My colleague Peter Schweizer’s runaway bestseller, Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, first revealed that the Biden family received some $31 million from the highest levels of Chinese intelligence at the same time Hunter was paying the vice president’s bills. Schweizer believes that there is a slam dunk case to indict Hunter Biden.
JOE BIDEN'S MAKE CHINA GREATER SO HUNTER GETS HIS CHECK
China’s economic warfare hollowed out our economy in the same
dedicated fashion, aiming low to aim high, capturing our
industries from the bottom so that we laughed at all the ‘Made in
China’ junk and we went on laughing until it became impossible
to find anything else. No aspect of our economy was too
unimportant to outsource and no angle was overlooked. Our
retail sector now consists of buying American brands that are
made in China from Chinese third party sellers on Amazon.
Soon we’ll be buying Chinese brands on Chinese platforms like
Alibaba.
Patriotism vs. Globalism in 2020: A Country Is at Stake
For the global majority, globalization has been a whole different story. Income inequality rose markedly both within and among countries. In the United States, despite a great increase in productivity thanks to new technologies, inequality rose. Underemployment, job insecurity, benefit loss — all increased.
VERONIKA KYRLENDO
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
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
Unless We Abandon Globalism, China Will Win
China doesn’t care about international law, should we?
Chinese spy balloons have briefly captured the nation’s imagination, but they’re just another in a series of surveillance layers that begins with satellites and ends with phone apps. The spy balloons seem odd, but they reveal the thoroughness and dedication of Beijing’s data hounds who are not satisfied with hacking us, embedding thousands of spies in our universities and tech firms, but want that added edge with slow-motion spying on our bases and defenses.
The balloon may seem silly but it reveals a rigorous mindset that ought to be frightening.
China’s economic warfare hollowed out our economy in the same dedicated fashion, aiming low to aim high, capturing our industries from the bottom so that we laughed at all the ‘Made in China’ junk and we went on laughing until it became impossible to find anything else. No aspect of our economy was too unimportant to outsource and no angle was overlooked. Our retail sector now consists of buying American brands that are made in China from Chinese third party sellers on Amazon. Soon we’ll be buying Chinese brands on Chinese platforms like Alibaba.
The same obsessive attention to detail that served China so well in its economic war is at play in its war plans. Having lost an economic war to China, we’re sleepwalking into a military defeat.
Even on our end, we’ve lost war games against China over and over again.
“The trend in our war games was not just that we were losing, but we were losing faster,” Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote stated. We’re losing because we have no serious plan to win and that’s because we don’t really believe that there will be a war and so we don’t need to.
China is serious. We’re not. Xi lives in a zero-sum world. So does the rest of the Communist regime. They believe that for them to win, we have to lose. They’d rather not fight a war and they would prefer that we decline into oblivion while selling our souls for consumer gadgets, but they are seriously preparing to fight and win a battle that will establish them as the world power.
Our leaders speak of China as being a “competitor” rather than an enemy. That’s a concession on our end, but China has no intention of merely competing, it wants to end the competition.
We don’t. And that’s why we’re setting ourselves up for defeat.
Despite the defeatism in some circles, China is not naturally superior to us. But, like most of our opponents, it’s nationalistic while we have decayed into a globalist apathy that claims to care about the world, but without any particular attachment to any part of it including our own.
China knew that it could stomp over Hong Kong and that it would excite no more opposition from most of the western world and its leaders than the manifold human rights abuses all over the world. Similarly, it anticipates that if it can manage to take Taiwan, the story will vanish in the news cycle the way that fighting in dozens of other places in the world have.
In the globalist paradigm, everything matters and so nothing matters. China’s human rights abuses deserve no more and no less attention than those in Africa, the Middle East, or the rest of Asia. Untethered from national interests, we have come to view China’s advance through the dispassionate lens of human rights activism, outraged over everything and dedicated to nothing.
Globalism seduced us into handing out pieces of our economy to any nation willing to take it on the disproven theory that binding nations together through collective economic interests would end war and usher in a collective humanity, a European Union, a North American Union, a United States of Africa, a New Middle East, an Asian Federation, and finally a United Earth.
“No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other,” Thomas Friedman idiotically argued in his paean to globalization, ‘The World Is Flat’. “No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain.”
Someone forgot to tell Russia and Ukraine.
