VETS WITHOUT WORK - NAFTA JOE SAYS FUCK HIM! WE'VE GOT CHEAPER LABOR ON THE WAY!

 

Skilled Virginia Vet Looks for a Job in Trying Times

NICK GILBERTSON

2 Oct 20210

3:15

A 65-year-old Virginia veteran has been unable to find work since losing his job as a go-kart mechanic at the start of the pandemic.

John Whitehead is a man going through trying times. The skilled veteran has been out of a job since the start of the pandemic, though he has been searching for one far and wide, WAVY reports. He has not received unemployment benefits since the end of last year, though he has tried to reach the Virginia Employment Commission for over eight months.

“I tried for literally eight months. Eight months straight, every day, three, four, five times a day trying to call these people. Could never get ahold of anyone,” Whitehead told WAVY. 

Whitehead lost his job as a go-kart mechanic at the beginning of the pandemic. “During this time, things in my life were falling apart. My mother died, my father died, of course, my wife has left me,” he said to WAVY. 

To make matters worse, he lost his house and has been staying with a relative. According to WAVY, he keeps what belongings he has left in a storage container that he will soon be unable to afford.  

“I’m not used to being like that. I’m used to being able to control what’s going on around me,” the veteran shared with WAVY. 

Whitehead is continuing his job search and has a wide array of skills that should intrigue employers. “I’m a small engine mechanic; I’m very good at that,” Whitehead told WAVY. He served in the Navy as a boiler tech during the tail end of Vietnam, operated cranes in a shipyard for seven years, and has experience operating heavy-duty machinery. “Bulldozers, backhoes, front-end loaders, you name it, I can operate it,” he informed WAVY. 

Anyone who has a job opportunity for the veteran should email WAVY at reportit@wavy.com.

Whitehead’s job search comes at a time when small businesses have a record number of openings. In September, a report came to light from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) that illustrated 50 percent of firms had jobs openings that needed to be filled in August. While job openings were at a record high in August, Biden’s disastrous economy created only 235,000 jobs in the month, which was below expert predictions.

According to Breitbart’s John Carney, materials released September 22 by the Federal Reserve illustrate downgrades in forecasts of economic growth compared to projections in June. In June, the median expectation of economic growth was seven percent compared to the 5.9 economic growth expectation released on September 22. 

Moreover, forecasts for unemployment have risen. In June, the median expectation for the unemployment rate at year’s end was 4.5 percent compared to a forecast of 4.8 percent, which came to light on September 22.

Editor’s Note: At the time of publication, this article described John Whitehead as a Vietnam veteran. Whitehead served near the end of the Vietnam War. He did not see combat in Vietnam, but he served on vessels in the Atlantic ocean. The article has been updated to clarify this fact.

She conquered herself and then her times

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Exclusive— Gov. Kristi Noem on ‘War’ at Border: Biden’s Crisis ‘Complete Failure of Leadership’

Matthew Perdie, Jack Knudsen

0 seconds of 2 minutes, 41 secondsVolume 90%

MATTHEW BOYLE

4 Oct 2021Keystone, SD0

3:19

KEYSTONE, South Dakota — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem told Breitbart News that she considers what is happening along the U.S. border with Mexico to be like a “war” and that is why she has deployed South Dakota National Guard troops to help border governors like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey control the situation.

“Our Guard was there for 60 days,” Noem said in an exclusive interview at Mount Rushmore in late September. “We deployed them down there. When the Texas governor and Arizona governor asked for help and resources, they asked for law enforcement. But as I evaluated what the needs were down there — first of all, we were having historic visitation to our state, so I didn’t want to shortchange my law enforcement agencies that enforce public safety throughout South Dakota. But also, looking at the mission that was there and the situations they would be in, the people that are trained specifically for that type of a mission is my National Guard. We have consistently, for years, had the best-rated, ranked, and awarded National Guard units in the country, and they are used to deploying, filling in, and working with other agencies, federal agencies, state agencies in cooperative levels, and they’re used to going into war. And what we’re seeing on the southern border, in many cases, is a war.”

Noem said the South Dakota National Guard members came home for a few days in September, but more are deploying back to the border in October.

