Stick it to me:
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The plight of progressive liberals:
Can Liberals Survive Progressivism?
By Bret Stephens
It’s been nearly 30 years since then-Gov. Bill Clinton took a break from the campaign trail to oversee the execution of death-row inmate Ricky Ray Rector. Morally, it may have been repugnant to kill a man so mentally handicapped by a failed suicide attempt that he set aside the pecan pie of his last meal because he was “saving it for later.”
Politically, it was essential.
By the early 1990s the American left had spent a generation earning a soft-on-crime image in an era of growing lawlessness. In 1988, Mike Dukakis secured the Democrats’ third landslide loss thanks in no small part to his stalwart opposition to the death penalty. Four years later, it was difficult to imagine any Democrat reaching the White House without a literal blood sacrifice to the gods of law and order.
Now Democrats seem intent on reviving that reputation. In Waukesha, Wis., six people were killed and at least 60 injured when Darrell Brooks drove his Ford Escape through a Christmas parade, according to the police. Brooks already had a lengthy rap sheet and had reportedly run over a woman with the same S.U.V. early this month. But, as The Times reported, he had been “quickly freed from jail on bond after prosecutors requested what they now say was an inappropriately low bail.”
What happened in Waukesha on Sunday is among the consequences of easy bail. And bail reform — that is, reducing or eliminating cash bail for a variety of offenses — has been a cause of the left for years.
Then there is California, which in 2014 classified possession of hard drugs for personal use and the theft of up to $950 of goods as misdemeanor offenses. In the Bay Area, the results have been stark: San Francisco’s overdose deaths rose to 81 per 100,000 people in 2020 from 19 per 100,000 people in 2014.
In the meantime, shoplifting has become endemic, brazen and increasingly well organized, culminating in mobs of looters ransacking stores and terrifying customers in the Bay Area last week. Local shops are closing, neighborhoods are decaying, encampments of drug addicts have proliferated, and streets are befouled by human excrement — a set of failures Michael Shellenberger calls in his thoroughly researched and convincing new book, “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” “the breakdown of civilization on America’s West Coast.”
As for the rest of the country: Can anyone seriously say that Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia or New York has been improved in recent years under progressive leadership? Why did rates of homelessness register their biggest jumps between 2007 and 2020 in left-leaning states like New York, California and Massachusetts — and their biggest decreases in right-leaning ones like Florida, Texas and Georgia?
Some readers might object that none of these trends take place in a vacuum. The jump in overdose deaths has surely been influenced by the effects of the pandemic, and they’ve also gone up heavily in red states. The rise in lawlessness is in some ways a product of last year’s social upheavals and a reckoning over how the police do their jobs. And murder rates have also gone up in Republican-led cities like Jacksonville, Fla., just as they have elsewhere.
True. But nowhere are dysfunctions more concentrated than in the very places that were supposed to have become beacons of progressive sunshine. And nowhere are the reasons more obvious, too.
If you permit petty vices and crimes to flourish, greater ones will usually follow. If you refuse to police quality-of-life infractions like public drug use or aggressive panhandling, the quality of life will decline. If you increase the incentives for bad behavior, and reduce the ones for good, you will inevitably achieve catastrophic results.
This is not social science. It’s common sense. It’s the basis on which the United States was able to make its streets far safer from around 1995 to 2015, when crime rates kept going down — above all to the benefit of the very minority communities that progressives claim to champion.
The Democratic Party has since thrown that legacy away. Joe Biden disavowed his 1994 crime bill. Last year’s protests often devolved into naked criminality, to which many progressives, including those in the news media, closed their eyes, notoriously including those “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” in Kenosha, Wis. Opportunities for thoughtful police and justice-system reform were squandered in the rush to defame, defund, diminish or abolish.
It may be that serious urban leaders like incoming mayor Eric Adams of New York can reverse the trend. Even the ultra-lefties in California D.A. offices, faced with recall votes, seem to have gotten the message that things are out of hand. But progressive mis-governance has now tattooed the words “soft on crime” on Democratic necks, and the country has noticed. It will take years to erase.
And who has been helped the most by all this, politically speaking? Donald Trump and his mini-mes. The country won’t be safe from them until a more serious Democratic Party can set itself free from ideas that embarrass it and endanger us all.
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Those who established these foundations must be turning over in their graves.
The political left and globalism:
By Brandon Smith
No one sane likes the political left. This is not a shocking revelation. As I have been outlining for many year (but specifically in the past few years), leftists are the only people in the country that consistently support draconian government policies and oppressive corporate monopoly.
They are the only people that support mass censorship of opposing viewpoints through Big Tech and social media. They are the only people demanding the deplatforming and "canceling" of public personalities that dare to utter conservative views or any views really that are contrary to the leftist narrative. They are the only group that has a vast majority in support of the authoritarian COVID lockdowns and mandates. They are the only people that aggressively call for forced vaccinations of the populace. They are the only people demanding that the unvaxxed be removed from their jobs or face potential criminal charges. They are the only people that push for the indoctrination of school children with Critical Race Theory (which is essentially racism repackaged as academic study). And, they are also the only people that are hyper-obsessive about propagating sexual politics in public schools.
