The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15 million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Beyond those from Wall Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]
As Breitbart News reported, Biden’s campaign is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on Wall Street, according to CNN analysis, and Wall Street executives and employees have donated more than $74 million to elect the former vice president.
Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from financial firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted from Wall Street.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
By Mark Krikorian
New York Post, May 31, 2023
Excerpt: But as in so many other areas of government policy, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security is set on brazenly violating the immigration law and the Constitution until somebody stops it.
AMLO and Biden: Agents of Immigration Chaos
By Phillip Linderman
American Conservative, May 26, 2023
Excerpt: As Biden’s initiative played out over months, President Lopez Obrador, for once, issued no protest, apparently as oblivious as his American counterpart to the looming unintended consequences. Blinded by his own open-border ideology, the stubborn AMLO seems never to have analyzed the impact of Washington’s unilateral migrant policies on Mexico’s national sovereignty. Much more subtle than previous Yanqui strong-arm tactics, President Biden was nevertheless blithely unleashing powerful outside forces that would trample Mexico.
U.S. Government Sanctions Foreign Companies for Censorship While Encouraging It at Home
The U.S Department of State has sanctioned Iranian tech company Arvan Cloud, along with its two co-founders and its United Arab Emirates-based affiliate, for “their roles in facilitating the Iranian regime’s censorship of the Internet in Iran.”
Meanwhile, the very same U.S. Department of State has funded efforts to pressure western tech companies to censor Americans. Earlier this year, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) called out the State Department for funding the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization that worked to blacklist conservative media companies for censorship and demonetization.
In its press release announcing the sanctions, the U.S. Treasury condemns Arvan for helping Iranian authorities “control and censor incoming and outgoing traffic,” and blocking websites at the request of the Iranian government.
Arvan is being sanctioned under the provisions of E.O. 13628, a Trump-era executive order that allows for the sanctioning of companies that assist the Iranian regime’s efforts to censor its citizens.
“The United States is committed to holding accountable those who seek to undermine freedom of expression and suppress dissent, and to call out regimes who deny their citizens this right,” Treasury Under Secretary Brian Nelson said.
The sanctions met with immediate criticism from Mike Benz, a Trump-appointed former State Department official who now runs the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), which fights against internet censorship.
“Our government is leading the crusade to censor the internet, while sanctioning other countries for censoring their own internet. This is an ‘open society for thee, closed society for me,'” Benz told Just the News.
“There is an incredible myopia right now in the Biden foreign policy establishment. They still use free speech talking points from 2016, as if the last seven years of U.S. domestic speech crackdowns went unnoticed by the international community. It hasn’t.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
THERE IS A COMMONALITY AMONG THESE PEOPLE:
1.) THEY'RE GAMER LAWYERS.
2.) For their corporate paymasters, Mexico and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce these people work for an endlss flood of illegals to keep wages depressed and vote dem for more!
3.) THEY ALL WORK HARD TO EXPAND THE LA RAZA "The Race" Mexican welfare state now border to open border.
4.) THEY HAVE A LONG DOCUMENTED HISTORY OF LYING TO THE AMERICA PEOPLE.
5.) THEY ARE FAVORED AND FUNDED BY THE BIGGEST CRIMINALS ON WALL STREET.
6.) THEY ARE ALL BANKSTER BRIBES SUCKERS. MOST HAVE MADE FORTUNES SUCKING BANKSTER IN THE FORM OF 'SPEECH FEE' BRIBES.
7.) MOST ARE SERVANTS OF THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS, AND IN PARTICULAR, GEORGE SOROS.
8.) ALL ARE DEDICATED TO PROTECTING THE HIGH TECH BILLIONAIRE CLASS WHO WANT NO CAPS ON IMPORTING 'CHEAP' LABOR. NEARLY 80% OF SILICON VALLEY TECH WORKERS ARE FOREIGN BORN.
9.) ALL STAGE THEMSELVES AS 'POPULIST' BUT IN REALITY ARE CLOSET REPUBLICANS.
10.) ALL ARE DEDICATED TO N.A.F.T.A AS DEMANDED BY THEIR CORPORATE PAYMASTERS. N.A.F.T.A WAS WRITTEN BY GAMER LAWYER PRESIDENT BILLARY CLINTON AND THEN SEN. 'CREDIT CARD' JOE BIDEN.
11.) ALL HAVE BEE ACCUSED OF BEING SOCIOPATHS, AS ARE MOST LAWYERS.
12). BEING GAMER LAWYERS, THEY ARE A PROTECTED WHITE COLLAR CRIMINALS WHO POCKET THE LOOT THEY STEAL AND LAUGH AT THE REST OF US FOR BEING SO FUKING STUPID AS TO HAVE LET THEM RUN THE COUNTRY.... INTO THE GROUND AS THEY FILLED THEIR POCKETS.
HOW MANY OF THESE PIGS ARE GAMER
LAWYERS ON THE TAKE?
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) (WHAT ABOUT THE CHINA BIDEN PENN CENTER?) and the Obama (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family (FOUR GAMER LAWYERS - JOE, HUNTER, JAMES, FRANK) corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the Warren (GAMER LAWYER) and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption (ADD GAMER LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS AND HER LAWYER HUSBAND AND THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY, LAWYER CHUCK SCHUMER AND GEORGE SOROS’ RENT BOY GAMER LAWER TONY BLINKEN AS WELL AS CON MAN ADAM SHIFF). BRIAN C JOONDEPH
IS LYING GAMER LAWYER JOE BIDEN FROM SCRANTON MIDDLE AMERICA OR JUST ONE MORE SLUT FOR WALL STREET CRIMINALS?
The Biden Crime Family Comes Undone
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
The Biden family is notorious for being the crookedest clan not only in Delaware, but in D.C.
Biden Family Values: They like to live large
Joe Biden likes to advertise himself as ordinary 'Scranton Joe' who's a family man and "devout" Catholic to the public.
A look at news rolling out about Biden's extended family in the wake of recent scandals suggests a different story. Far from being Lunchbucket Joe, House Biden is more like Venezuela's Maduro family, or Chavez family, or Cuba's Castro oligarchs. Cut to the chase and throw in Beijing's princelings or Russia's oligarchs, who frequently make cameo appearances. Not surprisingly, most claim to have a soft spot for "the common man."
Some photos of "the life" can be viewed here, here, here, here, and here.
Some headlines to give you the flavor:
Children of Venezuela’s elite including ex-leader Hugo Chavez’s daughter flaunt wealth
Fidel Castro’s son enjoying a millionaire vacation, while Cubans are starving
RICH KIDS OF INSTAGRAM IS INSPIRING A REALITY TV SERIES
Sound like the Bidens?
All we have to do is look at the latest story from the Daily Mail about how Joe used his "pull" to get his ne'er-do-well niece Caroline a fancy new job she'd never have otherwise gotten as a convicted criminal on probation for a $100,000 credit card theft.
President Biden helped his convict 31-year-old niece Caroline Biden land an interview for a job at Masimo Corporation, whose owner is one of his biggest donors, but she balked at the $85,000-a-year salary, records from Hunter Biden's laptop show.
Caroline, the daughter of Joe Biden's brother Jim and his wife Sara, in 2017 pled guilty to buying more than $100,000 worth of makeup on a stolen credit card.
