THE RICH DON'T GIVE A FUK WHO IS PRESIDENT SO LONG AS THEY ARE OBIDIENT TO THE STATUS QUO. ANY MEAT PUPPET WILL DO!
JOE BIDEN is known as a serial liar, a "public servant" who has somehow managed to accrue tremendous wealth, a race-baiting opportunist, a Catholic-in-name-only, and a bought-and-paid-for politician in bed with criminal cartels and foreign foes. In another era, Joe Biden would have been run out of his country much the same way Benedict Arnold was two and a half centuries ago; in an era when integrity, honor, fortitude, fidelity, and grit have been jettisoned for immorality, unscrupulousness, weakness, betrayal, and craven pliability, however, he is elevated to king sleazeball in a city drowning in sleaze. JB SHURK
Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of babies are aborted annually because Americans are angered at hearing that a victim of rape or the mother of a severely handicapped fetus was forced to give birth rather than get an abortion.
When It Comes To Immigration, Misplaced Compassion Will Destroy America
At her bicentennial, most Americans believed America to be a beacon of light to the world, with legal immigrants drawn by hopes of opportunity, building something and becoming an American success story. America and everything she stood for were things of value and unique, and those who came counted themselves as fortunate. As we approach her semi-quincentennial, things are different.
Today, large swaths of Democrats disparage America as illegitimate in one breath while, in the next, saying that we should allow in every person who wants to walk across the border and suckle at the public teat. After all, “Columbus was an immigrant.”
America is indeed a land of immigrants, as we’re constantly told. Actually, every place is a land of immigrants, for immigration is a hallmark of human history.
Wherever humanity originated, at some point, members of the species immigrated everywhere else. It’s almost never a simple process. Sometimes, it’s because people were chased from their homelands, like the Vandals who were chased by the Huns from eastern Europe into the Roman Empire, eventually settling in Gaul, then Iberia and, finally, North Africa. Other times, it’s because of people who seek to expand their territory through conquest, as happened with the various Muslim caliphates that emerged from Mecca and Medina, whose desire to encircle the Mediterranean was only stopped by Charles Martel in Tours in 732 and by John III Sobieski in Vienna in 1683.
Image: YouTube screen grab.
History is full of examples of people immigrating from one place to another. We often think of the earliest people moving into an area that was previously uninhabited. That may possibly be true of North and South America, but for the most part, it’s not true. When the earliest humans immigrated out of Africa and into Europe, Asia, and Oceania, they encountered our cousins, the Neanderthals, and after 100 centuries of war, eventually eradicated them.
All of this is to say that immigration is nothing new in human history. And it’s not in American history either. Pre-Columbian people in what’s now North America came across the Bering Straits at the end of the Ice Age and then, even in that large land, jostled with each other over territory.
The modern United States was built by immigrants from Europe from a land that was extraordinarily sparsely populated when they arrived. It’s estimated that there were 4.5 million inhabitants north of the Rio Grande in 1492, or about one-half a person per square mile. That compares to approximately 32 in Mexico at the time, 33 in Spain, 60 in France and 103 in India, the world’s densest nation at the time. Today America stands at approximately 100 people per square mile.
From its beginning, the land that became America experienced a series of waves of immigration, which included approximately 86 million people through 2019, a number that has increased to approximately 100 million over the last 5 years. Although Donald Trump stemmed the tide somewhat, Joe Biden has opened up the floodgates with more than 10 million illegal immigrants pouring over our now-nonexistent border since his installation. That’s fully 3% of the US population. As significant numbers of those people are heading to New York, California, and other blue states, which roll out the red carpet and give them free money, the Democrats are grateful because this swelling population helps their congressional numbers.
This is simply not sustainable. Particularly when the overwhelming majority of the people coming across the border are from countries that don’t share our values and have little experience with the freedoms that helped create history’s greatest nation and economy.
