Tuesday, April 13, 2021

 

Big Dirty Money: “White-collar crime” and the nature of capitalism

Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White-collar Crime , by Jennifer Taub, Viking, New York, 2020

The term “white-collar crime,” which appears in the subtitle of a new book, Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime, was apparently first coined during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The phenomenon is as old as capitalism itself. In Jennifer Taub’s work the focus is on the United States, but the reality she describes, though nowhere more explosive than in the US, is a global one.

Taub, a professor at the University of Western New England School of Law in Springfield, Massachusetts, brings together much valuable data and information on white-collar crime and on the connection between its recent prominence and that of extreme wealth inequality. Her book is noteworthy for correctly focusing on the role of class in shaping the lives and futures of humanity.

Big Dirty Money

The author indicates that white-collar crime must be defined far more broadly than embezzlement or what might be termed low-level forms of corruption. She gives some recent examples of white-collar criminals, all extensively reported by the WSWS: the Sackler family, worth some $14 billion (as of the book’s printing), responsible for the marketing of oxycontin, which led to 232,000 overdose deaths between 1999-2018; Pacific Gas and Electric, to blame for the deadly Camp Fire of 2018 in California, which left 85 dead and the town of Paradise completely destroyed; and General Motors, whose faulty ignition switches led to sudden engine shutdowns and at least 124 deaths between 2002 and 2014, when the cars were finally recalled.

All of the above criminals escaped serious punishment, paying for the lives lost through fines that amounted, even where sizable, to the mere cost of doing business.

Taub makes a number of useful points in the course of discussing these issues. As she notes, the US has a prison population of 2.3 million, but even the very few white-collar criminal convictions (as opposed to civil cases) rarely lead to jail time. The few who have been jailed— Michael Milken is one prominent example—have served their time in “country club” prisons, facilities whose very existence illustrates the fact that incarceration is a weapon principally designed for and used against the working class.

Taub is hardly the first to note the huge gulf between the treatment of the poor and the wealthy by the so-called justice system. Petty offenses get harsh punishment while big criminals get off scot free. Eric Garner lost his life for selling untaxed loose cigarettes, Taub points out, while the executives of companies responsible for death and misery on a vast scale have paid no price. Indeed, as Taub was putting the finishing touches on this volume last May, this class reality was brought home, to the horror of vast numbers of people all over the world, in the murder of George Floyd after he was accused of passing a small counterfeit bill at a neighborhood convenience store.

The magnitude of the class gulf today is one that could barely have been imagined by famed French novelist Anatole France when he famously ironized, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

The last 40 years have seen an uninterrupted growth of white-collar crime and of all the abuses associated with it. Government has done much to facilitate this growth, and the political representatives of the corporate elite have often shared in the spoils. Furthermore, this has been a thoroughly bipartisan operation. As Taub explains, “in the Carter and Clinton administrations, legislation was enacted that allowed the credit default swap and private mortgage securities markets to flourish, enabling the toxic mortgage-backed securities that eventually blew up the banking system in 2008.”

This history serves to illustrate, as Taub does not point out, that the dividing line between the legal and the criminal, to put it mildly, is a porous one in the capitalist economy.

After the 2008 crash, the greatest since the Great Depression, the get out of jail card really came into its own during the two terms of Democratic President Barack Obama. “The Justice Department led by Attorney General Eric Holder from 2009 to 2015 let every bank executive engaged in accounting or securities fraud get away without prosecution,” writes Taub. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., another Democrat, brought no charges, except against a tiny bank that no one had ever heard of.

Taub’s polemical zeal in exposing glaring injustice can only be welcomed. Her outlook, however, could perhaps be summed up in a paraphrase of the Biblical reference to the poor—we will always have white-collar criminals with us. Or to put it somewhat differently, capitalism is here to stay.

She reviews the history, over most of the last century, of what she terms “corporate crime waves and crackdowns.” This is a cyclical conception, in which capitalist “excesses” are followed by regulation and reform, until the pendulum swings back toward corruption once again. The Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era, whose birth is associated with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Later, after the speculative boom of the 1920s, came the reforms associated with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Big business steadily attempted to evade or circumvent regulation, and the decades from the 1940s through the 1960s are dubbed a period of “invisible industrial violations,” as Taub puts it, leading to scandals such as Love Canal and the thalidomide birth defects. This was followed by yet another decade of regulation, this time under the improbable reformer Richard Nixon. The Environmental Protection Agency was established, along with the Consumer Product Safety Commission. After Watergate, other legislation established the Federal Election Commission.

American capitalism unquestionably did undertake major regulatory efforts in the last century. What Taub does not discuss, however, is the connection between the last 40 years, a period of uninterrupted deregulation and social counterrevolution, and the crisis and decline of US capitalism. There is little or no mention of globalization in this book, and no discussion of the financialization of the economy. We are left with the supposed problem of human nature, and of what is seen as an endless struggle against greed. Behind white-collar crime, however, is not simply greed, but a system of production and distribution that produces and requires it.

A cyclical theory of inequality and corruption followed by regulation and reform does not explain the last several decades. The Biden administration and its backers, who it is safe to presume include Professor Taub—even if she recognizes, quoting New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, that Donald Trump “did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system; he came to bathe in it”—claim that a new era of reform is beginning. The conditions confronting US and world capitalism, however, are entirely different from those of the post-World War Two era.