She managed to get out of a grand larceny charge and the two-year prison sentence that carried, but was sentenced to two years' probation, which she wanted to serve in Los Angeles to be near her cousin Hunter Biden.
How the hell she managed to avoid prison for that is as mysterious as how Hunter Biden got into Yale. That kind of stuff happens When You're A Biden, which almost sounds like a Broadway song. What other Scranton Joe family has a "big guy" who can get every relative, down to nieces and nephews, out of any jam they get themselves into.
It wasn't just her. Hunter Biden was time and time again spared charges and jail time over his tax evasion, his falsification of his gun permit application, evidence of bribery and influence peddling, and his numerous drug incidents. He lived a wild and free-spending life at Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood as recently as 2018, around the time when he was occasionally driving old dad's Corvette from the Biden family garage where the misplaced classified documents were held. He seemed to have gotten a sweet deal in his string of homes around the Venice, California area.
Donations, it should be noted, tended to follow from these various "saves," as the Daily Mail noted in its report.
The entitlement mentality of this Biden scion of political privilege was stratospheric. The Mail continued:
Records show Jim Biden had asked Hunter to convince his cousin Caroline to accept a job, after a lifetime of only holding cushy jobs she had secured through her family name, according to the Free Beacon.
Emails show the job she was interviewing for in July 2018 at Masimo promised $85,000 per year plus a guaranteed 10 percent bonus plus stock options.
'That's below minimum wage in California after taxes,' Caroline wrote in an email to her father. 'I cannot take this job. I have never made this little money in my life.'
Caroline said she could not accept a job that would pay her 'less than $180,000.'
She then appeared to 'bomb' the interview, get passed up for the job, but was offered an internship at the company as a favor to her uncle Joe.
'I didn't get the job,' Caroline texted her cousin Hunter. 'I was given an intern job at 31 years old because of your dad asking him to give me something even though I bombed it.'
By July 28, Caroline texted Hunter that his father Joe was 'done' with her.
That suggests that a family culture of entitlement has been festering for a long time at House Biden. There was no sense of gratitude, let alone expectations of having to strike out on one's own. The Big Guy was always there for them -- yet at the same time, curiously absent as a parent who could teach his offspring and other relatives any sense of right and wrong. They didn't have that at all in that family.
More evidence of the entitlement mentality of the Biden princelings could be seen in the Vogue writeup of Naomi Biden's wedding. Naomi is the daughter of Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden's granddaughter. She fully expected to hold her wedding at the White House even though that had never been done beyond immediate family in the past. She even used the White House as a convenient crash pad, with Joe's consent:
When the couple’s lease ran out on their DC apartment, they asked Nana and the president if they could move in for a few months while wedding planning, along with their mini Australian shepherd, Charlie, who can often be seen gamboling on the South Lawn with the Bidens’ German shepherd, Commander. “I try to remind myself it’s the White House, but it also gets normalized over time,” says Naomi.
Naturally, Naomi and the rest of House Biden have their upscaling of standards and expectations.
Here's how she saw her White House wedding:
Naomi enters the Green Room inside a beehive of giddy activity: hairdresser, make-up artist, stylist Bailey Moon and two Ralph Lauren designers, Andrea and Lorenzo, who have come as keepers of the custom gown, quick to jump into the frame and help fluff and smooth the mille-feuille organza, charmeuse, and crinoline skirt.
“Like every little girl, I had a vision in my head—it was Grace Kelly’s dress I loved,” admits Naomi, who with her Audrey Hepburn brows and honey-colored hair is not a far cry from the Princess of Monaco (after all, a White House wedding is our country’s version of a royal one).
Ahhh, a royal wedding. Because she's a royal and has her privileges. It figures.
It gets worse when we get down to brand names here:
The bride and groom climbed a ladder to cut a seven-foot-tall, eight-tier lemon cake with buttercream frosting, while nearby, a dessert bar included everything from 20-inch apple pie (the groom’s cake) to the president’s favorite Graeter’s chocolate chip ice cream. “He used to be a Breyers guy all the way but we’ve gotten him to upgrade to Graeter's,” Naomi says.
Breyer's? Eeeew.
That wasn't all of it, either.
“I do know [Jill Biden] lost sleep over the fact that I was planning to serve turkey sandwiches at the lunch,” Naomi adds. (They amended the menu to chicken pot pie, as a surprise for the father of the bride, as it is Hunter’s favorite and the dish Dr. Biden cooks for him every year on his birthday.)
Turkey sandwiches to wedding guests? How dreadful. How very lunchbucket.
Obviously, this is a hell of a princeling class of privilege encircling the House of Joe Biden. Like all of these princelings cited, including the trashy Latin American ones, they are virtually all socialists who declare themselves to be looking out for the common man. Yet as their regimes of total power settle in, the nomenklatura activity begins, with every unworthy and tainted relative holding their hand out and being treated with deference even in the middle of crime sprees by the powers that be. We saw that with the Castros, the Chavezes, the Maduros, the oligarchs of Russia, the princelings of China and now we see it with House Biden.
What kind of trash is this? It's influence, it's entitlement, and its ill-gotten gains to the most unworthy people on earth. That's Lunchbucket Joe's real game and it's a disgusting one, no different from Maduro's.
Image: Anthony Quintano, via Wikimedia Commons (extracted image) // CC BY-SA 2.0
CUT AND PASTE YOUTUBE LINKS
IMAGES OF JOE BIDEN’S MANSIONS:
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a33809100/joe-biden-real-estate-homes/
· Hides in his basement because his handlers fear that if he spends too much time on the campaign trail he’ll say something to let voters know how monumentally dumb he actually is.
· Has a family that received an estimated $30 million to $40 million in bribes from countries like China and the Ukraine.
Reflections on Sleepy Joe
Exactly how and where will he lead us?
The most important election of our lifetime – perhaps in all U.S. history -- is upon us.
Here are some thoughts on the Democrat presidential candidate:
· Spent 47 years in office without accomplishing anything noteworthy -- who was ever and always a willing tool for the leadership of the Democrat Party.
· Has become a bobble-head for the socialists who now run his party.
· Took three months to issue a limp-wristed disavowal of the riots which are rocking our republic.
· Equates occasional police misconduct with business districts in flames, nightly looting, the murder of cops, and assaults on innocent bystanders.
· Thinks white supremacists pose a greater threat to America than Antifa, which he says is “an idea” not an organization. With Joe, you never know if he’s simply parroting progressive propaganda or really is that stupid.
· Wants to demolish the border wall and defund ICE, and once called illegal immigration “a gift” – that keeps on giving for the left.
· Said 150 million Americans died from “gun violence” since 2007 and 120 million of us died from COVID-19. There goes 80% of the population.
· Does press availabilities where he takes two questions – from reporters he knows are friendly.
· Has rallies which could be held in a broom closet.
· Thinks the president doesn’t have the authority to fill Supreme Court vacancies close to an election.
· Can’t quote the best-known phrase in the Declaration of Independence. (Joe: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created. by the, you know, you know the thing.”) Did he ever read the document? How about the Constitution?
· Hides in his basement because his handlers fear that if he spends too much time on the campaign trail he’ll say something to let voters know how monumentally dumb he actually is.
· Has a family that received an estimated $30 million to $40 million in bribes from countries like China and the Ukraine.
· Made his fortune in politics. Harry Truman used to say you can always tell the crooked politician. He’s the one who started poor and ended rich.
· Chose a running mate who’s ranked the furthest left member of the Senate and made her bones smearing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.
