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
If Trump is 'drama,' what is Biden?
Hillary Clinton's persuasion pitch to her undecided voters was to 'get over yourself.'
I prefer to use logic and reason with ours, so here is how I would appeal to undecided voters instead:
You say you’re not going to vote for Trump? You say you’re tired of the drama? You say you aren’t fond of the mean tweets and ungracious comments?
Drama, huh?
Are you tired of your president being incapable of cogent thought and fluid speech? Are you tired of the “Big Guy’s” softer than warm butter stance on China? Are you tired of rampant inflation and high taxes? The Strategic Oil Reserve being drawn down needlessly?
Are you tired of open borders and 100,000 deaths a year from fentanyl overdoses? Are you tired of human and sex-trafficking? Are you tired of illegal aliens migrants newcomers committing crimes and flooding our cities? Are you tired of rampant crime?
Are you tired of trains derailing, plane parts falling off, and bridges collapsing?
Are you tired of some groups being feted and others mocked on the basis of their skin color and religious affiliation?
Are you tired of freakishly-adorned high level nuclear officials stealing other people’s dresses at airports around the country? Are you tired of people who hold traditional views being prevented from speaking and chased off campuses?
Are you tired of being told what kind of stove and automobile you will be allowed to buy in the near future? Are you tired of being told what kind of food (hint: bugs) you will be allowed to eat? Are you tired of elites telling us that we will soon own nothing and be happy?
Are you tired of the government treating migrants better than American citizens? Better than Veterans? Are you tired of endless wars? Are you tired of the party in power attempting to imprison its political opponents?
Is this the America you remember and can be proud of? Is this all now considered “calm” and “normal?” Is any of the aforementioned “drama?” Is any of it “mean,” disgusting, or “ungracious?”
Are you better off than you were pre-pandemic, say in 2019? More hopeful?
Who are you going to vote for again?
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
The Democrat party is a Potemkin village
"Most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what they've been told to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see - not what is right in front of them in its pristine condition." --Vincent Bugliosi
A Potemkin village is a façade, an attempt to fool people into believing things are better or different than they are.
Nothing has revealed the shallow, empty façade of the Democrat party like the rather obscene fundraiser held Thursday night at Radio City Music Hall.
Joe Biden’s campaign is going so badly that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were resurrected from the shadows to bolster Biden’s sinking polling numbers.
Whoever is running the campaign apparently thinks people are so stupid that getting those two former presidents on board will fool voters into thinking Biden is not the failed, demented, callous man he is.
So along with Obama and Clinton they gathered up some reliably lefty performers like Queen Latifah, the quite unappealing Lizzo, and a few others with whom most people are unfamiliar to put on a show. Missing was Sean Combs, better known as P. Diddy, who campaigned vigorously for Biden in 2019. He got his home raided by police last week for a host of serious crimes: sex trafficking of minors, drug dealing and abuse, etc.
One can’t help but wonder if Combs and Hunter were party pals since they have similar lifestyle tastes.
According to the media, there were five thousand people in attendance, many of whom paid as much as five hundred thousand dollars to attend. A picture with the three presidents cost one hundred thousand dollars.
It was a disgraceful event, especially since the funeral of the most recently murdered policeman killed in New York was taking place a few miles away.
That is where President Trump was. Biden hardly, if at all, acknowledged this most recent senseless murder by yet another thug with so many previous violent crimes to his name, he should not have been on the streets. Biden similarly ignored the murder of Laken Riley by one of the ten million illegal aliens he has ushered into the country. Biden and his Marxist handlers could not care less about the victims of their soul-crushing policies. These are cruel and corrupt people. Their shabby bit of cheap and tawdry theater that allegedly raised $25 million only proves how unethical and tone deaf they truly are. They are about one thing, one thing only – money.
Who are those five thousand people who paid obscene amounts of money to wallow in the imagined glow of Obama, Clinton and Biden?
They are one-dimensional charlatans, self-appointed elites who think that being a Democrat makes them superior beings. Their relentless virtue-signaling would be amusing if it were not so eternally predictable. Outside of the event, about five hundred of their former and current base protested Israel’s self-defensive war against the terrorist organization, Hamas. This is ironic because those in attendance probably agree with the protestors.
The pro-Hamas, hate-Israel crowd are as one with the hate-America throng wildly applauding for a president that has brought America to the brink of disaster on every score – economic, national security, militarily and our sovereignty. Our judicial system has been Stalinized; Democrats are free to break all laws, conservatives will be punished severely for minor infractions. Our law enforcement agencies have been thoroughly weaponized.
Rampant crime is the chaos the Democrat party needs to further its agenda.
What has been done to the people who were present at the Capitol on January 6 is Stalinist in the extreme as is the lawfare perpetrated against Trump.
On top of that, Biden intentionally destroyed the energy independence we enjoyed under Trump. His open border has forever altered the demography of the nation and not in a good way. The migrants pouring over the border are not coming to be productive citizens; they are coming to be taken care of by American taxpayers. They are not grateful for what they are receiving, and they expect more. That’s what we get when other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending their worst our way.
Democrats routinely, endlessly present themselves as the party of democracy while they censor narratives and opinions they do not like.