These folks are exceedingly unlikable. One would think that they would remain on the very fringes of society where they can do little harm, but this has not been the case. Why? Well, it's not because they are the majority, at least not in any traditional way. They are actually a tiny minority. However, they are highly organized, single minded (some would say hive-minded), and, they have the full support of our national power structures.
Here's the thing — a lot of conservatives wrongly assume that the political left has become some kind of autonomous force within our culture that has the power to influence massive government and corporate interests, bending these interests to their will. This is simply not true. The reality is that it's the opposite dynamic; it is government and corporate and decidedly globalist institutions which have direct influence and control over the political left. Leftists are tools of the globalist system, they are not some "grassroots" movement "sticking it to the patriarchy." They are all slaves on the globalist plantation and many of them don't even know it.
Where do the leftists of the social justice cult actually derive their power from? Is it the pervasive threat of mob violence?
No, it's not. Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw an organized police presence and riot response to leftist mobs looting and burning down cities? In almost every case the police are told to stand down by city officials; they are told to do nothing. I have seen actual riot control used against actual peaceful protesters at events like G20. I have witnessed it personally, and it's not pretty. When cops actually want to control and disperse a crowd, they have a lot of weapons in their arsenal to make this happen. The fact is, leftist riots continue for days at a time exactly because they are allowed to continue for days at a time.
What about the prevalence of "cancel culture" and the use of online mobs to discredit or deplatform people that leftists don't like? This has been working less and less because the rest of the public has been made aware of the tactic through the tireless efforts of the alternative and liberty media, but for around four years the leftists had free rein to destroy the lives and careers of anyone they pleased. Just look at Gina Carano as a prime example of cancel culture in action.
The problem is, leftists would have no power to cancel anyone without the constant support of Big Tech, Hollywood, the mainstream media and international corporations. These companies don't actually care what social justice warriors think, and they're certainly not afraid of a tiny minority of lunatics with zero consumer leverage. Yet, they are the base of control that allows leftists to wield legitimate tools for deconstructing people's lives. The corporate world aids the leftists because leftist goals serve corporate interests (for now).
And what about government overall? I remember a few years ago I warned people that the extreme end of the leftist spectrum would become the norm for the Democratic Party by the time Trump was out of office. I noted that people like AOC and Ilhan Omar were the intended future successors of the party and that cultists like them would dictate the Democrat platform. Many people said that I was crazy and that the rise of Trump indicated that the opposite would happen. Now look at them.
Biden and half of all Democratic leaders spout off about white supremacy and social justice on a regular basis. The party has become exactly what is was always intended to become — a vehicle for communist dominance. Regular democrats and moderates might not agree with this kind of extreme ideological zealotry, but most of them keep their mouths shut because they are fearful of being labeled heretics and cast out. Being called a "bigot" or "misogynist" or "racist" only works on people that actually care and think those words still have meaning. In other words, most of the social justice control mechanism are designed to control other leftists, not free thinkers.
Leftists would have no political influence at all without the avid support of leaders within the Democratic party. The politicians give leftists the teeth they use to bite the ankles of their opponents.
This brings us to the underlying center of all sociopolitical influence — the globalist foundations. Where do leftist groups get all the funding to launch organizations like Black Lives Matter? How do programs like social justice and CRT find their way into college academia and all the way down to the public school system? What is the source for cultural Marxism and how did it become so pervasive in the first place?
Globalist foundations like Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Tavistock Institute George Soros' Open Society Foundation, etc. are usually the source of the seed money for most leftist movements. For examples, Open Society and Ford Foundation, partnered with Borealis Philanthropy, were key in the creation of BLM, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into the movement in its early days.
Ford Foundation, Open Society, Rockefeller Foundation and dozens of other globalist institutions are also deeply involved in the funding and proliferation of Critical Race Theory and gender studies programs. Once again pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into social justice groups as well as university indoctrination programs.
By extension, globalist institutions and international corporation have invested around $50 billion total in the development of social justice programs. Corporations implement indoctrination courses for their employees, but they also spread social justice propaganda to the public subconscious through commercials and popular media.
This has actually been going on a very long time by more subversive and secretive means. It was globalist institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation that funded different elements of the feminist movement and “gender studies” movements from the late 1960s onward. This included the Rockefeller Foundation’s large donations to 'The Feminist Press" and the Ford Foundation’s programs to groom teachers into injecting social justice talking points into their curriculum. This is openly admitted in Alison R. Bernstein’s book Funding The Future: Philanthropy's Influence On America's Higher Education. Bernstein is the vice president of Education at the Ford Foundation and the former Associate Dean of Faculty at Princeton.
