Saturday, July 18, 2020

BRIBES SUCKING BLACK LIVES MATTER HOAX - SUCKING OFF CORPORATE BRIBES LIKE HUCKSTERS JESSE JACKSON AND AL 'REVEREND' SHARPTON

BLM's corporate extortion


As Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots ransacked brick-and-mortar businesses over the summer, publicly traded companies, especially retail, began ponying up tremendous sums of money to BLM affiliated organizations. The staggering sums promised by Walmart, Target, Nike, McDonald’s, and others might be dismissed as a marketing stunt in a different context, but the size and timing of the donations suggests something more sinister.
These corporations have tremendous presence in black communities and are in close proximity to the riots. Their exposure is not limited to physical assets that might be looted or damaged; brands themselves may suffer reputational damage. After a black drunk driver who pointed a stolen taser at a police officer was shot dead in a Wendy’s parking lot, the restaurant was set ablaze in retaliation. Wendy’s, their logo in the frame of every photo of the incident, loudly announced a $500,000 donation to social justice causes and affirmed their support for the BLM movement.
Corporations are making these donations as protection money, hoping to bribe officials of BLM affiliated organizations into steering the mob away from their store. The BLM mobs are far from organic; they are well-funded corporate entities plucked off the shelf and filled with professional activists to run them. These activists use their platform to target other corporations with exposure to the riots and pressure them into making donations. Corporations are quick to pick up on the implied threat and immediately capitulate, handing money to their extortionists.
This dynamic even plays out for small businesses. After bearing witness to mass looting and vandalism, neighboring small businesses began to genuflect, painting their storefronts in BLM paraphernalia and praying for the angel of death to pass over them. It would seldom work, as individual rioters proved to be just as tribute hungry as their professional organizations. One Black Lives Matter activist, Devonere Johnson, received a federal criminal complaint for extorting businesses in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. Johnson had told business owners that the BLM mob would attack their stores unless they paid him off. Unlike George Soros’s BLM affiliate organizations, Johnson’s extortion racket was explicit and did not have the prepaid protection that comes with having a billionaire Democratic donor as a patron.
BLM may be the latest and greatest corporate extortion racket, but this game is nothing new. After Hallmark cut an ad campaign featuring a lesbian wedding in December 2019, LGBT pressure groups began churning out anti-Hallmark propaganda, relenting only after Hallmark made a substantial donation to GLAAD, a LGBT pressure group. Similarly, Jesse Jackson threatened to smear Toyota as racist and hold demonstrations unless they donated to his Rainbow Coalition organization. These high-profile extortions are just the tip of the iceberg; there are countless low-profile extortions made by politicians, petty regulators, and activists. The New York Times opined in 2018 that corporate philanthropy is largely backdoor political lobbying, citing a study that seemingly proved just that. Even Donald Trump, during his career as a New York real estate developer, found it impossible to do business without letting local Democratic party officials wet their noses first. Browsing the donor lists of politicians in every major city will tell the same story. Americans wondering why their country is under attack should know that their companies are unwilling financiers of the anti-American revolution.
The proliferation and normalization of corporate extortion by the political class must end. Fortunately, the solution is not complex: every business entity should be banned from donating to nonprofit organizations and sending money to for-profit organizations unless the payment is in exchange for goods and services of demonstrable value to the company.
This solution is not a business regulation, but instead a confirmation of the property rights of business owners. Corporate shareholders are the ones footing the bill when their earnings are given away by a CEO, despite having little say in the decision. Although a CEO could theoretically acquire the unanimous consent of shareholders before donating to a nonprofit, there is no advantage to a corporation donating to charity in the stead of an individual. Companies are not suitable as payment gateways for charities and the ability of corporate officers to give away monies belonging to shareholders is a conflict of interests.
Unfortunately, barring corporate cash giveaways would be an uphill political battle, as such a rule would hammer away at the ability of politicians to browbeat companies for campaign contributions. It is equally unlikely that political pressure groups would sign on, their very existence likely depending on the practice. However, such a rule may not require legislation. A few well-placed constitutionalist judges familiar with common law tradition and property rights could rule that corporate managers have no right to give away property which does not belong to them. It seems common sense that an employee, even a CEO, does not have the right to ransack a business to suit his ideological persuasion or pay off racketeers. Until those in power see it this way, mobs, politicians, and other extortionists will continue their corporate-funded attacks on America.
Image credit: Pixabay public domain