Texas National Guard troops stand by to assist outnumbered Border Patrol agents as more than 12,000 migrants are detained in Del Rio, Texas. (Photo: Office of the Texas Governor)

“They’re facing very dangerous situations with illegal criminals many times that are crossing, human trafficking, drugs, and I wanted them to be trained for those situations and make sure that they all came home safe,” Noem said. “So they’ve been home now for a few days, and we will redeploy in October. And I brought another 125 National Guard members to go down there and again support the mission of making sure that that southern border can be as secure as we as states can do that.”

Noem also ripped President Joe Biden for a “complete failure of leadership” on the border and said the border crisis, combined with the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, “has shocked people to the core.”

“People who maybe didn’t pay that much attention to politics before, maybe didn’t pay that much attention to government and the fact that leaders, the decisions they make have real consequences — well, they’re awake now. They’re paying attention, and it’s up to us to really articulate the difference in what we did have under President Trump and conservative leadership and what we have today with the Biden White House — that a nation without laws isn’t a nation at all,” Noem said. “And we’re quickly getting there, in fact, faster than I thought we would, under this president.”

Noem’s comments came as part of a broader pair of interviews for the latest On The Hill video special in late September for which she spent two days with Breitbart News in South Dakota — one at Mount Rushmore for this interview, and then again the next day at Custer State Park at its annual Governor’s Buffalo Roundup for a second interview. In the interview, Noem also hammered Biden for “rationing” lifesaving coronavirus medicine, and for fighting a fireworks ceremony at Mount Rushmore for Independence Day. More from the series is forthcoming.

THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR OPEN BORDERS, CHEAP LABOR AND NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!

Last week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told the media he did not know if “the Chamber’s an ally when they endorsed all the Democrats in the last election.”

Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best & Brightest

By Michelle Malkin and John Miano

Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms are from India.

House Republican Leaders Boot Chamber of Commerce from Strategy Calls

Win McNamee/Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

4 Oct 20210

House Republican leadership has booted officials with the United States Chamber of Commerce from their political strategy phone calls, a report reveals.

While House and Senate Democrats are demanding that a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package be passed through the legislature by tying it to the Senate-passed infrastructure bill, the Chamber has been opposing the reconciliation package while supporting the infrastructure bill.

On Monday, PunchBowl News reported that House GOP leadership had left officials with the Chamber off their strategy calls pertaining to the reconciliation package.

Last week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told the media he did not know if “the Chamber’s an ally when they endorsed all the Democrats in the last election.”

Five of the House Democrats who the Chamber endorsed in 2020 are now being targeted by the business group’s ads, demanding they oppose the reconciliation package but pass the infrastructure bill.

The decision came after the Chamber attacked House Republicans for their opposition to the infrastructure bill, as Roll Call reported:

Neil Bradley, executive vice president and chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told reporters Thursday during a conference call that some House Republicans privately admit they’d like to support the infrastructure measure, but don’t want to cross their leadership or conservative outside groups.

“I think there are some unfortunate things going on, and I’m being generous with the term unfortunate,” Bradley said, adding that there was “a lot of misinformation about the bill.”

…

“At the end of the day, members are gonna vote, but we’re also, at the U.S. Chamber, going to remember the members who put in the hard work to get us to this point, and they deserve credit,” Bradley said. “And anyone who kind of stands in their way and blocks this bill, that’ll be remembered, as well.”

While the Chamber continues pushing for infrastructure passage in the House, members of the House Progressive Caucus have increasingly said they’ll oppose the infrastructure bill without a vote to approve a reconciliation package.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.

Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas announces new immigration priorities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKYFocuh2EE

Idaho feels impact of drug trafficking from border

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFiTwBf6HwI

JOE BIDEN: NO DEMOCRAT PARTY DONOR SHOULD HAVE TO PAY A LIVING WAGE TO NO LEGAL!

Chris Hedges | NAFTA Was CRIMINAL!

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-104JMiZes&list=WL&index=5

Chris Hedges | NAFTA, Clinton, and Obama BETRAYED Americans... and Joe Biden was right there with the worst of them!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qryblALiqOI

Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality

Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best & Brightest

By Michelle Malkin and John Miano

Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms are from India.

 

 

Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street

JOHN BINDER

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has more than 30 business executives on his donor list that have connections to Wall Street.

Analysis of Biden’s more than 800 big donors, those who have bundled contributions for his presidential bid against President Trump, found that more than 30 of the executives listed have ties to Wall Street.