I have been asking this question of leftists lately and I have yet to receive any concrete or meaningful answer: If you are supposed to be the underdogs and the revolutionaries, then why is it that all of the evil power elites are on your side?
The relationship between the agenda of globalists are the agenda of the political left growing increasingly obvious and intertwined. The globalists want to dismantle traditional western structures, and so do leftists. Globalists want to dictate economic growth through carbon controls and climate change doom mongering, and so do leftists. Globalists promote a decidedly communistic approach to private property and economy, arguing in favor of the “Sharing Economy” and a world in which “we own nothing and are happy.” Leftist are embracing this concept.
What I see moving forward is that the political left is becoming the Cheka, or the political commissars of the globalist “Great Reset.” They have been molded for decades for this role and their purpose is to provide an element of social force and the illusion of consensus. The interesting thing about this strategy is that it seeks to exploit people who feel as if they are “oppressed” by the existing system, or they have been taught to feel oppressed. As with any Marxist takeover, Globalists use the “have-nots” as a shield while they grab more power.
Every time any conservative criticizes the lies and manipulation of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, we are accused of “racism.” And this is the big trick: We all know that BLM (founded by devout Marxists and funded by globalists) has nothing to do with civil rights or racial justice, it's just a means to destroy western society and replace it with a dystopian nightmare. That's what we are criticizing. Black lives are not the issue, globalism and communism are the issue. Social justice and leftists movements are a smokescreen for a bigger agenda, and the leftists love to be used.
Why do they do this? It's a mistake to assume they are merely “useful idiots.” Yes, some of them are, however, I think the people that fall into the leftist cult are people that are naturally inclined to do so. They are narcissists, psychopaths, degenerates, lazy, spoiled, and weak. They are people that are generally not capable of surviving independently and they know it, so they seek out collectivist frameworks to join and feed off of.
As an example, how does a mob of leftists try to attack Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha and every single person he shoots or tries to shoot ends up having an extensive and violent criminal record? It is because leftists movements attract such people in droves (just look are what a BLM advocate and career criminal just did in Waukesha, Wisconsin). They are not innocent in all of this. They don't care if they are being exploited by the elites because they think it's a trade for power and control they would not have otherwise. They are partners with globalism, and globalism breeds and encourages evil.
It is important to understand this dynamic going forward because I see the argument often that the globalists are trying to “divide and conquer” America. In truth, we are already divided and have been for some time. Trying to talk with and educate moderates on the facts is one thing, but there is very little point is trying to engage in diplomacy with leftists. They have already chosen a side, and it's not the side of reason or freedom.
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The Communist Democrats don’t want to defeat China. They seek to replicate its totalitarian system.
Saule Omarova, who attended Moscow State University on the Lenin Academic Scholarship, compared America unfavorably to the USSR, and called for nationalizing finance isn’t Biden’s first Communist nominee. Omarova is only Biden’s first openly Communist nominee.
Biden’s pick for comptroller of the currency has been taken to task for her calls to “end banking as we know it”, bankrupt oil and gas companies, and seize control of the entire economy.
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Have you learned these critical lessons?
If you're too open-minded, your brains will fall out.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you've never tried before.
It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.
A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.
Middle age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places.
Opportunities always look bigger going than coming.
Junk is something you've kept for years and throw away three weeks before you need it.
There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.
Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
By the time you can make ends meet, the ends move.
Someone who thinks logically provides a nice contrast to the real world.
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One man's perspective. The problem is the few are more vocal and active than the passive and quiet many.
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Ross Rant
The stock market and housing markets are doing great this year. SPX is up 25% and houses are up double digits. My view is the end is coming, and it is simply the date that is unclear. I got out of the market entirely in May, 2007 and was early. I sold a lot of stock just after the election last year because I foresaw what was coming, but I went all back in very fast as I realized the market was ignoring reality, and the Fed and Congress were hell bent on pumping lots of hot air into the economy, and the administration was lying about virtually everything, and it took Afghanistan and the Louden County soccer moms to wake everyone up. I remain fully invested in equities at the moment, and I am up 28% on the year, but I am standing by the get out sometime in the next several months . These bull runs historically last longer than they should, so timing is hard to know. It could be mid to late 2022 when the black swans throw their party, but it will be a doozie.
Here is my rationale. The current situation feels a lot like the subprime and CMBS extremes, plus a rerun of Archego with everyone believing it is good to invest more, and borrow more because it will always go up. The Fed has completely blown it again. It has been run by a guy who was running to be renominated, not by a central banker who is looking carefully at what he has wrought. The Fed should have begun taper back in spring, and should be ready to raise rates soon. Instead, Powell has led the Fed to maintain zero rates for too long, which forces up equity values because fixed income instruments have no real return, so everyone piles into the stock market or houses. Stock and bond prices, and home prices have, as a result, become unsustainable. Powell just keeps saying inflation is transitory, when in fact it is embedded now. Rates will be raised in May or June now that Powell is renominated, with another raise in October or November. With Brainard getting the nod as vice chair, she is a very liberal political person who will do the bidding of the left. Wall St has it wrong when they say she is not much different than Powell, She is much different. One of her responsibilities is regulation. She will over regulate the banks, and she will try to force an end to fossil fuel lending. She will be terrible.