America’s Cold War diplomatic strategy, carved out by FDR and Truman administration holdovers, hinged on a multilateralism built around the UN and international organizations, that at times suspiciously resembled a mirror image of the USSR, to avert a world war. The Soviet Union easily infiltrated and took over the multilateral organizations, beginning with the UN, and built alliances with third world nations that kept free western nations on the diplomatic defense.
Every Republican administration until Reagan put all of its efforts into maintaining this house of cards as the only way to avert the horrors of nuclear war. The more domestic propagandists terrified us with nuclear bombs falling on our cities while children were taught to cower under desks (not in the hopes of saving their lives, but of terrifying their parents into clamoring for a diplomatic solution), the more we turned to the globalism that was slowly destroying us.
And then the Soviet Union fell.
Having learned nothing, or perhaps everything, the Clinton administration made globalism into the axis of our foreign policy. The world was divided between progressive regimes, abiding by international law and institutions, and reactionary ones opposed to the international order. Instead of returning to our national interests, we put our military at the disposal of the UN, we fought to bring democracy to countries united only by the democratic desire to kill all infidels.
Biden complained that China violated “international law” by flying spy balloons over our territory. China responded by accusing us of violating its territory. This tedious tit-for-tat legal wrangling, so familiar from the Cold War, is also entirely besides the point. Do we object to China spying on us on the grounds of international law or national interest? Anti-American leftists and a few rightists excel at pointing out where America has violated international law. But nations that prioritize their interests view violations of international law as strategic, not moral. We shouldn’t care that China violated international law, but we should care that it violated our territory. And that it did so as part of a larger program to spy on us in order to military defeat us.
To globalists, this is a minor matter. A war between China and America is to be avoided not because they care about America, but because all wars are bad as a matter of principle. They interfere with the free flow of commerce, raise ocean temperatures and teach little boys warlike behavior. But as Americans, China’s military and economic threat to us should be foremost.
The myth of international law is dying a slow death in Ukraine. But it’s died many times before, in two world wars and countless massacres, wars and genocides since, especially in Africa. The international conclaves of “people of goodwill” have accomplished nothing except to build lifetime careers bemoaning the millions of deaths that they have utterly failed to prevent while claiming that those track records of failure somehow endow them with moral authority.
Moral authority cannot be vested in multilateral institutions, only national ones because only nations can be animated by a clear and defining sense of right and wrong rooted in their cultures that they implement by risking the lives of their people. That doesn’t mean that nations are necessarily right, either always or at all, but, unlike globalist ones, they are meaningful.
Globalism claims to represent everyone while representing no one. Its ambitions are as vast in scope as they are empty. Its world government of abstractions commands the loyalty of no one even while basing everything discredited theories that have never worked in the real world.
China’s ambitions are equally global, but it is not globalist. It has a clear plan to expand its territories locally and its economic empire globally. The only way we can even begin to fight it is by making the vital nationalistic calculation that we must be at the epicenter of our interests. China is not a threat to the international order, but to us, and it has effectively used the international order to weaken us, bleeding our economy and shackling our military operations.
No one wants a war with China, but, as WWII showed us, the surest way to stumble into one is to pompously proclaim the dogma of international law that we have no intention of defending, while having no notion of how to deal with an enemy that isn’t seeking a diplomatic solution.
England and France were convinced until the last minute that Hitler wanted a diplomatic solution. The FDR administration believed that the Japanese diplomats were there to negotiate in good faith until the bombs fell from the sky on Pearl Harbor. China’s attack, if it comes, will be equally sudden, ruthless and decisive unless we wake up from our daze and deal with reality.
(If COVID was deliberately released from a lab, it was a mere underpowered trial run.)
America’s leaders, Democrats and Republicans, still live in a globalist fantasy in which most issues can be worked out across conference tables, and in the worst case scenario, sanctions can be used to bring recalcitrant regimes to the table. North Korea, Iran and now the Ukraine war have taught them nothing. The globalist fallacy is that everyone wants to be globalists.
They don’t. Instead, serious nations want to be global world powers.
International law was created to bind us to be reactive, to appease and to bribe other nations to join us in the globalist utopia. As a result we have lost our edge, betrayed our allies, and put ourselves on a path to defeat. If we are going to confront China and avoid a war, we need to take a leaf from its playbook and remember the lessons of our own history. Weakness and empty rhetoric impress no one. America should be strong and silent. We should let our actions speak louder than words, make few threats, but demonstrate that we would win any war.
China, its goods and services, its companies and its scientists, should have no place in this country. The entire question of being open to Chinese commerce should not even be considered until the day that China is willing to open its borders to us the way that we have to it. Our enemies have clearly shown us what we have forgotten: a military rides on the economy.