The capitalist media dwell incessantly on misleading catchphrases like “systemic racism,” but the conditions described by the author demonstrate that what is truly systemic to capitalism is class inequality and all of its consequences. The solution to the misery that Taub details—the lives lost to poverty, illness and police violence—must also be systemic. It is not the pipe dream of a new era of reform, but rather the overthrow of the capitalist system and the building of a socialist society.

This is not Taub’s program. The final chapter of her book is entitled, “The Six Fixes,” and what she proposes is not much more serious than this somewhat glib heading. She calls for a new Department of Justice division devoted to white-collar crime; the amendment of the bribery laws to make it easier to convict politicians like Virginia’s former governor Robert McDonnell, who beat a bribery rap because of a legal loophole; legislation to protect journalists and whistleblowers; the restoration of Internal Revenue Service funding, after years and years of cuts that have been designed to cripple any effort to go after massive tax fraud; a nationwide registry for white-collar convictions; and improved data collection on white-collar crime.

To call these reforms would be a genuine stretch of the definition. Some of them amount to little more than improved methods of keeping track of the crime taking place, not doing anything about the conditions themselves. Even New York Times columnist James B. Stewart, in his review of Big Dirty Money, observes about these “fixes,” “These are earnest and well-intentioned, but small bore given the scope of the problem [Taub] so vividly illustrates.” It should also be pointed out that the fact that Taub, discussing whistleblowers, mentions Daniel Ellsberg and Karen Silkwood, but not Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, reflects her allegiance to what passes for bourgeois liberalism today.

Despite its serious faults, and although Big Dirty Money does not go much beyond a description of important aspects of 21st century capitalism, the exposures in this volume are vivid and at times gripping, and the book is therefore recommended, with the above caveats.


Protect the Family at All Costs

A damning portrait of the Sacklers, the billionaire clan behind the OxyContin epidemic.

Photo of a rural West Virginia town with an American flag hanging outside a rusted building blending into a photo of oxycodone pills spilling out of a prescription bottle
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Spencer Platt/Getty Images and BackyardProduction/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

In the late 2000s, an employee of Purdue Pharma was stunned by the words of the corporation’s in-house counsel. At a meeting, the company’s lawyer, Stuart Baker, had been praising three former members of the leadership team, including his own predecessor. Those three men had pleaded guilty in 2007 to making fraudulent claims about the harmlessness of Purdue’s cash cow product, OxyContin, and had been forced to resign. “Those people had to take the fall to protect the family,” Baker said, as quoted in Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe’s masterfully damning new book about that family, the billionaire Sacklers, who owned Purdue. The company’s foremost priority, Baker went on to remind all present, was “to protect the family at all costs.” The unnamed (and now former) Purdue employee who witnessed this little speech told Keefe, “I remember going home and saying, ‘Where the fuck am I working?’ ”

Empire of Pain, Keefe explains in his afterword, is a dynastic saga. Like Purdue, it is all about the Sackler family: how it transformed American medicine, the key role it played in the opioid crisis that now costs tens of thousands of Americans their lives every year, and the family’s belated and incomplete downfall. The Sacklers went from an esteemed clan known primarily for their philanthropy on behalf of cultural, educational, and scientific institutions—including, most famously, the spectacular Sackler wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which houses the Temple of Dendur—to public disgrace and repudiation. Among the final scenes in Empire of Pain is a student activist happily watching the Sackler name being chipped off the facade of a building at Tufts University. The family threatened to sue, claiming that the university was violating an agreement it had made when it received donations from one of its members. Keefe calls this “a graphic measure of the Sacklers’ vanity, and of their pathological denial, that the family was prepared to debase itself by trying to force its name back onto a university where the student body had said, quite explicitly, that they found it morally repugnant.” It’s also an illustration of how much the very rich, when crossed, operate like the Mafia, though they reinforce their power with shell companies and lawyers rather than omertà and violence.

Black and white photo of the author of Empire of Pain
Patrick Radden Keefe. Philip Montgomery

Keefe is no stranger to covering gangster tactics. His previous book, 2019’s Say Nothing, was an acclaimed bestseller about the abduction and murder of a widowed mother of 10 by the Irish Republican Army, and for the New York Times Magazine, he wrote about the financial management of the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico. In fact, it was Keefe’s interest in how the cartels function as businesses that piqued his curiosity about Big Pharma, and specifically the Sackler family, which he wrote about for the New Yorker in the article that became the basis for Empire of Pain. Keefe doesn’t lean too hard on the Mafia comparison in this book, but when he refers to Howard Udell—Purdue’s ultraloyal longtime staff attorney, and one of the three men who took the fall in 2007—as the Sacklers’ “consigliere,” the dart hits home.

ADVERTISEMENT

The Sackler story begins with three striving brothers, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond, born to a Jewish immigrant grocer and his wife in early 20th century Brooklyn. All three became doctors. Arthur, the eldest and a superhuman dynamo, seemed to start a new enterprise every week; after his death from a stroke in 1987, one of the greatest challenges facing his heirs was the task of locating all of his assets and paying off unexpected debts. Arthur Sackler didn’t like people knowing his business—literally—so no one had a grasp of the entire financial picture of his estate. This was partly because some of his dealings were ethically dubious. He secretly owned a controlling share in the chief competitor of one of his own firms, for example, and he kept his name out of medical newsletters that he published to conceal a self-interested editorial bias in favor of pharmaceuticals. When Arthur became obsessed with both collecting art and donating to cultural institutions in exchange for having galleries and wings named after himself and his family, he faced a challenge, as Keefe writes, to “reconcile this ardent desire for recognition of the Sackler name with his equally strong preference for personal anonymity.” He balanced this skillfully. In the art and philanthropy world, Arthur was known to have lots of money, but no one seemed to know where he’d gotten it.

