Thursday, December 31, 2020

JOE BIDEN'S GLOBALIST WORLD - Billionaires, Silicon Valley Tech Lords, and Communist China

 

2020’s Big Winners: Billionaires, Silicon Valley Tech Lords, and Communist China

Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos provides the keynote address at the Air Force Association's Annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference in Oxen Hill, MD, on September 19, 2018. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images) WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 23: …
Jim Watson, Chip Somodevilla, Nicolas Asfouri/Getty Images
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The coronavirus pandemic took nearly two million lives worldwide and caused unprecedented economic devastation this year, but 2020 had at least three big winners who came out stronger in spite of – or perhaps because of – the pandemic: the world’s billionaires, Silicon Valley’s tech lords, and communist China, where the virus originated.

COMMUNIST CHINA

China’s communist regime is sounding increasingly triumphalist in the wake of the economic destruction wreaked by the pandemic that originated in Wuhan and could have been prevented by Beijing. China’s communist dictator Xi Jinping boasted in his New Year’s Eve address that China is “the first major economy worldwide to achieve positive growth” in 2020, while the rest of the world’s economy shrank.

“China’s economy is projected to grow by 2% in 2020 and by another 8.4% in 2021. By the end of next year, its economy is expected to be 10.6% larger than it was at the beginning of this year,” Axios reports. “By contrast, after shrinking by 3.6% this year and growing by a projected 4% next year, the U.S. economy is going to end 2021 just 0.25% larger than it was at the beginning of 2020.”

Much of this is due to China’s dominance of global manufacturing; and with the whole world still reeling from the pandemic, China is moving to solidify its monopoly on the world’s supply chains through expanded free trade agreements, including a new agreement with the European Union. The pandemic’s economic damage has also allowed China to buy influence in the Third World through its international infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative, which the U.S. government has criticized as imperialist colonization via a predatory debt scheme.

As Breitbart’s Frances Martel reported:

The Chinese communist state documented a record-high trade surplus in November. Exports around the world increased 21.1 percent over November 2019 despite widespread reports that Beijing is relying heavily on enslaving its ethnic minority Uyghur population to keep production costs low. Dozens of international companies — including big names like Apple, Nintendo, and Nike — have been implicated in the use of Uyghur slave labor, some believed to be based in concentration camps.

Those not outright enslaved may also be vulnerable to forced labor, particularly in the cotton-picking industry. Offered few other options, many Uyghurs work in the cotton industry, sometimes becoming involved without clear consent, researcher Adrian Zenz revealed last month.

Much of the increase in exports for China has been the product of the pandemic causing other countries to limit their manufacturing sectors, and most economic activity in general. China’s imports from outside also declined, given the limited economic activity around the world, resulting in a staggering $460 billion trade surplus with the rest of the world in November.

The Center for Economics and Business Research, a U.K. think tank, predicted this month that, in part because of the pandemic, China was on a speedier path to becoming the world’s largest economy than it had ever been, and may overtake the United States by 2028.

The key to China’s economic resilience lies in its manufacturing sector, which bounced back faster from the pandemic, as did the U.S. manufacturing sector. For example, the U.S. automotive industry was among the industries to get back to work after the initial lockdown because it could set up clear safety protocols to keep factories Covid-free by keeping factory workers six feet apart, distributing protective gear, setting up cleaning stations, and alternating work shifts to deep clean the plant and limit any exposure from Covid outbreaks.

However, after years of bad free trade agreements and offshoring of labor, the U.S. economy is much more reliant on its service sector, which is why it was much less resilient to the pandemic. Even before the government mandated lockdown, consumers changed their habits out of fear of contracting the virus. Jobs in the travel, food, leisure, and entertainment industries were especially vulnerable because “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another,” the Associated Press reports. And even if every lockdown order was lifted, the elderly population – who comprise a signification percentage of American consumers – will still likely curtail their leisure and traveling habits until the virus is no longer a threat to them.

All of this was born out in an October report from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, which revealed that the U.S. manufacturing sector “held up much better and recovered much more quickly than the services sector,” as Breitbart’s John Carney reported. Overall, the pandemic hit the U.S. nonmanufacturing sector twice as hard as the manufacturing sector, all of which confirms the importance of having a vibrant manufacturing base. Meanwhile, China is increasing its investment in new manufacturing facilities and infrastructure, while the Unites States’ Congress has still failed to propose or pass any major infrastructure legislation that will put the U.S. on a path to compete with China in developing and building the technologies of the future on our shores.