They abhor the Constitution because, as Obama often noted, it is a document of negative rights; it lays out what the government must not do.
That the SCOTUS is right now weighing the value of the First Amendment tells us just how far they have succeeded to that end.
The Democrat party as a democratic institution is a false front.
It has no interest in the freedom of individual citizens. We are each only members of one or another identity group to them. We are oppressors or oppressed, white or minority, labeled according to our sexual orientation – LGBTQ++ or not. The party as currently constituted means to control every aspect of how we live, the more constrained the better.
For example, mandating EVs without building a requisite number of charging stations is just one way they strive to restrict our movement. The party loves to rage against Trump as an authoritarian but we’ve never had to endure a president more authoritarian than Joe Biden.
This Democrat party has to be commended for its hive mind – not one of them deviates from the mandated party line. They are not allowed to think for themselves. One has to assume that their leadership has something, some sort of leverage, on every one of them.
If Republicans were similarly of like mind, the country would not find itself in the grave state of near destruction that it currently is. Republicans present not a Potemkin village front but a fractured one which has rendered them self-destructive losers who infuriate their constituents. RINOs like Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowsky, Ken Buck, et al. are happy to betray their once-declared conservative tenets because they have no core values.
Like the Democrats who bow down in servitude to their leaders, those rascally Republicans think nothing of betraying those who voted for them. They do not care, they feel no allegiance to them. Like the Democrats, it is all about, only about, getting and keeping the power to get rich and stay rich. The American people therefore have very few men and women in power who have their best interests at heart.
Who does?
Trump does. That’s why they have to destroy him. The Democrat party is not what it pretends to be. The truth is that it is waging war against the American people while faking it all the way to the bank. That is what that Radio City extravaganza was all about. It takes money to cheat and they will cheat again.
“Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power.” --Robert Greene
Image: Erica Fischer, via Flickr // CC BY 2.0
Joe Biden has consistently prevaricated about his and Hunter’s foreign business dealings with China and other non-friendlies, and neither has paid a price. Joe is likely lying in public about never speaking to Hunter about his business endeavors. Just yesterday in a press conference Joe called the charges against him “all lies.” And in their ludicrous naivete the media believe him.
Biden was 25 in 1967, and was attending Syracuse University College of Law, from which he graduated 76th in a class of 85 in 1968. By 1967, when he supposedly talking to the Egyptian government on behalf of Golda Meir, he had already embarked upon his career of lying. A Syracuse College of Law faculty report on December 1, 1965 stated that Biden “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution,” and recommended that he fail a legal methods course because of his plagiarism.
Biden lied about his undergraduate degree and his majors, lied about his rank in law school, lied about scholarships and educational aid he had received, lied about his stance toward the Vietnam war while in college, lied about
his plagiarism of other politician's writings and speeches, lied about the
circumstances around his first wife's fatal accident, lied about how he met his second and current wife, and lied about the affair they were having when they were both married. MARK CHRISTIAN
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.
It doesn’t help matters that, today, tech giants are distrusted by conservatives and progressives alike. Firms that were run out of Palo Alto garages now chafe at antitrust laws like the railroad companies of a century ago.
And like those companies, they know how to use their influence. In 2019 alone, two of the biggest and most influential technology firms — Amazon and Facebook — each spent $17 million on “government affairs,” better known as lobbying.
Ocasio-Cortez’s reference to Uber may have been a subtle warning to the incoming administration: The brother-in-law of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is Tony West, who worked for the Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton and is now the chief counsel at Uber. Jake Sullivan, another top Biden adviser, also worked for Uber.
The company recently won a major victory in California with Proposition 22, a successful response to legal efforts to make Uber drivers and other “gig workers” employees, not contractors. That’s exactly the kind of labor policy, Ocasio-Cortez says, the Biden administration must avoid.
Many top Obama staffers went to Silicon Valley in 2017. They could be returning to Washington with a new appreciation for free market capitalism at a time when “socialism” is no longer a dirty word.
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology.
That’s exactly what worries Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks what Trump has called, without much affection, “the swamp.” He notes that the transition team for the Office of Management and Budget appears to have borrowed rather avidly from Silicon Valley, with team members hailing from Lyft, Airbnb and Amazon.
The budget office wields an “enormous amount of power,” says Hauser, including in both how congressionally appropriated money is doled out and how certain rules are implemented. Though it had a supporting role in Trump’s impeachment drama over foreign aid, OMB is otherwise obscure, making it a perfect site for covert exercises of federal power.
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.
Watching the transition, Gray, the former Sanders adviser, recalled an old saying: “The fish rots from the head.” The head, in this case, is Joe Biden, of whom Gray has long been a skeptic.
“He’s a fundamentally conservative man,” Gray says. She reasons that if Biden was “unmoved by the largest protest movement in American history” to endorse Medicare for All, he can’t be trusted to do much for conservative causes like a $15 minimum wage and the Green New Deal.
Still, she believes that Biden can be made to hear the voices of progressives — if, Gray says, they are loud enough. She points out that there is widespread support for progressive legislation like the $15 minimum wage in Florida, even though Trump won the state.
Biden easily won Oregon, but a push to legalize small amounts of drugs, known as Measure 110, was even more popular than he was.