· Refuses to denounce anti-Semitism in his party.
· Says America is an “idea” that was “never lived up to.” Funny, with the greatest democracy in the world – that pioneered civil liberties and saved humanity from Nazism and communism -- I thought we were doing pretty well.
· Thinks that taxes are a way to jump-start the economy and wants a $15-an-hour minimum wage to help small businesses that have been hit so hard.
· Changes his position on fracking every 15 minutes or so, depending on focus groups.
· Says we can “change America for generations to come.” Visions of Venezuela dance in my head.
· Is the leader of a party that wants to end free elections by abolishing the Electoral College, making Puerto Rico and D.C. states, and packing the Supreme Court.
· Has the absolute loyalty of The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and the rest of the mainstream media that’s been lying to you for decades.
· Whose supporters include Hollywood, Big Tech and academia – who’ve spent years stifling free speech, indoctrinating our children, and hating America.
· Was endorsed by the Revolutionary Communist Party.
· Can’t wait to destroy the economic recovery now underway with another lockdown, so he can “build it back better” – with Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren as the architects.
· Wants a national mandate for face masks – which the CDC says are worthless unless they’re hospital-grade.
· Spent the entire campaign whining about Trump’s Supreme Court nominations but refuses to give us a hint of whom he’d put on the high court.
· Whose mental deterioration is more painfully apparent with each passing day, reflected in an inability to speak coherently, gaffes galore, and embarrassing memory lapses, as when he recently said, “We need to stop four more years of George.” If he can’t remember the name of the incumbent he’s running against, how would he perform as president?
· Has a shocking inability to control his temper, reflected in such bizarre outbursts as telling an African American interviewer that he “ain’t black” if he’d even think about voting for anyone else.
Is this the man Americans want to lead the country and the free world (out of the Covid crisis, against our foreign foes and the anarchists who are trying to tear America apart) for as long as he can remain upright?
Exclusive — ‘This is China, Inc.’: Emails Reveal Hunter Biden’s Associates Helped Communist-Aligned Chinese Elites Secure White House Meetings
PETER SCHWEIZER and SEAMUS BRUNER
Newly obtained emails from a Hunter Biden business partner lay out in detail how the Vice President’s son and his colleagues used their access to the Obama-Biden administration to arrange private meetings for potential foreign clients and investors at the highest levels in the White House. These never-before-revealed emails outline how a delegation of Chinese investors and Communist Party officials managed to secure a private, off-the-books meeting with then-Vice President Joe Biden.
In a 2011 email, Hunter Biden’s business associates also discussed developing relations with what one called “China Inc.” as part of a “new push on soft diplomacy for the Chinese.” These emails are completely unconnected to the Hunter Biden emails being released by the New York Post.
These and more explosive never-before-revealed emails were provided to Schweizer by Bevan Cooney, a one-time Hunter Biden and Devon Archer business associate. Cooney is currently in prison serving a sentence for his involvement in a 2016 bond fraud investment scheme.
In 2019, Cooney reached out to Schweizer after becoming familiar with the revelations in his 2018 book Secret Empires. Cooney explained that he believes he was the “fall guy” for the fraud scheme and that Archer and Hunter Biden had avoided responsibility.
Archer, who was also convicted in the case, saw a federal judge vacate his conviction. But an appellate court overturned the lower court judge’s ruling, reinstating Archer’s conviction in the case. Archer, Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner, awaits sentencing.
Cooney, their associate who is currently serving a prison sentence on his conviction in the matter, later reestablished contact with Schweizer through investigative journalist Matthew Tyrmand. From prison, Cooney provided Schweizer with written authorization, his email account name, and password to his Gmail account to retrieve these emails. He authorized, in writing, the publication of these emails— notable because it is the first time a close associate has publicly confirmed Hunter’s trading on his father’s influence.
The emails offer a unique window into just how the Biden universe conducted business during the Obama-Biden Administration. These associates sought to trade on Hunter Biden’s relationship with, and access to, his father and the Obama-Biden White House in order to generate business.
For instance, on November 5, 2011, one of Archer’s business contacts forwarded him an email teasing an opportunity to gain “potentially outstanding new clients” by helping to arrange White House meetings for a group of Chinese executives and government officials. The group was the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the delegation included Chinese billionaires, Chinese Communist Party loyalists, and at least one “respected diplomat” from Beijing. Despite its benign name, CEC has been called “a second foreign ministry” for the People’s Republic of China—a communist government that closely controls most businesses in its country. CEC was established in 2006 by a group of businessmen and Chinese government diplomats.
Re China Entrepreneurs Club… by Breitbart News
CEC’s leadership boasts numerous senior members of the Chinese Communist Party, including Wang Zhongyu (“vice chairman of the 10th CPPCC National Committee and deputy secretary of the Party group”), Ma Weihua (director of multiple Chinese Communist Party offices), and Jiang Xipei (member of the Chinese Communist Party and representative of the 16th National Congress), among others.
“I know it is political season and people are hesitant but a group like this does not come along every day,” an intermediary named Mohamed A. Khashoggi wrote on behalf of the CEC to an associate of Hunter Biden and Devon Archer. “A tour of the white house and a meeting with a member of the chief of staff’s office and John Kerry would be great,” Khashoggi said before including what should have been a major red flag: “Not sure if one has to be registered to do this.” Presumably, Khashoggi meant a registered lobbyist under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Khashoggi believed the trip presented “a soft diplomacy play that could be very effective” and would give Hunter Biden’s business partners “good access to [the Chinese] for any deal in the future.”
Indeed, the email boasted of CEC’s wealthy membership:
CEC’s current membership includes 50 preeminent figures such as: Liu Chuanzhi, Chairman of the CEC, Legend Holdings and Lenovo Group; Wu Jinglian, Zhang Weiying, and Zhou Qiren, China’s esteemed economists; Wu Jianmin, respected diplomat; Long Yongtu, representative of China’s globalization; Wang Shi (Vanke); Ma Weihua (China Merchants Bank); Jack Ma (Alibaba Group); Guo Guangchang (Fosun Group); Wang Jianlin, (Wanda Group); Niu Gensheng (LAONIU Foundation); Li Shufu (Geely); Li Dongsheng (TCL Corporation); Feng Lun (Vantone) and etc.
The gross income of the CEC members’ companies allegedly “totaled more than RMB 1.5 trillion, together accounting for roughly 4% of China’s GDP.” The overture to Hunter Biden’s associates described the Chinese CEC members variously as “industrial elites,” “highly influential,” and among “the most important private sector individuals in China today.”
Before contacting Hunter Biden’s associates, the CEC had been trying to get meetings with top Obama-Biden administration officials to no avail. “From the DC side as you will see below they [CEC] have written letters to several members of the administration and others and have so far not had a strong reaction.”
“This is China Inc,” wrote Khashoggi in the email, referring to the delegation of Chinese billionaires.
“Biggest priority for the CEC group is to see the White House, and have a senior US politician, or senior member of Obama’s administration, give them a tour… If your friend in DC can help, we would be extremely grateful,” Khashoggi emphasized.
Hunter Biden and Devon Archer apparently delivered for the Chinese Communist Party-connected industrial elites within ten days .
The original Oct. 19, 2011, email from Khashoggi was sent to Gary Fears — a controversial political fundraiser with a checkered history who was caught up in a riverboat casino scandal in the mid-1990s — who forwarded it on to Archer a couple weeks later on Nov. 5, 2011.