To top off this victorious year for Beijing, the communist regime now has an ally in the Oval Office with Joe Biden emerging as the victor in this year’s presidential race. Not only does the president-elect have family members with close business ties with the communist regime, Biden has also repeatedly declared that he doesn’t see China as “competition” to the U.S. Furthermore, Biden has plans to impose a penalty tax on U.S. corporations that move business overseas. In theory, the proposal is to hurt companies for offshoring their manufacturing. But in practice, this policy aligns perfectly with the interests of communist China because companies can bypass Biden’s tax penalty by simply outsourcing their offshore manufacturing to foreign partners in China; so instead of making the parts themselves, these companies can simply buy from a third-party foreign manufacturer, which companies like Apple already do. Thus, the billionaire class, which favored Biden in the 2020 election, will have little to fear from Biden’s offshore tax threat, and China will be delighted by it.

2020 may well be remembered as the first year of the new Cold War with China; and like the last Cold War, there is now a space race, as China ends the year having planted its flag on the moon where the American flag was planted over 50 years ago. However, it remains to be seen whether the United States will emerge victorious against this new communist menace, which has already taken millions of American jobs and hundreds of thousands of American lives, all while tormenting its own citizens, who have been imprisonedsurveilleddisappeared, and used as slave labor by an authoritarian regime enriched by 20 years of record trade imbalances acquired through flagrant trade violations.

The greatest generation defeated its “evil empire.” Will the Covid-generation, which came of age during the great pandemic, defeat the new evil empire in the decades to come?

THE WORLD’S BILLIONAIRES

Never was the old cliché that “the rich get richer” truer than in 2020. The wealth of the world’s super-rich broke new records this year, according to a report conducted by PwC and the Swiss bank UBC. The combined wealth of the world’s over 6,000 billionaires grew to $10.2 trillion in July, blowing past the previous record of $8.9 trillion in 2017. And the number of new billionaires also grew from 2,158 in 2017 to 2,189 in 2020. All of this happened at the height of the pandemic between April and July 2020, as average people the world over were hit by economic devastation, but the world’s billionaires increased their wealth by over a quarter to 27.5 percent, the Guardian reports.

In 2020, America’s 614 billionaires increased their collective net worth by $931 billion, even as tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs. Between just March and May alone, the net wealth of these American billionaires increased by 15 percent, as over 36 million Americans were joblessness due to the pandemic. In contrast, the U.S. poverty rate rose to 11.7 percent in November, a jump of 2.4 percent since June, marking the highest single year increase since the government began tracking poverty 60 years ago.

On a worldwide level, the pandemic has caused global extreme poverty to rise for the first time in over 20 years, according to a World Bank report in October. The report estimates that the pandemic will “push an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty this year, with the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021.” They define “extreme poverty” as living on less than $1.90 a day, and about 82 percent of this “new poor” population will be in middle-income countries.

However, 2020 was a banner year for the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, whose wealth grew by nearly 80 percent during the pandemic from $113 billion in March 2020 to $203.1 billion in October 2020, as the lockdowns made everyone increasingly dependent on his Amazon services to deliver food and supplies. Amazon’s 2020 third-quarter profits tripled from what they were last year, from $2.1 billion on 2019 to $6.3 billion on 2020.

That is in stark contrast to the estimated one in five small businesses that closed during the pandemic. In May, the Washington Post reported that over 100,000 U.S. small businesses – once the economic engine of the American dream – closed forever due to the virus. The pandemic devastated mom-and-pop businesses that were forced to shut down due to government lockdown orders that favored large retail chains like Walmart. These big box stores were allowed to remain open and rake in huge profits, increasing their monopoly power and driving out smaller competitors for good. This year Walmart increased its profits by nearly 45 percent over last year, thanks to the pandemic. The net wealth of Walmart founder Sam Walton’s heirs — Jim, Rob, and Alice Walton – each increased by nearly a quarter during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the workers fueling this massive wealth increase for the billionaire owners of Amazon and Walmart gained little from this boom. Amazon workers received an extra 95 cents an hour and Walmart workers received 63 cents an hour as compensation over the course of the pandemic, while during that same period, Bezos’ income increased by $70 billion and the Walton family’s fortune increased by $45 billion, according to a Brookings Institute report. But there is little recourse for these workers to complain about that disparity. The companies, which combined employ nearly 3 million Americans, have been ruthless in suppressing attempts by their workforce to unionize and collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions.