The answer was Valium, the first $100 million drug in history. Arthur didn’t own F. Hoffmann-La Roche, the company that manufactured the tranquilizer (although he swanned around the headquarters so often that there were rumors he ran it). Though Arthur was an early proponent of psychopharmaceuticals, his greatest expertise lay in advertising and marketing, services provided by his agency, McAdams. The first inductee into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, Arthur Sackler was credited by that august institution with pioneering the field and bringing “the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing.” Some of his innovations included making unfounded claims for the nonaddictive nature of Valium, producing the first promotional insert designed to look like editorial content (in the New York Times, no less), and creating ads filled with the testimonials of practicing MDs who, upon investigation, turned out to be entirely fictional.

Arthur died before OxyContin was developed, and his widow and children, according to Keefe, energetically strive to distance themselves from that most notorious of Sackler-associated products. Purdue, which the brothers bought in 1952, was run by Mortimer and Raymond’s children and grandchildren. But Empire of Pain amply demonstrates that Arthur created the playbook used to make OxyContin a blockbuster drug, from incentives for sales reps to speakers, publications, and “grassroots” advocacy groups that are secretly funded by the manufacturer. Opioids are powerful and addictive painkillers, but not necessarily dangerous if used carefully and properly. Purdue Pharma, however, did nothing to ensure that OxyContin was used that way, and in fact encouraged its misuse. Internal documents and correspondence quoted in Empire of Pain prove that Purdue’s staff and leadership, including several of Arthur’s nephews and nieces, knew full well that many doctors were operating illegal pill mills. Yet the company refrained from reporting them because it made money from every bogus prescription.

ADVERTISEMENT

If you are someone who engages in this kind of sneaky conduct, the last person you want reporting on you is Keefe. Although the material in Empire of Pain is more complex and less action-packed than the crimes and terrorism of Say Nothing, the narrative is just as involving. Keefe has a knack for crafting lucid, readable descriptions of the sort of arcane business arrangements the Sacklers favored. He is also indefatigable. He will interview the yoga teacher you brought to Turks a few times to help with your bad back and who knows your wife ordered two butlers to escort you everywhere as “human crutches.” He will find the doorman who was standing outside your aunt’s apartment building when your cousin jumped out the window to his death. And he will not only dig up the third grade classmate who remembers you as “innocent and mocked and friendless and rich,” he’ll quote that classmate adding that “to be ostracized on that basis” at such a tony private school, “you had to be pretty fucking rich.”

The Sackler infighting described in Empire of Pain will surely prompt many comparisons to the HBO series Succession, but a real-world parallel also comes into focus. Around this time last year, I was knee-deep in memoirs by Trump staffers and associates, and while the Sacklers may be more housebroken than the former president, there are some significant similarities. The Sacklers who ran Purdue surrounded themselves with yes men and interfered with the more prudent employees who sought to curb their excessive demands for more and more OxyContin sales. They considered only their own enrichment when making any business decision. They lack basic empathy for other people, or any understanding of the difficulties life presents to those less fortunate than themselves. Richard Sackler—Arthur’s nephew and the driving force behind the OxyContin campaign—adamantly insisted that neither Purdue nor OxyContin was to blame for the abuse of the drug, and pointed his finger at the addicts themselves. They consider themselves victimized whenever they don’t get what they want or anyone criticizes them. The Sacklers are prone to feuds and tantrums and, finally, as Keefe puts it, there is their “reluctance to concede, even hypothetically, the possibility of error or wrongdoing.”

Held up to the Sacklers, Trump seems less outrageous and sui generis, his awful behavior less a manifestation of his dysfunctional individual upbringing than typical of his kind—the mediocre children of the rich. Only worse, of course—or is he? Cosmetically, Trump is certainly the more appalling, but when it comes to the deaths that can be chalked up to his heedless selfishness … well, Keefe’s book makes clear, the Sacklers can give him a run for his money.

Empire of Pain book cover

FLORIDA IMPOSES E-VERIFY - THEY SAW WHAT PELOSI, FEINSTEIN AND KAMALA HARRIS DID TO MEXIFORNIA!

 

GOP Memo: Joe Biden Has Opened Borders to Help Donors and CEOs

GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP via Getty Images
GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP via Getty Images
6:49

The Republican Study Committee has posted talking points for GOP legislators to help them focus public opposition against the mass migration caused by pro-migration zealots in President Joe Biden’s administration.

“The Biden Immigration Agenda sacrifices the interests of the American People in order to serve the interests of foreign citizens, criminal cartels, and ultra-wealthy multinational corporations,” says the April 12 memo from Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN). The memo continued:

Biden’s agenda rejects responsible limits and controls on the number of people entering the country.

It’s as if the Biden Administration recognizes no borders at all.

President Biden’s policy is not liberal, or even merely left-wing — it is radical, extreme and beyond the bounds of rational thought.

While Biden reshapes our immigration system to serve rich donors and giant corporations, we believe it must serve the interests of American citizens, families and workers.

“Trump FIXED it, Biden BROKE it. It’s just that simple,” the memo says.

