McAuliffe Touts ‘Dem Leadership’ on Economy as Supply Chain Crisis Hits Northern Virginia
DUMFRIES, Va.—As Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe rallied with Vice President Kamala Harris to tout "Democratic leadership" on the economy, businesses outside of the Northern Virginia venue struggled to deal with "unprecedented" labor and supply chain issues.
At his Thursday evening rally in Dumfries, McAuliffe spoke of "new high-paying jobs" and "reduced unemployment" in the state, adding, "That's what you get with good Democratic leadership." Throughout the surrounding area, however, businesses bore the impact of the Biden administration's ongoing supply chain crisis and crippling labor shortage.
In a nearby Waffle House—a late-night Southern restaurant chain known for remaining open during extreme events—both a sign at the door and an updated menu apologized for reduced seating capacity and limited service hours, citing "unprecedented staffing and supply chain challenges."
A sign outside the town's local Aldi, meanwhile, informed customers that due to "shipping delays," some advertised items may not be in stock. "We're hiring" and "help wanted" signs also lined restaurants and stores throughout Dumfries—according to one local service industry worker, eateries in the area are "real short-staffed," leading to inconsistent hours.
The Biden administration's economic stumbles complicate McAuliffe's bid for a second term as governor. According to a Thursday CNBC poll, just 40 percent approve of President Joe Biden's handling of the economy, while 54 percent disapprove. In addition, 46 percent say the economy will get worse in the next year, the "most in the 13-year history of the poll." While McAuliffe has Acknowledged Biden is "unpopular" in Virginia and could cause "headwinds" for his campaign, the president is set to return to the state for a McAuliffe rally one week before the election. McAuliffe's bet on Biden and Harris to put him over the edge may backfire—45 percent of Virginia voters cite "jobs and the economy" as a top issue in the election, a Tuesday Monmouth University Poll shows. That number is up from 39 percent in September.
Virginia's economy has struggled to bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic. In September, the state ranked 41st in the country in job recovery, having recovered just 66 percent of its lost jobs, Labor Department data show.
"I've been to restaurants where they have a notice sign on the door saying, ‘We are closed at this time due to shortage of staff,'" a Northern Virginia voter told the Washington Free Beacon. "I have friends who work at the grocery store who are saying that they're unable to fill the shelves—this is in Virginia—because they're not getting products in."
Neither the White House nor the McAuliffe campaign returned requests for comment.
Harris avoided addressing the economy during her Thursday night speech, which largely centered on abortion rights—she said "the right that every woman in America has to make decisions about her own body" is "what matters" in the race. According to the latest Monmouth poll, however, just 10 percent of Virginia voters identify abortion as their number-one issue, compared to 27 percent who cite the economy.
Harris also conceded that McAuliffe is embroiled in a "tight" race against Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin. Two October Polls show the Democrat is in a statistical tie with Youngkin. Biden won the state by double digits in 2020.
Not long after attendees filtered out of the rally, Biden took to the stage roughly 75 miles away in Baltimore to participate in a CNN town hall. The president acknowledged that some economic deficiencies will linger into 2022, an admission that is unlikely to ease Democrats' concerns as they look to avoid a high-profile loss in Virginia.
"I don't see anything that's going to significantly reduce gas prices right now," Biden told Anderson Cooper. "My guess is you'll start to see gas prices come down as we get … into next year in 2022."
McAuliffe and Youngkin will face off at the polls on Nov. 2.
Matthew Foldi contributed to this report.
Liberal Media Urge Americans to Embrace Shortages, ‘Stop Shopping’
Liberal media outlets are using the current supply-chain crisis, shortages, and inflation to push an anti-consumption, anti-growth ethic that they believe is better for human civilization and for the planet.
More than merely spinning bad economic news for the benefit of an administration whose left-wing policies they support, these outlets are hoping that the present scarcity will convert Americans away from an allegedly consumerist, wasteful lifestyle toward more socialist, environmentalist habits.
First came the Washington Post last week, where an op-ed admonished Americans: “Don’t rant about short-staffed stores and supply chain woes.”