We have a limited window in which China has out-competed us economically, but not militarily, unless we shift that balance of power soon, then we will be stuck in a weaker position. And we will need to retreat from Asia entirely while trying to maintain what’s left of our economy. By then, there will be negotiations, not over the status of Taiwan, but the status of Hawaii.
Either we will shed globalism and rediscover our national interests or, like much of Europe, the question of national interests will become irrelevant because we will have limited scope for asserting them. We will retreat into globalism, not to restrain our strength, but to protect our weakness, and then we will be a few generations away from total national extinction.
It’s not too late, but if we refuse to remember what makes nations great, it will be.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Reader Interactions
Hunter has reportedly sold five paintings worth $75,000 each to an anonymous buyer. Hunter’s art dealer, Georges Bergès, has previously boasted he had strong ties to businessmen in Communist China, which has concerned many due to the Biden family’s business ventures abroad.
“We are 95% sure that that artwork went to China,” Comer said. “We don’t know where exactly that went to in China, but we’re going to try to find out when we get subpoena power.”
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
Biden family business dealings with China is a ‘national security issue’: Schweizer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hew-Pm1d-0
Peter Schweizer’s new book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win tells the story of how Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) husband Richard Blum was part owner of a Chinese firm that allegedly sold computers with spyware chips to the U.S. military. The military has never been able to calculate how much sensitive data these computers allowed China to steal.
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmlcEBAiIs
Kevin McCarthy Pledges Subpoenas for 51 Intel Agents in Wake of Hunter Biden ‘Twitter Files’
11 Dec 20220
2:26
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said Saturday on FNC’s “One Nation” that he will bring the 51 intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was Russia collusion to testify at a congressional hearing.
Host Brian Kilmeade asked, “We saw the revelations coming out of Twitter as Elon Musk is unmasking the corruption that existed there and the denials that they testified about. So for you personally you have another move you want to make. Not only do we want to hear from the former executives of Twitter and the other entities, but you have something else you want to say.”
McCarthy said, Yeah, I do. This is egregious what we are finding. They should not have section 230 to start out with, but we also have to go further. What did Facebook and Google do as well because they became an arm of the Democratic Party and an arm of government.”
He continued, “Those 51 intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was all wrong — was Russia collusion — many of them have a security clearance. We are going to bring them before committee. I’m going to have them have a hearing. Why did they sign it? Why did they lie to the American public? A Clapper, a Brennan? Why did you use the reputation that America was able to give to you more information, but use it for a political purpose and lie to the American public?”
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism. Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’ investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Dow Soars on Election Day, Banking Stocks Lead the Way
3 Nov 202020
3:01
The U.S. stock market roared into election day, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average over 450 points higher.
The Dow climbed by more than 680 points, or around 2.5 percent Tuesday morning, before retreating from their highs.
With two hours of trading left, the Dow is up 460 points, or 1.74 percent. The Nasdaq Composite is up 1.5 percent. The S&P 500 is also up 1.5 percent. The small-cap Russell 2000 is up 2 percent.
Ten of the 11 sectors of the S&P 500 were up. The Energy sector was down 1.2 percent. The Financials sector was the best performing, up 2.3 percent for the day, lead higher by the bank component’s 2.7 percent gain and the consumer finance subsector’s 2.8 percent gain. The KBW Nasdaq Bank Index, which tracks the stocks of the biggest banks, rose 2.5 percent.
Donald Trump’s victory for 2016 set off an explosive rally in stocks, defying widespread predictions that he would lose or that if he won it would cause the market to crash.
Many of the big Wall Street firms have Joe Biden as the runaway favorite to win the presidency, just as they had Hillary Clinton the favorite four years ago. Morgan Stanley said in a note to clients Tuesday that they estimate a 76 percent chance that Biden wins and the Democrats take control of the Senate. They estimate just an eight percent chance that Trump wins and GOP holds the Senate. The Wall Street firm gives just a thirteen percent chance of a mixed result with Biden winning but the GOP holding the Senate.
Biden has raised tens of millions of dollars from Wall Street. During his time as a U.S. Senator from Delaware, Biden earned the nickname “Plastic Joe” for his willingness to promote legislation friendly to credit card issuers, including a law that made it harder for bankrupt customers to get debt relief.