However, these same American billionaires and their global corporations have been very vocal in support of woke political causes like the Black Lives Matter movement, promising millions of dollars to repair the damage caused by slavery in America over 150 years ago, even as these same corporations have little qualms about exploiting slave labor today in China.

The pandemic has intensified this already troubling income disparity. America today increasingly resembles an oligarchy, where the concentration of power into the hands of a small cadre of the super-rich and their monopolistic mega-corporations allow these elites to buy political influence and stomp on the rights of everyone else. Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald notes that America’s founders would have rightly feared that this “economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political rights and legal equality illusory.”

Indeed, as Greenwald writes, the “combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative ‘COVID relief,’ and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.” None of this reflects free market capitalism, but rather crony capitalism, whereby “the power of the state [is used] to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.”

Meanwhile, the year ends with a Republican Senate’s refusal to grant American citizens $2,000 direct relief payments, opting instead to “target” relief to the favored few. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell referred to direct payments to all Americans as “socialism for rich people,” even though actual billionaires are benefitting the most from the “relief” Congress targets their way. As Congress debates “socialism,” nearly 12 million Americans owe an average of $5,850 in back rent and utilities, and an estimated 5.4 million Americans lost their employer health insurance in a three-month span this year due to the pandemic, which is more than the loss of coverage in any single year.

SILICON VALLEY’S TECH LORDS

Of all the monopolistic billionaires blessed by the pandemic, perhaps none have come out as victorious as the tech lords of Silicon Valley. Not only did they increase their massive wealth and monopoly power during the pandemic, they also helped get their preferred candidate elected to the White House.

As has been well-documented, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (whose net wealth increased by over 85 percent this year) deliberately censored stories about Hunter Biden’s corruption scandal in the lead up to the November election, and Google (whose 2020 third-quarter revenue increased by 14 percent year-over-year) suppressed the Google search visibility of Breitbart News articles by 99 percent in 2020 compared to the same period in 2016.

Greenwald notes that the “most menacing” aspect of all of the pandemic-fueled increase of wealth and monopoly power is that its primary beneficiaries have been Facebook, Google, and Amazon – companies with “unprecedented power” over “the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.”

He writes:

Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.

That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship.

Greenwald calls Facebook’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden stories “one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years,” noting that “this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.”

“These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency,” he adds. “Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.”

Indeed, in 2020, the rich got richer, Silicon Valley got more powerful, and communist China reaped the benefits of the death and chaos that emerged from its shores. The rest of us, to quote the poet, are “turning and turning in the widening gyre” hoping that the centre will hold.

Rebecca Mansour is Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News. Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.

WILL THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY DESTROY AMERICA? - SO LONG AS IT PUTS MONEY IN THEIR BOTTOMLESS POCKETS

 

Murder Surged in Democrat-Controlled Cities During 2020

Police stepped up patrols near Belmont and Central avenues in Portage Park after a shooting Sunday night.
Scott Olson/Getty
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Murder surged in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, New Orleans, and numerous other Democrat-controlled cities during 2020.

The murder surge was great enough that columnist Byron York observed 2020 was possibly “the worst one year increase in murder ever recorded.”

For example, as of December 20, 2020, the Atlanta Police Department indicated there had been 154 murders in Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ (D) Atlanta, up from 95 in 2019.

And there were 768 killed in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) Chicago January 1, 2020, through December 27, 2020, according to the Chicago Tribune. For comparison, the Chicago Police Department noted 491 homicides in the city during 2019.

The Dallas Police Department noted as of December 29, 2020, there had been 262 murders in Mayor Eric Johnson’s (D) Dallas. There were 211 murders in the city during all of 2019.

As of December 31, 2020, the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department listed 174 murders in Mayor Quinton Lucas’ (D) Kansas City for 2020, which is up from 151 in 2019.

The New Orleans city government indicates there were 185 homicides in Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s (D) New Orleans January 1, 2020, through December 30, 2020, an increase of 61 of over the 124 witnessed in 2019.

And Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department shows 198 homicides in Mayor Muriel Bowser’s (D) D.C. for 2020, up from 166 in 2019.

On December 29, 2020, Crimealytics’ Jeff Asher reported similar surges in murder in Democrat-controlled cities such as Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Oakland, St. Louis, and Philadelphia, among others:

On June 29, 2020, Breitbart News reported that the Washington Post tried to undermine President Trump’s claim that the “20 most violent cities are Democrat-run.” Through tireless research the Post was able to show only 17 of the top 20 most violent cities in the U.S. had Democrat mayors.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkinsa weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

The bankster regime of lawyer Barack Obama, lawyer Joe Biden and lawyer Eric Holder orchestrated the greatest transfer of wealth to banksters and the rich in U.S. history!

