Saturday, January 2, 2021

LINDSEY GRAHAM BREAKS WITH NEO-FASCIST GOP - $2,000 Checks for Struggling Families ‘Is Not Socialism’

 

Lindsey Graham Breaks with Mitch McConnell: $2,000 Checks for Struggling Families ‘Is Not Socialism’

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) arrive for a meeting with GOP Senators in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, May 19, 2020 in Washington, DC. President Donald Trump is attending the weekly lunch meeting of Republican Senators. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) appeared to break with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) after the majority leader dismissed $2,000 checks to American families as “socialism for rich people,” with the South Carolina Republican contending it is “necessary in the times in which we live” and calling for a standalone vote.

“With all due respect to my Republican colleagues, a $2k direct payment for individuals and families who are struggling is not socialism. In my view it is necessary in the times in which we live,” Graham said on Friday, noting that direct payments “may not be most efficient way to help people in need but, given the situation we face are extremely necessary.”

“Going from $600 to $2,000 doesn’t make you a socialist,” Graham continued, urging President Trump to continue to fight for the American people and insisting on a “standalone vote”:

Graham’s remarks follow McConnell’s refusal to allow a standalone vote on increasing individual stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000, insisting that the Senate consider such as part of another measure that also addresses Section 230 and an investigation into allegations of voter fraud. The House standalone bill, McConnell said this week, has “no realistic path to quickly pass the Senate.”

“Here’s the deal: The Senate is not going to split apart the three issues that President Trump linked together just because Democrats are afraid to address two of them,” McConnell said.

Tensions erupted again Thursday when the majority leader dismissed attempts to raise the checks to $2,000 as “socialism for rich people,” using the phrase four times during his speech, according to Politico.

“The data show that many upper-middle class Americans have kept their jobs, work remotely, and remain totally financially comfortable,” the Kentucky lawmaker said.

“On the other hand, some of our fellow citizens have had their entire existences turned upside down and continue to suffer terribly,” he continued. “We do not need to let the speaker of the House do socialism for rich people in order to help those who need help.”

McConnell added, “Borrowing from our grandkids to do socialism for rich people is a terrible way to get help to families who actually need it.”

President Trump, who has been forcefully pushing for $2,000 stimulus checks, has continued to criticize Senate Republicans for failing to take action.

“Our Republican Senate just missed the opportunity to get rid of Section 230, which gives unlimited power to Big Tech companies. Pathetic!!!” he said on Friday.

“Now they want to give people ravaged by the China Virus $600, rather than the $2000 which they so desperately need,” he added. “Not fair, or smart!”:

OPEN BORDERS AND RED CHINA - THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS' AGENDA TO SERVE THE RICH - Perdue: ‘Amazing’ Media Can Ignore Ossoff China Issue When You Have Swalwell, Hunter Biden Issues

 

Perdue: ‘Amazing’ Media Can Ignore Ossoff China Issue When You Have Swalwell, Hunter Biden Issues

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On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s News HQ,” Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) said he’s amazed “that you can have the Eric Swalwell crisis, the Hunter Biden crisis, and ignore the Jon Ossoff crisis” when it comes to China.

Perdue said, [relevant remarks begin around 7:10] “[T]his question needs to be asked. But it’s not asked by any of the liberal media that’s out there. It’s amazing to me that you can have the Eric Swalwell crisis, the Hunter Biden crisis, and ignore the Jon Ossoff crisis. This is clearly a pattern of activity from the Chinese Communist Party. They identified Jon Ossoff after his 2017 attempt to run for the U.S. House, and lost. They identified him as an ambitious young politician on the Democratic side that they probably could get influence with. So, they hired him, and he worked for two years for this propaganda company of the Chinese Communist Party, Julie, and he hid it from the people of Georgia during his primary. He might not have won that primary had he fully disclosed that. He got caught. He then disclosed it, lied about it, and lied about it again, … he never has answered that question.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

How China Surpassed Hollywood and Ruled the Post-Pandemic Box Office

The Hollywood sign is seen from Hollywood Boulevard, on the site of the upcoming Academy Award ceremony on February 21, 2019 in Hollywood. - The annual Academy Awards ceremony will take place on February 24, 2019. (Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP) (Photo credit should read ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)
ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images/BNN Edit
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The year 2020 was the year China surpassed the United States as the largest cinema market in the world – thanks, of course, to the Wuhan coronavirus.

In 2019, American box office receipts were worth about $11.4 billion in total, compared to about $9.2 billion for China. In 2020, the American box office gross was down 80 percent thanks to the pandemic, weighing in at just $2.7 billion, while Chinese ticket sales reached $3.06 billion.

The highest-grossing film worldwide in 2020 was not a Hollywood production but a Chinese film, The Eight Hundred — a splashy blockbuster war film about Chinese troops defending Shanghai from Imperial Japan in 1937 that was supposed to come out in 2019, but was delayed when the Communist Party belatedly realized the 800 heroes of the film were the wrong sort of Chinese.