She sees that as evidence that progressive ideas are more popular than Biden himself. “Progressives should never stop screaming that reality from the rooftops,” Gray told Yahoo News. And she vowed to keep fighting, even with Trump gone and a Democratic president in the Oval Office once again.
“I don’t accept resignation,” she said.
Cover thumbnail photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
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
CUT AND PASTE YOUTUBE LINKS
JUST NOW: Biden is TOTALLY COMPROMISED by Communist China!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caNTUxjth9Y
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology
We have lost faith in the American notion of justice, which is now malignantly skewed to favor Democrats. Even when a Democrat is convicted, they don’t get punished.
Hunter Biden’s scalp will not spend one day in jail
By M.B. Mathews
Because Trump may again be POTUS, Hunter Biden gets to skate the nine tax charges, some felonies. He will see no punishment because the indictment against him is only meant to distract from the accusations that we have a two-tier justice system—one for Republicans and one for Democrats. Hunter will skate because he is the son of the man in the Oval Office, and because he is a Democrat… and for the most part Democrats don’t serve time. Joe will pardon him, but before that happens, stalling tactics will keep him out of prison for any significant length of time. He may serve a token few days or weeks but nothing like what they want to do to Trump, who will get life in prison or execution for “incitement” and “insurrection” if Democrats get their way, even though he is manifestly innocent. Trump cannot be allowed to get back into the White House, so Hunter must divert attention away from Justice; “See? Hunter got indicted. The Justice system worked.” Well, no. People are not stupid; they see what is being done.
If judged by the success of Trump’s policies, the best president Americans have ever had will suffer because of the worst one we have ever had.
Joe Biden has consistently prevaricated about his and Hunter’s foreign business dealings with China and other non-friendlies, and neither has paid a price. Joe is likely lying in public about never speaking to Hunter about his business endeavors. Just yesterday in a press conference Joe called the charges against him “all lies.” And in their ludicrous naivete the media believe him.
The Biden family are as corrupt as the Clinton family and both have left paper trails and live witnesses to prove it, but the corrupt FBI and DOJ have a vested interest in keeping these Democrats out of jail to be voted into office or appointed to the (In)Justice Department in order to effect Marxist policies. Comey famously said, “No serious prosecutor” would bring charges against Hillary Clinton. Of course not. She’s a Democrat, among other things, and Comey is a Democrat shill, among other things.
Hunter won’t serve a day in jail because the justice system is rigged for silent running against Republicans, much like the election system. The proof is there for clear eyes to see—Hunter and Joe and Hillary are corrupt—despite the attempts to cloud our vision, imposed upon us in the smoke being blown from our alleged Justice apparatus. Justice gets acute blindness when a Democrat commits crimes, but is crystal clear when a Republican gets even false charges against him.
We will not fix this because Republicans will not cohere in their efforts to rehabilitate the confidence Americans had in our system of justice. The only reason Hunter got indicted was to sacrifice his scalp in order to allay the myriad cries of DOJ corruption emanating from the populace, whose eyes are not clouded.
We see what is going on and our outrage is matched only by our cynicism. We have lost faith in the American notion of justice, which is now malignantly skewed to favor Democrats. Even when a Democrat is convicted, they don’t get punished. But let one lone Republican step amiss and the walls come tumbling down. Trump committed no crimes, there are no proven victims; yet he is being persecuted as though he were a Jewish student or a Jewish restaurant owner.
We were warned too many times that our Republic would crumble like Ozymandius’ visage if we forgot the eternal verities enshrined in our Constitution. We did and it will, unless this tide of justice-less favoritism is not reversed. No entity can survive internal rot before the outer structure crumbles to dust.
Hunter Biden Indicted on Nine Tax-Related Charges, Three Felonies
Kenny Holston/The New York Times via AP, Pool
7 Dec 20231,098
3:06
President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has been indicted on nine charges, including three felonies, for allegedly failing to file taxes, evading an assessment, and filing a fraudulent form.
The 56-page indictment filed in a federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday alleged that the president’s son “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle” rather than pay his taxes, per NBC News. The indictment also alleges that Hunter Biden “willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 taxes on time, despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes.”
Special counsel David Weiss brought the charges, and the case was assigned to Donald Trump-appointee Judge Mark Scarsi.
Neither the White House nor Hunter Biden’s attorneys have responded to the indictment.
David Weiss, who started serving as U.S. attorney in Delaware following Trump’s appointment in 2017, said in a statement that Hunter Biden “engaged in a four-year scheme in which he chose not to pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019 and to evade the assessment of taxes for tax year 2018 when he filed false returns.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Weiss as special counsel in August to oversee the investigation into Hunter Biden.
“As special counsel, he will continue to have the authority and responsibility that he has previously exercised to oversee the investigation and decide where, when and whether to file charges,” Garland said in August. “The special counsel will not be subject to the day-to-day supervision of any official of the Department, but he must comply with the regulations, procedures, and policies of the Department.”
Special Counsel David Weiss leaves a closed-door meeting with lawmakers surrounding the investigation into Hunter Biden on November 7, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty)
CNN noted that “though Hunter Biden did eventually pay his taxes from 2018, prosecutors allege that he included “false business deductions in order to evade assessment of taxes to reduce the substantial tax liabilities he faced.'”