Pelosi Creates Panel to ‘Combat the Concentration of Wealth in America and Its Role in Triggering Economic Collapse’

By CNSNews.com Staff | December 30, 2020 | 1:09pm EST

 
Nancy Pelosi at Canton Bazaar in San Francisco's Chinatown, Feb. 24, 2020. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Nancy Pelosi at Canton Bazaar in San Francisco's Chinatown, Feb. 24, 2020. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) announced today that she has created a new congressional committee—inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt—that is designed “to study and combat the concentration of wealth in America and its role in triggering economic collapse.”

“As House Speaker, I am proud to announce the creation of the new, bipartisan Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth, which will be an essential force in Congressional Democrats’ action to combat the crisis of income and wealth disparity in America,” Pelosi said.

“It is molded after the mission of the Temporary National Economic Committee, founded by President Roosevelt and the Congress after the Great Depression to study and combat the concentration of wealth in America and its role in triggering economic collapse,” she said.

“As President Roosevelt said before founding this Committee, ‘The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself… the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living,’” she said.

“The past several decades have shown with devastating clarity the marked imbalance between the financial fortunes of CEOs and workers,” Pelosi said.

Here is the full text of Pelosi’s statement about the creation of this new committee:

Nancy Pelosi: “As House Speaker, I am proud to announce the creation of the new, bipartisan Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth, which will be an essential force in Congressional Democrats’ action to combat the crisis of income and wealth disparity in America.  It is molded after the mission of the Temporary National Economic Committee, founded by President Roosevelt and the Congress after the Great Depression to study and combat the concentration of wealth in America and its role in triggering economic collapse.

“As President Roosevelt said before founding this Committee, ‘The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself… the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.’

“The past several decades have shown with devastating clarity the marked imbalance between the financial fortunes of CEOs and workers.  The reverence of those who amass profits by stagnating wages has seriously undermined the lives and livelihoods of many Americans, while slowing economic growth in our country.  This year, the disturbing, dangerous trend of economic disparity has also been accelerated by the coronavirus economic crisis.

“The devaluing of work has had a negative impact on consumer confidence, job creation and economic growth.  And the situation of families no longer believing that their children will have a brighter future than they is seriously damaging and demoralizing to our society.

“That is why we are creating this Select Committee, which will be a resource to the Congress to make policy related to economic fairness, access to education and workforce development.  Working with the Committees of Jurisdiction, the Select Committee will study and recommend proposals to make our economy work for everyone, powering American economic growth while ensuring that no one is left out or left behind in the 21st Century Economy.

California Judges Reopen ‘Flores’ Border Gate for Coyotes, Cartels, Migrants

EL PASO, TEXAS - FEBRUARY 01: Central American immigrants walk along the border fence after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico on February 01, 2019 in El Paso, Texas. The migrants later turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents, seeking political asylum in the United States. (Photo by John …
File Photo John Moore/Getty Images
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Three white-collar judges in San Francisco are reopening the judge-created, 1997 border gateway that has allowed at least one million wage-cutting economic migrants to flood into the jobs, housing, and schools needed by blue-collar Americans.

“They’re basically saying, ‘Bring a child with you across the border and it is a get-out-of-jail card,'” said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

The December 30 decision by the judges on the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected a careful 2019 regulation by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is intended to replace the 1997 Flores rules.

The Flores policy was set in 1997 by California Judge Dolly Gee in cooperation with pro-migration officials in President Bill Clinton’s administration and various pro-migration groups. The Flores court settlement enables and invites migrants to overwhelm U.S. border rules by first claiming asylum to prevent quick deportation and then using their children to get released after 20 days into U.S. workplaces.

The judges said President Donald Trump’s DHS regulation would wrongly end the 1997 Flores‘ catch and release policy:

Together, the DHS regulations regarding the release of accompanied minors and the revised definition of “licensed facility” dramatically increase the likelihood that accompanied minors will remain in government detention indefinitely, instead of being released while their immigration proceedings are pending or housed in nonsecure, licensed facilities. Effecting this change was one of the principal features of the [DHS] Final Rule. The government “strongly disagrees” with our holding in Flores [1997] that “the plain [catch and release] language of the Agreement clearly encompasses accompanied minors [with parents].”