The author, a culinary expert named Micheline Maynard, scolds “pampered” and “spoiled” American consumers who “whine” at shops and restaurants, and suggests that “we’d do ourselves a favor by consciously lowering expectations.” After all, she says, previous generations endured shortages of gasoline, food, and housing: “Now it’s our turn.”
Next, liberal “explainer” website Vox.com declared: “It’s time for Americans to buy less stuff.” Never mind the consequences for retailers, wholesalers, importers, manufacturers, advertisers, delivery drivers, and the whole economy: the “holiday shopping industrial complex” deserved to be cut to size.
Early shopping, author Terry Nguyen asserted, is bad for workers “and the planet.” We can just “buy less,” she explained, adding that “mindfulness” in consumption can bring us greater joy.
The Atlantic weighed in more prosaically: “Stop shopping,” ordered Amanda Mull, whose previous gig was reviewing pricey Chanel and Hermès bags at the PurseBlog website.
The reason there are shortages, she claims, is because Americans are just buying too much stuff. But “spending is not distributed equally,” with rich people buying “discretionary” things while others struggle to find supplies to make school lunches. The problem: “resources get allocated according to little other than profit.”
The advice offered by these writers tracks an ideology known as degrowth, described by conservative radio host Mark Levin in his recent book, American Marxism, as an amalgam of “red” and “green” ideologies: “[T]he goal is to reverse the massive economic progress resulting from, long other things, the Industrial Revolution, which created a huge, vibrant middle class and infinite technological, scientific, and medical advancements that have overwhelmingly advanced the human condition.”
Centrally-planned economies have historically been known for shortages of basic consumer goods, like toothpaste, and the complete absence of others, like tampons.
President Joe Biden is proposing to extend the control of the federal government to more of the U.S. economy than ever before, using massive new spending proposals to expand public funding of health care and child care, and to enforce “green” energy alternatives, rather than the fossil fuels on which the economy now depends.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Watch: Migrant Caravan Breaks Through Mexican Police Lines
A caravan of a few thousand migrants has begun pushing its way north Saturday from southern Mexico, hoping the U.S. and Mexican governments will stand aside while they reach the new lives and jobs in the United States.
The economic migrants departed from the southern town of Tapachula, where many of them have been kept by the Mexican government.
The migrants are fleeing their own failed economies, and are hoping to let them into the United States. Since January, Biden’s deputies have allowed roughly 1 million southern migrants into the United States, even as they also rejected 1 million migrants.
The migrants are appealing to President Joe Biden to let them into the United States:
The caravan migrants pushed their way past a thin line of Mexican police:
The migrants come from many countries, including the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
The economies of these three countries have been deeply damaged by the U.S. government‘s policy of extraction migration. At least one million young people have been extracted from those countries to serve the U.S. economy as workers, renters, and consumers. The loss of many young people reduces investment in those countries, cuts job growth, and cripples political reform of corrupt governments.
Mexico’s government has the power to block the migrants. But it may prefer to let them get to the United States — just as it let roughly 15,000 Haitian migrants cross the Rio Grande at Del Rio in September.
Currently, Mexican and U.S. government officials are negotiating some sort of migration policy.
The Del Rio Port of Entry has reopened after it was closed for over a week due to an influx of migrants, mostly Haitian, that had gathered under the bridge at the US-Mexico border in Del Rio, Texas on September, 25, 2021. (PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images)
Mexico has leverage in those negotiations, in part, because President Joe Biden’s border officials at the Department of Homeland Security favor migration and are deeply reluctant to physically stop migrants.
This official reluctance to defend Americans’ border and national labor market ensures that the Mexican government can pressure the U.S. government by allowing migrants to hit the U.S. border. This threat can help Mexico’s government extract promises from Biden to provide direct or indirect benefits to Mexico.
One of the claimed leaders of the group told a reporter that many of the migrants would stay to work in Mexico if they got Mexican work permits:
What Mexico should like every country is to make sure they do their share … Money is not going to solve the problem …. [pushing] people from the south border [of Mexico] to the northern border is not the solution. They should give them [work and residency] papers here. They should get an opportunity to work here because a lot of them don’t want to be brought to the U.S. But the Biden administration — with this [Mexican] administration — it’s like holding them [the migrants] like cattle. First they come to this jail [Tapachula], then to go to the northern border. We’re asking them, [the] Mexican government, to give them papers to have a choice because Mexico is a good place to live, to work.