Time was short, as Khashoggi’s original email noted that the Chinese delegation would be in DC on Nov. 14, 2011. Fears told Archer to “reach out” to Khashoggi about the request regarding getting the Chinese businesspersons and officials into the Obama White House, adding it would be “perfect for” Archer to also “attend” with them and then “get guys for the potash deal.”
The same day Fears sent Khashoggi’s message to him, Archer took the email from Fears and sent to Khashoggi a business proposal for a potash mine deal he had lined up.
Six days after the initial overture, Archer received a followup email asking how a meeting with CEC’s representative went. The email closed with “Do me a favor and ask Hunter [Biden] to call me — I’ve tried reaching him a couple of times.” Archer responded, “Hunter is traveling in the UAE for the week with royalty so probably next week before he will be back in pocket…. The meeting with [CEC representative] was good. Seems like there is a lot to do together down the line. Probably not a fit for the current Potash private placement but he’s a good strategic relationship as the mine develops. Definitely have a drink with Mohammed and let him know how impressed I was with his whole deal.”
One minute later, Archer sent a follow-up email, “Couldn’t confirm this with Hunter on the line but we got him his meeting at the WH Monday for the Chinese folks.”
On the day of the meeting, November 14, 2011, Cooney emailed Fears to confirm that Archer “got the Chinese guys all taken care of in DC.”
The Obama-Biden Administration archives reveal that this Chinese delegation did indeed visit the White House on November 14, 2011, and enjoyed high-level access. The delegation included approximately thirty members, according to White House visitor logs. But those records also obscure perhaps the most important item for the Chinese delegation: a meeting with Vice President Joe Biden himself.
The visitor logs list Jeff Zients, the deputy director of Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as the host of the CEC delegation. Obama had tasked Zients with restructuring and ultimately consolidating the various export-import agencies under the Commerce Department—an effort in which the Chinese delegation would have a keen interest.
A trip itinerary posted by the CEC also confirms the delegation met with Obama’s then-recently-confirmed Commerce Secretary John Bryson.
Curiously, the Obama-Biden visitor logs do not mention any meeting with Vice President Joe Biden. But the Vice President’s off-the-books meeting was revealed by one of the core founders of the CEC. In an obscure document listing the CEC members’ biographies, CEC Secretary General Maggie Cheng alleges that she facilitated the CEC delegation meetings in Washington in 2011 and boasts of the Washington establishment figures that CEC met with. The first name she dropped was that of Vice President Joe Biden.
The relationships established during that visit may have benefited Hunter Biden and Devon Archer down the road. Two years later, they famously helped to form the Chinese government funded Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) investment fund. One of BHR’s first major portfolio investments was a ride-sharing company like Uber called Didi Dache—now called Didi Chuxing Technology Co. That company is closely connected to Liu Chuanzhi, the chairman of the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the founder of Legend Holdings—the parent company of Lenovo, one of the world’s largest computer companies. Liu is a former Chinese Communist Party delegate and was a leader of the 2011 CEC delegation to the White House. His daughter was the President of Didi.
Liu has long been involved in CCP politics, including serving as a representative to the 9th, 10th, and 11th sessions of the National People’s Congress of the PRC and as a representative to the 16th and 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Liu was the Vice Chairman of the 8th and 9th Executive Committee of All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (ACFIC), an organization known to be affiliated with the Chinese United Front.
The Biden campaign has not responded to a request for comment on this story.
This is a developing story.
Peter Schweizer is the author of Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite. Seamus Bruner is the author of Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties.
Biden Whistleblower Emails: Chinese Energy Company Gave $5 Million Non-Secured, Forgivable Loan to Biden ‘Family’
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.”
The Biden Crime Family Comes Undone
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
The Biden family is notorious for being the crookedest clan not only in Delaware, but in D.C.
And yet the Biden family stood out even there. To be born a Biden in the era after Joe switched his party affiliation, plagiarized his speeches, and inappropriately touched every woman or girl he could get his hands on in the state and the nation, was to be bred into dirty money.
Joe Biden was now asked in Wisconsin if Hunter had “profited off the Biden name”.
“None whatsoever,” the godfather of Delaware retorted. And the entire state laughed.
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, in Delaware, everyone knows that the Biden name means money in the bank. Literally. Just ask MBNA, Hunter’s former employer, whose executives poured $200,000 into Joe’s coffers, and one of whom bought his house.
“Don’t worry about investors,” James Biden, Joe's brother, famous for scoring a billion dollar contract to build houses in Iraq, told executives at Paradigm Global Advisors. “We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”
James had bought Paradigm together with Hunter Biden.
Biden can try to deny the obvious, but he isn’t even trying to deny that the emails and photos are real, or that it was his son’s laptop. Instead, he spouted a word salad of gibberish, stating, “the vast of the intelligence people have come out and said there’s no basis at all.”
Why does Biden need to call on “the vast of the intelligence people” who carefully avoided making a firm statement, to deny something he is better able to deny on his own?
Because it’s really an admission.
The latest emails make it all too clear that Joe Biden got Viktor Shokin, the Ukranian prosecutor, fired because Burisma wanted him gone and that Hunter Biden's purpose in making deals with a powerful Chinese energy company linked to the Communist regime was to produce income for "me and my family". It’s no wonder that the latest reports link the FBI’s subpoena of the laptop, not to the media’s false claims of a Russian op, but to a money laundering investigation.
Investing in Joe Biden or, as one message allegedly has it, "the big guy", meant depositing the money with James or Hunter. And then Hunter deposited a laptop with a small computer repair shop in Delaware five miles from his father’s home, and never picked it up. The rest is history.
And the history is happening now.
The Hunter Biden laptop unrolls two ragged threads. One is the descent of Joe Biden’s son into new depths of depravity and the other are the foreign investors who bought into Joe Biden Inc.
The alleged photos of Hunter Biden’s drug use and underage girls might be dismissed as a spoiled rich kid’s demons. But, looking at public photos and videos of Joe Biden touching, caressing, and sniffing women and young girls, it’s hard not to see the influence. What did a teenage Hunter grow up seeing his father do? How did that shape him into the man he is?
And why was Hunter able to get away with it for so long?
In alleged text messages exchanged between Joe and Hunter Biden, father and son discuss "sexually inappropriate" behavior with a 14-year-old girl.
"She told my therapist that I was sexually inappropriate with [name of 14-year-old girl redacted] when she says that I facetime naked with her and the reason I can’t have her out to see me is because I’ll walk around naked smoking crack talking [redacted] girls on face time," Hunter appeared to message his father.
What was done about this? The odds are good that the answer is nothing.
The Hunter Biden laptop was turned over to the FBI in December of 2019. And the FBI appears to have done little with it. Giuliani submitted material allegedly showing criminal sexual behavior to the Delaware police who passed it off to the Delaware Department of Justice.
A spokesman for Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings said it was sent to the FBI.
Jennings is not only a Democrat, but a friend of the Biden family who had worked under Beau Biden and has been vigorously campaigning for Joe Biden.
"I’ve known Joe, Jill, and the Biden family for most of my life. Joe is one of the kindest and most genuine people I’ve ever known," Jennings had posted on her Facebook page.
The Biden family may have been able to get away with a lot for the same reason as the Kennedy clan. They were big fish in a small pond being protected by the Democrat club. Like some Kennedy sons, Hunter may have spun out of control because he could get away with it.