“That’s the puzzling thing — how can a [1997 Cinton] arrangement like this be used to bind every future administration?” asked Miano. “That is nuts … it seems contrary to any democratic process.”

The judges did not bar DHS from holding migrant adults for long periods — but they also know that pro-migration Democrats and media outlets will emotionally slam the separation of children from their migrant parents after 20 days. For example, in October, President-elect Joe Biden declared:

Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated and now they cannot find over 500 of sets of those parents and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal, it’s criminal.

Since his election, Biden has begun describing his pro-migration border policy as “family reunification.”

The judges’ decision allows Biden to keep the Flores gateway open during his first term — despite Trump’s regulatory closure — and use the 20-day rule to justify releasing many wage-cutting migrants into the jobs needed by blue-collar Americans. So far, very few white-collar journalists have defended the right of blue-collar Americans to their own national labor market.

Trump’s deputies did not release the DHS regulation until August 2019, 32 months after he took office. The late release — and slow judicial consideration — means that his deputies do not have time to get the Supreme Court to overturn the California judges’ veto.

The judges insisted the Flores gateway has any impact on the flow of migrants through the obstacle course of dangers that lie between migrants’ homes and the jobs they want in the United States. “The crux of the government’s … argument is that an unprecedented increase in the number of minors arriving annually at U.S. borders warrants termination of the [1997] Agreement,” said the judges’ decision, released December 30. The decision continues:

According to the government, “irregular family migration” has increased by 33 times since 2013, and in 2019, more than 500,000 people traveling as families reached the southwest border.

,,,

The government has failed to demonstrate that the recent increase in family migration has made complying with the Agreement’s [1997] release mandate for accompanied minors “substantially more onerous,” “unworkable,” or “detrimental to the public interest.”

Amid the court’s claims, many migrants have told U.S. media outlets they brought their children up to the border to exploit Judge Gee’s Flores catch-and-release gateway.

By restarting the catch and release process that allows migrants to get U.S. jobs quickly, the judges’ gateway makes it possible for the cartel-affiliated coyote networks to operate their multi-national, industrial-scale conveyor belt that delivers economic migrants into Americans’ jobs and extracts billions of dollars in smuggling fees.... FREQUENTLY MONEY LAUNDERED THROUGH BIDEN'S CRONY BANKS!

For example, the New York Times reported in June 2018:

“This is the reason I brought a minor with me,” said Guillermo T., 57, a construction worker who recently arrived in Arizona. Facing unemployment at home in Guatemala, he decided to head north; he had been told that bringing his 16-year-old daughter would assure passage. He asked that only his first named be used to avoid consequences with his immigration case.

“She was my passport,” he said of his daughter.

Migrants die while trying to reach the gateway opened by Dolly Gee. In June 2019, the Washington Post reported:

Standing on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, America looked within reach. Martínez and Valeria waded in. But before they all made it to the other side, to Brownsville, Tex., the river waters pulled the 25-year-old and his daughter under and swept them away.

Of the 283 migrant deaths that Border Patrol recorded at the Southwest border last year, the largest share — 96 — perished in the Rio Grande Valley. Agents rescued another 4,300 who were “in danger and in some cases life-threatening situations” border-wide.

Gee’s rule is also emptying towns in Central America. In April 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported:

COLOTENANGO, Guatemala—Gloria Velásquez is used to saying goodbye. Four of her six siblings have migrated to the U.S. and she, too, is thinking about heading north with her 9-year-old daughter.

Ms. Velásquez said her four siblings in the U.S. are encouraging her to join them. Her daughter Helen Ixchel likes to teach language and mathematics to fellow children. She wants to learn English and become a teacher.

“I’m a bit scared [about going to the U.S.] after hearing all the news about the suffering of migrants at the border. But it’s my daughter’s greatest dream,” Ms. Velásquez said.

Teenage migrants also use the judges’ Flores gateway to expand America’s child labor workforce. In November 2o20, ProPublica reported:

“Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the [migrant] teens are coming to work and send money back home,” said Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, a national organization that advocates for immigrant children in court. “They want to help their parents.”

But whether they stayed in a shelter in Florida or California or Illinois, the teens heard similar warnings from the staff: They had to enroll in school and stay out of trouble. The immigration judges who would decide their cases, they were told, didn’t want to hear that they were working.

“They would ask you: ‘Who are you going to live with? Is he going to support you financially?’” said one 19-year-old who spent nearly six months at a shelter in New York before a family friend in Bensenville agreed to take him in. “And you say yes. ‘Are they going to be responsible for you?’ And you say yes. ‘Are they going to take you to school?’ And you say yes.”