The other factors are: we have a Congress run by radicals who are pushing a socialist agenda, which if enacted will drastically change and damage the US economy. We will go from a nation of self-sufficient strivers, to one of government supported workers who do not feel a need to get a job and hold that job. Dems in Congress are believers in MMT, and that is a false theory that suggests debt does not matter, and spending on entitlements makes everyone more equal, so it is all OK. Fiscal spending is already out of control, and is going to be in an unknown place if they pass this bill. MMT will lead to a massive fiscal deficit, and that will lead to displacement of private initiative and restrained private capital market activity which will be squeezed out by government borrowing. It will become a national security crisis as defense will get cut back to accommodate the social spending deficit. As the House of Lords study stated, the central banks will no longer be independent because they will need to accommodate the massive over spending of the legislatures by continuing QE for too long. This is why the reconciliation bill must be stopped.
We also now have a whole generation of children who have decided that fundamental investing is no longer needed, and they listen to 4 or 5 other children who have blogs, or other social media outlets where they give investment advice based on nothing, knowing that if they promote a stock it will go up just because they promoted it, and so millions of other children will pile in, so they then look like geniuses. Until they don’t. We have a crypto market that is based on nothing, and is valued purely upon speculation and hype. Nobody really knows what is a crypto coin other than a computer generated thing which does not really exist. It is not a currency, and just because some stores take it for payment or some mayors take it as salary does not make it real.
Inflation is already rising to unsustainable levels, well beyond the Fed target of a little over 2%. It is 3 x that now, and maybe headed higher. Still Powel and Yellen lie, and say it will be all OK in a few months. No it will not. That is pure political BS. It is not just a port problem. It is an energy cost and labor cost and supply shortage problem. Because Biden, and many others like Larry Fink, believe the false story that the world is ending unless we stop fossil fuels, the Arabs and Russia will just continue to keep prices high knowing that Biden and the left want high prices to try to force and end to fossil fuels. Nobody wants to invest in new drilling since they fear getting regulated out of any return on investment. Energy costs will therefore remain high. All the entitlement money, and the new surge of quits to get a higher wage is costly because training new hires is expensive, and disruptive and that will not change anytime soon no matter how many containers they move off the dock. Inflation is now embedded in everyone’s mind, and that is when it gets dangerous. If there is a CPI inflation print at 8% in another month or three or three, the market will crack and drop by a major amount.
We have social dysfunction, and a press that is totally irresponsible and dangerous. They push false stories like Russiagate and now, that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist and should have been found guilty, even though none of them listened to the evidence. They are undermining the rule of law, and ignoring the sanctity of the US court system. We have a president and a VP who are also undermining the rule of law with comments about Rittenhouse. Academia is not teaching history, or what they teach is false based on CRT. That is now in elementary schools, so the American culture is being distorted, which will lead to very bad decision making. This is extremely dangerous and irresponsible.
A day will come, in 2022 most likely, when the music stops. Right now the market is running on FOMO. That is not a market. That is pure hype, and over valuation, just like 2008, and one day something happens like a Bear Stearns, and then Lehman, or some other financial event, like an inflation report at 8% possibly, and then the end is suddenly here. All it takes is some investors to start to pull back and influence others to do the same, and slowly a small drop becomes a cascade. History tells us this is going to happen, just not when.
In 2005, 6 and 7, several of us in Wall St kept saying publicly, this is insane and cannot go on, but it did, until it started to come apart very slowly at the end of July 2007. Only a few of us saw it start to happen, and the rest of the world said, it will all be better in January 2008 when the institutions get a new year of funding allocation, and that those of us who warned of the coming crash were called idiots. In January 2008, I was yelled at in public by the leading hotel data firm CEO, during hotel industry conference, and called a fool for predicting a coming crash in the hotel values in 2008. A year later one of the top appraisers in the industry asked me how could I have known what was going to happen. It is simple-just pay attention to what is happening, and the levels of froth and exuberance, and distortion in the capital markets. A few old time readers of the Rant will recall my warnings back then. My gut is screaming now, that we may be in June, 2007 all over again. Too early for most to realize it, so the party goes on for a while, and nobody wants to get off the party train. This view may seem overboard to many, and maybe it is, and maybe I am all wrong, but I just can feel it coming like I did in May, 2007. Just like then, most say it will go on and up in 2022, and not to worry, everything is good, but you need to look at everything is context of history. Exactly like mid-2007, there is a small, but growing group of very smart, major Wall St investors who share my view. . I may be very wrong so make your own decision. Buying bonds now is not the answer
We just closed the Bayonne deal I was a development partner in. The price paid by the buyer of the assets was 37% over our most optimistic forecast. That is the happy result of the state of exuberance and minimal interest rates distorting the market. We got an offer over a full year earlier than expected. Another sign of the exuberance. The building has just begun construction, but the sale closed. The other piece was a sale of land which is a ready to go pad for a warehouse.