That’s why Hunter Biden’s story is just an echo of Joe. Father and son appear to share a boundless greed for unearned wealth and women, and a complete lack of self-control with both.
And both men have spent their lives being protected from the consequences of their actions.
Laptop computers, like notebooks, are the mirrors of their owners. We use them and fill them with the things that matter to us. Going through a lost laptop or phone tells us a lot about the man or woman who spent years with it. Hunter Biden’s laptop is a mirror of the man. And the mirror shows a broken and corrupt human being filling its gigabytes with his demons.
What were Hunter Biden’s demons? The same as the ones that bedeviled Joe. Women and money. And as dirty and wrong as possible. That’s why Hunter allegedly didn’t just seek out money, he went after business opportunities in the most corrupt places in the world, like Kazakhstan and the People’s Republic of China, and he didn’t just chase women.
Instead, Rudy Giuliani has said that the laptop contained photos of underage girls.
But the bigger story isn’t Hunter’s depravity, it’s the business opportunities, the lobbying gigs and board seats offered to him by foreign companies looking to invest in Joe Biden.
In less than two weeks, Joe Biden’s stock will either boom or bust. And voters are entitled to know who, beyond the battalions of domestic special interests from Wall Street to Hollywood, from the gun control lobby to green businesses, pouring hundreds of millions into his campaign, is getting ready to collect interest on the foreign money that financed Hunter’s lifestyle.
Hunter Biden's emails offer a window into a global operation, in the Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, and the People's Republic of China, of investing in Joe Biden courtesy of his wastrel son.
Joe Biden has claimed that he has nothing to do with his son’s business affairs, but that’s a transparent lie that had been shot down even long before the laptop by media reporting. The media is frantically trying to bury information that backs up their own reporting from the primaries when the same media now trying to save Joe Biden originally wanted to bury him.
Why did so many Democrat officials, beginning with Barack Obama, try to keep Joe Biden from running in 2016 and then 2020? Joe Biden is a mediocre hack, but he’s a better candidate than Hillary Clinton, not to mention lefty luminaries like Al Gore or John Kerry. The problem was that the small state that spawned the Biden crime family was littered with their dirty laundry.
And now, in the final stretch before Election Day, the messy stained laundry is spilling out.
Like Humpty Dumpty, all the Democrat horses and men are trying to keep the mess contained. Twitter and Facebook are blatantly suppressing the story. The media has refused to cover the biggest scandal of the election while falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation despite clear denials by the intelligence community and the FBI.
Hunter Biden’s laptop isn’t just evidence of a degenerate past, but of the coming attractions.
The Biden crime family has built a global network of contacts. And when their father was a mere veep, they could only wet their beaks a little. If he wins, they’ll be able to drown in money.
Joe could throw around his weight in a backwater like Ukraine, but if he wins, Burisma will just be a tiny taste of what is to come. And the corruption in D.C. will make Delaware blush again.
Corruption is nothing new in D.C., but what the laptop reveals about Hunter Biden and his father is that, like the Clintons, they have no self-control. And the only thing more dangerous than cunning crooks at the head of a nation are inept kleptocrats who would leave evidence of their financial and sexual corruption on a laptop abandoned in a Delaware repair shop.
As new details trickle out, two things are obvious about the Biden crime family: they’re not only as crooked as a bent tree in a thunderstorm, they’re also hopelessly stupid at covering it up.
Even as the media denies everything for the Bidens, they have yet to deny the core facts.
Rep. Schiff may claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a Russian conspiracy, but neither Joe nor Hunter will say it. And what Schiff and the Democrats and their media can only say behind their backs is that they can’t believe how corrupt and incompetent the horse they bet on really is.
They haven’t seen anything yet.
Some signs of the couple’s prior lifestyle, however, appear to have remained in tact. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, Biden’s charitable giving has only slightly increased. According to the most recent tax returns released, Biden gave 1.4 percent of his income to charity in 2016. The following year, when the couple reported making 11 million, they donated just around 9.2 percent to charity. The percentage fell significantly in 2018 to six percent, even though the couple earned more than $4.58 million.
The more you know about Biden, the ickier he is
We've long known that Joe Biden is a man with unseemly habits. He sniffs and fondles little girls, swims naked in front of female Secret Service agents, and has a legitimate sexual assault claim hanging over him. If the Biden hard drive documents are legitimate (and they seem to be), he used his drug-addicted son as a bagman for bribes from foreign governments and businesses and knew that his son was inappropriate with underage girls. A recently unearthed 1974 interview with Biden shows us the genesis of all these gross and illegal activities.
Kitty Kelly interviewed Biden two years after he entered Congress — and two years after his wife, Neilia, ran a stop sign and collided with a truck, killing her and their baby daughter. Beau and Hunter suffered serious injuries. (Hunter had a "serious head injury," which — and I say this without sarcasm — may explain a lot about his struggles with drugs and alcohol.) It was a tragedy and garnered the 31-year-old Biden some much deserved sympathy.
Sympathy, however, cannot obscure that Biden is an unpleasantly weird character. There's the arrogance from a man who was a mediocre student at best:
"My wife always wanted me to be on the Supreme Court," he says. "But while I know I can be a good Senator, and I know I can be a good President, I do know that I could never be another Oliver Wendell Holmes. I know I could have easily made the White House with Neilia. And my family still expects me to be there one of these days. With them behind me anything can happen."
Biden also engages in weird sexual boasting about his dead wife, both in terms of how sexy she was and how much she sexually satisfied him:
"Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover. The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports. Most guys don't really know what I lost because they never knew what I had…."
[snip]
"Let me show you my favorite picture of her," he says, holding up a snapshot of Neilia in a bikini. "She had the best body of any woman I ever saw. She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn't she?"
[snip]
"At first she stayed at home with the kids while I campaigned but that didn't work out because I'd come back too tired to talk to her. I might satisfy her in bed but I didn't have much time for anything else."
Do you want to know about Joe Biden's sex life and his Playboy bunny fantasies? I sure don't. His sexual obsessions seem to pair well with his behavior around little girls.
Biden's compulsive boasting shows up, too. Was Joe really a "football hero"? He says he was, but we now know he freely borrowed other people's life experiences. Also, while he praises his dead wife's intelligence, there's the familiar theme of his own above-average intelligence:
"She was the most intelligent human being I have ever known. She was absolutely brilliant. I'm smart but Neilia was ten times smarter."
Biden is also openly greedy. When you read his complaints about this salary, you can practically see him thinking of ways to use his political power to augment the salary:
Unlike most other senators, Biden makes no bones about saving he is underpaid. Last September, when the Senate was debating a pay raise for itself, he said, "I don't know about the rest of you but I am worth a lot more than my salary of $42,500 [$224,379.31 in 2020] a year in this body. It seems to me that we should flat out tell the American people we are worth our salt."
No wonder Biden told Kelly he was already feeling "the temptation to sell out":
He feels the indignity is compounded by the temptation to sell out to big business or big labor for financial help, and says it's almost impossible for a candidate to remain true to his conscience in this situation. He admits that more than once he was tempted to compromise to get campaign money.
While Biden claimed then that the memory of his upright wife restrained him from corruption, that restraint apparently vanished over the years.
The whole interview is peculiar and creepy. It also foreshadows the man Biden became after 47 years of power and corruption.