Watch below: 

The Number Two worldwide spot might belong to a Chinese film as well, since ticket sales for My People, My Homeland are very close to the top-grossing American movie of the year, Bad Boys for Life. Some analysts think Bad Boys for Life belongs in the Number Three spot.

Watch below: 

As 2020 drew to a close, American theaters generally remained shuttered completely or could sell only a handful of tickets. Major movie releases from the latter half of the year were delayed until 2021 and beyond. Some movies abandoned theatrical release plans entirely and went directly to pay-per-view or even regular subscription streaming, notably including the entire slate of movies from Warner Bros. for the coming year. Warner Bros. accounted for $1.6 billion in U.S. ticket sales in 2019, so that’s a lot of revenue vanishing from movie theaters to become HBO Max subscription content.

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys for Life (Columbia Pictures, 2020)

The Chinese box office was already threatening to overtake the American market in 2019. American grosses slipped a bit from 2018, while China’s were up 5.4 percent. American films also did notably worse in China in 2019 than usual.

Looking back at Hollywood trade papers from the beginning of 2020 is a melancholy affair. For example, Deadline rejected predictions of doom for the theatrical experience due to the rising popularity of streaming services. 

“There’s no way one can say theatrical is dead. Even though Disney is boss, and continues to prove that its branded IP is the bread and butter of the entire theatrical business, no, theatrical isn’t in the hospital,” the December 30, 2019, article declared, using a turn of phrase that would become rather unfortunate in retrospect.

And 2019 year-in-review articles tended to argue that Disney sucked down an abnormally large percentage of the box-office oxygen in 2019 with its dominant Star Wars and Marvel superhero franchises, but since those moneymakers would be largely absent from screens in 2020, other studios would have a chance to launch profitable franchises of their own. Streaming was cutting into the middle range of box-office fare, and prestige TV was stiff competition for the sort of movie that generally lacks explosions, gunfire, spaceships, or people who can fly, but audiences would surely flock back into cinemas in the spring, summer, and holiday season of 2020 for big spectacles that are best enjoyed on huge screens with crowds of excited fans.

As we all know, the pandemic scuttled those plans, utterly devastating the American box office and turning movie theaters into haunted houses. The summer blockbuster season is usually good for over $4 billion in revenue, but this year it brought only $176.5 million, and a good deal of that was from suddenly resurgent drive-in theaters showing older films. 

Only one hotly-anticipated blockbuster made it to screens, Christopher Nolan’s elaborate sci-fi action film Tenetand while it certainly made some money, it came in well below expectations.

John David Washington and Robert Pattinson in Tenet. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Nolan said he was happy with Tenet’s performance and argued that it was a mistake for studios to view its diminished receipts, and its failure to single-handedly rescue movie theaters, as an epitaph for cinema:

Warner Bros. released Tenet, and I’m thrilled that it has made almost $350 million. But I am worried that the studios are drawing the wrong conclusions from our release – that rather than looking at where the film has worked well and how that can provide them with much needed revenue, they’re looking at where it hasn’t lived up to pre-COVID expectations and will start using that as an excuse to make exhibition take all the losses from the pandemic instead of getting in the game and adapting – or rebuilding our business, in other words. Long term, moviegoing is a part of life, like restaurants and everything else. But right now, everybody has to adapt to a new reality.

But that is exactly the conclusion studio executives drew from the soft underwhelming performance of Tenet. It was supposed to be the next Inceptionand Inception made $837 million in the United States.

Part of the problem for American cinema is that the entertainment industry was absolutely determined to portray going to the movies as dangerous and irresponsible, even though not a single coronavirus outbreak has been traced to a movie theater, anywhere in the world.

Entertainment industry writers constantly send the message to print and online readers that they should not even think about going to the movies. Critics make a point of beginning their reviews by noting that they were sent copies of the film to watch at home. The disconnect between the actual safety record of movie theaters during the pandemic and the way they are described in the press, is remarkable.

It could be some time before audiences taught to think of cinemas as bubbling petri dishes of coronavirus doom are willing to venture back, especially since so many alternatives have been presented to them, and there was already a good deal of grumbling about the soaring cost and declining quality of the cinema experience before the Chinese coronavirus came along.

China’s box office recovered from the pandemic quickly and was back to pre-coronavirus levels by October. Ticket sales surged by 70 percent going into the final weeks of the year, driven almost entirely by Chinese productions; the few major American films released in Chinese theaters fared poorly.

The arrival of some big releases delayed for a few months by the pandemic helped to push Chinese ticket sales up for the winter season. China is also making a very big production out of defeating the coronavirus and resuming normal life in every respect, so theater patrons are getting the exact opposite of the fearful message blasted to their American counterparts.

Most of the other big foreign markets for Hollywood films are suffering from the pandemic, so China’s resurgent box office will be very appealing to studios desperate for revenue. Expect Hollywood to do whatever it takes to gain access to the market, and expect the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to take full political advantage of their eagerness. American films are already written and edited to avoid irking CCP censors. The big studios will be even more eager to please in the year to come, while American movie theaters totter on the edge of ruin.

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 in 2019 to $6.3 billion in 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.