Across the country, we’re seeing sanctuary states and cities being overwhelmed by the events they supported in the first place. Citizens, veterans, children, and more are being displaced to make room for illegals, with taxpayers picking up the tab. Virtually every aspect of public services is being overwhelmed, from shelters to schools to hospitals to police.
The good thing is, Donald Trump has promised that on Day One, he will start the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. That, combined with a wall the likes of which we’ve never seen, is a great start.
But there’s a problem, and Jesse Kelly hit it right on the head…
Kelly is right. America is simply too soft to do what’s necessary to deal with this disaster.
Americans are largely a compassionate people. The LBGTQXYZ travesty we’re experiencing today is, at its core, the result of Americans reacting to gay partners not being able to visit dying lovers in hospitals during the AIDS epidemic because they didn’t have rights and families of the dying kept them out of the hospital rooms.
Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of babies are aborted annually because Americans are angered at hearing that a victim of rape or the mother of a severely handicapped fetus was forced to give birth rather than get an abortion.
In wide swaths of the country, policing and justice have been eviscerated because too many Americans believe that blacks are incapable of overcoming slavery that ended a century and a half ago or discrimination that was outlawed back in the 1960s.
Americans are indeed a compassionate people, but sometimes compassion can get you killed. Compassion has a role to play in a moral civilization, but when it becomes the driving force to the exclusion of rational thought, it ceases to be a virtue. (See Europe, which, since 2015, at Angela Merkel’s direction during the war in Syria, imported tens of millions of military-aged men from Africa and the Middle East who are bringing war to the streets, along with the problem that many of them despise Western culture and want Sharia law in Europe.) You cannot run a country based on teary anecdotes. They make for great media and heartfelt stories, but they make for terrible policy.
If Donald Trump is going to fix this situation, he must be willing to endure the unprecedented level of vitriol that will be thrown at him. AOC crying at the side of cages will be child’s play compared to what the media will do with images of little Pedro and his pregnant mommy being pulled from the taxpayer-provided hotel room and loaded up into a DHS van. Trump must be willing to endure stories about the heartbreaking lives that face deportees back in Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and the rest of the countries from whence they came with him playing the role of Hitler.
At the end of the day, if Donald Trump is going to lead the nation out of the morass that Democrats and the swamp have led us into, he must be willing to be vilified, cursed, defamed, libeled, reviled and basically all of the other things he has been exposed to over the last eight years, on steroids.
Trump wasn’t willing to endure that abuse last time and allowed random judges to throw roadblocks all along the way. As a result, his wall was never finished, and now there are 10 million new illegals in America. As the country approaches her 250th birthday, if Donald Trump is going to be the leader Americans need right now, he’s going to have to be a lot more George Patton and a lot less Mark Milley.
Follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA, or you can visit his new website Gratitude for America.
The Democrat party: who are they?
Other oppressed are the millions of illegal aliens they’re importing. Non-D/s/c Americans have so disappointed them. They intend to abolish them and import their replacements. That many of them are criminals, terrorists, pedophiles, slavers and masses who can’t speak the language and have no skills with which to support themselves is a feature rather than a bug. They’re worried about the illegal avalanche, but not because of the damage it’s doing to America. They’re afraid of losing power, afraid, despite their best Trump Derangement Syndrome efforts, their election fraud protocols might not prevail. MIKE McDaniel
Establishment TV Networks Pressure Biden, 81, to Debate Trump
Establishment television networks prepared a public letter on Tuesday to pressure President Joe Biden, 81, to debate former President Donald Trump.
Biden remains noncommittal about debating Trump. In contrast, Trump is happy to confront Biden on his record, pledging in March to debate Biden anytime, anywhere, and anyplace.
Nearly three-fourths of voters believe if Biden skips the presidential debates, it shows “weakness,” a Fox News poll found.
“Biden won’t get away with the basement routine this time,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, told the New York Times on Tuesday.
In an “unusual” open letter endorsed by ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News, the networks urged Biden to debate Trump, citing the need to reduce polarization, according to a draft version obtained by the Times.