Lastly, here's something to chew on, which I think is the most unnerving statement that Biden made in the whole interview:
He defines politics as power. "And, whether you like it or not, young lady," he says, leaning over his desk to shake a finger at me, "us cruddy politicians can take away that First Amendment of yours if we want to."
That's the Democrat view of politics in a nutshell: it's about power, and Democrats in power will always trample Americans' constitutional rights given half a chance.
JOE BIDEN HAS NEVER DONE ANYTHING FOR AMERICA BUT HE SURE GOT RICH DOING IT!
Some signs of the couple’s prior lifestyle, however, appear to have remained in tact. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, Biden’s charitable giving has only slightly increased. According to the most recent tax returns released, Biden gave 1.4 percent of his income to charity in 2016. The following year, when the couple reported making 11 million, they donated just around 9.2 percent to charity. The percentage fell significantly in 2018 to six percent, even though the couple earned more than $4.58 million.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, who often pitches himself as “Middle Class Joe” on the campaign trail, is a multi-millionaire, according to his most recent tax returns.
On Tuesday, Biden’s presidential campaign released three years worth of tax filings showing the Democrat frontrunner and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, earned more than $15.6 million since leaving the White House. The majority of the couple’s income came from a book deal — estimated to be worth $8 million — and lucrative speaking engagements.
In 2017, Biden’s first year out of elective office since 1973, the couple earned more than $11 million. This was exponentially more than the $396,552 both reported making in 2016. The following year, the couple’s annual income decreased slightly to $4. 58 million.
Biden’s political standing appears to be the reason for the couple’s new found wealth. The returns show that Biden earned $9.49 million in 2017 through CelticCapri Corp., a shell company named after the couple’s Secret Service code names.
CelticCapri, which was incorporated in Delaware only days after Biden left office, serves as the main vehicle for the former vice president’s public engagements. In 2018, Biden was paid $2.73 million through the company for appearances and speeches all across the country. In total, over the two year period, Biden made 49 speeches with some generating honorariums upwards of $249,000.
Not to be outdone, Jill Biden also cashed in on her public persona. The former second lady delivered 18 speeches between 2017 and 2018, earning on average $36,000 per event. Giacoppa Corp., the former second lady’s shell company named after her family’s original last name, reported paying her more than $557,00 in 2017 and $506,000 in 2018 for such engagements.
Rounding out the couple’s income was Biden’s pension from the U.S. Senate and the vice presidency which generated $241,00 in 2017 and more than $190,000 in 2018. Biden also earned a six figure salary from the University of Pennsylvania. The former vice president leads the university’s Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., a position that paid more than $371,000 in 2017 and more than $405,000 in 2018.
The couple’s income for both 2017 and 2018 put them squarely within the top one one percent of economic earners, a threshold set at $480,930 by the IRS. In fact, the former vice president’s income was the largest of any of his fellow 2020 Democrats.
Biden’s ascension into the economic elite comes relatively late in life. For the majority of his political career, Biden was one of the poorest members of Congress. The couple’s income barely edged above $300,000 until Biden’s first year in the vice president’s office, when he became eligible to to receive social security and his governmental pension.
Despite waiting so long to break into the one percent, the Bidens appear to have comfortably transitioned into their new lifestyle. Last month, it was disclosed the couple now resides in a 11,750 square foot Georgian-style mansion overlooking the Potomac River in McLean, Virginia. Biden rents the house, which once belonged to the late-Secretary of State Alexander Haig, even though he owns two properties within driving distance in his home state of Delaware. One of those is a recently purchased $2.7 million vacation house on the Atlantic Ocean.
Some signs of the couple’s prior lifestyle, however, appear to have remained in tact. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, Biden’s charitable giving has only slightly increased. According to the most recent tax returns released, Biden gave 1.4 percent of his income to charity in 2016. The following year, when the couple reported making 11 million, they donated just around 9.2 percent to charity. The percentage fell significantly in 2018 to six percent, even though the couple earned more than $4.58 million.
Since signaling his intention to run for president, Biden has sought to regain some of the working-class appeal that was exhibited in his early career.
“I know I’m called Middle-Class Joe. It’s not meant to be a compliment. It means I’m not sophisticated. But I know what made this country what it is: ordinary people doing extraordinary things,” the former vice president said last year.
Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has more than 30 business executives on his donor list that have connections to Wall Street.
Analysis of Biden’s more than 800 big donors, those who have bundled contributions for his presidential bid against President Trump, found that more than 30 of the executives listed have ties to Wall Street.
CNBC reports:
CNBC reviewed a new list of more than 800 Biden bundlers who raised at least $100,000 for the campaign, and found that several of them had links to financial firms. A few had been mentioned on the initial list of Biden fundraisers that was released in 2019 during the Democratic primary contests. [Emphasis added]
…
Beyond those from Wall Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]
Those executives with ties to Wall Street funding Biden’s campaign include:
Frank Baker, Brett Barth, Jim Chanos, Mark Chorazak, David Clunie, William Derrough, Roger Altman, Blair Effron, Jon Feigelson, Mark Gallogly, John Rogers, Jon Gray, Tony James, Jon Henes, Sonny Kalsi, Orin Kramer, Brad Krap, Brian Kreiter, Marc Lasry, Nate Loewenthall, Eric Mindich, Kara Moore, Charles Myers, Alan Patricof, Deven Parekh, Robert Rubin, Evan Roth, Faiza Saeed, Rajen Shah, Jay Snyder, Rob Stavis, and Jeff Zients.
As Breitbart News reported, Biden’s campaign is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on Wall Street, according to CNN analysis, and Wall Street executives and employees have donated more than $74 million to elect the former vice president.
Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from financial firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted from Wall Street.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
In a post on Sunday, Biden wrote that “Donald Trump sees the world from Park Avenue,” whereas he sees the world “from where I came from: Scranton, Pennsylvania.” In fact, Biden has raised over $1 million from wealthy Park Avenue donors, more than eight times the less than $130,000 that Trump has taken from Park Avenue residents.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter
at @JxhnBinder
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities.
She sees a dark side of Silicon Valley tech — U.S. engineers replaced by lower-cost H-1B visa holders. All workers suffer, she said: The system unfairly pushes down salaries, while foreign-born engineers remain heavily dependent on their employers.
Bay Area dissatisfaction: Rich, poor, young and old unhappy here
Poll: More residents now want to leave than stay
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/02/23/bay-area-dissatisfaction-rich-poor-young-and-old-unhappy-here/
Bay Area dissatisfaction: It reaches every county — and more residents are planning to leave.
By LOUIS HANSEN | lhansen@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: February 23, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. | UPDATED: February 23, 2020 at 7:19 a.m.
Bay Area residents — despite being swept up in an unprecedented economic boom — are growing ever unhappier with the place they call home.
Nearly 3 in 4 residents think the quality of life in the Bay Area has gotten worse in the last five years, according to a new poll of registered voters conducted for this news organization and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. That marks an astonishing 10-point jump in dissatisfaction from last year.
In another dramatic shift from last year, more residents are thinking about moving, 47 percent, than staying, 45 percent. Nearly 10 percent say they have definite plans to leave this year.
The survey unearths a remarkable paradox — high wages, an expanding economy, record growth in home values, coupled with natural wonders have failed to alleviate the crushing toll of longer commutes, spreading homeless encampments, and budget-breaking prices for houses, apartments, childcare and date nights.