CNBC reports:

CNBC reviewed a new list of more than 800 Biden bundlers who raised at least $100,000 for the campaign, and found that several of them had links to financial firms. A few had been mentioned on the initial list of Biden fundraisers that was released in 2019 during the Democratic primary contests. [Emphasis added]

…

Beyond those from Wall Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]

Those executives with ties to Wall Street funding Biden’s campaign include:

Frank Baker, Brett Barth, Jim Chanos, Mark Chorazak, David Clunie, William Derrough, Roger Altman, Blair Effron, Jon Feigelson, Mark Gallogly, John Rogers, Jon Gray, Tony James, Jon Henes, Sonny Kalsi, Orin Kramer, Brad Krap, Brian Kreiter, Marc Lasry, Nate Loewenthall, Eric Mindich, Kara Moore, Charles Myers, Alan Patricof, Deven Parekh, Robert Rubin, Evan Roth, Faiza Saeed, Rajen Shah, Jay Snyder, Rob Stavis, and Jeff Zients.

As Breitbart News reported, Biden’s campaign is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on Wall Street, according to CNN analysis, and Wall Street executives and employees have donated more than $74 million to elect the former vice president.

Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from financial firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted from Wall Street.

Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

In a post on Sunday, Biden wrote that “Donald Trump sees the world from Park Avenue,” whereas he sees the world “from where I came from: Scranton, Pennsylvania.” In fact, Biden has raised over $1 million from wealthy Park Avenue donors, more than eight times the less than $130,000 that Trump has taken from Park Avenue residents.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter 

Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden transition teams, tempering progressive hopes

Alexander Nazaryan administration takes office in January.

WASHINGTON — For six years, Brandon Belford worked as an economic policy adviser to President Barack Obama in the White House and federal agencies. He moved to the Bay Area when Donald Trump became president, part of a massive flight of Obama officials from Washington to Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood. He took high-ranking positions with Apple and then Lyft, where he is currently the ride-sharing company’s chief of staff.

Now Belford is back, as part of one of the “transition teams” named by President-elect Joe Biden to restock a federal government that has been battered after four years of Trump by hiring new officials and advising the incoming administration on what its first governing steps should be. 

Those steps could be timid, judging by the composition of those teams, where Obama-era centrism prevails. That has some progressives worried that Biden represents nothing more than a return to normal, at a time when many of them believe the nation is ready to embrace policy ideas well to the left of center. 

“The status quo is killing us,” says former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, who now hosts a podcast called “Bad Faith.” 

Belford is joined by dozens of other Democratic operatives who have spent the past four years working at prestigious law firms and think tanks. On these “agency review teams” are high-ranking executives from Amazon, partners at white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling and enough experts from D.C. center-left think tanks — including six from the Brookings Institution alone — to fill a center-left think tank.

Progressives knew this was coming. “I am very concerned about the role Uber executives would play in this administration,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y., told Yahoo News. Even though she also effusively praised the appointment of Ron Klain as the incoming White House chief of staff, Ocasio-Cortez vowed that corporate America would not “pull the wool over our eyes” when it came to crafting the Biden presidency.

Some have put it less bluntly. “Biden’s transition team is full of wealthy corporate executives who are completely disconnected from the struggles of the working class,” complains left-leaning activist Ryan Knight, whose Twitter handle is @ProudSocialist. 

App-based drivers from Uber and Lyft protest in a caravan in front of City Hall in Los Angeles on October 22, 2020 where elected leaders hold a conference urging voters to reject on the November 3 election, Proposition 22, that would classify app-based drivers as independent contractors and not employees or agents. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)More

He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.

The agency review teams are not exactly settling into their cubicles just yet. For one, President Trump has not yet conceded the election, and the transition has been hindered in part by Republican operatives at the General Services Administration. And agency review is an enormously complex process, one that actually began months ago. The transition teams are supposed to ensure a “smooth transfer of power,” in large part by making sure that capable officials are ready to get to work in their respective agencies the moment Biden lifts his hand from the Lincoln Bible.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one member of the Biden campaign working on agency-related matters says teams were primarily tasked with surveying the landscape of the federal bureaucracy. She says that the transition teams would make some hiring recommendations, but only as a secondary function.

With a single exception, the agency review team members mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.

One with a typically impressive biography is that of Aneesh Chopra, who served as the U.S. chief technology officer for Obama before starting his own medical data logistics company, CareJourney. Now he is on the transition team for the U.S. Postal Service, where he will presumably work to undo the alleged damage by another logistics maven: Trump appointee Louis DeJoy.  