FLASHBACK: Trump Debates Biden on Climate Change — China ‘Sends Real Dirt Up into the Air’
“General election debates have a rich tradition in our American democracy, having played a vital role in every presidential election of the past 50 years dating to 1976,” it reads. “In each of those elections, tens of millions have tuned in to watch the candidates debating side by side, in a competition of ideas, for the votes of American citizens.”
“If there is one thing Americans can agree on, during this polarized time, it is that the stakes of this election are exceptionally high,” the letter continued. “There is simply no substitute for the candidates debating with each other, and before the American people, their visions for the future of the nation.”
The Commission on Presidential Debates already announced potential dates, venues, and requirements for the confrontation.
“Though it is too early for invitations to be extended to any candidates, it’s not too early for candidates who expect to meet the eligibility criteria to publicly state their support for, and their intention to participate in, the commission’s debates planned for this fall,” the draft read.
FLASHBACK: White House Stands By False Joe Biden Debate Claim That Hunter Did Not Make Money From China
The White HouseDemocrats are not enthusiastic about the prospects of Biden debating.
“I would think twice about it,” Senate Democrat Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) recently said. I’ve been physically present at one of [Trump’s] debates with Hillary Clinton, and I watched him do outrageous things and say outrageous things. It’s just an opportunity for him to display his extremism.”
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), a Biden ally, said Biden should be weary of debating Trump due to the former president’s ability to overcome establishment media bias. Biden should be careful about allowing Trump to air alleged “hateful, fascist remark,” he added.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
The Dirty Trick Both Parties Have Pulled on Americans | Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Joe Biden’s America: Wealthiest 1% Set Record with $44 Trillion Total Net Worth
The wealthiest one percent in President Joe Biden’s America set a record with a net worth of $44 trillion at the end of the fourth quarter, U.S. Federal Reserve data revealed.
Biden casts his administration as opposed to the widening wealth gap, even though a majority of Americans still live paycheck to paycheck, a recent LendingClub study found, raising concerns that so-called “Bidenomics” failed to help average Americans.
A majority of voters are “worse off financially” under Biden, up 25 points since he assumed office in 2021, a Fox News poll found Wednesday.
The fourth quarter gains resulted from stock holdings, thanks to an end-of-year rally, CNBC reported:
The total net worth of the top 1%, defined by the Fed as those with wealth over $11 million, increased by $2 trillion in the fourth quarter. All of the gains came from their stock holdings. The value of corporate equities and mutual fund shares held by the top 1% surged to $19.7 trillion from $17.65 trillion the previous quarter.
While their real estate values went up slightly, the value of their privately held businesses declined, essentially canceling out all other gains outside of stocks.
The quarterly gain marked the latest addition to an unprecedented wealth boom that began in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic market surge. Since 2020, the wealth of the top 1% has increased by nearly $15 trillion, or 49%. Middle-class Americans have also seen a rising wealth tide, with the middle 50% to 90% of Americans seeing their wealth increase 50%.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
Unfortunately for his electoral prospects, however, Biden’s attempts to present himself as a “man of the people” have become increasingly strained. “Middle-class Joe” has been displaced by “Genocide Joe” in public consciousness, as he has become indelibly associated with the war crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza, armed and financed by the Biden administration.
An election for the billionaires
There are two presidential elections taking place in the United States in 2024. The voting by the American population, which culminates on Election Day on November 5, will receive the bulk of the media attention.
Far more decisive, however, is the second election, which is going on right now, in which a relative handful of billionaires and corporate oligarchs decide which of the candidates of the two established capitalist parties, Democratic President Joe Biden and Republican ex-President Donald Trump, will better serve their class interests.
As of March 31, the Biden campaign had more than double the cash on hand of Trump and the Republicans, $192 million compared to $93.1 million. The Biden campaign is touting the fact that its war chest is the highest total amount amassed by a Democratic candidate in US history. It includes $26 million raked in two weeks ago in Manhattan, where three Democratic presidents—Biden, Obama and Clinton—and an array of Hollywood and Broadway performers appeared before an audience with ticket prices that topped out at $500,000.