NANCY PELOSI'S OPEN BORDERS - 10,000 ILLEGALS DEPORTED FROM ONE COUNTY - BUT HOW MANY WERE NEVER CAUGHT?

Nearly 10K Illegals Deported from a Single County in Virginia Since 2007
sessions
Scott Olson/Getty
2:27

Nearly 10,000 criminal illegal aliens turned over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency have been arrested and deported from a single county in Virginia since 2007, new data reveals.
Last month, Prince William County, Virginia, officials voted to end their longterm cooperation with ICE — effectively making it increasingly difficult for federal immigration agents to arrest and deport criminally accused illegal aliens from the region.
“When county residents are victimized by these aliens, the Jail Board will have a lot to answer for,” Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) Executive Director Dale Wilcox said of the decision.
Data obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) shows the extent to which illegal immigration has gripped Prince William County. For instance, since 2007, about 9,537 illegal aliens have been handed over to ICE agents after being arrested for crimes.
This indicates that more than two percent of Prince William County’s entire population of more than 470,000 residents have been handed over to ICE for arrest and deportation in the last 13 years.
Between October 2019 and May 2020, alone, more than 530 illegal aliens in Prince William County have been turned over to ICE after being arrested for various crimes.
In one specific case, illegal alien MS-13 gang member Celio Alexander Serrano-Trejo, 34-years-old, was deported by ICE agents in May after he was arrested in Prince William County and handed over to them. Serrano-Trejo is wanted in his native El Salvador.
ICE officials said more than half of the 2,600 illegal aliens taken into their custody since 2017 were serving time for drunk driving convictions. Another 65 of those illegal aliens were facing murder charges and nearly 300 were accused of sexual assault.
Now, with Prince William County’s expiration of their ICE agreement, such illegal aliens are much more likely to be released back into the community after posting bail or serving time in prison.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

Kris Kobach: Even Talk of Amnesty Drives Up Illegal Immigration

Kris Kobach Speaks at Trump Rally in Topeka, Kansas
Scott Olson / Getty Images
3:51
The flow of illegal immigration is highly responsive to political talk of amnesty and related issues, noted Kris Kobach, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate to represent Kansas, offering his comments on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
Recent monthly reductions in illegal crossings into the U.S. across the southern border are largely a function of the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico … and … immediate turnaround policies,” Kobach stated. He added, “You take those two [policies] together, and the word gets back very quickly among the coyotes [and] among the would-be immigrant communities that, ‘Hey, you can’t just walk into the United States anymore.'”
Political discussion on Capitol Hill and advanced by news media acts as a magnet for aspiring illegal immigrants and Mexican crime cartels selling human smuggling services across the U.S.-Mexico border, said Kobach.
“Whenever there’s talk of an amnesty in Congress, all of a sudden the numbers [of illegal border crossings] tick upward,” Kobach remarked. “The traffic at our border is very sensitive to policy changes, so if there’s a policy change, it’s just a matter of days, maybe even hours, and all of a sudden the traffic slows down or speeds up. So by taking the right steps, the administration has seen a real slow down in illegal crossings, and that’s a great thing.”
LISTEN:
The push for amnesty is hyped during election season by “open borders” and “pro-amnesty” advocates, Kobach stated, identifying the Chamber of Commerce as such an organization.
“We should secure the border first before we even talk about an amnesty,” Kobach advised. He warned that amnesty for illegal aliens classified as DREAMers via former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order would used as precursor for further amnesties.
Kobach addressed his campaign for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate to represent Kansas, highlighting Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s opposition to his candidacy.
“The big development is that the dark money super PAC that is almost certainly controlled by Mitch McConnell has just weighed into the race in the last week, and they are running tons — almost three million dollars [worth] — of negative ads trying to knock me out, and it’s the same thing. McConnell comes in to knock out the conservative who’s ahead.”
Kobach continued, “The crazy thing is, Republicans are lagging behind Democrats all across the country in U.S. Senate fundraising, so why in the world is McConnell spending three million dollars worth of ammunition trying to knock me out when he should be saving that to defend Republicans in the fall or go to defend Republicans right now who are on the ropes in Colorado, Arizona, Iowa?”
“There are so many places where Republicans are in trouble of losing a seat to Democrats,” warned Kobach. “Why in the world [are] McConnell and his allies trying to take out a conservative Republican in a primary?”
McConnell opposes conservative populism of “Breitbart-types,” assessed Kobach.
“[McConnell] sees me as someone who stands for Breitbart populist conservatism, and I’m sure that’s part of [his opposition to me],” concluded Kobach. “Another part of it is probably, McConnell wants yes men. He doesn’t want disruptors. He doesn’t want populist conservatives or Breitbart-types who will come in there and point things out when something is corrupt and will push a very strong conservative agenda.”
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.