We all need to pound on our congressmen and senators to vote against the reconciliation bill. If Manchin and Sinema fold and vote for it, the damage to America is inestimable.
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Does one have to actually take a minute to think about this?
Tearing Down Thomas Jefferson Over Slavery Is Moral Idiocy
By Dan McLaughlin
Posted By Ruth King
Actually, Thomas Jefferson did a lot of good, even on slavery.
Y ou can always count on woke progressives to live up to the worst caricatures of their ideas. Democrats on the New York City Council have now removed a statue of the founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson, from the City Council chamber in New York City Hall. The statue has been in City Hall since 1834 (eight years after Jefferson’s death), when it was erected to celebrate his advocacy of religious liberty. It is a sign of how proud Democrats are of their decision that they tried to block the press from witnessing the removal.
This is madness, and it vindicates many on the right — prominently including Donald Trump — who argued that the campaigns against Confederate statues were dangerous precisely because the people pushing for the removals were certain to move next against the Founding Fathers. When Trump made that argument in 2017, he was met with sneers. In a piece titled “Statues of Washington, Jefferson Aren’t ‘Next,’ But It’s Complicated, Historians Say,” Dartunorro Clark of NBC News wrote:
Historians who spoke to NBC News said such fears are slightly misplaced and that Trump is championing a murky interpretation of history. . . . “The president can raise the slippery slope, but it’s a false slippery slope,” said Kevin Levin, a Boston-based historian who specializes in American Civil War history.
John Oliver:
I’ll tell you where it stops. Somewhere! Any time someone asks, where does it stop, the answer’s always . . . somewhere. You might let your kid have Twizzlers, but not inject black tar heroin. You don’t just go, “Well, after the Twizzlers, where does it stop?”
Actually, you do ask that, and this is why. Whatever Trump understood about history, he understood the madness of mobs better than Kevin Levin or John Oliver did.
Without rehashing here the whole debate over Confederate icons — which has been going on for years now and has been vigorously debated on this website, sometimes by me — the strongest argument for removing some or all Confederate statutes and monuments is that the Confederate cause was not just flawed in the way that many great Americans are flawed; it was actively wrong, and the people who supported it made the country worse, or at any rate tried to, and thus should never have been memorialized in the first place.
The underlying assumption of this argument is that it is possible to reasonably and rationally distinguish some historical figures from others: We can honor those who did good things as well as bad ones, while dishonoring those who are best known for bad causes. By contrast, a major argument against tearing down statues and monuments in general is that we end up not just disfiguring public places and concealing our own history but also feeding the iconoclasm of mobs who by nature do not reason, and never know when and how to stop. Few things draw people to Trumpism more than a sense that one is dealing with people who can never be reasoned with, only opposed at every turn.
For those of us who still care to reason, however, the City Council’s move is not just an anti-intellectual assault on historical memory; it is also moral idiocy. Jefferson should not be canonized, but building statues is not about sainthood. There is much to dislike in his personality and his long and eventful career, including his service in New York City as our first secretary of state. He was hypocritical, devious, and too easily enamored of radical fads. He lived his whole life off of the labor of slaves and did not take even George Washington’s belated steps to emancipate slaves in his will. For that, he must answer to his Maker. But he was also a monumental contributor to early America — and specifically to many of the things that almost anyone would see as this country’s virtues. There are good reasons why Jefferson has a memorial in the capital and his face on Mount Rushmore, the nickel, and the two-dollar bill, is the namesake of the capital of Missouri and many other American towns and streets, and was until the past few years embraced by the Democratic Party as its founding inspiration.
It is a particular sign of the bullheaded ignorance of the City Council that its case against Jefferson is based entirely on his personal ownership of slaves and his personal sexual relationship with one of them, Sally Hemings, rather than anything Jefferson did as a public man. Americans of past generations who built statues were under no illusion that they were honoring saints; they were memorializing great accomplishments in the public sphere. Unlike his namesake Jefferson Davis, we do not have statues to Jefferson because of his vices, but because of the good he did for his nation.