Most analysts think the economy and the stock market could get a big boost if Democrats sweep the election. A unified government would be more likely to quickly pass a stimulus bill, likely giving stocks a short-term boost and ameliorating the drag from new restrictions aimed at stemming the pandemic’s surge.
Biden’s immigration and visa programs would likely import enough workers to ease wage pressure, boosting corporate profits by lowering compensation costs. An increase in foreign workers also generates new customers for U.S. companies, especially U.S. banks and large retailers. Biden is viewed as likely to lift tariffs on China, allowing U.S. companies to send more jobs to cheaper overseas labor markets.
Biden has promised a rush of higher taxes and new regulations, including climate change schemes that would make energy more costly and damage U.S. manufacturing.
Patriotism vs. Globalism in 2020: A Country Is at Stake
BY VERONIKA KYRLENDO
Given the extraordinary pace of events in America and the world this year, it is not hard to imagine that a bystander — perhaps a bug-eyed alien who has been following the series "The Earth" — would be pleased with the dynamics of the show. But he also would be puzzled at the rapid twists of the plot. The U.S., for example, enters a 2020 season in all its might and glory, with the strong economy, where unemployment for everyone is low, where reduced taxes and regulations promise further growth, and the basic indices of economic activity spell "victory" for the funny-looking guy who made it happen. Then — BAM! — a "deadly virus" hits — eh, unimpressive...the mortality rate would have been much higher for the sake of the show; 2 percent is a rookie number (would be even lower if the infected were not placed in the nursing homes). Nonetheless, America goes into lockdown, losing trillions of dollars. Unemployment soars. Then — BAM! — massive protests accompanied by rioting, looting, arson, vandalism, and sheer violence erupt as a response to the incident of police brutality. The whole system is declared evil and beyond repair. The crime rate soars. American flags are burned — not in Iran or North Korea, but in Washington, D.C. Some parts of the country that were the envy of the world look like a war zone. Whoa, a startled viewer would think — what just happened?
What is happening is that November gets closer, and the country finds itself in a situation that may be described with a mathematical catastrophe theory used to study discontinuous processes. An example of a discontinuous process would be an arched bridge to which more and more weight is added. At first, little effect is seen as the weight on the bridge is increased — the bridge begins to bend almost imperceptibly. At a certain point, however, enough weight is added to the bridge that it collapses. A sudden change in a discontinuous process is called a catastrophe.
The American model right now has one active variable, the economic model, and one active parameter, a necessity to choose one out of two courses of its development. Speaking scientifically, we have reached a divergence point that requires a system to follow one of the two possible paths that are mutually exclusive. At this point, both of them are equally probable, and the system "freezes" — to land on one of the paths, it needs a push. It is difficult to accurately prognosticate the system's behavior at this point, but one can model it. Once the choice is made, the return to the divergence point is impossible — if you stand before the abyss, you may either walk around it or take a step into it.
Which paths lie before America? The first one is presented — and has been practiced for the last 20 years — by the globalism aimed to secure America's leading place in monopolar world. The main tools of it are supranational entities such as international organizations, multinational corporations, and financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. Even though globalization has been pictured by academia and media as an endless pool of growth, opportunities, and progress, it has been marked by substantial shortcomings. For example, under the new regime of enhanced financial mobility and power, with greater volatility of financial markets and increased risk, real interest rates have risen substantially. This has discouraged long-term investment in new plants and equipment and stimulated spending on the re-equipment of old facilities along with a large volume of essentially financial transactions — mergers, buybacks of stocks, financial maneuvers, and speculative activities. This explains why overall productivity growth in the member-countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development fell. So did gross fixed investment, and so did GDP growth. But the elites have done well despite the slackened productivity. Because globalization has helped keep wages down, while increasing real interest rates, the upper 5 percent of households have been able to skim off a large fraction of the reduced productivity gains, thereby permitting elite incomes and stock market values to rise rapidly. For the multinational corporations that shaped foreign policy by engaging in lobbyism, globalization has also been great. One of their main objectives that they achieved was cheaper labor sources. Labor is often cheapest, and least prone to cause employer problems, in authoritarian states. Capital moves to such friendly investment climes, shifting resources from the more expensive to the less costly locale. (That is why the MNCs have vocally opposed the Trump administration's escalation of trade tensions, tightening of immigration restrictions, and disruption of global value chains.)
For the global majority, globalization has been a whole different story. Income inequality rose markedly both within and among countries. In the United States, despite a great increase in productivity thanks to new technologies, inequality rose. Underemployment, job insecurity, benefit loss — all increased.