Koch Group, Amnesty Advocate Lobbied Trump on DACA in White House Meeting

daca-activists
Frederic-Brown/AFP/Getty
3:00

A spokesperson for the pro-mass migration Koch brothers’ network and an advocate for amnesty attended a White House meeting last week where President Trump was lobbied to allow illegal aliens to remain permanently in the United States.
Trump caught conservatives off guard when he told Telemundo on July 10 that he was planning to give a “road to citizenship” to about 800,000 illegal aliens enrolled in former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
The White House has not yet pointed to any specific plan regarding DACA amnesty.
The day before Trump’s comments, he met with a roundtable of Hispanic executives — including Daniel Garza of the Koch-funded Libre Initiative and Mario Rodriguez of Hispanic 100. At the meeting, Trump was once again encouraged  to strike a deal on DACA before the presidential election.
Garza confirmed he also had a phone call with Trump the month before. The Libre Initiative, along with the Kochs’ network of donor-funded organizations, have sought to pass a DACA amnesty through the House and Senate for the last three years.
Their latest effort included lobbying the Trump administration not to reduce the inflow of foreign workers, even as 35 million Americans remain jobless or underemployed.
Rodriguez, a longtime advocate of amnesty for illegal aliens, spoke directly to Trump at the roundtable meeting about providing some form of amnesty to DACA illegal aliens.
“I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve tried to do for these DACA recipients,” Rodriguez told Trump. “You put something on the table that was very fair.”
“And what was really disappointing is that the Democrats are using these young adults as political pawns, and that’s just totally unacceptable in this country,” Rodriguez continued.
In response, Trump told Rodriguez that he would “take care” of DACA illegal aliens.
“They’re not going to have anything to worry about,” Trump said. “But we did have a deal on DACA, and the Democrats decided not to make the deal.”
A DACA amnesty would put more citizen children of illegal aliens — commonly referred to as “anchor babies” — on federal welfare, as Breitbart News reported, while American taxpayers would be left potentially with a $26 billion bill.
Additionally, about one-in-five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one-in-seven would go on Medicaid.
At the southern border, a DACA amnesty has the potential to trigger a border surge that could triple the number of illegal aliens pouring through the border. Since DACA’s inception, more than 2,100 recipients of the program have been kicked off because they were found to either be criminals or gang members.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

ANARCHY IN PORTLAND - TRUMP ATTEMPTS A POLICE STATE BUT FAILS

Mayor of Portland to Trump: Get your troops out of the city
In this July 4, 2020, file photo, protesters gather near a fire in downtown Portland, Ore. Oregon's largest city is in crisis as violent protests have wracked downtown for weeks. The mayor can't bring the council along on cracking down because of very liberal council members and no matter what …