Trump’s efforts were given a boost at a record fundraiser Saturday night, held at the estate of hedge fund billionaire John Paulson in Palm Beach, a short distance from Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago compound. The price of admission ranged up to $800,000, and the 117 guests ponied up a total of $50.3 million in campaign pledges, nearly double the Biden total at Radio City Music Hall.
“Tonight, we raised an historic $50.5 million for the re-election of President Trump,” Paulson wrote in a statement to the media Saturday evening. “This sold-out event has raised the most in a single political fundraiser in history. This overwhelming support demonstrates the enthusiasm for President Trump and his policies.”
The enthusiasm of the assembled billionaires was no doubt fueled by Trump’s 2017 tax cut for the wealthy and by the fact that the exemption for “pass-through” corporations, worth $700 billion to private equity firms and other speculative ventures, will expire in 2025, the first year of the new presidency. Trump’s open embrace of fascist violence is seen by an increasing section of the ruling elite as necessary to crush social opposition to its policies of austerity and war.
If money is any indication, however, there is even more “enthusiasm” among the billionaires for Democrat Joe Biden, whose war against Russia is seen as critical to the global interests of the American ruling elite. Dominant sections of the capitalist class see Trump as too erratic on foreign policy and recognize that Biden’s occasional anti-corporate demagogy is purely for show, a means of deluding the population and defusing popular resistance to the war policies of American imperialism.
Unfortunately for his electoral prospects, however, Biden’s attempts to present himself as a “man of the people” have become increasingly strained. “Middle-class Joe” has been displaced by “Genocide Joe” in public consciousness, as he has become indelibly associated with the war crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza, armed and financed by the Biden administration.
Biden continues to collect multimillion-dollar amounts at closed-door meetings with wealthy supporters on virtually every campaign swing. On Monday, for example, he traveled to Wisconsin to unveil his latest political swindle, a proposed reduction in college student loan repayment, which will provide little actual benefit. Air Force One then touched down at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, so Biden could attend a fundraiser that collected $2.5 million from about two dozen individuals (roughly $100,000 apiece).
The co-hosts of this affair were Michael Pratt, who runs GCM Grosvenor, a $77 billion hedge fund specializing in “alternative,” i.e., socially “progressive” investments, and Laura Ricketts, co-owner of the Chicago Cubs and daughter of the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade.
Over the weekend, Politico published a revealing account of the 2024 campaign headlined, “Big-dollar fundraisers are back,” which noted that both parties are relying on small affairs where Trump and Biden schmooze with the super-rich to raise the bulk of their campaign funds. This is particularly important for the Democrats, the website reported, citing the comments of former Obama fundraiser Ami Copeland.
For Biden, burying Trump in cash is central to his general election strategy. He’s started with a sizable financial advantage over the former president, and hosting splashy, high-dollar fundraisers helps to further pad that edge. “His cash advantage is existential,” Copeland said, because “it’s the thing working the best on the campaign right now.”
The fundraising for both campaigns seems inversely related to their actual support, given that polls and media accounts generally concede that Biden and Trump are the two most unpopular political figures in America. Small-donor fundraising, which was up substantially in 2016 and 2020, driven initially by support for the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders and later by opposition to (or support for) Trump’s fascist demagogy, has slowed significantly this year.
The massive domination of money is only one aspect of an electoral process that is completely undemocratic and aimed at excluding any opposition to the capitalist two-party system. The Democratic Party in particular has taken the lead in waging an “all-out war” on third party and independent candidates, which will be focused on challenging their efforts to meet massive signature requirements to gain a place on the ballot.
This is the state of American democracy in 2024: One of the two major parties is controlled by the perpetrator of an attempted fascist coup to overturn the 2020 election, while the other party will renominate the president responsible for an ongoing war against nuclear-armed Russia and the first genocide of the 21st century.