Of course, most progressives are glad that there’s a Biden transition to speak of, instead of a second Trump term. But they also recognize their own role in the Democratic candidate’s victory.

“Everyone fell into line and did everything they could to get Joe Biden elected,” says Max Berger, a progressive activist who worked for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Justice Democrats, the group that helped elect Ocasio-Cortez to the House in 2018. 

Berger recognizes that progressives will be a “junior partner” to the establishment Democrats with whom Biden has been ideologically and temperamentally aligned for a good half-century. They want to be partners all the same, not just the loyal opposition.

Many are cheered by some of the agency review teams. For one, they are notably more diverse, a stark contrast to Trump’s reliance on white males for so much of his advice. On the transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is Jedidah Isler, the Dartmouth professor who in 2014 became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in astrophysics from Yale. The transition team for the Small Business Administration includes Jorge Silva Puras, a political leader in Puerto Rico who also teaches entrepreneurship at a community college in the Bronx. 

“The presence of labor officials throughout many of the groups is notable,” says David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect. In the Department of Education team, for example, are several executives from the American Federation of Teachers.

He called the Federal Reserve and Treasury teams “all-stars,” a sentiment shared by other progressives interviewed for this article. On the Treasury team is Mehrsa Baradaran, a progressive economist who has written on the racial wealth gap. She is also on the Federal Reserve team, along with Reena Aggarwal, a corporate governance expert.

Progressive strategist Elizabeth Spiers says the finance-related teams are not “not quite Elizabeth Warren levels of aggressiveness but also not stuffed with finance people.” Biden’s advisers appear to have learned the lessons of his former boss. During Obama’s first year, he relied on banking executives to help quell the financial crisis. They did so in ways that steered the new president away from progressive proposals, such as nationalizing those very same banks. 

There is not a single current executive from Citibank or Goldman Sachs on any of the transition teams. Bank of America has also been shut out. JPMorgan can boast a single toehold in the agency review process: Lisa Sawyer of the Pentagon team. A spokesman for JPMorgan told Yahoo News that the bank was “following the appropriate election laws” and that Sawyer was “not on an agency review team that will touch any banking issues.”

“I think the Biden administration is going to be surprising to progressives in some ways and disappointing in others, and the agency review teams reflect that,” Dayen says. During the summer, the American Prospect published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate America. Many are set to return to the highest echelons of official Washington. 

“I have to be cautiously optimistic,” says Waleed Shahid, communications director for the Justice Democrats. 

Relatively young progressives like Shahid are less likely to wax romantic about the way things were in Washington. They are less interested in experience than conviction. But for many in Biden’s camp, a lack of experience was among the several fatal flaws of the Trump years.

“Everyone — right or left — has made the mistaken assumption for years that governing is easy,” says “The Death of Expertise” author Tom Nichols, who teaches at the Naval War College and is an ardently anti-Trump Republican.

“After having a bunch of nitwits and cronies loose in the government,” Nichols wrote in an email, “I think a lot of people on the left are really giving in to the assumption that as long as you’re not Trump, or not a complete idiot, anyone can do it.”

Given the title and theme of his book, Nicholas cautioned against that approach. “It’s a childish and silly approach to government, but it’s a bipartisan problem,” he told Yahoo News.

While progressive may not see their stars like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren occupying the Treasury Department, they do very much hope that a Biden presidency amounts to more than a third Obama term. It was unaddressed economic inequality, they believe, that bred the populist resentment that gave Trump an opening in 2016. The coronavirus has only made that inequality worse. That will only increase populist resentment, they worry, to be exploited by a Trump acolyte — or perhaps Trump himself, again — in 2024.

Addressing that inequality, for now, falls to transition team officials like Mark Schwartz of Amazon and Ted Dean of Dropbox, as well as Arun Venkataraman of Visa and David Holmes of defense contractor Rebellion Defense, in which Eric Schmidt of Google is an investor. Many of these officials are veterans of the Obama administration or Democratic offices on the Hill. 

“There is a lot of corporate influence there,” says Maurice Weeks, co-founder of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. “And that is troubling.” But he is encouraged by the presence of “hard-core progressives” like Sarah Miller, a former Treasury deputy who is both an anti-Facebook activist and the executive of the American Economic Liberties Project, which seeks to curb corporate power. She is now on the Treasury transition team.