The mayor of Portland is demanding that President Donald Trump remove militarized federal agents he deployed to the city after some detained people on streets distant from federal property they were sent to protect
Mayor of Portland to Trump: Get your troops out of the cityBy ANDREW SELSKY and GILLIAN FLACCUSAssociated PressThe Associated PressPORTLAND, Ore.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The mayor of Portland demanded Friday that President Donald Trump remove militarized federal agents he deployed to the city after some detained people on streets far from federal property they were sent to protect.
“Keep your troops in your own buildings, or have them leave our city,” Mayor Ted Wheeler said at a news conference.
Democratic Gov. Kate Brown said Trump is looking for a confrontation in the hopes of winning political points elsewhere. It also serves as a distraction from the coronavirus pandemic, which is causing spiking numbers of infections in Oregon and the nation.
Brown’s spokesman, Charles Boyle, said Friday that arresting people without probable cause is “extraordinarily concerning and a violation of their civil liberties and constitutional rights.”
Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said she would file a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Marshals Service, Customs and Border Protection and Federal Protection Service alleging they have violated the civil rights of Oregonians by detaining them without probable cause. She will also seek a temporary restraining order against them.
The ACLU of Oregon said the federal agents appear to be violating people’s rights, which “should concern everyone in the United States.”
“Usually when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street we call it kidnapping,” said Jann Carson, interim executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. “The actions of the militarized federal officers are flat-out unconstitutional and will not go unanswered.”
Federal officers have charged at least 13 people with crimes related to the protests so far, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported Thursday. Some have been detained by the federal courthouse, which has been the scene of protests. But others were grabbed blocks away.
“This is part of the core media strategy out of Trump’s White House: to use federal troops to bolster his sagging polling data,” Wheeler said. “And it is an absolute abuse of federal law enforcement officials.”
One video showed two people in helmets and green camouflage with “police” patches grabbing a person on the sidewalk, handcuffing them and taking them into an unmarked vehicle.
“Who are you?” someone asks the pair, who do not respond. At least some of the federal officers belong to the Department of Homeland Security.
Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that its agents had information indicating the person in the video was suspected of assaulting federal agents or destroying federal property.
“Once CBP agents approached the suspect, a large and violent mob moved towards their location. For everyone’s safety, CBP agents quickly moved the suspect to a safer location,” the agency said. However, the video shows no mob.
In another case, Mark Pettibone, 29, said a minivan rolled up to him around 2 a.m. Wednesday and four or five people got out “looking like they were deployed to a Middle Eastern war.”
Pettibone told The Associated Press he got to his knees as the group approached. They dragged him into the van without identifying themselves or responding to his questions and pulled his beanie over his eyes so he couldn’t see, he said.
“I figured I was just going to disappear for an indefinite amount of time,” Pettibone said.
Pettibone said he was put into a cell and officers dumped the contents of his backpack, with one remarking: “Oh, this is a bunch of nothing.”
After he asked for a lawyer, Pettibone was allowed to leave.
“Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters,” Democratic U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a tweet.
U.S. Attorney Billy Williams in Portland said Friday he has requested the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General to investigate the actions of DHS personnel.
In a letter Friday, Oregon’s two senators and two of its House members demanded that U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Homeland Security Acting Secretary Chad Wolf immediately withdraw “these federal paramilitary forces from our state.”
The members of Congress also said they’ll be asking the DHS inspector general and the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the presence and actions of federal forces in Portland.
“It’s painfully clear this administration is focused purely on escalating violence without answering my repeated requests for why this expeditionary force is in Portland and under what constitutional authority,” Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden said.
On Thursday night, federal officers deployed tear gas and fired non-lethal rounds into a crowd of protesters.
Wolf visited Portland on Thursday and called the demonstrators, who are protesting racism and police brutality, “violent anarchists.”
Wolf blamed state and city authorities for not putting an end to the protests. But Portland police said Friday they wound up arresting 20 people overnight.
At least two protests occurred Thursday night, one near the federal courthouse and the other by a police station in another part of the city. Police told protesters to leave that site after announcing they heard some chanting about burning down the building. Protester Paul Frazier said Friday the chant was “much more rhetorical than an actual statement.”
Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell told reporters Friday that his officers are in contact with the federal agents, but that neither controls the others’ actions.
“We do communicate with federal officers for the purpose of situational awareness and deconfliction,” Lovell said. “We’re operating in a very, very close proximity to one another.”
The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Oregon on Friday added the federal government to a lawsuit it filed earlier to halt the use of crowd control measures, including tear gas and rubber bullets, against journalists and legal observers at protests in Portland.
“The lawsuit is one of many the ACLU will be filing against federal authorities in Portland for their unconstitutional attacks on people protesting the police killing of George Floyd,” the group said.
Tensions have escalated in the past two weeks, particularly after an officer with the U.S. Marshals Service fired a less-lethal round at a protester’s head on July 11, critically injuring him.
The protests following the police killing of Floyd in Minneapolis have often devolved into violent clashes between smaller groups and the police.
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This version corrects that the governor did not say the deployment serves as a distraction, and that chanting about burning happened at police station, not federal courthouse.
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Selsky reported from Salem, Oregon. AP reporters Ben Fox in Washington and Jake Bleiberg in Dallas contributed.