The memo would help GOP legislators reframe the debate around Americans’ concerns, and away from the focus on migrants’ desires that pro-migration groups and most of the nation’s media tout.
For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group funded a polling memo which warned pro-amnesty legislators to avoid talking about jobs and wages and to instead focus their pitch on the worries and concerns of foreign migrants:

It is better to focus on all of the aforementioned sympathetic details of those affected [by an amnesty] than to make economic arguments, including arguments about wages or demand for labor. As we have seen in the past, talking about immigrants doing jobs Americans won’t do is not a helpful frame, and other economic arguments are less effective than what is recommended above.

The migrant-first framing is pushed by establishment media outlets — such as The Washington Post — and by politicians who have decided to support an amnesty. “This is basically for the children,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said April 1 after endorsing a 2021 amnesty that would reward investors and CEOs to hire foreign migrants instead of recruiting West Virginia’s adults and graduates.

The new GOP memo also shifts the Party’s message towards pro-American solutions and away from vague, donor-approved complaints about socialism, welfare, and security. A polling memo released March 24 by the billionaire-funded, pro-migration Immigration Hub group spotlighted the weakness of GOP messaging that avoids positive proposals:

In message-testing, Republicans’ greatest vulnerability on immigration is their refusal to work with Biden on solutions to the problem — instead opting to score political points. When presented with a range of criticisms of Republicans’ approach to the southern border, the following item is most concerning:

That Republicans in Congress refuse to work with President Biden on solutions to address what’s happening at the border, instead opting to block everything Biden is doing on immigration to score political points.

Banks wrote his memo after leading a delegation of GOP representatives to the border:

In the matter of mere weeks, the Biden Administration has transformed President Trump’s secured Southern Border into the sprawling site of an unmitigated and rapidly worsening disaster.

As we could clearly see with our own eyes what the Biden Administration desperately wants to hide from the American public: the situation is devolving and deteriorating by the day. When we met with local sheriffs, mayors and judges at the border, they told us in no uncertain terms that this is an indisputable crisis. They also told us they don’t have time for Congress to drag its feet and pass laws — they need help now. And they need it fast.

President Biden must not be allowed to hide behind the liberal media’s smoke screen. We must urge he and Vice President Harris to visit the border and see the crisis they created firsthand. It is incumbent upon all of us to ensure that he is held accountable to the American public for his massive failure.

Banks’ memo suggests four ways for GOP legislators to talk about Biden’s cheap-labor economic policy at the border:

1. National Security: Immigration policy should protect our national security by protecting the American people from terrorism, cartels, and other threats to their safety;
2. America First: Immigration policy should prioritize American workers first, help grow our middle class, raise wages, and enhance economic opportunity for all lawful residents well;
3. Rule of Law: Immigration policy should respect the rule of law, along with immigrants that honor our legal immigration processes, rather than incentivize law breaking;
4. Patriotic Assimilation: Immigration policy should aim to assimilate legal immigrants into the American family so they too can take pride in our values, history, and heritage.

Biden is also far from the mainstream, the memo says:

Americans regardless of party recognize the need to afford basic protections to U.S. workers in the job market. And voters throughout America recognize that we must first consider the social, economic and financial well-being of all American citizens and lawful residents here today. Biden has rejected this mainstream consensus and, with virtually no announcement or discussion, is sailing the United States deep into uncharted waters.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracialcross-sexnon-racistclass-basedintra-Democraticrational, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.

The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly progressives — embrace the many skewed polls and articles that push the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families. It moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, from Red states to Blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.

Exclusive — Gov. Ron DeSantis Hangs ’Florida Uses E-Verify’ Signs on All Highways into Sunshine State

Highway Sign Florida Uses E-Verify
Office of Gov. Ron DeSantis
6:46

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has hung signs on all the major interstate highways entering Florida informing everyone traveling by road into the state that the Sunshine State has implemented E-Verify, a background check system for employers to see if prospective hires are in fact legally authorized to work in the United States.

The signs, DeSantis’s office told Breitbart News, are now visible on all three main interstate gateways into Florida along I-10, I-95, and I-75. The signs come after Florida’s legislature last year passed E-Verify measures which DeSantis signed into law last summer.

“I want all residents and visitors to receive this message: Florida Uses E-Verify,” DeSantis told Breitbart News exclusively. “For years prior to my administration, attempts to pass E-Verify legislation in Florida failed, but I would not yield until this matter was addressed. Last year, I was able to deliver on working with the Florida Legislature to get E-Verify over the finish line and signed SB 664 into law. Requiring use of an employment verification system not only places upward pressure [on] Floridians’ wages, it also protects the public safety. Assuring a legal workforce through E-Verify is crucial to upholding the rule of law and deters illegal immigration into Florida, which is more important than ever given the border crisis.”

DeSantis, whose popularity has been surging due to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic much more effectively than many Democrat governors in the northeast, with no mandates or restrictions, also noted that President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration has “been abysmal” and hurts all states, including Florida.

“The Biden Administration has been abysmal on immigration and their policies threaten to turn all states, including Florida, into border states,” DeSantis said. “Under this administration, it’s very clear we must enforce our laws and protect our residents.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) makes E-Verify available to every U.S. state and territory, but not all states require it or use it. Technically, from a federal perspective, E-Verify is currently voluntary, according to the program’s website.