In some ways, the difference is between former Obama officials who, like Miller, went on to become activists and those who moved on to become rich. The latter did only what many government officials had done before them. But at a time of mass unemployment, a stint at the corporate law firm Latham & Watkins (three transition team members) may not seem as impressive as it may have when Obama was president.

“We don’t just want to rewind the clock by four years,” Weeks says.

For many progressives, Trump was a singular threat to important institutions of the federal government, but rebuilding those institutions is simply not as important as rebuilding entire communities shattered by economic, social and racial inequalities. 

Right-wing Democrats dictate cuts in Biden social policy

Patrick Martin

12 hours ago

The Biden administration has responded to pressure from a right-wing minority among House and Senate Democrats by slashing its proposed social spending increase nearly in half.

Biden delivered the news to a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic caucus Friday afternoon, telling them the overall cost of the reconciliation bill would come down from the $3.5 trillion proposed by the White House to between $1.9 trillion and $2.3 trillion, far closer to the $1.5 trillion ceiling backed by West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin.

Manchin and Arizona Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema have opposed passage of the social spending legislation by means of the reconciliation procedure, which allows the Democrats to bypass a Republican filibuster in the closely divided Senate. The procedure can only be used on a spending bill, and only once in a fiscal year.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., walks at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The House Progressive Caucus, which comprises nearly half the 220 Democrats in the House of Representatives, has blocked passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, approved in August by the Senate, until the two right-wing Senate Democrats reach agreement with the White House on the reconciliation package.

Their opposition forced House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to push back a planned September 27 vote on the infrastructure bill, agreed to with another small right-wing faction of Democrats in the House, first until October 1, and then until October 31, a decision she announced in a letter made public Saturday.

Biden made his in-person visit to the Capitol, his first since delivering a nationally televised address last April, to discuss the deadlock with the Democratic caucus. He brought something for both factions: a fig-leaf concession on procedure to the “progressives” and a near-total victory on substance to the right-wing.

Biden endorsed Pelosi’s delay in the infrastructure vote, despite grumbling from some of the House right-wingers, explaining that it was necessary to reach a deal with Manchin and Sinema on the reconciliation bill so the two pieces of legislation could be passed “in tandem.” But he went much more than halfway towards Manchin on substance, giving him an effective veto over the top-line number.

This cave-in to a small minority—two out of 50 Democrats in the Senate, eight out of 220 in the House—cannot be explained by parliamentary arithmetic in a closely divided Congress. The power of Manchin, Sinema and their counterparts in the House is explained by their voicing most clearly the demands of corporate America, particularly in their opposition to tax increases on the wealthy and big business, as well as any significant expansion of the social safety net.

The decision by the White House to accept a much lower price tag for the social spending bill now sets in motion a Hunger Games-style competition between the various social programs that were components of the reconciliation bill: making the child tax credit permanent; adding vision, hearing and dental care to Medicare; expanding Medicaid in states where Republican governors have blocked it; providing paid home health care for the elderly; expanding Head Start through universal pre-kindergarten for three- and four-year-olds; one week of paid family and medical leave; initiating a policy of free tuition for community colleges; and spending on a number of programs to combat climate change.

There is reportedly now debate in the White House and among congressional Democrats involving whether to fully fund some of these programs and eliminate others, or to fund some of the programs for less than the full 10 years provided in the original bill, or some combination of the two methods. Manchin has proposed means-testing some of the programs, although this is supposedly not under consideration.

“The whole shrinking of the pie pits Medicare recipients against poor families against home care workers against victims of climate change,” Faiz Shakir, former campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, told the Washington Post. “It makes the working class of America fight over the scraps.”

Shakir’s former boss, however, was enthusiastic about Biden’s intervention and praised it to the skies in several appearances on the Sunday television interview programs. Interviewed on “Meet the Press” on NBC in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Sanders said that he did not believe Biden had given any specific number in his remarks to the House Democrats.

“What he said is there’s going to have to be give and take on both sides,” Sanders said. “I’m not clear that he did bring forth a specific number. But what the president also said, and what all of us are saying, is that maybe the time is now for us to stand up to powerful special interests who are currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to prevent us from doing what the American people want.”

On the ABC program “This Week” Sanders said, “Three and a half trillion should be a minimum, but I accept that there’s gonna have to be give and take.” He then went on to make an extraordinary tribute to the Democratic leadership, headed by Biden: “We are not just taking on or dealing with Senators Manchin or Senator Sinema. We’re taking on the entire ruling class of this country. Right now the drug companies, the health care—the health insurance companies, the fossil fuel industry are spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent us from doing what the American people want. And this really is a test of whether or not American democracy can work.”