Democrats Are Forcing a Civil War


Through Antifa and BLM, the Democrats are preparing for war.  The riots, looting, arson, and public beatings taking place every day are merely practice for the coming revolutionary conflagration.  They are war-gaming to see how best to seize control of the streets and intimidate citizens into ceding their right to vote for the candidate they support.
From the beginning, they forced the police to stand down.  The constant drumbeat for defunding the police has sent a message to LEOs everywhere: "Don't interfere" when the insurrection goes hot.
Knowing that the police can be constrained into allowing anarchy to reign, they then went after the National Guard and regular army, saying it would be un-American to deploy troops to quell the violence and restore law and order against "mostly peaceful" protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.
They appear to be having great success in controlling the narrative, but if they think this nation is going down without a fight, they have another "think" coming.
Americans believe that one can never be too rich, too thin, or too well armed.  And we are, indeed, well armed, with citizens who are beginning to see the game that is being played.  Many estimate that between 300 million and 700 million firearms are in the hands of the public.
If only 10% of those guns are brought to bear, it would mean a minimum of 30 million weapons deployed against Antifa and BLM.  No one wants to see bloodshed, especially gun-owners, who for the most part want to be left alone to protect their families, homes, places of worship, and places of employment.
Yet people are not going to stand by and watch America become another "socialist paradise."  Americans are going to fight back — this should worry the left, as every hunter is something of a sniper.
Leftists are pushing to see how far they can go before the people confront them.  The push for "change only they can believe in" is going to force this country in a series of bloody battles the left cannot win.
Before the economy-killing and unnecessary lockdowns, and the rioting, I would have said the civil war would happen after the election, no matter who won.  Yet, those on the left are not going to allow that grace.
Everything they are doing speaks to a political movement preparing to overthrow a nation.  They think this country is owed to them and they are determined to take it.
Having sidelined or neutered the National Guard and police, the facts on the ground today are Antifa and BLM rioting in most cases unopposed.  They will run rampant in the days and weeks preceding the election unless citizens stand up to them.  It is early, but it seems that more and more people have had enough of their terror tactics.
As far as the election is concerned, the police probably will be ordered to stand down, and the National Guard, if they are out at all, will be unarmed.  Democrats think voter intimidation will be easy. Why not use rioting, chaos, and anarchy to shut down the polls in areas suspected of supporting the president?  Remember the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia in 2008 — something like that, but more so.
Yet regular Americans vastly outnumber the forces of the left — they can terrorize the populace into submission only if normal people allow them to.
Part of their plan is to use the media to push the BLM message and social media to destroy anyone who does not go along.  The "fake history" 1619 Project, claims of systemic racism, the national monument defacements, the toppling of statues with no real coherence as to the reasons why — are all done to rewrite the history and force-sell the notion that all they do is justified because we are to blame.
It is all propaganda to convince citizens that they must acquiesce to the violence or be labeled a racist and be canceled, their jobs gone, and their lives ruined.  People are not even allowed to remain silent because "silence is violence."  If they can get people to apologize for their privilege, all the better.
It is all about getting people to be active participants in their machinations to install the "king of aphasia," Joe Biden, as the new president.
Once Americans accept their culpability, the left can begin the process of healing by abrogating the constitution on which our republic is based.  The violence they will use to make this so will be a "healing violence."  After all, one cannot make a revolution omelet without breaking some heads.
They think they can convince Americans to forgo the fight and accept what they will force upon us.  We must not allow them to succeed.  They must be confronted when they come for our country.  We must fight.
To date, the vast majority of Americans do not support the premise that America is unfair and must be changed.  In response, the Democrats, in conjunction with Antifa, the party's paramilitary arm; BLM, the ideological arm of the party; and the media, its propaganda arm, are planning outright rebellion.  What we are witnessing now from the Democrats is insurrection.  It is a revolution that will end in bloody civil war.  The left could not win total control of the nation at the ballot box, so leftists intend to take it.
They have miscalculated; what we are about to see in the streets of this country is going to make the violence and destruction of the riots seem mild by comparison.
But in the end, they lose, and we win...
Please follow the author on Twitter @williamlgensert.