On the specific issue of slavery, as our editorial noted, Jefferson did quite a lot of good, and not only because of the pivotal role played by his “all men are created equal” rhetoric in inspiring later generations. He was a lifelong opponent of the transatlantic slave trade, perhaps the nation’s most vocal, consistent, and ultimately successful opponent. In 1776, Jefferson tried to get a denunciation of the trade into the Declaration of Independence. In 1778, as governor of Virginia, he signed into law a state ban on importing slaves (a bill he may or may not have authored). The Constitution forbade the federal government from banning the slave trade before 1808; as president, Jefferson called on Congress in his 1806 State of the Union message to ban it at the first moment allowed by the Constitution and “withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights, which have been so long continued on the unoffending Inhabitants of Africa, & which the morality, the reputation, & the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe.” He signed that ban into law in 1807. True, the ban on the external slave trade was in the financial interests of Jefferson and other Virginia planters, who could sell their slaves internally to the Deep South — as with so many things, the issue had its trade-offs and moral complexities — but the fight against the transatlantic slave trade was the central battlefield of the abolitionist movement during Jefferson’s political career, he was on the right side of it, and he succeeded in ending America’s involvement in it.
Jefferson’s record on the domestic expansion of slavery was mixed but also had genuine and enduring positive influences. In 1784, Jefferson proposed to the Continental Congress a ban on slavery in all the territory west of the Appalachians after 1800. His bill, the Territorial Governance Act, failed by one vote, but Jefferson’s language was included in the final, narrower Northwest Ordinance passed in 1787, which banned slavery west of the Appalachians and north of the Ohio River. The Northwest Ordinance helped create the free states of the Midwest that proved decisive in the long-term free–slave state balance. Moreover, the language Jefferson used in 1784 was reused by Congress in 1865 for the 13th Amendment. Thus, Jefferson is, literally, the author of our constitutional ban on slavery.
Jefferson always maintained that slavery was an evil, even when he was in the mood to excuse it as one that could not practically be done away with easily. In 1820, during the controversy that led to the Missouri Compromise, he wrote, “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” In 1785, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, he took a harder look at the pervasive corrupting influence of slavery on the master class (a prophetic sentiment in light of the decay in the quality of statesmen produced by Virginia in the generations that followed Jefferson):
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. . . . This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. . . . The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.
With what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavours to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him. With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour.
And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.
Jefferson gradually lost the moral courage to do more about slavery in the nation, in his home state, or in his own household. But he continued, into his old age, to encourage others to keep alive the anti-slavery cause. In 1814, he wrote to Edward Coles, urging him to carry on anti-slavery in Virginia into the next generation: “The love of justice & the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a mortal reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.” Coles ended up moving to Illinois instead, where he played a crucial role as governor in beating back an effort in 1824 to introduce legal slavery. In 1826, receiving a letter asking for him to make a public statement against slavery, Jefferson demurred, but in a response written just six weeks before his death, he added: “My sentiments have been 40. years before the public . . . altho I shall not live to see them consummated, they will not die with me. But living or dying they will ever be in my most fervent prayers.”
There of course is more to the Jefferson record on slavery and race; there is more even in some of these letters. He shared many of the racist assumptions of his time. His treatment of Haiti during his presidency, when it was struggling to throw off French slavery, was deplorable. The Louisiana Purchase, while a great boon to the nation, also did a lot to extend the institution of slavery westward. But that, like so much else in Thomas Jefferson’s career, is why he is worthy of study and critique rather than expungement from memory.
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How to lose leverage.
How America Lost Its Leverage on Iran
Ten years ago, two senators, one Republican and one Democrat, joined together to force America to sanction Iran. In the years since, the leverage they built has dissipated. Why?
By RICHARD GOLDBERG
Next week, President Joe Biden will send his envoys back to Vienna for yet another round of indirect talks with Iran. This will be Iran’s first multilateral engagement over its nuclear program since President Ebrahim Raisi took office in August. But while the cast has changed, the Iranian script remains the same as it was when negotiations began during Barack Obama’s first term: buy time to stabilize an economy freed of the burdens imposed by U.S. sanctions enforcement, obscure its clandestine nuclear activities from international inspectors, and secure future pathways to nuclear weapons.
Without an unexpected change in direction, it should come as no surprise if, in the months ahead, we learn of an Israeli airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities—or that Iran has tested a nuclear weapon. But for those in Congress who still hold out hope that Iran’s nuclear program can be dismantled through coercive diplomacy, the window for taking action is closing fast. A showdown in Congress about whether to preserve any economic leverage over Tehran may soon emerge from Biden’s diplomatic foray in Vienna. The results may leave America with only two options: military action or a nuclear-armed Iran.
This month marks the tenth anniversary of one of the most impressive foreign-policy accomplishments in the history of the Senate. Facing the ever-growing threat from Iran’s nuclear program, alongside the regime’s continued sponsorship of terrorism and accelerated ballistic-missile development, two U.S. senators—the Republican Mark Kirk and the Democrat Robert Menendez—introduced an amendment to the annual defense bill that would impose sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran. The sanctions would attack the economic lifeblood of the Islamic Republic—its oil export revenue—and cut the country off from the international financial system.