“Prosecutors also allege in the indictment that he ‘subverted the payroll and tax withholding process of his own company’ by withdrawing millions of dollars outside of its payroll and tax withholding process,” noted the outlet.
The Justice Department said that Hunter Biden could face a maximum of 17 years in prison if convicted of the charges.
“The case had been close to being resolved in July when a plea deal fell apart,” noted CNN. “The new tax case stems from Hunter Biden’s lucrative overseas business dealings – including his involvement with Ukrainian energy company Burisma and a Chinese private equity fund.”
Paul Roland Bois directed the award-winning feature film, EXEMPLUM, which can be viewed for FREE on YouTube or Tubi. A high-quality, ad-free stream can also be purchased on Google Play or Vimeo on Demand. Follow him on Twitter @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
"Along with Obama (LAWYER) Biden (LAWYER), Pelosi and Schumer (LAWYER) are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the eight years of that administration." PATRICIA McCARTHY Add the Banksters’ rent boy Eric Holder (LAWYER) and the up and coming Swamp Empress Kamala Harris (LAWYER…but keep counting….(LAWYER) Brian Deese (OF BLACKROCK), Obama-Biden’s loot-for-Wall Street guy.
"Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the twin nutters of Congress, were certain they could beat Trump at his own game, but have made fools of themselves, as usual. The stand-off is not over but with each passing day, the Democrats reveal more of their anti-American, pro-illegal immigration agenda. Conservatives have been sounding the alarm for years: Democrats do not care about American citizens!" PATRICIA McCARTHY
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos congratulates Biden as the president-elect packs his transition teams with servants of the corporate oligarchy
Amazon oligarch and COVID-19 profiteer Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, congratulated president-elect Joe Biden following the declaration four days after the November 3 vote that Biden had won the US presidential election.
“Unity, empathy and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era,” Bezos wrote on Instagram, congratulating Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. “By voting in record numbers, the American people proved again that our democracy is strong.”
This sentiment was echoed on November 7 by the Business Roundtable, including Bezos as well as the chief executives of Apple, Cisco, Microsoft and Salesforce. The big business organization issued a statement that said: “Business Roundtable congratulates President-elect Biden on his election as 46th President of the United States. We also congratulate Vice President-elect Harris on her historic accomplishment as the first woman, Black woman and person of South Asian descent to be elected Vice President of the United States… We look forward to working with the incoming Biden Administration and all federal and state policymakers.”
Last week, Biden’s transition team posted the names and most recent employers of members of its agency review teams on the website buildbackbetter.org. Given the composition of these teams, it is easy to see why Bezos and his fellow oligarchs are in a congratulatory mood.
The individuals who have been appointed are listed alongside the company for which they most recently worked, and organized into “teams” based on the government operations they are tasked with reviewing, such as the departments of Commerce, Defense, Education, Labor, State and Homeland Security.
The composition of these agency review teams demonstrates the intersection, if not outright integration, of the technology monopolies, academic aristocracy, beltway think tanks, trade union bureaucracies, giant law firms and the military-intelligence apparatus of war and repression at home and abroad.
Amazon will have not one, but two seats on the transition teams. Tom Sullivan, Amazon’s director of international tax planning, will sit on Biden’s Department of State team. In addition to Sullivan, Mark Schwartz, an “enterprise strategist” for Amazon Web Services, will serve on the extremely powerful Office of Management and Budget (OMB) team. The OMB oversees the $5 trillion federal budget and exerts influence across a broad range of federal regulatory frameworks.
In addition to figures from Amazon, Nicole Isaac, senior director of North American policy at LinkedIn, will sit on the Department of Treasury team. Brandon Belford from Lyft will serve on the Office of Management and Budget team, along with Divya Kumaraiah from Airbnb.
Shara Mohtadi of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which is funded by the donations of billionaire oligarch Michael R. Bloomberg, will sit on the Council on Environmental Quality. And no less than four individuals, serving in various capacities, are drawn from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is co-owned by Facebook oligarch Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.
Arun Venkataraman from Visa will sit on the team tasked with reviewing the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which will also review the US International Trade Commission and the US Trade and Development Agency. This team will also include Ted Dean from Dropbox.
The labor bureaucracies will also have seats at the table, demonstrating their complete integration into the apparatus of capitalist rule. Beth Antunez, Shital Shah and Marla Ucelli-Kashyap of the American Federation of Teachers, together with Donna Harris-Aikens of the National Education Association, will sit on the Department of Education team.
The labor bureaucracies are also represented by LaQuita Honeysucker from the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, who will be on the Department of Agriculture review team, while Josh Nassar of the United Auto Workers will sit on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau team.
Brad Markell of the AFL-CIO will sit on the Department of Energy Team. His name appears right before that of Trisha Miller from the venture capital firm Gates Ventures.
On the Department of Labor team will be Jennifer Abruzzo of the Communications Workers of America, Dora Chen of the Service Employees International Union, Jessica Chu of the Amalgamated Transit Union International, Nadia Marin-Molina of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), and Shaun O’Brien of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, among others.
The major academic institutions represented on the list include Harvard Law School, the University of Michigan Law School, New York University School of Law, Duke University, Stanford University, Georgetown University and others. Major law firms and consulting firms include Deloitte Consulting; DLA Piper; Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; Sidley Austin; Covington & Burling; and Latham & Watkins.