“The odd thing is, usually judges try to avoid catastrophes because they don’t want to be blamed … [but] we’ve already seen the chaos happening,” Miano said.

Three of the four judges were appointed by Democrats.

Gee is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and was nominated to the court by Clinton, as were appeals court judges William A. Fletcher and Marsha S. Berzon. The third appeals court judge, Milan D. Smith, was nominated by President George W. Bush, who was so pro-migration that he pushed for a cheap labor “Any Willing Worker” economy.

The court case was brought by a vast array of establishment, pro-migration business and white-collar legal groups, most of whom stand to gain from the flow of cheap foreign labor and welfare-aided consumers into Americans’ communities:

Carlos R. Holguin (argued) and Peter A. Schey, Center for Human Rights & Constitutional Law, Los Angeles, California; Holly S. Cooper, Co-Director, Immigration Law Clinic, University of California Davis School of Law, Davis, California; Leecia Welch, Neha Desai, Poonam Juneja, and Freya Pitts, National Center for Youth Law, Oakland, California; Kevin Askew, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, Los Angeles, California; for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Elizabeth B. Wydra, Brianne J. Gorod, and Dayna J. Zolle, Constitutional Accountability Center, Washington, D.C., for Amici Curiae Members of Congress.

James H. Hulme, Arent Fox LLP, Washington, D.C.; David L. Dubrow and Melissa Trenk, Arent Fox LLP, New York, New York; Justin A. Goldberg, Arent Fox LLP, Los Angeles, California; for Amici Curiae American Pediatric Association, American Pediatric Society, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Pediatrics California Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics Pennsylvania Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics Texas Chapter, American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work, American Medical Association, American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychoanalytic Association, Association of Medical School Pediatric Department Chairs, California Medical Association, California Psychiatric Association, Center for Law and Social Policy, Center for Youth Wellness, Children’s Defense Fund, Doctors for America, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, March of Dimes, National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners, National Association of Social Workers, National Education Association, Society for Pediatric Research, Women’s Refugee Commission, First Focus On Children, Save The Children Action Network Inc., Save The Children US, United States Fund for UNICEF, and Zero To Three.

Amanda Aikman, Jennifer K. Brown, and Natasha Greer Menell, Morrison & Foerster LLP, New York, New York, for Amici Curiae Interfaith Group of 40 Religious and Interreligious Organizations.

Alexis Coll-Very, Redwood City, California; Molly L. Leiwant, New York, New York; Wendy Wylegala, Kids in Need of Defense, New York, New York; for Amici Curiae Kids in Need of Defense, Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc., Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, Immigrant Children Advocates’ Relief Efforts, International Rescue Committee, Legal Services for Children, National Immigrant Justice Center, Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, Public Counsel, and Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.

Sarah P. Alexander, Constantine Cannon LLP, San Francisco, California, for Amici Curiae Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA., Aaron X. Fellmeth, Arizona State University, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Phoenix, Arizona; W. Warren H. Binford, Willamette University College of Law, Salem, Oregon; Blaine I. Green and Erica Turcios Yader, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, San Francisco, California; Michael Garcia Bochenek, New York, New York; Stella Burch Elias, University of Iowa College of Law, Iowa City, Iowa; Ian M. Kysel, Cornell Law School, Ithaca, New York; for Amici Curiae Legal Scholars and Nongovernmental Organizations.

Joseph P. Lombardo, Sara T. Ghadiri, and Eric S. Silvestri, Chapman and Cutler LLP, Chicago, Illinois, for Amici Curiae Children’s Advocacy Organizations.

Xavier Becerra, Attorney General; Michael L. Newman, Senior Assistant Attorney General; Sarah E. Belton, Supervising Deputy Attorney General; Virginia Corrigan, Rebekah A. Fretz, Vilma Palma Solana, and Julia Harumi Mass, Deputy Attorneys General; California Department of Justice, Oakland, California; William Tong, Attorney General, Hartford, Connecticut; Kathleen Jennings, Attorney General, Wilmington, Delaware; Kwame Raoul, Attorney General, Chicago, Illinois; Aaron M. Frey, Attorney General, Augusta, Maine; Brian E. Frosh, Attorney General, Baltimore, Maryland; Maura Healey, Attorney General, Boston, Massachusetts; Dana Nessel, Attorney General, Lansing, Michigan; Keith Ellison, Attorney General, St. Paul, Minnesota; Aaron D. Ford, Attorney General, Carson City, Nevada; Gurbir S. Grewal, Attorney General, Trenton, New Jersey, Hector Balderas, Attorney General, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Letitia James, Attorney General, New York, New York; Ellen F. Rosenblum, Attorney General, Salem, Oregon; Josh Shapiro, Attorney General, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Peter F. Neronha, Attorney General, Providence, Rhode Island; Thomas J. Donovan Jr., Attorney General, Montpelier, Vermont; Mark R. Herring, Attorney General, Richmond, Virginia; Robert W. Ferguson, Attorney General, Olympia, Washington; Karl A. Racine, Attorney General, Washington, D.C.; for Amici Curiae States of California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