One would think that the red flag had been raised above the White House! Joe Biden was a six-term senator who protected the interests of the credit card industry and the corporations headquartered in Delaware, while Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has long been known as the “Senator from Wall Street” for his close ties to the stock exchange and major banks. To claim that they are “taking on the entire ruling class” is to lie without scruple or remorse.

The former co-chair of the Sanders campaign, Representative Ro Khanna of California, was equally effusive in his embrace of Biden. Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” he said he relied on the White House to sort out which social policy proposals would survive the reduction from $3.5 trillion to $2 trillion or even less. “Ultimately the president is an honest broker,” he said. “He’s going to bring all of the stakeholders together. And I trust his judgment to get a compromise.”

Asked whether blocking the infrastructure bill constituted opposition to the White House, he replied, “I would not have contradicted the president’s vision. What I have said—consistently what most progressives have said is we want to do what the president wants.”

Perhaps the most abject display came from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who told CBS that the Democrats were already beginning to sort out how to implement the cuts in proposed social spending needed to meet the demands of senators Manchin and Sinema. “I think it’s unfortunate that we have to compromise with ourselves for an ambitious agenda for working people,” she said, then urged people to “reach out to their elected officials to let them know what programs they want to make sure are kept.”

Asked about her statement last year that in any other country she and Biden would be in different parties, she said, “I think that President Biden has been a good faith partner to the entire Democratic Party. He is in fact a moderate and we disagree on certain issues. But he reaches out and he actually tries to understand our perspective, and that is why I am fighting for his agenda with the Build Back Better Act.”

The contempt with which the real powers in the Democratic Party regard their left-talking colleagues was expressed in another comment on “Meet the Press,” by Jeh Johnson, former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, the enforcer of mass deportations and counter-terrorism policies.

Host Chuck Todd asked him about the headline on the Democratic Party crisis in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, “Biden Throws In With Left, Leaving His Agenda in Doubt.” Johnson dismissed the newspaper’s claim that Biden siding with the progressives. “Let’s not forget that the bill the progressives are pushing for is Biden's bill,” he said. “It’s his domestic agenda.”

Johnson continued, “It’s not as if it’s some wild-eyed far-left socialist piece of legislation. This is Joe Biden’s Build Back Better domestic agenda. And the progressives are carrying his water on Capitol Hill and appear to be doing it rather effectively right now.”

Water boys (and girls) for Biden and the Democratic Party: A fitting political epitaph for Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and their DSA and pseudo-left cheerleaders.

Dems Tuck Multibillion-Dollar Handout to Illegal Immigrants Into Reconciliation

Biden's $3.5 trillion spending bill gives migrants same child benefits as Americans

Getty Images

Joseph Simonson • October 4, 2021 5:00 am

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President Joe Biden’s budget includes a provision that provides billions of dollars in cash to illegal aliens with children.

The $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill extends the Child Tax Credit to anyone in the United States who provides an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, overturning a crucial safeguard against fraud. Federal law required a valid Social Security number to receive the cash transfer from the federal government. The potential payout for illegal immigrants is massive, with each family receiving a monthly payment of $250 to $300 per child.

A survey from the Pew Research Center found that roughly 675,000 children are not eligible for a Social Security number, making the tax credit expansion for illegal aliens cost between $2.025 billion to $2.43 billion a year. Other estimates put the total number of illegal children residing in the United States at more than 800,000.

Families, regardless of their legal status, would be eligible to receive checks of $3,600 per year per child. The Democratic bill would amount to a universal basic income for parents residing in the country. Under U.S. law, illegal immigrants are barred from enjoying the benefits of federal entitlements.

The Alarm Bells are Ringing for American Citizenship

By Richard Baehr

The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson

Basic Books, October, 2021

Victor Davis Hanson, the classics scholar and military historian, has written or co-authored two dozen books and many hundreds of articles. His latest book, The Dying Citizen, is a powerful and carefully developed argument for preserving American citizenship, a unique patrimony now under attack in many ways from many sources, and from all appearances, a  losing battle.