The racial and identity politics promoted by the Democratic Party did not fail to be reflected on the list, with Bonnie Jenkins appointed to the Department of State team from an organization titled Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security. Jenkins, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, previously served as the coordinator for threat reduction programs in the Obama administration’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation.
The Department of Defense team will be led by Kathy Hicks from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), who will be joined by Melissa Dalton and Andrew Hunter, also from the CSIS; Stacie Pettyjohn, Christine Wormuth and Terri Tanielian from the RAND Corporation; Ely Ratner from the Center for a New American Security; and Lisa Sawyer of JPMorgan Chase, among others.
The composition of Biden’s agency review teams exposes and refutes all of the pseudo-left and opportunist groups in the orbit of the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracies, which have throughout the year attempted to persuade American workers that Biden, the Democratic Party and the unions represented some sort of channel through which they could advance their own independent interests.
The parade of lobbyists, servants and agents of the capitalist class into the incoming Biden administration prompted a defensive article in the New York Times on Thursday, titled “Progressives Press Biden to Limit Corporate Influence in Administration.”
The title of the article essentially acknowledges that “corporate influence” (i.e., corruption) is playing a pervasive role in the formation of the incoming administration, and suggests “limits” on that influence.
The article concedes that “Mr. Biden’s team included executives from Amazon Web Services, Lyft, Airbnb and a vice president of WestExec Advisors, a Washington consulting firm whose secretive list of clients includes financial services, technology and pharmaceutical companies.”
The Times then points to the efforts of “progressive Democrats” who are advocating “for tighter ethics rules.” This is nothing but a fig leaf for the otherwise naked domination of the Democratic Party by the interests of the military-intelligence-corporate-financial oligarchy.
The facts presented in the Times article themselves paint a devastating picture of how the so-called “left” wing of the party is being shoved aside as the fat cats shoulder their way into the new administration. In a joint letter sent Thursday, a number of organizations associated with the so-called “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party pleaded with Biden not to “nominate or hire corporate executives, lobbyists, and prominent corporate consultants,” and to adopt “ethics” rules to limit corruption.
These and other feeble efforts by the “progressive Democrats” are being unceremoniously ignored. The Times itself was compelled to acknowledge that “Mr. Biden has not always shared the left’s concerns about lobbying.”
Tendencies like the Democratic Socialists of America were used by the Democratic Party during the election campaign to further the Democrats’ electoral prospects, but within days of the vote they were tossed aside and roundly denounced for having supposedly cost the Democrats votes and positions with their “radical” and “socialist” rhetoric.
These “socialist” elements had been promised “space” in a Biden administration, but they showed up after the election only to find their “Green New Deal” and other promised reforms piled up in trash bags by the curb.
There is nothing unexpected about the emerging right-wing, pro-war, pro-Wall Street composition of the incoming Biden administration. Biden himself spent decades in Washington as a corrupt bag-man for wealthy interests in the state of Delaware, the legal headquarters of hundreds of thousands of corporations that take advantage of its business-friendly laws.
As vice president, Biden was reportedly opposed even to the barebones rules against corruption that were imposed during the Obama presidency. In the words of the Times: “When he was vice president under Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden bristled at the strict lobbying rules, which he contended would deprive their nascent administration of experienced talent.”
From the moment Biden secured a lead in the voting results, the Democratic Party swung viciously to the right, attacking “socialism” and the “left” in general. On a conference call with House Democrats after the election, former CIA agent Abigail Spanberger, now a representative from Virginia, shouted: “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”
While the “socialists” have been escorted out of the back door, the front door has been thrown open to corporate executives, lobbyists and consultants to staff the new administration.
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.
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.
It doesn’t help matters that, today, tech giants are distrusted by conservatives and progressives alike. Firms that were run out of Palo Alto garages now chafe at antitrust laws like the railroad companies of a century ago.
And like those companies, they know how to use their influence. In 2019 alone, two of the biggest and most influential technology firms — Amazon and Facebook — each spent $17 million on “government affairs,” better known as lobbying.
Ocasio-Cortez’s reference to Uber may have been a subtle warning to the incoming administration: The brother-in-law of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is Tony West, who worked for the Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton and is now the chief counsel at Uber. Jake Sullivan, another top Biden adviser, also worked for Uber.
The company recently won a major victory in California with Proposition 22, a successful response to legal efforts to make Uber drivers and other “gig workers” employees, not contractors. That’s exactly the kind of labor policy, Ocasio-Cortez says, the Biden administration must avoid.
Many top Obama staffers went to Silicon Valley in 2017. They could be returning to Washington with a new appreciation for free market capitalism at a time when “socialism” is no longer a dirty word.
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology.
That’s exactly what worries Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks what Trump has called, without much affection, “the swamp.” He notes that the transition team for the Office of Management and Budget appears to have borrowed rather avidly from Silicon Valley, with team members hailing from Lyft, Airbnb and Amazon.
The budget office wields an “enormous amount of power,” says Hauser, including in both how congressionally appropriated money is doled out and how certain rules are implemented. Though it had a supporting role in Trump’s impeachment drama over foreign aid, OMB is otherwise obscure, making it a perfect site for covert exercises of federal power.