E-Verify’s DHS government website says:

E-Verify is a web-based system that allows enrolled employers to confirm the eligibility of their employees to work in the United States. E-Verify employers verify the identity and employment eligibility of newly hired employees by electronically matching information provided by employees on the Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, against records available to the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). E-Verify is a voluntary program. However, employers with federal contracts or subcontracts that contain the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) E-Verify clause are required to enroll in E-Verify as a condition of federal contracting. Employers may also be required to participate in E-Verify if their states have legislation mandating the use of E-Verify, such as a condition of business licensing. Finally, in some instances employers may be required to participate in E-Verify as a result of a legal ruling. E-Verify, which is available in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, is currently the best means available to electronically confirm employment eligibility.

Florida’s new law makes it mandatory in the Sunshine State for employers, both public and private, to use E-Verify when hiring someone.

According to a January analysis published by the Orlando law firm Littler Mendelson, Florida’s new E-Verify law affects all employers in the state. For public employers—defined as “an entity within state, regional, county, local, or municipal government, whether executive, judicial, or legislative, or any public school, community college, or state university that employs persons who perform labor or services for that employer in exchange for salary, wages, or other remuneration or that enters or attempts to enter into a contract with a contractor”—they must register with and use E-Verify for all new hires.

“No public contract may be entered into unless each party to the contract registers with and uses the E-Verify system,” the analysis reads.

The analysis adds that for public employers, use of subcontractors requires signed affidavits confirming that all of the workforce are legally authorized to work in the United States.

the Littler Mendelson analysis continues:

Additionally, if a public contractor enters into a contract with a subcontractor, the subcontractor must provide the contractor with an affidavit stating that the subcontractor does not employ, contract with, or subcontract with unauthorized persons. The contractor must maintain a copy of the affidavit for the duration of the contract. A public employer that has a good-faith belief that a contractor or subcontractor knowingly violated these requirements must terminate the contract with this entity or order the contractor to terminate the contract with the subcontractor immediately. This will not be considered a “breach of contract” for contract purposes.

The new law also affects private employers, who according to the Littler Mendelson analysis of the law must:

…after making an offer of employment that has been accepted by a person, verify the person’s employment eligibility by either using the E-Verify system or requiring the person to provide the same documentation that is required by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on its Employment Eligibility Verification (I-9) form.

Any private employers who go the I-9 USCIS documentation route must, per the law, maintain those records for at least three years after initially employing someone. The Littler Mendelson analysis notes that a private employer is described as any “person or entity that transacts business in this state, has a license issued by an agency, and employs persons to perform labor or services in this state in exchange for salary, wages, or other remuneration” and that there is no minimum threshold of employees that triggers the E-Verify requirements—meaning they are universal and anyone employing someone in the state of Florida must use E-Verify.

Steve Daines: ‘Outrageous’ States Handing Illegal Aliens Cash While Millions Unemployed

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 16: Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) speaks during a news conference about proposed reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill January 16, 2018 in Washington, DC. Daines is part of a bipartisan group of senators that supports legislation …
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
2:31

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) said in a statement Monday that it is “outrageous” that states continue to hand illegal immigrants cash payments while millions of Americans are unemployed; he said he will introduce legislation to address this concern.

Daines announced he will soon introduce legislation to stop federal taxpayer dollars from going to states that make direct or indirect payments to illegal immigrants. Daines announced the legislation after news reports found that New York created a $2.1 billion fund to provide illegal immigrants payments, which could then be covered by the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion coronavirus package.

Daines said in a statement Monday that lawmakers should prioritize Americans over illegal aliens. He said:

It’s outrageous that while millions of American workers are still hurting, and in the midst of a border crisis created by President [Joe] Biden, that we have states handing out taxpayer dollars to illegal immigrants. We should not be rewarding Biden’s open border policies by creating incentives for people to cross our border illegally. That’s why I’m introducing a bill to stop taxpayer dollars from going to any state that is providing payments to illegal immigrants. Americans should always come first.

The legislation would prevent stimulus payments from the American Rescue Plan from going to any state that provides cash payments to illegal aliens and includes provisions allowing the federal government to recoup the payments if a state were to provide illegal aliens any monetary payment.

Reps. Jason Smith (R-MO) and James Comer (R-KY) sent a letter to the Joe Biden administration calling for an investigation into New York over distributing coronavirus funds to illegal immigrants. They wrote:

Unfortunately, the $1.9 trillion spending bill included language prohibiting states from using these funds to offset tax relief they might wish to provide their citizens. However, despite concerns raised by Congressional Republicans, it did not explicitly limit the potential use of American taxpayer dollars to prioritize illegal immigrants over American families.

“It now appears that New York is using its state budget, recently bolstered with billions in federal dollars, to funnel money to illegal immigrants,” they wrote.

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.

GOP Memo: Joe Biden Has Opened Borders to Help Donors and CEOs

GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP via Getty Images
GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP via Getty Images
6:49

The Republican Study Committee has posted talking points for GOP legislators to help them focus public opposition against the mass migration caused by pro-migration zealots in President Joe Biden’s administration.

“The Biden Immigration Agenda sacrifices the interests of the American People in order to serve the interests of foreign citizens, criminal cartels, and ultra-wealthy multinational corporations,” says the April 12 memo from Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN). The memo continued:

Biden’s agenda rejects responsible limits and controls on the number of people entering the country.

It’s as if the Biden Administration recognizes no borders at all.

President Biden’s policy is not liberal, or even merely left-wing — it is radical, extreme and beyond the bounds of rational thought.