The Trump administration disdains globalization and practices a healthy and much needed protectionism. It withdrew from free trade and other deals and viciously attacked globalization structures nurtured by the previous administrations: U.N., NATO, WTO, International Criminal Court, and now WHO, which proved shockingly unprofessional and frankly hostile to the U.S. interests.
If Trump gets four more years as a president, he may get to the holy of holies of the economic globalism — the IMF and the World Bank — which will undoubtedly face a debt crisis due to the downfall of the world economy. Ironically, the COVID-19 hysteria that became an act of desperation for the Democrats — whether it was a projected event or a natural crisis that would have been a shame to waste — now plays against the global financial leviathan and its masters. According to none other than George Soros, the COVID-19 pandemic is a one-two financial punch for developing economies. Not only has it put extraordinary pressure on budgets worldwide, but it has also caused a sharp exodus of capital from emerging markets. JPMorgan Chase & Co. predicts that 1 in 5 emerging-market countries will default on their debt obligations — meaning that the core banks may collapse. If some federal reserve banks fail, the government may nationalize them — but no doubt Trump would not save them, as Obama did in 2008. That would fatally undermine the economic foundation of the Democrats for good; that's why Trump's victory is not an option for them.
If Biden wins, he, as a true O'Biden-Bama Democrat, will have to save the failing banking system by unprecedentedly increasing the national debt in a weakened economy. The previous model that balanced emission with trade deals would not be possible to execute in a severely damaged global economy. That is why Biden's victory would lead to a delayed catastrophe, but with lower chances of surviving it, because the condition of the country will deteriorate — his leftist policies will make sure of it.
The choice we as a country will make in November is clear: Trump and patriotism or Biden and globalism. Development or decline. It is just that simple.
Follow Veronika Kyrylenko, Ph.D. on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Image: Fox News via YouTube.
WALL STREET BANKSTERS KNOW HOW WELL OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER SERVED AND PROTECTED THEM DURING THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN THEY CAUSED.
A remarkable article in The American Prospect—a liberal publication that supports Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”
In other words, Wall Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23 million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.
“According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”
Wall Street, Republicans and
militarists back Biden campaign
9 July 2020
Anyone who wants to know what type of policies will be pursued by a Biden administration in the event the Democrats win the November 3 presidential election has only to look at the social and political forces that are rallying to his campaign.
BLOG EDITOR: BIDEN WAS ENDORSED VERY EARLY BY WAR PROFITEER AND PARTNER FOR RED CHINA SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN.
They include Wall Street, prominent Republicans and veterans of the Obama national security team.
Thanks to strong support from big business, the presidential campaign of the former vice president outraised President Trump’s reelection campaign in June, according to figures announced by the two campaigns last week. Joe Biden raked in $141 million, while Trump’s campaign took in $131 million.
It was the second consecutive month that Biden collected more in campaign contributions than Trump, following a $6 million edge in May, $80.8 million to $74 million, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The Trump campaign still leads in cash in the bank, with $295 million on hand as of July 1, as it had few expenses during the Republican primaries, where Trump had only token opposition. Biden’s campaign was effectively broke at the time of his breakthrough victories in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 3, but he now has amassed a war chest of at least $125 million, according to published estimates.
ActBlue, the online fundraising vehicle for the Democratic Party as a whole, took in $392 million in June, shattering all previous records, the bulk of it in smaller donations and contributions from first-time donors. This is an indication of the widespread popular hostility to Trump, exacerbated by his vitriolic attacks on the mass protests against police violence that took place throughout the month, as well as his refusal to take any serious action to stem the coronavirus pandemic.
BLOG EDITOR: THE RICH KNOW WHO WILL SERVE THEM BEST! ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH IN AMERICAN HISTORY OCCURRED DURING THE BANKSTER REGIME OF OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER.
But a major factor in Biden’s fundraising surge has been a series of virtual events featuring former President Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Kamala Harris, at which wealthy contributors were invited to give the maximum donation of $5,600 directly to Biden as well as much larger sums to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the political action committee favored by the Biden campaign, Priorities USA, which expects to spend $200 million by itself to support his election.
Under the terms of an agreement between the Biden campaign and the DNC, the Biden Victory Fund can receive checks as large as $620,600 from wealthy donors. The money is then distributed in smaller amounts to the campaign, the DNC and various state parties in order to comply with campaign finance regulations.