Hanson provides a history of the concept of citizenship dating back to the Greeks and Romans and makes clear how rare the American experience has been in creating a modern citizenry with both rights and responsibilities. Hanson’s book was mostly written from 2018 through early 2020, and contains a final chapter which updates the impact of the calamitous last year on the citizenship issue, dominated by the coronavirus, racial unrest and a bitterly fought presidential election. Hanson argues that the Trump presidency pushed back against the forces diminishing American citizenship with some modest success from 2017 to 2019, but the events of the past year led to a reversal of those gains, and the prospect of greater threats than existed before.

Hanson’s book contains six primary chapters, each addressing a specific threat to American citizenship, as it was understood in our founding documents, and expanded through political participation for women and races and ethnicities different from the original predominant majority culture.

The first chapter, “Peasants,” maintains that for a people to be self-governing, they must be economically autonomous. In essence, they need to avoid dependency on either the “private wealthy or the state.”  A healthy middle class enables economic self-reliance and autonomy. Politicians from both parties are always claiming they are fighting for the middle class, but if they have been doing this, they have been failing on their promises, as evidenced by a hollowing out of much of America as its industrial and manufacturing base faltered, and major parts moved overseas and the failure to replace the lost opportunities with “good jobs with good wages.”  

Without a sustainable and thriving middle class, society becomes divided between “modern masters and peasants.” In this circumstance, government assumes a responsibility to subsidize the poor to dampen any possibility of revolution, and exempt the wealthy, who respond by enriching and empowering the governing classes. The current attempt by Democrats in Congress to pass a massive “human infrastructure” bill is part of developing a cradle-to-grave dependency for much of the citizenry (and non-citizens as well) on government welfare programs.

Chapter 2, “Residents,” argues for privileging citizens over non-citizens (residents). Citizens live within “delineated and established borders.” Citizens share values, and they assimilate and integrate into what becomes a national character. But today, many argue for a borderless world, and opening America to the world’s 8 billion people. They ask, “Why should those fortunate enough to have been born here, or been legally allowed to enter under various quotas or other limits, be privileged above those others who would also benefit from living here rather than where they are now living and  fleeing?”

The collapse of the American southern border under the current Biden administration was not an accident, but a plan. It fits an ideology that more people moving here, from wherever they may have come, is better for America, since it makes us look  more like the rest of the world going forward. Naturally, there is a political dimension to this ideology, since it assumes that when the new residents become citizens at some point, they will align with the political party favoring mass immigration and open borders.

Hanson argues that people will naturally want to move to a country with political rights, a Bill of Rights,  economic opportunity, and a generous welfare system to tide them over in the short term or forever.  Immigrants don’t see America in the critical fashion of many of its current citizens, but as better than the places they left, but will they accept the responsibility of citizenship, as well as its bounty?

Chapter 3, “Tribes,” argues for American citizenship, not tribal identification -- whether racial, ethnic, religious, or a former nationality. Regrettably, America is on a different course in this area, and the exit velocity away from Hanson’s ideal is accelerating.  In pretty much every sphere of American society, we have moved away from individualism and rewarding achievement and accomplishment to counting participation rates by group shares, striving towards some ideal of equalizing results in every aspect of modern life. 

Rather than encouraging citizens to compete for society’s rewards, we are moving to having them distributed based on race or group size. Immigration plays a role in this since it is part of a strategy for some to reduce one group’s size and share and power. In addition, our modern-day overseers feel free to tarnish all those who came before who failed to achieve the perfection of racial and ethnic distribution -- equity as it is now called. Why study American history when the country has been so flawed? If everyone sees themselves first as members of a group, rather than citizens of a country, then Hanson argues, a constitutional republic cannot exist. ,

Chapter 4, “Unelected” describes how an unelected, appointed and permanent and rapidly growing federal bureaucracy has become the  political power center of America . New rules issued by myriad federal agencies dwarf the output of Congress, even with the mammoth omnibus spending bills written by lobbyists and congressional staff and unread by the representatives who vote to make them laws.

Congress members are first and foremost concerned with their future electoral prospects. The bureaucrats survive changes in administration and party control of the White House or Congress. Bureaucrats are the experts who believe they know better than the masses what is good for them, but they also are always on guard to prevent any elected newcomer who seems to operate outside the established lines observed by most elected officials from both parties.  Donald Trump was a threat since he did not come to office pledging allegiance to the established unelected power structure and various federal intelligence agencies took it upon themselves to destroy his Presidency from the start with the crafting of a Russia collusion narrative, which was nonsense.