While Biden reshapes our immigration system to serve rich donors and giant corporations, we believe it must serve the interests of American citizens, families and workers.

“Trump FIXED it, Biden BROKE it. It’s just that simple,” the memo says.

The memo would help GOP legislators reframe the debate around Americans’ concerns, and away from the focus on migrants’ desires that pro-migration groups and most of the nation’s media tout.
For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group funded a polling memo which warned pro-amnesty legislators to avoid talking about jobs and wages and to instead focus their pitch on the worries and concerns of foreign migrants:

It is better to focus on all of the aforementioned sympathetic details of those affected [by an amnesty] than to make economic arguments, including arguments about wages or demand for labor. As we have seen in the past, talking about immigrants doing jobs Americans won’t do is not a helpful frame, and other economic arguments are less effective than what is recommended above.

The migrant-first framing is pushed by establishment media outlets — such as The Washington Post — and by politicians who have decided to support an amnesty. “This is basically for the children,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said April 1 after endorsing a 2021 amnesty that would reward investors and CEOs to hire foreign migrants instead of recruiting West Virginia’s adults and graduates.

The new GOP memo also shifts the Party’s message towards pro-American solutions and away from vague, donor-approved complaints about socialism, welfare, and security. A polling memo released March 24 by the billionaire-funded, pro-migration Immigration Hub group spotlighted the weakness of GOP messaging that avoids positive proposals:

In message-testing, Republicans’ greatest vulnerability on immigration is their refusal to work with Biden on solutions to the problem — instead opting to score political points. When presented with a range of criticisms of Republicans’ approach to the southern border, the following item is most concerning:

That Republicans in Congress refuse to work with President Biden on solutions to address what’s happening at the border, instead opting to block everything Biden is doing on immigration to score political points.

Banks wrote his memo after leading a delegation of GOP representatives to the border:

In the matter of mere weeks, the Biden Administration has transformed President Trump’s secured Southern Border into the sprawling site of an unmitigated and rapidly worsening disaster.

As we could clearly see with our own eyes what the Biden Administration desperately wants to hide from the American public: the situation is devolving and deteriorating by the day. When we met with local sheriffs, mayors and judges at the border, they told us in no uncertain terms that this is an indisputable crisis. They also told us they don’t have time for Congress to drag its feet and pass laws — they need help now. And they need it fast.

President Biden must not be allowed to hide behind the liberal media’s smoke screen. We must urge he and Vice President Harris to visit the border and see the crisis they created firsthand. It is incumbent upon all of us to ensure that he is held accountable to the American public for his massive failure.

Banks’ memo suggests four ways for GOP legislators to talk about Biden’s cheap-labor economic policy at the border:

1. National Security: Immigration policy should protect our national security by protecting the American people from terrorism, cartels, and other threats to their safety;
2. America First: Immigration policy should prioritize American workers first, help grow our middle class, raise wages, and enhance economic opportunity for all lawful residents well;
3. Rule of Law: Immigration policy should respect the rule of law, along with immigrants that honor our legal immigration processes, rather than incentivize law breaking;
4. Patriotic Assimilation: Immigration policy should aim to assimilate legal immigrants into the American family so they too can take pride in our values, history, and heritage.

Biden is also far from the mainstream, the memo says:

Americans regardless of party recognize the need to afford basic protections to U.S. workers in the job market. And voters throughout America recognize that we must first consider the social, economic and financial well-being of all American citizens and lawful residents here today. Biden has rejected this mainstream consensus and, with virtually no announcement or discussion, is sailing the United States deep into uncharted waters.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracialcross-sexnon-racistclass-basedintra-Democraticrational, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.

The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly progressives — embrace the many skewed polls and articles that push the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families. It moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, from Red states to Blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.

Financial Corruption Plagues House Democrats as Republicans Find Success in Push to Ditch Corporations

In this photo taken Oct. 18, 2016, Florida Democratic Congressional candidate Stephanie Murphy meets with voters at a senior center in Altamonte Springs, Fla. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., is seeking a 13th term in Congress from central Florida, but it’s not an easy path. The veteran Republican tells supporters turnout …
AP Photo/John Raoux
12:50

An interesting trend is emerging in American politics whereby Democrats are emerging as the party of financial corruption as Republicans find fundraising success sans corporate dollars. The tectonic political shift could prove significant in the long-run leading into the 2022 congressional midterm elections, and beyond.

Several frontline House Democrats find themselves embroiled in financial corruption scandals, with at least five—Reps. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX), Dean Phillips (D-MN), Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), and Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY)—facing questions and criticisms over their personal finances and portfolios, which may cause them political blowback in the upcoming elections.

Gonzalez’s account with the Bank of China, now closed after it was reported first by Breitbart News, has hurt him politically in Texas. Local news outlets followed up on the original Breitbart News investigation that uncovered an account with the Chinese Communist Party-controlled bank the congressman revealed on personal financial disclosure forms for the calendar years 2017, 2018, and 2019. The account, valued at between $100,001 and $250,000, pulled in annually in interest between $2,501 and $5,000—a particularly lucrative arrangement.