The Socialist Equality Party entered the 2024 elections to provide a genuine choice for the working class, Joe Kishore for president and Jerry White for vice president, running on a socialist and antiwar program.
In a statement posted on X/Twitter Monday responding to the massive domination of money over the election, Kishore wrote:
As Marxists have long explained, the state is not a neutral arbiter but an instrument of class rule. It is controlled by a ruling class that supports the genocide in #Gaza and an escalating global war, while waging a war on the social and democratic rights of the working class at home.
The Socialist Equality Party campaign is aimed at developing a movement in the working class. The existential questions confronting workers in the US and throughout the world will not be resolved by tinkering around the edges, by hoping for “change” within the existing political structure. The working class has to take up the fight against the entire social and economic system of capitalism. This is the essential question, and the only way to oppose the drive of the ruling class to world war, dictatorship and capitalist barbarism.
The central issue in the 2024 elections is to bring the class questions of jobs, living standards, social benefits, democratic rights and war before the widest possible audience and to win the most politically advanced sections of workers and youth to the program of revolutionary Marxism.
GET THIS BOOK ON AMERICA’S RULING CLASS KLEPTOCRACY
On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake BY SARAH CHAYES
· Hardcover : 432 pages
· ISBN-10 : 0525654852
· ISBN-13 : 978-0525654858
·
Sarah Chayes uses her considerable analytical skills to tell the story of corruption in America and the scale of our current corrupt systems, exemplified by the network of Corporations, politicians, enabling lawyers and other agencies who have effectively corroded in the furtherance of their profit, all that was good and just and egalitarian in US society. Please read, please vow to support the changes she calls for. Our morality, our souls are at stake.
On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake
From the prizewinning journalist, internationally recognized expert on corruption in government networks throughout the world, author of Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security ("I can't imagine a more important book for our time,"--Sebastian Junger; "Required reading,"--Tom Friedman; "compelling, fascinating . . . a call to action,"--The Huffington Post), a major, unflinching book that looks homeward to America, exploring the insidious, dangerous networks of corruption of our past, present, and precarious future.
Now, bringing to bear all of her knowledge, grasp, sense of history and observation, Sarah Chayes writes in her new book, that the United States is showing signs similar to some of the most corrupt countries in the world. Corruption, as Chayes sees it, is an operating system of sophisticated networks in which government officials, key private-sector interests, and out-and-out criminals interweave. Their main objective: not to serve the public but to maximize returns for network members.
From the titans of America's Gilded Age (Carnegie, Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, et al.) to the collapse of the stock market in 1929, the Great Depression and FDR's New Deal; from Joe Kennedy's years of banking, bootlegging, machine politics, and pursuit of infinite wealth, as well as the Kennedy presidency, to the deregulation of the Reagan Revolution, undermining the middle class and the unions; from the Clinton policies of political favors and personal enrichment to Trump's hydra-headed network of corruption, systematically undoing the Constitution and our laws, Chayes shows how corrupt systems are organized, how they enforce the rules so their crimes are covered legally, how they are overlooked and downplayed--shrugged off with a roll of the eyes--by the richer and better educated, how they become an overt principle determining the shape of our government, affecting all levels of society.
Top reviews from the United States
5.0 out of 5 stars The 21st century successor to Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair
Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2020
Verified Purchase
Reading Sarah Chayes's descriptions of Gilded Age and modern kleptocracy from Reagan to Trump, I couldn't help remembering Upton Sinclairs' observation that he had aimed for the nation's heart with his novel _The Jungle_ but hit its stomach. Chayes's history of the Gilded Age, in my opinion, is at least as good if not better than Howard Zinn's and Thomas Frank's, and some of her detailed descriptions of American corruption from 1873 to present often made me feel physically ill.