Garbage- and graffiti-strewn Portland upchucks at offered federal help


Oregon's city of Portland is looking more like Caracas, Venezuela by the day, not just in its Marxist ideology, but in its moral rot and physical shambles.
John Hinderaker at Power Line noted a few days ago that he had until recently taken comfort in knowing that his home city of Minneapolis wasn't the worst-run city in America, because of Portland.
But now the blue-city shambles is taking another turn - Portland's leaders are openly screaming for federal law enforcement coming in to protect federal property, such as courthouses, to leave the burning garbage dump that is their city. They'd rather the city be left to fester.
Fox News has a very good report:

What a dump.
According to the Washington Post:
During a video news conference Friday, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler twice called the federal police in his city President Trump’s “personal army” and said that he is joining a chorus of Oregon’s elected officials in sending a clear message to Washington: “Take your troops out of Portland.”
“This is part of a coordinated strategy out of Trump’s White House to use federal troops to bolster his sagging polling data, and it is an absolute abuse of federal law enforcement officials,” Wheeler said. “As we were starting to see things de-escalate, their actions last Saturday and every night since have actually ratcheted up the tension on our streets.”
There was also this leftist fool:
“I am proud to be among the loud chorus of elected officials calling for the federal troops in Portland’s streets to go home,” Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said in a statement shared with The Post on Sunday. “Their presence here has escalated tensions and put countless Portlanders exercising their First Amendment rights in greater danger.”
The governor of Oregon was just as bad:
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said President Donald Trump, who deployed Department of Homeland Security officers to Portland, "is looking for a confrontation in Oregon in the hopes of winning political points in Ohio or Iowa."
"Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government," Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement late Thursday.
And here's more overwrought rhetoric from an under-brained Oregon senator:
“A peaceful protester in Portland was shot in the head by one of Donald Trump’s secret police,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a Thursday tweet that also called out acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf. “Now Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media.”
According to federal officials, leftist anarchists were preparing to attack federal property, such as courthouses, had attempted to break and enter, and were last seen chanting of their plans to burn it down. If that doesn't suggest a situation that requires federal intervention -- to defend the threatened third branch of government with its courts and rule of law -- what does?
A federal official tweeted this:


