thrown a life-line by a Pennsylvania bank that loaned him a further $300,000.
During the same time period James Biden was receiving the extensive lines of credit, Joe Biden was sitting on the Senate Banking Committee, which had purview over the financial sector. A specific jurisdiction of the committee was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which provides bailouts to banks if they should become over-leveraged.
2. Joe Biden’s top campaign contributor hired his youngest son Hunter right out of law school.
Shortly after Joe Biden was reelected to the U.S. Senate in 1996, his largest campaign contributor, the credit card issuer MBNA Corp., hired his son for an undisclosed role. The job raised eyebrows from good government groups because MBNA employees had just donated $63,000 to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign in what appeared to be a coordinated manner to sidestep federal campaign finance regulations.
Clouding the picture even further was that, at the time, Hunter Biden was a 26-year-old recent graduate of Yale Law School with no prior banking or business experience. Both father and son defended the job offer, claiming nothing improper had or would result because of the arrangement.
“Unfortunately, no matter where I went to work, some people would make an issue of it,” the younger Biden told the Delaware News Journal in November 1996 when the job was announced.
Despite his role being unknown at the time of his hiring, when Hunter Biden left the company in 1998 to join the Clinton-era Commerce Department it was as a senior vice president.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Joe Biden was championing bankruptcy reform legislation endorsed by financial interests and credit card companies like MBNA.
3. An MBNA executive purchased Biden’s house for the full asking price in a deal that appeared facilitated by the company.
A senior MBNA executive purchased Biden’s 10,000 square foot colonial mansion in the Wilmington, Delaware, suburbs for the asking price of $1.2 million in February 1996 . The sale garnered notice because larger and newer homes in the vicinity sold for less. The issue became a minor campaign problem for Biden’s reelection but was quickly dismissed when the senator provided local media appraisal forms showing his home was worth the value for what it was sold.
Byron York, however, investigated the matter in an exposé for the American Spectator and found that properties appraised around the same value in the vicinity had “sold for a good deal less” than at what they were valued on paper.
“In comparison, it appears [the MBNA executive] simply paid Biden’s full asking price,” York wrote. “And, according to people familiar with the situation, the house needed quite a bit of work; contractors and their trucks descended on the house for months after the purchase.”
As York also noted, it appeared that MBNA may have played a role in facilitating the purchase. Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that “in 1996 MBNA reimbursed [the executive] $330,115 for expenses arising from the move.” Of that total, $210,000 “was to make up for a loss [the executive] suffered on the sale of his Maryland home.”
4. Hunter Biden remained on MBNA’s payroll while Joe Biden was writing bankruptcy reform legislation.
Throughout the early 2000s, Hunter Biden remained on MBNA’s payroll as a consultant while his father was writing and pushing the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. The arrangement, which did not become public until after the law was passed, started in 2001 after Hunter Biden had left his position in the Commerce Dept. MBNA was paid monthly consulting fees, with some claiming they ranged upwards of $100,000, to advise the company on online banking issues.
The 2005 bankruptcy tightened regulations to make it extremely more difficult to declare bankruptcy. It was heavily favored by MBNA and other giants in the banking and finance sectors. Many consumer protection advocates, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), have claimed the bill benefited special interests at the expense of consumers. Some have even suggested the law only served to hasten and aggravate the recession of the late 2000s.
As previously reported by the New York Times , Biden worked against many of his own fellow Democrats in Congress to ensure the final version of the bill was free of provisions opposed by companies like MBNA.
Biden “was one of five Democrats in March 2005 who voted against a proposal to require credit card companies to provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying only the minimum amount due each month,” the Times noted.
5. Joe Biden paid his family members with campaign cash.
During his failed 2008 presidential campaign, Joe Biden paid more than $2 million to his family members and their business. According to the Washington Times, the money went to a company that was a long-time employer of Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens. Biden also directed funds to a law firm started by his old campaign treasurer, which at the time also employed his youngest son Hunter.
6. James and Hunter Biden sought to monetize off Joe Biden’s political standing.
In 2006, close to when Joe Biden assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launched his second presidential campaign, James and Hunter Biden purchased a hedge fund called Paradigm Global Advisors. Although neither man had a strong background in finance, James and Hunter Biden reportedly believed they could leverage Joe Biden’s political connections to their benefits.
“Don’t worry about investors,” James Biden purportedly told Paradigm’s senior leadership upon taking over the fund, as reported by Politico . “We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”
Paradigm’s executives claim that James and Hunter Biden saw the hedge fund as a way to “take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money” to Joe Biden’s campaign account.
“We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” James Biden allegedly told Paradigm’s staff.
Hunter and James also tried to solicit labor unions to invest their pension funds in Paradigm by relying on Joe Biden’s long record of advocating in favor of collective bargaining.
The efforts proved to unsuccessful, though, with James and Hunter Biden choosing to strip and sell the company off by 2010 after a number of bad decisions, including partnering with a Ponzi scheme.
7. James Biden’s received a $1.5 billion contract to build houses in Iraq while Joe Biden was overseeing the region.
After his foray into the world of high finance ended disastrously, James Biden joined Hillstone International LLC as a vice president in 2010. The company, a subsidiary of Hill International, at the time, was pursuing technology and construction projects around the globe.
Although the company had been losing money for some time, James Biden’s arrival resulted in something of a reversal in fortune. Within six months of James Biden joining the firm, Hillstone was the recipient of $1.5 billion dollar contract to build 100,000 houses in war-torn Iraq. The deal, which was never finalized because outside funding failed to materialize, quickly caught attention as Joe Biden was overseeing the Obama administration’s policy in the region.