According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”
Trump raised $33.5 million from the broader category of finance, insurance and real estate. He was competitive with Biden among the real estate moguls, who view Trump as one of their own, but trailed badly, with only $7.8 million, from the “securities and investment” subcategory.
In other words, Wall Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23 million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.
Along with the support of the stock exchange and financial institutions, Biden is winning support from sections of the Republican Party. This includes the well publicized Lincoln Project, established by former Republican campaign operatives Reed Galen, John Weaver, Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, with the support of other former party officials like Jennifer Horn, former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, and George Conway, a prominent Republican lawyer and husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
The Lincoln Project began running television and internet commercials denouncing Trump from a right-wing foreign policy standpoint, criticizing him as soft on China and Russia. One ad, released after the New York Times launched its fabricated and unsubstantiated charge that Russia paid bounties to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, features a former Navy SEAL who attacks Trump for not ordering military action to kill Russians. The ad is titled “Betrayal.”
BLOG EDITOR: BOTH BIDEN AND GEORGE W BUSH ARE GLOBALIST FOR OPEN BORDERS AND ENDLESS WAR. THE BUSH FAMILY, LONG PARTNERED WITH THE 9-11 INVADING SAUDIS, STARTED TWO WARS AGAINST IRAQ WHICH ARE STILL FILLING THEIR POCKETS.
Another political action committee, “43 Alumni for Biden,” consists of hundreds of former officials in the Republican administration of George W. Bush (the 43rd US president). They declare they are “choosing country over party” in the November election, stating: “We believe that a Biden administration will adhere to the rule of law ... and restore dignity and integrity to the White House.” As a Super PAC, the group can raise unlimited sums of money to run ads attacking Trump or boosting Biden.
The final component in the rapidly coalescing coalition of reactionaries supporting the Biden campaign consists of former military-intelligence officials of the Obama administration, who have made a killing in the lucrative business of “strategic consulting” and now hope to return to power in a Biden administration. Several of them, including former deputy defense secretary Michele Flournoy and former deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state Anthony Blinken, have signed on as Biden’s top national security advisers.
A remarkable article in The American Prospect—a liberal publication that supports Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”
It documents the creation of a strategic consulting firm called WestExec Advisors (named after West Executive Avenue, the street outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington D.C.). WestExec was founded by two lesser operatives, Sergio Aguirre, former chief of staff to Samantha Power, UN ambassador under Obama, and Nitin Chadda, a former aide to Obama Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.
These two recruited Flournoy and Blinken to serve as the group’s biggest “names.” Flournoy was widely expected to become secretary of defense if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and she is once again at the top of the list for Pentagon boss under Biden.
Under Trump, Flournoy served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the CIA director’s External Advisory Board, before leaving once the 2020 presidential campaign heated up. She is a notorious warmonger, and The American Prospect article details her role in advocating continued US military support to Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen, which has resulted in $3 billion in weapons contracts for Raytheon. WestExec principal Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary, is a member of Raytheon’s board of directors.
WestExec quickly made a splash in Washington with its launch party attended by top former Obama national security aides such as Susan Rice, Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough. It lined up a list of clients so potent that neither WestExec nor the Biden campaign would release the names, for fear of exposing the fact that Biden’s foreign policy advisory group is a wholly owned subsidiary of the big military contractors.
One particularly noxious principal at WestExec is former Deputy CIA Director Avril Haines, who, as The American Prospect put it, “helped design Obama’s program of using drones for extrajudicial killings.” In June, the Biden campaign announced that Haines would oversee foreign policy for the Biden transition team.
While the former drone missile chief prepares plans for the future Biden administration, the current advisers, with their lucrative “consulting” affiliations, are listed by The American Prospect as follows: “Nicholas Burns (The Cohen Group), Kurt Campbell (The Asia Group), Tom Donilon (BlackRock Investment Institute), Wendy Sherman (Albright Stonebridge Group), Julianne Smith (WestExec Advisors) and Jake Sullivan (Macro Advisory Partners). They rarely discuss their connections to corporate power, defense contractors, private equity, and hedge funds, let alone disclose them.”
This is what Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and their various liberal and pseudo-left apologists have embraced as the alternative to the fascistic Trump administration—a government of warmongers and corporate shills, no less committed to the defense of the interests of the American ruling elite.
Fear and uncertainty dominate Jackson Hole central bankers’ meeting
The annual Jackson Hole conclave of central bankers, which concluded over the weekend, underscored the incapacity of global financial authorities to devise any policies either to bring about economic growth or counter the mounting contradictions in the financial system.