At the time, the price of oil hovered above $100 a barrel. The Obama administration fiercely opposed the amendment, fearing it could cause gas prices to spike in an election year and alienate U.S. allies that purchase Iranian crude. But Kirk and Menendez secured a unanimous vote in favor of the amendment.
Years later, President Obama would credit these sanctions with bringing Iran to the table to negotiate what would become the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). President Trump would then restore these sanctions and add new ones, in what his administration termed a “maximum-pressure” campaign, but it was the Menendez-Kirk amendment that forced other countries to cease importing oil from the Islamic Republic, dramatically reducing the regime’s accessible foreign-exchange reserves.
Rather than use the current sanctions to force Iran into a “longer and stronger” version of the JCPOA—in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken—the Biden administration has during these last nine months rolled back the Trump-era economic pressure. Although some of the White House’s defenders have pointed out that the sanctions are still formally on the books, that is hardly relevant, since the Treasury Department simply hasn’t been enforcing them.
A key tool of economic pressure is what are called secondary sanctions: if an entity from a third country, such as China, buys Iranian oil, the U.S. can use these sanctions to cut off Chinese state-owned enterprises from the American financial system. But if China understands that a president will not enforce U.S. sanctions, then it will violate them. And, indeed, that’s exactly what we’ve seen this entire year as Chinese imports of Iranian oil have increased dramatically with barely a peep from Washington.
Market psychology, too, plays a role. When the market perceives that sanctions are being enforced and more are the on the way, a regime like Iran enters a downward economic spiral from which it cannot escape. When the market perceives no more sanctions are coming and that sanctions may not even be enforced, the spiral is replaced with a flywheel—and the economy stabilizes. Biden, moreover, has also provided billions of dollars to Iran in direct sanctions relief, dramatically expanding its ability to use previously inaccessible foreign-exchange reserves to repay foreign debts and to import any goods that could conceivably be defined as “humanitarian” or “COVID-related.”
In short, there is no maximum economic pressure in place today. There hasn’t been since January. The failure to coax concessions out of Iran isn’t a result of an overreliance on sanctions, but of their underutilization.
Ten years on, America needs another Menendez-Kirk moment.
A return to the JCPOA, which the Biden administration professes to be its primary objective, would not prevent an Iranian bomb. The nuclear pact guaranteed Tehran pathways to advanced centrifuges, stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium, and nuclear-capable missiles within a few short years. It did not put Iran’s nuclear program “in a box,” as Biden’s advisers suggest, but rather on a slow and steady glide-path to the threshold of nuclear weapons. Iran essentially agreed not to race to a bomb—but to get paid instead to walk calmly toward it over a decade.
During the last year, however, Tehran has raced forward, rapidly expanding its nuclear activities while enjoying Biden’s sanctions relief at the same time. The regime heads to the Vienna talks with a key objective: maintain its nuclear advances and receive sanctions relief at the same time.
That’s essentially what President Biden’s proposed “Plan B” would deliver. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has already signaled that the goal is no longer to return to the JCPOA, and certainly not to achieve a “longer and stronger” deal, but simply to come to some agreement with Iran. Whatever the details, such a deal is apt to involve further easing of the Menendez-Kirk sanctions on Tehran’s central bank in exchange for Iran modestly curtailing its now vastly expanded nuclear program. In short, Iran gets more money to retain a more threating nuclear program. The arrangement might be characterized as interim, temporary, or a bridge to a longer, stronger deal. But once Iran gets more cash and banks its nuclear progress, the odds that it will become a nuclear power before the end of this decade increase significantly.
The administration’s claims that the JCPOA or some other kind of limited nuclear deal would “put a lid” on Iran’s advance to the bomb are deceptions. A lid atop a container with no sides doesn’t contain. Absent a credible threat of military force, and without unrelenting political and economic pressure, the clerical regime will carry the international community on its back, slowly but surely, all the way to the finish line: a test of a nuclear weapon.
To its critics on the left, maximum pressure was a recipe for war, perhaps even intentionally so. Sanctions would eventually meet with a violent response from Tehran, which would in turn provoke a military response from Washington. According to some of these critics, Trump’s talk of using maximum economic pressure to set up a negotiation with Iran over an agreement that was tougher, more comprehensive, and more enduring than the 2015 accord was just a ruse; the administration knew the mullahs would never accede to its conditions, and merely sought a pretext for military intervention.
On the right, some hawks saw the maximum-pressure campaign in the exact opposite light. Economic and political pressure alone, they argued, could never deter the Islamic Republic. Deterrence requires Tehran to believe that the United States is truly on the verge of using overwhelming military force to put the regime in jeopardy. And that belief can only result from a demonstration of Washington’s willingness use force, starting with a rollback of the Iranian military presence throughout the region. In this view, maximum pressure was the politically expedient way for Trump to satisfy his isolationist base while talking a tough game. These critics also worried that Trump’s vision of leveraging maximum economic pressure for a “better nuclear deal” would ultimately lead the president to legitimize and empower an evil and dangerous regime.