Sara Leslie, a Bay Area native living in Los Gatos, sees the mounting stress in her friends and family, made worse by rapidly changing neighborhoods and an eroding sense of community. “I know so many people moving,” said Leslie, 46. “I don’t see that the financial gain is worth the stress.”
Dave Metz of FM3 Research, which conducted the poll, said the high levels of dissatisfaction are almost unprecedented given the region’s strong economy. Last year, 44 percent of residents said they expected to leave in a few years, while half expected to stay. The new survey follows a trend of growing unrest found in 2016 and 2017 polls by the Bay Area Council, where residents saying they planned to move grew from about 33 to 40 percent.
“Nobody is really happy with the way things are going,” Metz said.
The survey of 1,257 registered voters in five core Bay Area counties reflects deep misgivings across the social strata — wealthy, established homeowners, middle-class workers, poor people and younger residents in apartments all sense a decline in their quality of life:
· Rich and poor: About 77 percent of respondents making less than $60,000 and 74 percent making more than $120,000 felt the region was getting worse;
· Political affiliation: Republicans (81 percent) and Independents (80 percent) were more pessimistic than Democrats (70 percent)
· Young and old: Roughly 76 percent of surveyed residents between the ages of 18 and 49 said the quality of life has declined, similar to those between 50 and 64 (73 percent) and over 65 (75 percent);
· Homeowners and renters: And despite record gains in home values and personal wealth since 2012, homeowners (73 percent) agree with renters (76 percent) that Bay Area life has gotten worse.
Angst about the future also runs deep. About 65 percent of Bay Area residents surveyed say the region is headed in the wrong direction, up from 47 percent last year. Residents now are almost as worried about the region’s future as the country’s future, with 72 percent pessimistic about the direction of the United States.
Residents say they’ve grown frustrated with the inability of state and local leaders to fix long-standing and obvious problems — homeless and RV camps popping up along city streets, rising housing costs sinking the working poor and middle class, and traffic and transit solutions running the bureaucratic gauntlet for years until comatose or dead.
The poll reflects a growing concern about homelessness. This year, nearly 9 in 10 residents called it an extremely or very serious problem, up from 8 in 10 last year. “That is about as bright a flashing red light as you can see,” said Metz.
“It’s the cumulative weight, like rock after rock placed on your chest, that’s come to a breaking point for many of our neighbors, friends and family members,” said Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino. “These challenges won’t be solved overnight.”
Carl Guardino, President and CEO, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, worries about how many people have definite plans to leave. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)
Guardino is concerned that nearly 10 percent of residents say they have concrete plans to move. They’ve decided other cities are better places to live and work than the Bay Area.
“The choice we have is, are we going to fight or flight?” said Guardino. “I still think our area is worth fighting for.”
Richard Hallsted, 62, recently retired as an operations manager for a manufacturing company in the East Bay. He and his wife have lived in Palo Alto for more than 40 years and raised their two daughters in the city.
During a recent family walk through their neighborhood, he saw four homeless people pushing shopping carts along the streets. It was a new sight in their community.
“What do you do?” Hallsted asked and sighed. “I don’t know. If you built a bunch of condos on El Camino (Real), they couldn’t afford them.”
Hallsted feels the big issues — transit, infrastructure, fixing state pension obligations — have been ignored by politicians more interested in small battles and identity politics. “They need to get back to basics,” he said.
But even the litany of daily annoyances fails to dislodge many long-term residents. Homeowners and those over 65 say they’re likely to stay put.
Donald Prestosz, 71, a retired high school teacher and businessman living in Half Moon Bay, said the Bay Area he has called home since 1969 has become too liberal. He hates one-party, Democratic rule in Sacramento. “If you don’t have diversity of thought,” said Prestosz, a Republican, “you’ll never get anywhere.”
But Prestosz has no plans to leave his mobile home a short walk from the ocean. His doctors and favorite golf courses are all nearby. He’s sliced his handicap to 12. “My quality of life,” he said, “is great.”
Irene Yen, 55, a public health professor at UC Merced, bought her home in north Oakland 20 years ago. The family raised their two sons and sent them to very good public schools, she said. But she’s worried about public employees and other workers getting priced out.
Much has changed — once a predominantly black neighborhood, her community has gentrified as techies and other professionals priced out of San Francisco move in. Yen loves the energy and plans to stay: “I have a lot of affection for Oakland.”
For renters, the prospect of putting down roots in the Bay Area — even if they grew up here — seems bleak. Roughly 6 in 10 renters say they expect to move in the next few years.
Austin Rickli, 22, grew up in Antioch and Brentwood and expects to finish his computer science degree at Sonoma State in a few months. Despite good grades, low student debt and a marketable degree, his hopes of staying in the Bay Area after graduation are waning.
Most entry salaries at smaller tech companies range around $50,000 — a healthy paycheck at a glance, but one quickly eaten up by rent and loan payments, he said.
He could move back home, he said, but he might choose another city. “I want to do anything in my power to start my own life,” Rickli said.
Many feel they’re reaching the breaking point.
Robert Nueding and his wife, Kelly, arrived in the Bay Area a decade ago from central Ohio with optimism and career opportunities. But in the last few years, Nueding, 38, lost his job at Walmart and his wife, suffering from anxiety, left a well-paid position at Apple. They live in an old RV with a roommate along the streets of Fremont.
“It’s just like being trapped in a corner,” said Nueding, who holds a master’s degree in literature.
They considered moving back to their hometown, but jobs are scarce and pay poorly. Nueding worries that a local school or university would not hire a homeless person to teach classes, even as a substitute. “Until I have an actual legal residence,” he said, “I feel homeless.”
Leslie, the Bay Area native in Los Gatos, lives with her husband in a farmhouse in the foothills. Each has more than an hour-long commute on good days.
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Leslie has spent two decades in the tech industry and enjoys her job. Her mother and sister have already been priced out in the past few years. The Santa Cruz native would leave if other family members weren’t still here.
She sees a dark side of Silicon Valley tech — U.S. engineers replaced by lower-cost H-1B visa holders. All workers suffer, she said: The system unfairly pushes down salaries, while foreign-born engineers remain heavily dependent on their employers.
Leslie said many of her friends, especially with young children, are over-stressed. She sees them trying to ease the anxiety with prescription medication and therapy just to navigate daily life.
Leslie rides her three horses or goes to the beach with her four dogs to cope. But she’s not sure how much longer that therapy will work.
The poll of 1,257 registered voters in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo counties, was conducted by FM3 Research for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Bay Area News Group. The poll, conducted Jan. 11-19, has a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
TRUMP’S CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX!
Only a complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!
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“Trump Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
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https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/04/billionaires-for-wider-open-borders.html
The latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch brothers.
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Efforts by the big business lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
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A handful of Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open borders.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/em-cadwaladr-impending-death-of.html
“Open border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR
Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Tucker Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding
Rich Polk/Getty
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of establishment conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by the establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in Washington.
Tucker revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly conservative group” controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to stave off the closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook. The ads targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” reported Carlson.
The Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly “conservative” D.C. think tanks that take money from big tech, and often advocate against regulating them over political bias or any other matter.
“In all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million defending Silicon Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”
The Columbia Bugle 
@ColumbiaBugle
Tucker Carlson Slamming Conservative Inc. for Defending Big Tech
Tucker Calls Out
-Kochs
-Heritage Foundation
-American Conservative Union
-AEI
"Big Tech Companies silence Conservatives, Conservative Non-Profits try to prevent the government from doing anything about it."