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.
Watching the transition, Gray, the former Sanders adviser, recalled an old saying: “The fish rots from the head.” The head, in this case, is Joe Biden, of whom Gray has long been a skeptic.
"Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the twin nutters of Congress, were certain they could beat Trump at his own game, but have made fools of themselves, as usual. The stand-off is not over but with each passing day, the Democrats reveal more of their anti-American, pro-illegal immigration agenda. Conservatives have been sounding the alarm for years: Democrats do not care about American citizens!" PATRICIA McCARTHY
Report: Migrants Along Border Say They ‘Want Biden to Win’ 2024 Election
Migrants at the United States-Mexico border say they “want [President Joe] Biden to win” the 2024 presidential election, while others hope to get released into the nation’s interior before election day — knowing their chances will be nearly eliminated under a second term of former President Donald Trump.
In interviews with The Free Press’s Peter Savodnik, migrants waiting to cross the southern border said they vastly prefer Biden to Trump in this year’s election, primarily because they say their chances of being freed into the U.S. interior are high with the current administration.
With Trump, though, they see those chances as disappearing.
“I want Biden to win,”45-year-old Daniel Cortez of Honduras, currently living in a migrant camp in northern Mexico, told Savodnik.
Richard Betancourt, a 46-year-old Venezuelan citizen also living at the migrant camp, said, “If it’s Trump, it doesn’t matter how much I work or want to work, they won’t let me in.”
Migrants stand on the other side of the fence in Eagle Pass, Texas, after crossing into the US from Mexico on August 25, 2023. The orange buoys extend for about 300 meters. (SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP via Getty Images)
Alejandra Falcon, a 26-year-old Venezuelan citizen, said she is waiting to use the magic words — “credible fear” — to get into the U.S. after scheduling a border appointment via Biden’s “CBP One” mobile app.
Falcon told Savodnik she is not particularly worried about what will become her life after crossing the border. Instead, she is concerned with who wins on November 5. Mainly, she wants to get into the U.S. before that day to secure her chances of staying.
“If [Biden] doesn’t win, I can’t imagine what will happen,” Falcon said.
Migrants cross through a gap in the US-Mexico border fence on December 22, 2023 in Jacumba Hot Springs, California. (Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images)
From February 2021 through February 2024, Biden has overseen nine million encounters at the nation’s borders — more than 7.4 million of which occurred at the southern border.
Those figures do not include the nearly two million “known got-aways” who successfully crossed U.S. borders or the millions more who are estimated to have successfully crossed the border but who remain unknown by Border Patrol.
Likewise, under Biden, the foreign-born population has hit unprecedented levels.
The Center for Immigration Studies unveiled that the nation’s foreign-born population has surpassed 51 million — the highest in American history. Put another way, the foreign-born population is 15.5 percent of the total U.S. population.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Houston Car-Theft Ring Tied to Mexican Terrorist Drug Cartel
HOUSTON, Texas — A six-month investigation led to a series of raids on Mexican cartel-connected chop shops in the Houston metroplex this week. The raids led to the seizure of more than $1 million in stolen vehicles.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez posted photos on X showing the chop-shop operations located on Leago, Yale, and Gulf Bank streets. The auto-theft ring has “possible ties to a cartel,” the sheriff stated.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were more direct in tying the operation, run by three Mexican nationals to the narco-terrorist organization Cartel Jalisco New Generation, according to a report by the New York Post. ICE officials identified the ring leaders as Edgar Bravo, Jesus Gutierrez-Escamilla and Bernando Fernandez-Pereyda.
The New York Post stated that Gutierrez-Escamilla entered the U.S. illegally more than 12 years ago. He has had frequent contact with law enforcement during the interim, but has never been turned over to ICE for removal. Fernandez-Pereyda also entered the U.S. illegally in March 2023, according to Border Patrol reports, the article states.
Sheriff Gonzalez reported the raids led to the recovery of 14 stolen vehicles worth more than one million dollars.
The Cartel Jalisco New Generation also made news in Houston less than a week ago when the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas handed down a drug smuggling indictment against 41 people, Breitbart Texas’s Brandon Darby and Ildefonso Ortiz reported. The indictment identified 52-year-old Roque Zamudio Mendoza, from Michoacan, Mexico, as the ringleader. He is believed to be hiding in Mexico.
Darby and Ortiz reported:
Court documents do not specify details about the crossing areas used by the cartel or their methods of distributing the drugs, but authorities revealed that from Houston, CJNG members would move their shipments to New Orleans, Louisiana; Pensacola, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Nashville, Tennessee; and Chicago, Illinois. The indictment claims that the smugglers moved drugs for CJNG from 2018 to 2020. It remains unclear if members of the group continued their operation since then.
Cartel Jalisco New Generation is one of Mexico’s most violent drug cartels and has been linked to several terror-stye attacks where they have used explosives. This criminal organization has been at the forefront of implementing the use of IEDs and weaponized drones as they wage fierce turf wars against Sinaloa Cartel factions and other cartels.
The indictment and the operation against a Houston-based CJNG cell come as the Texas city has been dealing with a public relations nightmare. As Breitbart Texas reported, a series of audits revealed that in an eight-year span, the Houston Police Department did not investigate and filed away more than 260,000 criminal cases, including more than 4,000 sexual assault cases.