Reporting on the meeting, held in virtual format this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Financial Times noted: “It was the head of Singapore’s monetary authority who best summed up the biggest fear gripping the virtual Jackson Hole conference this year.
“‘We’re not going back to the same world,’ Tharman Shanmugaratnam warned.’”
The central initiative at the gathering was the decision by the Fed’s key policy-making body to maintain interest rates at their ultra-low levels for an indefinite period and keep pumping money into the financial system.
The decision, announced by the Federal Open Market Committee as the conclave opened and elaborated on in a keynote speech by Fed Chair Jerome Powell, was in effect a guarantee to Wall Street that its demand for “forward guidance”—lower interest rates for longer—would be met.
The Fed said it would no longer be guided by a 2 percent inflation rate limit in determining its interest policy, but would instead focus on an “average” rate of 2 percent, meaning that the cheap money regime could continue even if prices rose above that level.
As for dealing with the slump in the global economy—the most serious since the Great Depression—and combating the potential for further storms in the financial system following the market meltdown in mid-March, there were no answers, as underscored by the remarks of the Singapore finance minister.
“We’ve got to avoid a prolonged period of high levels of unemployment, and it’s a very real prospect,” he said. “It is not at all assured that we will get a return of tight labour markets even with traditional macroeconomic policy being properly applied.”
It was a significant comment because one of main themes in remarks by central bank chiefs was that monetary policy alone would not be sufficient to restore growth, and government intervention was needed to boost the economy. But, as Shanmugaratnam noted, even if “properly applied,” there were no guarantees of success.
According to the Financial Times, the notion that central bankers “need to face the reality of permanent upheaval and long-term economic damage” was the “main theme” of the event.
One of the most frequently cited academic papers produced for the meeting was prepared earlier this month by Colombia University academic Laura Veldkamp on the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The paper said that the biggest economic effects of the pandemic “could arise from changes in behaviour long after the immediate health crisis is resolved.” A potential source of such a long-lived change was a shift in the “perceived probability of an extreme, negative shock in the future,” and that “long-run cost for the US economy from this channel is many times higher than the estimates of the short-run losses in output.”
The paper continued: “This suggests that, even if a vaccine cures everyone in a year, the COVID-19 crisis will leave its mark on the US economy for many years to come.”
In other words, the pandemic was not only a trigger event, acting on the contradictions that had built up in the economy and financial system, but a transformative one as well.
With the Fed now having formally committed itself to the endless supply of cheap money to Wall Street, attention will turn to the European Central Bank (ECB), which is also conducting a strategic policy review, to see whether it goes down the same road.
While the governing council, under the presidency of Christine Lagarde, may be inclined to move in the same direction as the Fed, it would face certain opposition from Germany’s Bundesbank, which has expressed opposition to the easing of monetary policy.
A member of the governing council told the Financial Times, “we will look at it,” but the Bundesbank would be “very nervous” about it.
“We are not out of firepower by any means, and to be honest, it looks from today’s vantage point that we were too cautious about our remaining firepower pre-COVID,” he said, adding that there are times when we “need to go big and go fast.”
The actions of the Fed have done nothing to boost the real economy, as an increasing number of companies announce that temporary layoffs will be made permanent.
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that a survey conducted by Randstad RiseSmart found that “nearly half of US employers that had furloughed or laid off staff because of COVID-19 are considering additional workplace cuts in the next 12 months.”
This indicates that the pandemic has been a trigger for a major restructuring of employment conditions.
The effects of the Fed’s policies and the further monetary easing to come are focused on the stock market, with Wall Street indexes rising to the record levels they achieved in February. The main beneficiaries have been the high tech companies—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (the owner of Google) and Facebook—which together comprise more than a fifth of the Nasdaq index.
The extent of their rise and growing financial and monopoly power is indicated by the results of an analysis carried out by Bank of America Global Research, reported by the business channel CNBC. It found that the market capitalization of the major US tech firms, now standing at $9.1 trillion, was greater than the market capitalization of the entire European market, including the UK and Switzerland, at $8.9 trillion. In an indication of the massive shift that has taken place, the research note pointed out that in 2007, total European market capitalization was four times that of US technology stocks.
Joe Biden's Susan Rice: Alejandro Mayorkas
It's one thing for doddering Joe Biden to utter something inchoate about the border crisis he himself created, but quite another when a sane person comes out to explain and justify the same senile fact-free gibberings as something normal.