Chapter 5, ”Evolutionaries,” documents those who think our founding documents, and constitutional framework, with its balance of enumerated powers, federalism , and individual rights, has outlived its usefulness.  They say that a modern constitution is required, which at its heart is majoritarian in all ways -- 50% plus 1 shall determine the direction of the country. This is playing out as enormous programs of social change and redistribution are on the agenda for a single party to use tiny majorities in Congress to get its way.

But it is not enough, to have a single budget reconciliation bill passed each fiscal year. The left would prefer the Senate to become like the House: shares by population, rather than 2 per state, though this would require an amendment to the Constitution, not possible under current  party shares. So, the workaround is to add new states, each with 2 Democrats in places like DC and Puerto Rico.  

They want the Electoral College eliminated, also not likely to happen by constitutional amendment, so instead, by a compact among various states to vote for electors of the winning national popular vote ticket. The filibuster should no longer restrain majorities with less than 60 votes and must be tossed into the dustbin of history. Democrats are frighteningly close to being able to do that now, and with a few Senate pickups in 2022, won’t be blocked by a Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema.

New justices need to be appointed to the Supreme Court, since it has a conservative majority, and the progressives are always in the plpanned new order to dominate every decision-making body. New voting rules are to be established at the federal level, bypassing a long history of state control of this process.

The Biden administration is ignoring court orders on evictions, and immigration policy. At the city and state level, governments have made rules which defy federal authority, such as Democrats’ creation of sanctuary cities, and other cities  which will not observe federal gun laws.  So much for the rule of law.

Perhaps a mandatory reading of the Federalist Papers should be part of every Congress member’s first week in office so that those who want to eliminate or change  a process that has worked quite well for over 230 years would begin to understand  the reasoning behind the  choices which were made in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention, even if that makes progressive shifts more difficult.

Chapter 6, “Globalists,” describes the attempt by those who have reached the pinnacle of power and wealth to move the country and its citizens towards an international or global membership, rather than something as narrow as national citizenship. The world needs to come together (by private jets to Davos) to talk about saving the planet from climate catastrophe and plastic bags.  New rules which benefit those who trade and sell across the planet will trump protections for workers and individual nations, and as a result, jobs and entire industries can move from one country to another, many to China. The globalists are certain of course that their preferred political and social currency of unrestrained democracy, and  liberal tolerance, are what people around the world want.

Hanson’s final chapter, “Epilogue,” details how the Trump administration pushed back against the destruction of the middle class, open borders, the bureaucracy (the “deep state”), and the effort to privilege racial and ethnic groups over individuals. Concern for an economic class rather than a racial or ethnic group turned out to have appeal to members of these groups, when their economic condition improved as the economy responded to tax cuts, deregulation, and pushback against Chinese trade practices. President Trump appeared to have a good chance for a second term, as 2020 began with record low unemployment rates for members of various minority groups and strong national economic growth.

Covid 19 quickly changed that scenario. Large sections of the economy were shut down. Governors applied stringent lockdowns on vast sectors of their state economies. In person school ended, preventing family members from working if their jobs were still available. People were frightened with mixed and rapidly changing, advice from the “health professionals.”

States changed their voting rules, often in ways that violated their own established state policies and constitutions, making the election process less secure. Many Americans also came face to face with the fact that many drugs, facemasks, respirators, and other basic medical supplies were not produced in America, but in China or other lower wage locations. Our managing through the pandemic required their provision of goods, until any replacement manufacturing could begin again here.

Americans, the once rugged individualists of old, seemed often to want to cuddle up under their warm state governors’ blankets and follow all the rules, since they knew best. Those who spoke up or challenged the orthodoxy were silenced or lost their jobs. This included election news, with major social networking companies and cloud computing hosts prohibiting viewpoints or news stories which threatened the approved party line and could endanger the Democratic ticket before the November election. This development has become much more of a problem under the Biden administration. “Following the science” became following the determinations of political players, who made political decisions more than scientific ones.

If citizens lose their freedom of speech, if the press becomes a politically compliant advocate for one party, if jobs are at risk based on vaccination status (anything to lift sagging poll numbers), if election rules can be changed overnight and not by those who are given the legal power to do so, then we are at a crisis point in the country, and citizens will have lost their authority and ability to select the government that is supposed to serve them. 

Hanson‘s subtitle reads: “How Progressive elites, tribalism and globalization are destroying the idea of America.” American citizens will preserve their Republic or they will lose it. There are lots of countries, but only one America.