While Gonzalez’s office denied any wrongdoing, after the reports his staff announced he closed the account. The fiasco has been the subject of vicious attack ads against Gonzalez in his district, a South Texas border district that in its more-than-a-century in existence has never gone Republican. In the last election, in 2020, GOP candidate Monica de la Cruz Hernandez nearly defeated Gonzalez, holding him to just 50.05 percent of the vote. She got just over 47 percent of the vote. Her surprisingly strong performance has Republicans excited about her decision to run again in 2022, hoping she can replicate that energy and perhaps defeat Gonzalez, flipping the 15th district in Texas for the first time ever—more than a century—into GOP hands. In a recent radio appearance on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, De la Cruz Hernandez hammered Gonzalez for the Bank of China account—and lit him up over President Joe Biden’s malfeasance with immigration policy. Biden’s immigration policy—a complete reversal from former President Donald Trump’s remain-in-Mexico plan and a return to the failures of catch-and-release—has slammed the 15th district in Texas where the now-famous Donna facility that is housing thousands more unaccompanied minor children (UACs) than it was built for.

But the broader theme of Gonzalez getting rich off a foreign bank account with an institution that has no branch in his district and aligns itself with the core mission of the chief adversary of the United States while he fails to address major problems with American immigration failures under Biden is a potent recipe for potential political disaster for him. In other words, Gonzalez is rolling in the dough while his constituents do not have someone addressing their very basic concerns such as the mass influx of migrants at the border. Gonzalez is seeking to remedy that toxic image this week by hosting a bipartisan group of lawmakers for a border trip in his district as part of the House Problem Solvers caucus, but it may already be too late for him on this front.

Gonzalez is hardly the only Democrat in a tough reelection battle who has real financial problems though. Phillips, a wealthy Democrat from Minnesota, represents the battleground third congressional district there. His latest financial disclosure forms indicate he has holdings in the Cayman Islands worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The questionable investment could prove politically damaging for him, as the Cayman Islands is “the world’s most notorious offshore tax haven,” as National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spokesman Mike Berg said. Should Phillips vote for the forthcoming so-called “infrastructure” plan from Biden, which is not really an infrastructure bill but is more so an environmentalist restructuring of the country using tax hikes to do so, he will inevitably face harsh criticism for why he has assets sheltered offshore in the Cayman Islands while he votes to raise taxes on everyone else to pay for an aggressive leftist agenda.

Murphy, meanwhile, faces renewed questions over patents she holds for softball apparel her husband’s company manufactures in China. Murphy first faced questions over the arrangement back in 2017, but never answered any of them herself. The arrangement continues to this day, as she continues to hold the patents and her husband’s company keeps making the softball pants in China rather than in America. In a district as close as Florida’s 7th congressional district—Cook Political Report rates it as even between GOP and Democrat voter registration—shipping jobs that could be in America instead to China is potentially politically fatal. Murphy’s office previously dismissed reports about this, but the congresswoman herself has never answered questions about her involvement with products made in China instead of in the United States.

Malinowski, another frontline Democrat whose New Jersey district has a three-point voter registration advantage for Republicans according to the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index, was caught earlier this year making stock trades last year that he failed to report as required of members of Congress by federal law. The at least 24 transactions in the spring of 2020 that Malinowski did not report made him between $671,000 and $2.76 million according to ethics complaints filed against him.

Maloney, the chairman of the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), also failed to disclose thousands of dollars worth of trades as revealed earlier on Monday. Those stock trades that Maloney failed to report as required by law may result in a fine, which his office said he intends to cooperate with and pay assuming such a penalty is levied against him.

Democrats facing these financial issues come as the party has embraced a new rising woke leftism inside American corporations, politicization of companies that has driven Republicans away from corporations. Major companies have cut ties with Republicans in many ways, stopping political donations and shifting their support to the Democrats. Companies have framed their new woke leftist shift as a moral stand for voting rights in the wake of former President Trump’s failed challenges of the 2020 election results which culminated in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. After that, Republicans in state legislatures around the country—from Georgia to Arizona to Texas and elsewhere—have led a fresh push for strengthened election security measures that Democrats have falsely claimed make it more difficult to vote. The measures, particularly Georgia’s new law, actually expand voting hours in the lead-up to elections pairing the voting expansion with anti-fraud measures like requiring voter ID even for absentee ballots and banning third-party funding of state and local election offices.

As states pass these laws, many mega corporations ranging from airline carriers to Major League Baseball, have split with Republicans on the measures. But even with the freeze many companies implemented on political donations to Republicans, the GOP has never fared better in a first quarter of fundraising—with American grassroots donors stepping up to more than fill the void left behind by woke leftist corporate donors—in a midterm election cycle’s off-year. In fact, everyone from the NRCC to House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy to House GOP whip Steve Scalise pulled in record fundraising hauls sans corporations.

Perhaps no better indicator about the success of the new worker-focused anti-corporate Republican Party is the fundraising prowess of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO)—who does not even face reelection until 2024 but pulled in an astonishing $3 million in the first quarter of 2021. Hawley, who was the first senator to push for a challenge to electoral college certification back in the lead-up to Jan. 6, was the target of ire of the left’s new corporate-helmed alliance of Democrats and corporate executives. Their push to cut off his fundraising flow seems to not only have failed but backfired as a populist surge rushed to Hawley’s rescue and flushed his campaign coffers with more money than many of his colleagues who are up for reelection this cycle.

An unsigned memo last month from CGCN, a group of GOP insiders and political consultants who have worked for any number of Republicans across the gamut of the party ranging from former staffers to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and former Speaker John Boehner to former Trump aides, warned companies this may happen. The memo forecast that there could come a time when Republicans, who were traditionally defenders of corporate interests in policy negotiations in Washington, ditch the companies leaving them voiceless—or at least with Democrats as their only option—in tax and other policy matters. That populist shift, a surge for anti-corporate Republicans in grassroots donations that blow away anything companies could do for people like Hawley, seems to be accelerating now.