Fox 26 Houston reported that the vehicles that can be identified will be returned to their owners. A total of five suspects were taken into custody during the tactical operation.
Bob Price is the Breitbart Texas-Border team’s associate editor and senior news contributor. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday morning talk show. He also serves as president of Blue Wonder Gun Care Products.
2,000 members of Mexican National Guard sent to Tijuana to deal with cartel caused violence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2WpqRS7A5Q
Ordinary people are taking the law into their own hands to counter cartel threat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VqjAZhJobE
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Tentacles of Mexican Cartels Reach into U.S., Says Rep. Chip Roy
ILDEFONSO ORTIZ and GERALD TONY ARANDA
The tentacles of criminal organizations like the Gulf Cartel or the Cartel Del Noreste faction of Los Zetas do not end at the Texas border, said U.S. Congressman Chip Roy.
Congressman Roy made those statements during a series of exclusive interviews with Breitbart Texas as he traveled the Texas border in a fact-finding effort amid the current border crisis, which he attributed to the policies of the Biden Administration. Roy stepped away from the formal congressional delegations to border hotspots like McAllen, Laredo, Carrizo Springs, Eagle Pass, and others.
One of the largest takeaways of those visits is that Mexican cartels have real operational control of the border as Mexico’s government remains unable to do anything about it, Roy said.
“That’s something that the American people don’t fully understand,” he said. “The Mexican government–they can’t have their force mean anything in that area. The cartels have control there.”
However, according to Congressman Roy, the power of the cartels does not end at the border. In some cases, U.S. agencies in San Antonio and others have turned a blind eye to the presence and power of cartels, he said.
In the Rio Grande Valley, the Reynosa faction of the Gulf Cartel has been benefiting from the lack of enforcement at the border, while in Laredo the CDN-Los Zetas are the ones reaping the benefits, Roy said.
“They are the ones making a lot of money moving human beings for profit,” he said.
During those visits, Roy has encountered several groups of migrants, some of those who had been trying to run away from authorities such as in Laredo, while in the Rio Grande Valley, migrants became lost in the brush after crossing the river after not being able to find any agents.
“The word has gotten out that Border Patrol is now distracted,” Roy said, explaining that agents from other sectors have been moved to the Rio Grande Valley to man detention and processing facilities. “What does that mean? You don’t have patrols going out and stopping the flow between the ports of entry. So now we have fentanyl up, pounds of marijuana up, human smuggling between ports of entry up, and that is kind of where your bad guys are generally coming. This is the state of our border.”
HIGHLY GRAPHIC IMAGES OF AMERICA UNDER LA RAZA MEX OCCUPATION
This is what America will look like with continued open borders with Narcomex. That is the agenda of the Globalist Democrat party for endless hordes of ‘cheap’ labor.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/10/america-la-raza-mexicos-wide-open.html
Tom Cotton: If You’re a Human Trafficker or Drug Dealer — You’d Give Biden ‘an A-Plus’ on Immigration
Thursday, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) took a jab at the new Biden administration’s approach to immigration policy during an appearance on FNC’s “Fox News Primetime.”
The Arkansas Republican lawmaker questioned the motivations and warned Biden’s policy had consequences for the American public.
“Joe Biden is great on immigration. I guess depends on your perspective. If you’re a human trafficker, or drug dealer, or all those migrants wearing the Biden let us in shirts, you’d give him an A-plus, plus, but the American people would give him an F. The crisis we said our border, Trey, was not only entirely predictable. It was predicted. I predicted it last fall that if you campaign all year long on open borders, amnesty, and health care for illegals, you’re going to get more migrants at the border. That’s exactly what’s happened every month since the election.”
“And the principle is simple,” Cotton continued. “If you let them in, more will come. And that’s what we see with Joe Biden’s administration calling illegal aliens, customers and changing the names of detention centers to reception centers and then giving them tickets for bus rides or plane rides to wherever they want to go inside the country. And as you said, even Mexico is now grown alarmed about this. And they – Mexico knows that whenever Central Americans show up at Mexico’s southern border, they may be seeking asylum there. When they make the journey across Mexico to get to our southern border, they’re not seeking asylum. They’re seeking better jobs and better health care and better communities.”
“It’s understandable, but it’s not what our immigration laws are designed for,” he added. “And it’s not what the American people should be asked to shoulder.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
Tom Cotton: Joe Biden Will Keep Foreign Drug Dealers in U.S.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) slammed President Joe Biden’s
administration amid evidence that his deputies want to
minimize the deportation of illegal migrants who are caught
dealing deadly drugs.
“It’s the Biden administration policy to allow illegal aliens to stay in America even after they: -Deal fentanyl and heroin -Commit fraud -Commit assault -Drive drunk -Launder money,” Cotton tweeted February 8.
“More than 80,000 Americans died from drug overdoses last year. And the Biden administration just announced that deporting illegal alien cartel members who deal with fentanyl and heroin is no longer a priority for his administration,” he added.
For more than 20 years, many Americans have been killed by drunk-driving illegals, including many killed after federal and state officials decide not to deport illegals.