However, many migrants have told U.S. media that they only get Mexican legal documents to help them avoid arrest as they travel up to the U.S. border.
The claimed leader, Irineo Mujica, however, is a long-time activist for a pro-migration group, dubbed Pueblo Sin Fronteras — people without borders. The group is reportedly a spin-off of a Latino group in Chicago. Mujica also has ties to a pro-migration group in Ireland, dubbed Front Line Defenders.
The night before, however, Mujica criticized Biden’s administration with language matching the criticisms from U.S. progressives and corporate lobbyists:
They are just relying on their own polls. If I told you the truth … at least with Donald Trump, we knew what we had. With Biden … he doesn’t seem to have a clue what to do with immigration because he says one thing and does another. Tell me something that Joe Biden has done [for migrants]? He promised immigration reform. He hasn’t done it. He promised he was going to take care of the migrants. He hasn’t done it.
In reality, Biden’s deputies have rolled back border defenses and allowed roughly 1 million economist migrants to openly or stealthily cross the border from January to the end of September.
Biden has also granted or renewed work permits for at least 1 million migrants living in the United States, including Haitians, Venezuelans, and even residents of Hong Kong.
Biden has also imported roughly 50,000 Afghans, and his deputies are doing little to deter a growing number of economic migrants from Asia and Africa.
Biden is also trying to provide an amnesty and citizenship to all illegal migrants in the United States. If the migrants get across the U.S. border, and if Congress passes the amnesty, they will be able to buy fake documents that claim they are eligible for the amnesty.
Haitian migrants play cards and rest outside a migrant shelter where they await their immigration resolution, in Monterrey, Mexico, on September 26, 2021. The mostly Haitian migrants who had gathered on both sides of the US-Mexico border have provoked a major border crisis for the Biden administration. (JULIO CESAR AGUILAR/AFP via Getty Images)
The huge flow of foreign workers across the line of the 50-state union is welcomed by many employers. The employers claim that a lack of willing American workers is forcing them to raise wages and to treat those workers with more respect.
In contrast, Trump blocked nearly all migration in 2020, and also blocked the planned inflow of one million expected foreign workers from the U.S. economy in 2020 and 2021. His pro-employee policy helped American employees gain wage-raising clout in their own national labor market.
Late in the day, the caravan had swelled to perhaps 5,000 people, and some migrants carried a cross in an appeal to Christian charity.
The caravan may take 18 days to reach the U.S. border. But the pace will be faster if Mexican drivers provide many riders with short-distance rides, as has happened in prior caravans.
The pace will be slower if Mexican police start picking off smaller groups of migrants, and drive them back to Tapachula or deport them to their home countries.
Brooks: ‘I’m Not Quite Sure I See’ Goal of Refining Reconciliation Bill Being Supporting Working Class and Those Without College Degrees
On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that the reconciliation bill should push “money to people without college degrees who are in the working class,” but right now, he doesn’t see that being the approach to what gets taken out of and left in the package.
Brooks said, “Some choices, I think, are quite unfortunate. They’ve put at risk the size of the child tax credit, which I think is the single best thing in the whole bill, which really does reduce childhood poverty to a great degree. Some choices they could wander into could be very good choices. They’ve lost the core of the climate change. But senators like Ron Wyden, Democrat from Oregon, is talking about a carbon tax, and that would solve a lot of things at once. It would help reduce carbon emissions, but also raise revenue to pay for this stuff. And so, I still think a lot is under negotiation. And what I’m looking for is, is there a theme to what they leave in and what they take out? Do they have an overall theory of the case? In my view, we’ve spent the last 40 years funneling money to rich people with college degrees. We should have a big spending bill that funnels money to people without college degrees who are in the working class, and that would be my theme, decide what [comes] and goes. Right now, I’m not quite sure I see it.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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