What’s particularly interesting about this latest development, too, is that Democrats in Washington—from Biden on down through both chambers of Congress—are now openly championing hiking the corporate tax rate to pay for their restructuring of the country they call “infrastructure.” While Republicans are not gunning for tax hikes by any stretch—they are basically lining up against Biden’s push for the multi-trillion dollar plan—they are also not as interested in fighting on behalf of these corporations who have shifted their allegiance to Democrats. If anything, Republicans are piling on these corporate special interests with vicious criticisms. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), for instance, has led a messaging push from the Senate GOP conference ripping companies for their woke new leftism, and Republicans across the party seem to be joining his cause rather than rushing to defend companies’ leftward shift.

This raises interesting questions about whether this realignment will leave the Democrats holding the bag of all the negative connotations and consequences of taking special interests’ campaign cash and doing the bidding of corporations, without the benefits of support from the voters, and whether Republicans will see a boon as the populist shift inside the GOP cements itself more and more in the post-Trump era.

For Republicans to retake the House majority next year, they only need to flip a net five seats—or more. With five frontline Democrats already facing serious financial issues, that prospect seems easier and easier—and if the GOP gets there, back into the majority, without corporate donor help because the companies and their executives decided to go all woke leftist on America then the Republicans will not owe them anything when they get there. Democrats, on the other hand, could be saddled with the perception of financial malfeasance and corruption that had plagued Republicans for years before—an interesting twist of fate. Perhaps the only things that stand in the way of this political resurgence of right wing populism are the Republicans themselves, and whether they are sharp enough to understand the opportunity that exists before their eyes or if they will listen to corporations while getting nothing from them. A recent spat between Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson demonstrated that reality of the political stupidity of some Republicans when he denied Walmart, Tyson’s, or other corporate interests influenced his decision to veto a bill that banned transgender hormone treatments for minors in his state. Viewers of Carlson’s program found out only the very next day after the interview that such corporate interests did in fact influence Hutchison’s decision.

Now that some Republicans are showing the party the way forward—they can raise lots of money for their campaigns without doing the bidding of the corporations, so let the Democrats have the obsolete corporate special interests and all their baggage while Republicans can shed the influence operations and run effective populist campaigns—this tectonic political shift seems to have accelerated. Even stupidity might not be able to stop it at this stage, as evidenced by the Arkansas example, as the state legislature overrode Hutchinson’s veto hours after he signed it—thereby making the transgender hormone treatment for minors ban the law the of land anyway overriding the wishes of corporate special interests.

Need a reason not to vote for Biden/Harris? Here are 50

By Gary M. Wilmott

The modern left must be stopped and thoroughly discredited before it destroys America.  Is it too late?

Consider that the modern left and the godless Marxists stand for, actively promote, and/or have accomplished the following:

1. Legalized murder in the womb, AKA abortion

2. Legalized many street drugs

3. Encourage releasing prisoners into the cities

4. Renaming streets and places in the name of cancel culture

5. Renamed sports teams

6. Tearing down monuments and memorials

7. Rioting

8. Looting

9. Arson

10. Murder

11. Mayhem

12. Revisionist history

13. Atheism

14. Marxism

15. Communism

16. Socialism

17. Activist judges

18. Spying on American citizens

19. Race-baiting

20. War on cops and disrespect for rule of law

21. Spying on a presidential candidate

22. Spying on a sitting president

23. Weaponizing intelligence agencies

24. Weaponizing the IRS

25. Sanctuary cities

26. Sanctuary states

27. Leaking of classified information

28. Co-opting the media for partisan propaganda purposes

29. Ballot-harvesting

30. Entitlement programs for illegals

31. Open borders

32. No cash bail

33. Usurping the presidency in 2008 and 2012

34. Green New Deal

35. AOC and the squad

36. Shredding the Constitution

37. Redefining marriage

38. Destruction of the family unit

39. Embrace of BLM and Antifa

40. Disrespecting the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the National Anthem

41. Boys participating in girls' activities and vice versa

42. Destruction of the Boy Scouts

43. Bogus and destructive climate change policies

44. Climate Change fear-mongering based on lies and bogus scientific  claims

45. Clinton pay-for-play corruption

46. Biden pay-for-play corruption

47. Destruction of evidence

48. Russia collusion hoax

49. Phony impeachment

50. Barack Hussein Obama and Joe Biden: the most corrupt administration in American history

This list was amazingly easy to compile and nowhere near dispositive.  I can come up with many, many more items to add to this list of shame.  But this list should be persuasive enough to give anyone pause and provide a clear indication of the threat the modern left poses to the American way of life and our future as a free, secure, and prosperous society.

The unprincipled progressive politicians, the Marxist academics, the race-baiters, the anti-Trumpers, and the despicable media propagandists who constitute the modern left are selfishly pursuing a radical agenda intent on destroying America and its founding principles.  This anti-American leftist agenda must be stopped and thoroughly discredited before real and irrevocable harm is done.

Left unchecked, the modern radical left is an existential threat to our safety, our prosperity, and our freedom.  That means that the Wicked Witch of the West, Kamala Harris, and Swampy Joe, running as a "proud Democrat," must be defeated on November 3.  Anything less and America as we know it is finished.