It's the Biden administration policy to allow illegal aliens to stay in America even after they:
-Deal fentanyl and heroin
-Commit fraud
-Commit assault
-Drive drunk
-Launder moneyhttps://t.co/Vr0RhYAJQV
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) February 8, 2021
The Washington Post reported February 7 how Biden’s deputies are changing deportation priorities for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency:
While ICE’s new operational plans are not yet final, interim instructions sent to senior officials point to a major shift in enforcement. Agents will no longer seek to deport immigrants for crimes such as driving under the influence and assault, and will focus instead on national security threats, recent border crossers and people completing prison and jail terms for aggravated felony convictions.
“Generally, these convictions would not include drug based crimes (less serious offenses), simple assault, DUI, money laundering, property crimes, fraud, tax crimes, solicitation, or charges without convictions,” acting director Tae Johnson told senior officials in a Thursday email advising them on how to operate while new guidelines are finalized.
“The priority for the enforcement of immigration laws will be on those who are imposing a national security threat, of course, a public safety threat, and on recent arrivals,” Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in the February 8 White House press briefing:
Nobody is saying that DUIs or assaults are acceptable behavior, and those arrested for such activities should be tried and sentenced as appropriate by local law enforcement. But we’re talking about the prioritization of who is going to be deported from the country.
The priority list for deportations also excludes migrants who take American’ jobs and wages. This policy will largely abandon the task of protecting Americans’ right to a national labor market.
Biden has repeatedly declared he wants to make the nation’s immigration system more “fair” to migrants. Since January 20, he has minimized deportations, stopped construction of the border wall, offered an amnesty to migrants, broken anti-migration deals with three counties, and has lowered legal barriers to migration.
However, he has said little or nothing about how he will protect Americans’ rights, wages, safe streets, and reasonable housing from foreign criminals or job seekers. A February 2 statement said:
President Biden’s strategy is centered on the basic premise that our country is safer, stronger, and more prosperous with a fair, safe and orderly immigration system that welcomes immigrants, keeps families together, and allows people—both newly arrived immigrants and people who have lived here for generations—to more fully contribute to our country.
Amid Biden’s inrush of migrants and shutdown of deportations, more than 20 million Americans are unemployed or are stuck in part-time jobs.
Biden is also rolling back protections for American graduates, who have lost at least one million jobs because Fortune 500 CEOs and their subcontractors have hired more than 1 million foreign graduates for jobs sought by Americans.
In a separate tweet, Cotton lambasted Biden’s team for dropping a rule that would protect American graduate from losing jobs to H-1B graduate visa-workers who are willing to work for low wages in the hope of getting green cards:
Big Tech abuses the H-1B visa program to hire cheap foreign labor instead of Americans. That isn’t good for American workers, but the Biden administration is letting companies get away with it.https://t.co/YIolIoyqJl
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) February 5, 2021
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the hiring of temporary contract workers into the jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, priority-driven, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and immigration in theory.
Joe Biden's deputies attack Americans' right to their own national labor market, by quietly barring the deportation of illegal migrants who take Americans' wages and jobs.
That labor policy helps corporate donors.
But hurts blue collars & college grads. https://t.co/RNCMFv4aJh
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) February 8, 2021
How Biden helps criminals in Mexico
President Biden's border policy is getting mixed reviews south of the border. The biggest problem is that opening the border may be helping criminal elements in Mexico. This is from my friend Allan Wall:
On the one hand, the Mexican government likes the U.S. to have a more open border. On the other hand, that also causes problems for Mexico.
Yes, it causes problems because Mexico will now become the highway to the U.S., from Central Americans to others.
Coincidentally, I spoke with several Mexican friends who have confirmed this.
First, they don't want strangers walking across the country. I've been told that some of these strangers don't speak Spanish. In other words, they are not Central Americans.
Second, criminal elements are fully invested in the business of bringing people to the border. This is "coyotes on steroids," as a Mexican friend said on the phone. He shared a report that some of these people killed in Southern California recently had paid up to $10,000 for the trip to "el Norte."
Where in the world does a person in Mexico get $10,000? The rich or middle class don't need to pay anyone to go to the U.S. They get on a plane and fly north.
So how are these people coming up with that kind of money? I've heard all kinds of horror stories, from mortgaging their farm tractors to paying the balance once they cross the border.
It's a horrible policy that will promote criminal elements in Mexico.
PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk).
“He’s a fundamentally conservative man,” Gray says. She reasons that if Biden was “unmoved by the largest protest movement in American history” to endorse Medicare for All, he can’t be trusted to do much for conservative causes like a $15 minimum wage and the Green New Deal.
Still, she believes that Biden can be made to hear the voices of progressives — if, Gray says, they are loud enough. She points out that there is widespread support for progressive legislation like the $15 minimum wage in Florida, even though Trump won the state.
Biden easily won Oregon, but a push to legalize small amounts of drugs, known as Measure 110, was even more popular than he was.
She sees that as evidence that progressive ideas are more popular than Biden himself. “Progressives should never stop screaming that reality from the rooftops,” Gray told Yahoo News. And she vowed to keep fighting, even with Trump gone and a Democratic president in the Oval Office once again.
“I don’t accept resignation,” she said.
Cover thumbnail photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
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