Michael N. Feuer, City Attorney; Kathleen Kenealy, Valerie L. Flores, Michael Dundas, and Danielle L. Goldstein, Attorneys; Office of the City Attorney, Los Angeles, California; Donna R. Ziegler, County Counsel, Oakland, California; Craig Labadie, City Attorney, Albany, California; Esteban A. Aguilar Jr., City Attorney, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Joanna C. Anderson, City Attorney, Alexandria, Virginia; Nina R. Hickson, City Attorney, Atlanta, Georgia; Anne L. Morgan, City Attorney, Austin, Texas; Andre M. Davis, City Solicitor, Baltimore, Maryland; Farimah F. Brown, City Attorney, Berkeley, California; Eugene O’Flaherty, Corporation Counsel, Boston, Massachusetts; Nancy E. Glowa, City Solicitor, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Mark A. Flessner, Corporation Counsel, and Benna Ruth Solomon, Deputy Corporation Counsel, Chicago, Illinois; William R. Hanna, Director of Law, Cleveland Heights, Ohio; Zach Klein, City Attorney, Columbus, Ohio; Sharon L. Anderson, County Counsel, Martinez, California; Jessica M. Scheller, Assistant State’s Attorney, Chicago, Illinois; Heather M. Minner, City Attorney, Cupertino, California; Ronald C. Lewis, City Attorney, Houston, Texas; Charles Parkin, City Attorney, Long Beach California; Margaret L. Carter, O’Melveny & Myers LLP, Los Angeles, California; Michael P. May, City Attorney, Madison, Wisconsin; Leslie J. Girard, County Counsel, Salinas, California; James E. Johnson, Corporation Counsel, New York, New York; Barbara J. Parker, City Attorney, Oakland, California; Marcel S. Pratt, City Solicitor, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Cris Meyer, City Attorney, Phoenix, Arizona; Yvonne S. Hilton, City Solicitor, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Tracy P. Reeve, City Attorney, Portland, Oregon; Jeffrey Dana, City Solicitor, Providence, Rhode Island; Susan Alcala Wood, City Attorney, Sacramento, California; Dennis J. Herrera, City Attorney, San Francisco, California; Richard Doyle, City Attorney, San Jose, California; James R. Williams, County Counsel, San Jose, California; Dana McRae, County Counsel, Santa Cruz, California; Peter S. Holmes, City Attorney, Seattle, Washington; Francis X. Wright Jr., City Solicitor, Somerville, Massachusetts; Michael Jenkins, City Attorney, Best Best & Krieger LLP, Manhattan Beach, California; for Amici Curiae 37 Cities and Counties.


Democrats Destroyed All the Savings of Americans Three Times Over

And added a Broken Glass Belt to the Rust Belt.

  

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Americans have $1.3 trillion in personal savings. A study published in The Economics of Disasters and Climate Change found that the coronavirus pandemic will result in between $3.2 trillion to $4.8 trillion in GDP losses. That approaches the economic output of Japan.

Much of those losses were caused by the lockdowns which could result in a 60.6% fall in GDP.

Governors, most of them Democrats, destroyed three times the household savings of the country, not just as an abstract number by piling

on more debt and adding more infinite zeros to an impossible number, but by actively destroying small businesses on an unprecedented scale.

The results won’t go away when the virus does. Much of the country may never recover.

The sheer scope of the destruction may be couched in statistics, but it can be seen in empty storefronts, deserted streets, and food bank lines in cities across the country. It’s an act of economic warfare with no precedent in our history waged against a very particular group.

Small businesses were shuttered by the lockdowns and then hammered by the race riots.

Compared to those trillions, the estimated $2 billion in damage from the Black Lives Matter riots funded, endorsed, and enabled by the Democrats almost seems like nothing. Unless you’re one of the many small business owners who had their stores looted and their insurance rates rise. Or unless you’re one of the many people who need those businesses to be there on the corner.