Which brings us to Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas, who was sent out by the White House to do the Sunday talks, in what's obviously the same role that Susan Rice played in the Benghazi days of 2012. He's the designated liar.
Here he is, on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, via YouTube:
Here he is on CNN, with Jake Tapper, via YouTube:
While he's unflappable, he isn't quite as good a liar as Rice was, given that he laid out a lot of damning facts, calmly and coolly, apparently in the vain hope that his demeanor would entice the press to simply glide on by with those facts as something normal.
To wit, we learned that contrary to what the Biden administration told us earlier about "mass deportations," more than 10,000 illegal border crossers, many at that squalid encampment in Del Rio, Texas, have not all been deported back to Haiti (as the administration claimed earlier). They've been released into the U.S., some with court dates, some with requests to get court dates, all of whom are free to move about the country.
"Approximately, I think it's about ten thousand or so, twelve thousand," Mayorkas told "Fox News Sunday."
"It could be even higher," Mayorkas said. "The number that are returned could be even higher. What we do is we follow the law as Congress has passed it."
He justifies it as simply following the law, effectively converting the Border Patrol into an escort service for tens of thousands of illegal border crossers, with the occasional one picked out for deportation photos to presumably keep the Sunday talks and discontented independent voters driving Biden's poll numbers down happy.
The numbers that Mayorkas said were returned came to about 3,000 thus far, but he made sure to say that number could be higher. Question: If 12,000 have already been released into the interior of the U.S., where is he going to get the 'higher' number of migrants to send back, supposedly on Title 42 COVID concerns?
The released migrants of course have no COVID concerns to worry about. We learn that none of other 12,000, or 14,000 or however many it may be, have been tested for COVID - (or measles, leprosy, leishmaniasis, mumps, tuberculosis, malaria or the whole host tropical diseases they may be bringing in with them) - as Mayorkas sent them on their way into the U.S. interior on other grounds. Masks for your two year-old, proof of vaxx from you as you try to buy groceries or ride a plane, but no testing at all for unvetted foreign nationals entering the country illegally in search the best benefit packages.
Mayorkas kept justifying it as following the law, on the grounds that all 12,000 of them, most of them previously classed as refugees from 2010 and settled in reasonably decent countries such as Chile and Brazil, are in dire need of asylum and each should be free to make his or her case.
Wallace pointed out that some 30,000 more were in the pipeline for this kind of 'asylum' processing, and the good result the first batch of asylum-seekers got, entering the U.S. illegally and being allowed to stay, certainly would serve to notify the others. According to Gallup, some 158 million people worldwide are interested in moving to the United States, so the pipeline may be very long, but that instant relief, instant papers, and instant escort service on the spot from the Border Patrol now, ultimately led by Mayorkas, certainly should make illegal entry more attractive than legal entry, particularly for people with few skills, low education, zero knowledge of the English language, or a criminal record or two.
The Border Patrol, see, is an escort service, he pretty well said. Asked about the "patently false" as Jake Tapper put it, narrative about Border Patrol agents on horses using "whips" (which ignorant reporters confused with split reins used in rough roadless terrain to keep horses from strangling on brush) to supposedly beat migrants illegally entering the country, Mayorkas was particularly bad. The Border Patrol agents, he suggested to Wallace, were "individual persons" acting in their own capacity rather than standard agents acting according to their training. He made gushy comments praising the Border Patrol as a whole, but these guys, he effectively explained, were bad apples, kind of like Derek Chauvin.
He got worse when he was asked by both Tapper and Wallace about how these agents now under professional investigation could expect to be judged fairly given that Joe Biden had already declared, Queen of Hearts-style, that "those people will pay." He refused to answer Tapper's question as to who ordered the agents to the river crossing where illegals were pouring into the U.S., and then said the only purpose for the mounted patrols was to "gather information and sometimes help people." Apparently, they were supposed to help the foreign nationals illegally entering our country in, instead of protect the border.
Mayorkas demonstrated that he was one cool, slippery character, someone who packages the wide open border as normal now and something to get used to, He repeatedly downplayed the extent of the crisis even as both Wallace and Tapper tried to bring the surge in numbers up. He admitted that more than tens of thousands were let in, not sent back, and then insisted that the Border Patrol was now a migrant escort service.
Then in his contentment, he declared the immigration system "broken" as if he were not the guy who broke it.
What kind of a smooth liar and charlatan is this? He's obviously the designated liar, the spin master, the normalizer of the crazy. What a valuable guy he is for Joe Biden. And what a disaster for the country.
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