Oregon's U.S. Attorney, a federal rather than state official, had this to say:
“The overarching goal of law enforcement is public protection and, during tense and dangerous situations, de-escalation. Federal law enforcement officers protecting the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse and other federal buildings have been operating with those two critical goals. Night after night for the past 50 nights, they have protected the federal courthouse from incursion and fire. They have rebuffed efforts to enter the building by force and have been met with an onslaught of commercial fireworks, laser strikes, glass, mortars, paint, and anything else near at hand. They have endeavored to find the individuals within the crowd who are committing these violent acts and arrest them in a manner that is safe for both the officers and nearby non-violent protesters. In limited instances, their conduct has been questioned and the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General appropriately opened an investigation into the use of less lethal ammunition directed at a [protester] last week."
What we are looking at here is an unprecedented opposition to any semblance of law and order. Worse still, we are seeing a city and state at odds with federal interests in the most basic of interests, protecting federal property.
We are seeing fantastical narratives from Oregon's mayor in particular, but pretty much all of them.
Start with the claim that the Portland violence had died down until the feds came along. The feds were causing the problems, not the rabid leftists. Baloney, Portland has been a leftist hellhole for months - just look at the evidence shown from the Fox News coverage. Widespread reports about people not being able to go out at nights and crime running rampant didn't suggest anything at all dying down, it suggested a festering problem growing and getting worse.
And, considering Wheeler's bizarre projecting, not a word about why there was violence and hellishness in the first place, a violence brought about by Wheeler's own weak leadership and more likely, kowtowing to the rabid mob. The mob had pretty much become his governing arm, either by choice or default. That ought to be grounds to demand he forfeit his office, given his hostility to all rule of law and failure to maintain the peace. We haven't really seen anything like this in the last 100 years. Perhaps the best analogy would be that some dispirited elements of the defeated Confederacy embraced the ways of the mob, unable to accept the results of the Civil War. They became Klansmen. Portland looks disturbingly similar in its defiance.
There was also the nonsense from several of them, claiming Trump was only cracking down on their hellhole city to please voters in Ohio and Iowa, to get his numbers up in the polls. Let's translate that: Instead of numbers up in the polls, how about 'doing things people like'? People like it when laws mean what they say and rule of law is a given in any American city. They like courthouses to be courthouses, and police to police, all things that are anathema to the freaks running Portland. Why would people support the president and reward him in the polls if his administration decided to protect federal, taxpayer-paid-for property? It's completely opaque to them that this would be popular - except of course among all those un-hip people in Iowa, as one of them said. By extension, they unwittingly signalled that they had been keeping their city a hellhole to keep President Trump's poll numbers down, which doesn't speak well for them.
Thirdly, there were the bizarre and Confederate-like howls to get out. They want the feds to abandon federal property to the Antifa mobs they succor. The howls should be treated with the contempt they deserve and the federal response should if anything be harsher. We all know what they really want out, not the feds, but President Trump, out from the White House. That's what explains the vehemence of their statements. They never really got over the 2016 election and now that they know they can't overturn it, they turn their own city into a dump and tell the President to get out that way.
It just serves as a new argument to re-elect Trump.
  

THE COVID CRISIS - THE RICH ARE GETTING MUCH RICHER AS THEY ALWAYS DO UNDER ANY CRISIS

Markets soar as the corpses pile up

16 July 2020
Wednesday was a disaster in the United States. There were 71,670 new cases of COVID-19 recorded, the second-worst day on record. Nearly 1,000 people lost their lives to the disease, according to official figures.
With Texas hospitals at 90 percent capacity, dozens of mobile morgues are being dispatched to the state. In Florida, 54 hospitals now have zero available beds in their intensive care units. And, amid a full-on drive to reopen schools, officials said that one third of children who were tested in Florida were positive, adding to the body of evidence that children can play a major role spreading the disease.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington reported that it estimates 224,089 people will die from COVID-19 by November 1, an upward revision of 20,000 from just one week ago.
Meanwhile, the most basic medical supplies, such as masks, gowns, gloves and disinfectants, “simply are not readily available from the usual sources our physicians use,” the American Medical Association reported.
The economic situation is equally disastrous. American Airlines said it would likely furlough 25 , 000 workers later this year, adding to the 36,000 furloughs announced at United Airlines last week. These layoffs are scheduled to take place despite the $25 billion bailout of the airline industry by the federal government.