Not a few money-obsessed Democrats come in for scathing criticism alongside the expected bevy of Republicans (including the heirs to the Dixiecrats). It is not a matter of party or class per se: Chayes argues, correctly I think, that the Great Depression and World War II not only enabled the fulfillment of many of the goals of the strikers and protestors of the six decades from 1873 to 1933 but also taught most Americans a kind of social empathy that has been systematically and deliberately attacked by networks of moneyed interests from 1980 to the present day.
Some readers may be a bit put off by Chayes's reliance on Greek and Christian allegories for thematic continuity, but I appreciated them. In any case, she more than redeems herself by drawing from her personal experiences in "third world" nations to expose, again and again, the hubris of Americans like Trump, whose infamous comment about "shithole" African countries reveals so much of the kleptocratic mindset and his personal psychopathy.
Chayes offers many specific ideas for digging ourselves out of the quagmire of kleptocracy and corruption, but no simple solutions. Given climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, will we survive long enough to pursue them, let alone turn the tide?
WHERE DID ALL OF JOE BIDEN'S LOOT COME FROM???
Jesse Watters : WOW, this is just OUTRAGEOUS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgDVORGTg_A
There it is. That's the issue. To begin, you have the corrupt family Biden. They've been scamming us and our system well for almost fifty years. The man is supposedly worth over 250 million dollars. How is this possible on his salary? It's not. So where did his wealth come from? Not from being a brilliant businessman. DAVID PRENTICE
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation (TWO GAMER LAWYERS - OWNED BY GEORGE SOROS) (WHAT ABOUT THE CHINA BIDEN PENN CENTER?) and the Obamas (TWO GAMER LAWYERS - OWNED BY GEORGE SOROS) book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family (FOUR GAMER LAWYERS - JOE, HUNTER, JAMES, FRANK - OWNED BY GEORGE SOROS AND LARRY FINK OF BLACKROCK) corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the (GAMER LYING LAWYER )Warren and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption (ADD GAMER LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS (OWNED BY GEORGE SOROS) AND HER LAWYER HUSBAND AND THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY, (GAMER LAWYER) CHUCK SCHUMER, OWNED BY LARRY FINK OF BLACKROCK WHO OWNS A BIG PIECE OF THE ‘BIG GUY’ JOE, AND GEORGE SOROS’ RENT BOY (GAMER LAWYER) TONY BLINKEN, AS WELL AS CON MAN (GAMER LAWYER) ADAM SHIFF AND HIS CORRUPTNESS (GAMER LAWYER) BOB MENENDEZ STILL EVADING PRISON, AND NOT BE VERY LEAST, (GAMER LAWYER) ERIC SWALWELL, THE CHINESE SPY AND HO CHASING BRIBES SUCKER, AND OF COURSE, PREDATOR LAWYER AND COVID LIAR (GAMER LAWYER) ANDREW CUOMO.
BRIAN C JOONDEPH
Lifelong Democrats Are Turning to Trump. Roseanne Barr Explains Why
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFMXMx2xPSs
It certainly worked for Biden in 2020, and his Attorney General, Merrick Garland, arguably the most corrupt and weaponized in history—that’s saying something with Obama’s “wingman,” Eric Holder in the running—is working hard to keep that organization up and running:
Biden Admin Gives $6.6 Billion to Project Run By Ex-Solyndra CEO
Brian Harrison led green energy company to bankruptcy after receiving $500 million in Obama admin loans
The Biden administration is giving $6.6 billion to a semiconductor project run by the former CEO of Solyndra, the failed solar energy company at the center of an Obama-era scandal over government misspending.
Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC’s Arizona subsidiary, whose president is former Solyndra head Brian Harrison, will receive $6.6 billion to build a factory in Phoenix, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced Monday.
Harrison was CEO of Solyndra when it declared bankruptcy in 2011 after receiving over $500 million in loans from the Obama administration.
The funding could fuel criticism from Republicans over the Biden administration’s energy spending. The Department of Energy’s loan office has poured billions into companies with an array of financial and legal problems, leading to investigations by GOP lawmakers.