Both the Obama White House and Hillstone denied Joe Biden had anything to do with the deal, pointing to the fact the contract was awarded through a South Korean group working to build homes in Iraq. Despite the denials, Irvin Richter, the founder of Hill International, did admit James Biden may have had something to do with the deal.
“Listen, his name helps him get in the door, but it doesn’t help him get business,” Richter told Fox Business in 2012 when discussing James Biden. “People who have important names tend to get in the door easier but it doesn’t mean success. If he had the name Obama he would get in the door easier.”
Complicating matters was the fact James Biden was likely to get rich if the deal went through. Fox Business reported that a group of minority partners, which included James Biden, owned 49 percent of Hillstone. The other 51 percent was owned by the company’s parent group, Hill International. Given Hillstone’s profit breakdown structure, James Biden and the other minority partners would have been eligible to split more than $735 million after the deal was completed
8. Hunter Biden’s firm scored a $1.5 billion deal with the Bank of China only days after Joe Biden and his youngest son visited the country.
Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends that Hunter Biden’s firm signed a multi-billion dollar with a subsidiary of the state-owned Bank of China only ten days after he visited the country with his father aboard Air Force Two.
In a SiriusXM Breitbart News Tonight radio interview from last year, Schweizer explained how the Biden-China deal unfolded:
“In December of 2013, Vice President Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a visit to Beijing, China,” said Schweizer. “To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely criticized on that trip for going soft on China. So basically, no challenging them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.”
So Hunter Biden followed his dad around to Romania, too?
By Monica Showalter
Hunter Biden was quite the devoted little sproutling, following his dad around wherever he went.
According to this NBC News report :
In the final year of the Obama administration, an American lawyer traveled to Romania to meet with a businessman accused of orchestrating a corrupt land deal.
The businessman was Gabriel “Puiu” Popoviciu, a wealthy Romanian real estate tycoon. The lawyer brought in to advise him was Hunter Biden , the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Hunter Biden’s work for Popoviciu in 2016 went unreported at the time, but Joe Biden’s involvement in Romania was very much public. The vice president was among the leading voices pushing the government to crack down on corruption.
At Fox News, Sean Hannity called it a "pattern." Hunter Biden following his dad around -- to China, Ukraine, and now Romania -- and somehow always came away with big-dollar business deals. Kind of the way then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used Bill Clinton as her bagman to scarf up donations to the Clinton Foundation after Hillary made some foreign policy decision. That's certainly the way it happened with the 2011 passage of the U.S.-Colombia free trade pact, according to Peter Schweizer in his book, " Clinton Cash ."
Hillary had her Bill. Joe had his Hunter. It's worth it to take this pattern where it goes, which is an emerging picture of modern bribery.
Imagine what it must have been like in the not-so-long-ago years when Joe Biden was vice president of the U.S. -- big, powerful, full of demands to advance the Obama political agenda.
You're a scruffy post-Soviet regime or third-world country. You need some kind of help from nearby predators, you want to avoid sanctions, or your country's just generally a hellhole.
In comes Biden, who just happens to be the guy assigned as 'point man' to handle your case, with his cocaine-using son in tow.
In order to get what you want from Joe, you need to set up some kind of meeting with sonny boy - who's traveling with Joe, supposedly there to do "business deals." Sonny boy doesn't know anything about business, or the industries he could be dropped into, or for that matter, following the rules on cocaine use in the Navy. He's unemployable. But he's there with dad, waiting for his post-dad meetings, too.
And he walks off with big-dollar business deals, often from no-show jobs, nice big money streams, the flying dollar-bill wake of Joe Biden's tour. After about the first or second one, you'd start to notice a pattern.. Joe blows in, a payoff will be required.
The strange passage of Colombia's free trade pact in 2011 , based on a sudden change in Democrat sentiment of being utterly against it to being at least grudingly for it, was also reportedly enacted through a payoff. The Clinton Foundation got a big $800,000 payment with Hillary Clinton as sitting Secretary of State and voila, Clinton was in favor of passage. In a way, the House Biden setup paralled the Clintons-Clinton Foundation setup. It's now worth it to check now if that, or any trade pact passed during the Obama years -- and there were several -- also could have involved Joe.
Because obviously, word would have gotten around. You're a scruffy third world country, your job is to watch the gringos closely, see how you can get them to help you, see what it takes. You'd watch one, two, many international transactions with comparable countries. You'd watch closely to see what it takes.
I know this, because I've spent a lot of time in such countries, speaking with their officials. "What do we have to do?" is the most commonly asked question I've heard the world over.
As John Hinderaker at Power Line notes - the answer was bribery, an updated modern-day version of bribery that can't be pinned as bribery by the long arm of the law the way walking into a smoke-filled room with a black bag full of cash can. He writes :
Joe Biden didn’t do anything wrong? A time-honored method of taking bribes is having them paid to a family member, usually in exchange for nominal or nonexistent services. It is comical to watch “reporters” pretend not to understand this.
They all know this, which is why this sort of thing happens. For Biden, the first shakedown of the scruffy foreigners is the hardest. But by the third or fourth, Biden doesn't have to say a thing. He just jets in with his son in tow and the everyone knows what to do.
This is how hideous the House Biden operation got to be. As Hannity noted, the cash that followed the visits was quite a pattern.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and make a forecast. With Ukraine, China and Romania being brought up, it's likely these aren't the only countries we are going to be hearing Joe and Hunter Biden's name attached to. They had a heckuva Pop-and-Junior tag-team racket.
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