Amid all of this death and economic devastation, the stock markets surged, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing up for the fourth trading day in a row, with an increase totaling over a thousand points. The S&P 500 is now significantly higher than it was one year ago today.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) now predicts two possible scenarios by the end of 2020. Its “pessimistic” scenario is one in which the unemployment rate remains at 11.3 percent and economic output falls by 7.3 percent, both worse than any other recession since World War II. Its “more pessimistic” scenario is one in which the unemployment rate is 12.9 percent and economic output falls by 8.5 percent.
Wednesday’s market binge was triggered by the announcement early in the day that Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, posted one of its most profitable quarters ever, doubling the predictions of analysts.
There is no longer any question of the extent to which the stock market and the fate of society have totally separated. “The stock market and the economy have parted ways,” Mark Zandi, chief of Moody’s Analytics, told the Washington Post.
The massive run-up in stock prices and the profits of banks has only one explanation: The capitalist state has put at the disposal of its masters in the financial oligarchy unlimited amounts of money, the central purpose of which is nothing other than the enrichment of the wealthiest people in the world. As a result of the massive surge in the markets, US billionaires have become some $600 billion richer since mid-March.
To date, the Federal Reserve has funneled more than $3 trillion dollars into the financial markets, in addition to the $2 trillion in economic stimulus—much of it in the form of corporate bailouts—created by the CARES Act passed in late March.
All the claims that the bailout of major corporations by the CARES Act and the Fed’s bailout of Wall Street had anything to do with helping the mass of the population are totally exposed by what has taken place.
It would be hard to imagine a more corrupt social order than currently exists. The pandemic has become a favorable factor for enriching the financial oligarchy. As long as the crisis provides the pretext for massive bailouts by the Federal Reserve, there is no incentive to bring it under control.
If there were, even for a minute, any cutoff of the massive subsidies to the markets, there would be a devastating crash on the scale of that which took place in March, when the Dow fell by 50 percent.
The financial oligarchy lives at the expense of society, not just through class exploitation in factories and workplaces, but through the massive upward redistribution of wealth through the mechanism of the market.
While it has been hell for millions of people, the pandemic will be seen by sections of the ruling class as a certain golden age. As the bodies piled up, the oligarchs quarantined themselves in their beachfront properties and condominiums, flying between their residences on private helicopters and, at the sign of the slightest sniffle, attended to by private physicians.
It makes no difference that corpses are piling up in refrigerated trucks around the country. The bank accounts of the rich keep getting bigger and bigger.
As tens of thousands die, the ruling class and its media mouthpieces have only two demands: Reopen the schools and cut unemployment benefits. “American children need public schools to reopen in the fall,” declared the lead editorial of the New York Times on Friday. On Wednesday, it called for “a plan to reduce the payments” to workers “as the economy recovers.”
In the endless discussion of the pandemic in the media, there is never any examination of the social interests that drove the back-to-work campaign and the ensuing resurgence of the pandemic.
During the First World War, a major factor in keeping the war going—even as tens of millions died in the trenches—was the immense fortunes generated through war profiteering. So too now, it is the massive fortunes piled up that explain why there is no effort to bring the pandemic under control. While the oligarchy that dominates society makes trillions exploiting the crisis, there will be no serious effort to stop the daily toll of death and destruction.
Under these conditions, the expropriation of the capitalist class and the shutdown of Wall Street become a matter of public health. There will be no end to the pandemic without the class-conscious intervention of the working class, in a struggle against capitalism and the establishment of socialism, which will create the conditions for an effective response to the disease.