President Joe Biden touted the funding to TSMC in a press statement on Monday. The company said it will invest an additional $65 million into its manufacturing compound in Arizona, where it already has two factories and is building a third.
"Thanks to this investment, TSMC will also build a third chip factory in Phoenix, increasing its total investment in Arizona to $65 million and creating over 25,000 direct construction and manufacturing jobs, along with thousands of indirect jobs," Biden said.
The funding comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, which was signed by Biden in 2022 and is intended to boost U.S. chip manufacturing and counter China’s dominance of the semiconductor industry.
Harrison, who is overseeing TSMC’s projects in Arizona, said he was involved in securing the federal financing in a media interview last August.
"We’re in the process of applications for the CHIPS Act funding," he told CNBC.
Harrison joined TSMC Arizona in 2021 and has served as president since last April, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was CEO of Solyndra from 2010 to 2011.
Solyndra received over $500 million in loans from the Obama administration under a 2009 stimulus program. During Harrison’s tenure, the company declared bankruptcy and defaulted on the loans. Federal investigators also reportedly seized Solyndra records from Harrison in 2011, but no charges were ever brought against him or other executives at the company.
An inspector general investigation found that Solyndra executives provided misleading information to Department of Energy officials during the loan negotiations in 2009 and later "while drawing down loan proceeds." The IG report said the "actions of certain Solyndra officials were, at best, reckless and irresponsible or, at worst, an orchestrated effort to knowingly and intentionally deceive and mislead the Department."
Republicans held up Solyndra as an example of reckless government spending. In 2012, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney held a press conference outside the company’s headquarters, calling it a "symbol" of "failure."
In the wake of the scandal, the Obama administration scaled down the operations of the Department of Energy’s loan programs office, which had issued the funding.
But now the Biden administration has revived and expanded the office—giving it a massive $400 billion budget for green energy loans.
The spending has come under fire from Republicans, who have noted that the loan office’s director, Jigar Shah, appears to have conflicts of interest with some of the loan recipients.
"Solyndra is going to look like chump change compared to the amount of money that’s been wasted by this administration," Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) warned in December.
The Department of Commerce did not respond to a request for comment.
The DOJ sued DISH network for $3.3 billion but dismissed the suit after its chair donated to Biden
Two sayings are pertinent to this essay. The first is that correlation does not imply causation. Just because two events seem connected doesn’t mean they are. The second is that timing is everything. Think about both as you consider the Department of Justice’s decision to dismiss a massive corporate fraud lawsuit a short time after the corporation’s founder made a sizable donation to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
DISH Network is an American satellite network. In 2015, the DOJ sued DISH under the False Claims Act. The suit was based on Whistleblower Vermont National Telephone Company, Inc.’s allegation that DISH and its affiliates were allegedly using fraud to get small business discounts for wireless spectrum licenses. As recently as November 2023, a federal judge kept the case alive in the face of DISH’s motion for a judgment on the pleadings (i.e., DISH contended that the DOJ’s complaint contained within it the seeds of its own destruction).
On December 15, 2023, less than one month after the federal court refused to dismiss the DOJ’s suit, one of DISH’s founders, Charlie Ergen, along with his wife, Candy, donated a total of $113,200 to keep Biden in the White House…and, inevitably, to keep his currently constituted Department of Justice in power.
Image: A downed DISH receiver by frankieleon. CC BY 2.0.
On January 10, 2024, only three-and-a-half weeks after Ergen sent his money to Biden, and while the fraud suit was still pending, DISH received $50 million in taxpayer funds when the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced an $80 million round of five grants. The other four grantees divided the remaining $30 million in grant money.
A mere two days after the $50 million grant, the attorney for Vermont Telephone, which had triggered the DOJ’s initial action against DISH, complained that the DOJ was putting pressure on Vermont Telephone to enter into “an unethical settlement” or it would dismiss the suit:
The move to dismiss the case scrapped plans to depose the Ergens about their knowledge of the allegedly fraudulent scheme, prompting Vermont Telephone’s attorneys to accuse the Justice Department of political interference.