That $2 billion is just the insurance claims. The full total of losses suffered by the stores, the toll of the brutal violence inflicted on random people and on police officers, and the dollars and cents cost to taxpayers dealing with the rioting and the aftermath is much higher.

2020 was the worst year for the American middle class in almost a century. Millions of small business owners fell off the charts. A SCORE survey found that only 34% of small business owners were turning a profit. Meanwhile Yelp claimed that 800 small businesses are closing every day. The scope of this disaster extends to their workers, their suppliers, and the buying habits of their customers. The retail sector has been gutted and the winner is Communist China.

When shoppers shifted to Amazon in greater numbers than ever, they were really buying from Chinese third party sellers who are using the Bezos platform to sell directly to Americans. The retail sector in this country was cut out of the loop leaving few jobs except those of Amazon warehouse workers and executives as Made in China didn’t just mean factories, but retail.

Big Tech’s real business model is a trojan horse offering free services in exchange for user data that helps Chinese businesses target Americans. It’s why Facebook takes in $5 billion a year in ad money from China even though it's not allowed to operate in the Communist dictatorship.

Democrats are happy to move sales away from the domestic retail sector, which is traditionally more conservative, and to Big Tech which has poured unprecedented amounts of capital into their operations while acting as a political gatekeeper for their agendas. Wiping out the middle class and turning business owners and workers into welfare cases wraps up the Dem deal.

Republicans benefit from economic improvements while Democrats benefit from economic declines. Every time in the last thirty years that a Democrat replaced a Republican in the White House was during an economic decline. Voters are more receptive to Democrat promises that Washington D.C. will take care of them when times are hard and the future appears uncertain.

Democrats claim that they hate big business. But what they really hate are the small businessmen who are the backbone of local politics. Each economic disaster is built to thin out the ranks of the local businessmen and replace them with subsidized political operatives who benefit from generous bank loans and affirmative action government contracts. And then the Democrats can hit up Chinese oligarchs for bribes in exchange for contracts on terms that will wipe out the rest of the economy and reduce America to a third world welfare state. Again.

The Democrat playbook under Bush and Trump was to cause massive economic disasters, run for office promising to take care of the little guy, and then wipe out small businesses nationwide. Now they’re doing to the retail sector what they already did to manufacturing in America. The Rust Belt wasn’t enough and they intend to add a Broken Glass Belt across the nation.

The Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 were the biggest national disaster in terms of cost in a century. But this disaster was not caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes or wildfires. It wasn’t even an act of international terrorism, or the work of a few domestic radicals huddled in a basement. Instead it was funded, planned, and carried out by some of the biggest donors and organizations affiliated with the Democrats and their political nonprofits.

Think of the riots as a $2 billion version of 9/11 whose leadership isn’t hiding in a cave or in Pakistan, but is meeting openly in D.C. hotels while buying elections from coast to cost.

But that $2 billion orgy of rioting, looting, burning, maiming, and killing still pales when compared to the largest disaster of the pandemic lockdowns which cost trillions of dollars. A sum amounting to several times more than the household savings of the country was burned in that fire and will go on burning if Democrat leaders and their leftist activist base has its way.

The fact that both the lockdowns and the riots targeted small business is not a coincidence.

While the lockdowns were presented as being all about science and the riots as a populist response to racial injustice, both emerged from policy shops and think tanks. Neither were a natural response to conditions and neither came close to achieving their stated goals.

The lockdowns did not stop the surge and the race riots did nothing for black lives. Instead pandemic deaths and the deaths of black people actually increased in the wake of these measures. But the lockdowns and the riots did achieve their true goals which, among others, was to decimate the retail sector in order to reconstruct the economy and local politics.

Every disaster is followed by a recovery. And the Democrat playbook is to cause the disaster and then control the recovery. The Obama recovery was just another kind of disaster and the pandemic recovery will be as devastating in some ways as the pandemic and the riots.

The recovery is the carrot while the disaster is the stick, but both reconfigure the economy to undermine the independence of businesses and the social mobility of individuals, moving money and jobs away from conservative areas and businesses, and into leftist areas and organizations, while deepening big government’s death grip on the economy.

Even as the pandemic may be approaching its end, the next stage of the disaster is here.

Democrats may have destroyed a sum equal to the household savings of the country three times over, but that was just the warm-up act. After the crisis comes the recovery. And if you thought the crisis had hit small businesses hard, wait until you see how hard the recovery is.