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2,315 people are talking about this
“Google has given money to at least 22 right-leaning institutions that are also funded by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those institutions include the American Conservative Union, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson explained that this spending gets results.
“In September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and three other groups funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to the Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over the DoJ’s plans to look into whether search engines and social media were hurting competition and stifling speech.”
Carlson also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that its shilling for big tech meant that it “no longer represents the interest of conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”
“A recent paper by Heritage, entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is the Best Remedy For Online Bias Concerns,’ defends the special privileges that Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And if conservatives don’t like it, Heritage says, well they can just start their own Google!”
Evidence of big tech’s efforts to co-opt establishment conservatives has been accumulating for some time. In March, Breitbart News published leaked audio from a senior director of public policy at Google, talking about using funding of conservative institutions to “steer” the movement. Another part of the leaked audio transcript was also revealed on Tucker Carlson’s show at the same time.
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech against efforts to strip them of their special legal privileges, which were given to them by Congress in the 1990s and are enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities.
December 20, 2019
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s still time to change course.
“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate, technology, gender, or race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities. California hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a troubling direction.
This didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur described the American as “this new man,” and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In fact, growth often favored suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families, including minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades, the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity prices have risen five times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every state. At the same time, California’s economy has shed industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace, finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of its operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University of California, where professors are required to prove their service to “people of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration policy while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify for free health care, too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.
Such radical policies may make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer Californians could count on education to help them move up. But today’s educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than results. Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test scores for black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents, especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth culture, creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From 2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44 cohort.
As families with children leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain West. Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend, with California millennials forced to rent, with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term owners. California is increasingly a greying refuge for those who bought property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example. The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the state’s proclaimed goal of building more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though experiencing population gains, keep losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated, especially in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric cars to electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid jobs, even as the state continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green mandates against controlled burns and brush clearance than anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible policies.
Few climate advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed, California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments of tech leaders, even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, that progressive politicians like Garcetti—who leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment to other states, notably Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in professional and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms of contract labor, reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the legislation also extends to independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some point, as even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent $100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies, including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe Nation. U.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump. Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43 percent, placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s governors. A conservative-led campaign to recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys reveal growing opposition to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing concern about the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of Commerce and the three most prominent ethnic chambers—African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have joined this effort.
Californians need less bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs. Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change course is now.
Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. His book on the return to feudalism will be released next year.
OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER
The Rise of Wall Street Thievery
How corporations and their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
by Ryan Cooper
America has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era. Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is, their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations. Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.
Berle exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and pensions.
Lemann then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning democratic political economy.
Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands.
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.
In his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
If concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out, especially African Americans.
Lemann writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings.
Conversely, for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families are below the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still, Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
Report: Big Tech Will Expand Further into Finance in 2020
JOSH EDELSON/Getty
5 Jan 202040
3:31
According to a recent report, the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley have plans to further expand into the world of finance in the new year — falling just short of opening their own banks.
A recent report from CNBC claims that Silicon Valley tech giants are likely to expand their business into the world of finance even further in 2020, but many want to avoid the hassle of becoming a fully-fledged bank. With Facebook announcing its own cryptocurrency, Googles plans to introduce consumer bank account sin collaboration with Citibank, and Apple’s new credit card in partnership with Goldman Sachs, finance seems to be a major focus for tech firms.
CNBC writes:
Though their products are different, both firms share something in common: they have no plans to become regulated financial institutions like Citi or Goldman. While Big Tech — a group of companies that includes Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple — will undoubtedly push deeper into finance this year, their progress in banking will be “more of a slow creep than big strides,” said Sarah Kocianski, head of research at fintech consultancy 11:FS.
“The big tech firms will continue to add services that are peripheral to banking to their existing offerings, without going full-stack banking,” she said. “The headache of getting, and maintaining, a banking license would likely be considered too big a risk for these companies. Instead, they will continue to operate with licensed partners.”
But, Accenture’s global payments lead, Sulabh Agarwal stated when asked that it makes little sense for tech firms to become banks. “Do I expect them to become banks? I don’t think so do. I expect them to create new services to enhance their propositions,” Argawal stated.
Facebook is making moves on two fronts in the world of finance, with its digital currency Libra and with its payment processing platform Facebook Pay. CNBC writes:
“The theory goes that if 2 billion people were to withdraw their deposits from the banking system and move them into Libra tokens, you’d effectively have a run on the banks,” said Simon Taylor, co-founder and blockchain lead at 11:FS. “Facebook is absolutely big enough for that to be plausible, but whether or not it happens depends much more on what consumer problem is being solved.”
Aside from libra, Facebook is also consolidating its payment products under a new brand called Facebook Pay. Uber, like its Southeast Asian competitor Grab, is moving further into finance with a division called Uber Money that houses a digital wallet and upgraded payment cards. They’ll face competition from the likes of Google Pay and Apple Pay in the U.S. and Chinese payment apps like Alipay and WeChat Pay.
E-commerce giant Amazon is already in the process of lending out money but has yet to break into consumer banking. It should be noted that Amazon at one point set up a student loan scheme in 2016 with Wells Fargo which shut down shortly afterward. Sarah Kocianski, head of research at fintech consultancy 11:FS, stated that there was “every reason to suspect they’ve learned from that.”
Read the full report at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’
Bob Gathany / AL.com via AP
10 Mar 2019122
3:19
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Masters of the Universe” want more legal immigration to the United States to further diminish the incomes of American working and middle-class families.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks said recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations to deplete the earnings of Americans.
Brooks said:
I’m not a part of the Masters of the Universe crowd who thinks we ought to be bringing in all this foreign labor and the reason for it is pure economics. This is the chance for Americans and lawful immigrants who are already here who are working in the blue-collar trades, who are working in the places where wages are not as high they ought to be, this is their chance to prosper. [Emphasis added]
And to the extent you import a lot of foreign labor, then you are artificially increasing the labor supply which in turn means that you’re artificially suppressing the wages of American families who are often hard-pressed to make ends meet So I respectfully disagree that we need more foreign labor, to the contrary, I would like to see us reduce the foreign labor that comes into America so that American families who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly those of us who are earning the least amounts, would be better to take care of their own families and less likely to be dependent on the welfare. [Emphasis added]
Brooks said Democrats support for mass legal immigration is centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a permanent dependent class of Democrat voters.
“Don’t get me wrong, [Democrats] want to decrease the incomes of Americans so that they’re dependent on welfare,” Brooks said.
That makes them in turn likely Democrat voters and the best way to do that is to have a huge surge in the labor supply, particularly illegal aliens, that will depress their wages therefore creating more Democrats who are dependent on welfare at the same time as they bring in illegal aliens who also under Democrat doctrine will be allowed to vote and those types of voters, they’re also dependent on welfare. [Emphasis added]
“About 70 percent of illegal alien households are on welfare … plus this is a bloc of voters that seems unusually susceptible to the racial divisions that the Democrats advance,” Brooks said. “You have to look at the big picture in all of this, and to me, we should not be importing as much foreign labor as we are. We should be helping the least among us earn more and importing foreign labor that suppresses wages is not the way to do that.”
Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.2 legal immigrants annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15 million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. Pacific).
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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