“[I]t appears that the effect — if not the purpose — of the DOJ’s rush to seek dismissal of this case is to protect Mr. Ergen from being questioned under oath,” Ross wrote in a Feb. 8 letter to the lead DOJ attorneys handling the case, according to a copy reviewed by The Post.
“We do not believe it is a coincidence that Mr. Ergen, his wife (who also is scheduled to be deposed next week), and DISH’s Political Action Committee collectively contributed in excess of $5 million to Democratic candidates and causes between 2008 and 2022,” he added.
“With the upcoming election, this case looks like just the latest example of the DOJ’s two-tiered justice system under which the well-heeled, politically connected are treated one way, while everyone else is treated differently.”
The last item in this chronology is that on March 8, the DOJ moved to dismiss the case. You can read more details about the whole case, from its inception to the motion to dismiss, in this New York Post article. Indeed, the article is worth reading as an expose about how corporate money and politics work in D.C., with most money flowing to Democrats but surprisingly large sums keeping individual Republicans afloat.
As I noted at the start of this post, just because there seems to be a connection between things, that doesn’t mean there is a connection. The chronology suggests that, once Ergen started throwing large sums of money at a sitting president whose re-election campaign is in trouble, that same president told his Department of Justice to lay off his good friend. It could just be, though, that the case has been kicking about for years so that the DOJ decided it was time to unload it because it was hogging resources without any discernable benefit to the American people.
But as always, timing is everything, and the appearance of impropriety can be just as powerful as actual impropriety. We’ve long known that Garland’s DOJ is driven by politics, not principle. Now, we have the strong suggestion that it can be bought, too.
demented. In the process, they’re insulting America’s poor and black citizens, branding them too stupid to obtain identification necessary for daily life. Reasonable people might call that racist.
Reasonable people might also think our republic is better off if people who can’t get identification, and can’t be bothered to get to the polls on election day, don’t vote. Obviously, people who have legitimate reasons for being unable to be present on election day, like our military serving overseas and the handicapped, must be allowed absentee ballots, but with effective safeguards and verification.
Using taxpayer resources and the power of the federal government to violate Supreme Court decisions and enable vote fraud on a never before imagined scale is among the most un-American, anti-republican acts of a thoroughly corrupt administration. Reasonable people might call that tyrannical. And they’d be right, and consistent. They’re absolutely perpetuating “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.”
That’s great for “our democracy—a permanent, one-party, Democrat/socialist/communist state, but terrible for our constitutional, representative republic. I wonder if Garland has heard about that?
Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
Graphic: X screenshot
The DOJ sued DISH network for $3.3 billion but dismissed the suit after its chair donated to Biden
Merrick Garland Risks Contempt Proceedings After Stonewalling Biden/Hur Interview Audio
Attorney General Merrick Garland risks being held in contempt of Congress after he refused on Monday to divulge the audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur.
Biden’s Justice Department offered to provide the transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden’s book ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, Axios reported, but Republicans say Biden’s transcript and audio are needed to conduct oversight of the president’s classified document scandal.
“The Biden Administration does not get to determine what Congress needs and does not need for its oversight of the executive branch,” the House Oversight Committee told reporters.
“It’s curious the Biden Administration is refusing to release the audio of President Biden’s interview with the Special Counsel after releasing the transcript,” it continued. “Why shouldn’t the American people be able to hear the actual audio of his answers? The American people demand transparency from their leaders, not obstruction.”
Further responses to Garland’s stonewalling are reportedly forthcoming. Republicans previously threatened to brand Garland in contempt for not producing the audio.
During the president’s interview with Hur, Biden, 81, experienced mental lapses and “poor memory” at least seven times, according to a transcript obtained by Breitbart News.
Hur’s investigation, which concluded in February, found Biden “willfully” retained classified documents but declined to prosecute him, citing “insufficient evidence.” Hur characterized Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.