Both camps were wrong—at least in that they misunderstood the intention of the framers of maximum pressure. Economic warfare was conceived of as part of a strategy involving political and military power as well as covert action to turn the screws on Iran, based loosely on the approach Ronald Reagan used to defeat the Soviet Union. In practice, the economic element of the maximum-pressure campaign became its defining feature, but the entire strategy could only work if the United States were willing to use force as a last resort: to defend U.S. interests if ever attacked and to destroy nuclear and missile sites if red lines were crossed.
The Iranian response to this approach tested American resolve on two fronts. Starting in June 2019, weeks after Trump’s sanctions sent Iranian oil exports plummeting toward zero, Iran opened a two-pronged counter-pressure campaign: terrorist attacks against U.S. forces and allies, and incremental expansion of its nuclear program.
Trump did not respond militarily that June when Iran shot down an American drone. Nor did he defend Saudi Arabia three months later when its oil infrastructure was attacked. Nor did any retaliation come in the wake of Iranian mine and drone attacks on maritime shipping that same year. This passivity led to a fatal miscalculation in Tehran: that Trump was a Twitter tiger, that Iran would pay no price for continued violence, and that such violence could ultimately erode public opinion back in the United States, forcing Trump to pull back on the maximum-pressure campaign. Trump closed the door on that illusion when he ordered the killing of Qassem Suleimani.
After firing off a salvo of ballistic missiles that left no Americans dead, the Islamic Republic stood down. World War III did not start. The mullahs had executed a face-saving counterattack for propaganda purposes but were unwilling to risk further escalation. And while Iran kept producing more low-enriched uranium than the JCPOA allowed, it refrained from producing highly enriched uranium until it was clear that Trump, by then on his way out of office, was handcuffed from taking military action.
The conclusion from these years is clear: the regime may be made up of religious ideologues irrationally obsessed with the United States and Israel, but the mullahs at their core still fear anything that might threaten their survival. They know they can’t win a conventional war against the United States. And they act accordingly.
Today, it’s hard to imagine that Iran’s supreme leader believes President Biden is willing to use military means to prevent Tehran from crossing the nuclear threshold. Biden’s failure to respond forcefully to an Iran-directed attack on a U.S. base in western Iraq that left an American contractor dead was a reversal of Trump-era doctrine of defending American forces and interests. Even this past month, Biden declined to retaliate after an Iran-directed drone strike against U.S. forces in Syria. Combined with continued sanctions relief, the lack of a credible military threat invites miscalculation and adventurism by the mullahs—both on the nuclear and terrorism fronts.
In August 2013, 77 senators sent a letter to then-President Barack Obama urging him to “reinforce the credibility of our option to use military force” against Iran to deny the regime nuclear weapons. They demanded “a convincing threat of the use of force that Iran will believe,” and concluded that the U.S. “must be prepared to act, and Iran must see that we are prepared.”
The first signature on the letter: Robert Menendez, the current Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But also on the list: now-Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Jack Reed, Kirsten Gillibrand, Richard Blumenthal, and many others.
Legislators should deliver the same message to President Biden along with a clear defense of the Menendez-Kirk sanctions architecture.
The Central Bank of Iran, the National Iranian Oil Company, and the National Iranian Tanker Company are all currently subject to U.S. terrorism sanctions for their financing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. It makes little sense to lift sanctions on these entities and allow them to funnel money into terrorist groups in exchange for mild concessions that neither end Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism nor permanently dismantle its nuclear weapons-related infrastructure.
Ideally, Congress should pass a law to prevent President Biden from lifting any terror-related sanctions until Iran has ceased all sponsorship of terrorism—and to establish rigorous oversight and accountability for enforcement. This would keep the Menendez-Kirk amendment fully intact and maintain significant economic leverage for the United States to negotiate something better than Biden’s Plan B.
Even if that’s not possible due to a lack of bipartisan support, members of Congress—and those running for president in 2024—can send a clear message to importers, banks, investors, insurers, and shippers: there is no evidence these institutions have changed their terror-supporting ways; U.S. sanctions will soon return with a vengeance; and investigations will be launched into anyone who did business with Iran’s Terror Inc. while Joe Biden was president.
Noting the loss of American leverage, the lack of an American military threat, and the potential for more Iranian escalation in the weeks ahead, Israel has launched a rather public effort to signal that it is developing its own military option against Iran. Its military is budgeting for preparations for a strike on the Islamic Republic, and sources tell the media the IDF will begin rehearsing various scenarios next year
The moves feel a bit hokey coming from a military that built up its mystique by operating with a “show don’t tell” philosophy. Indeed, these pronouncements have a distinctly political flavor—especially in the context of the razor-thin majority of the fragile governing coalition and the desire to project strength vis-à-vis Tehran while Benjamin Netanyahu (who billed himself as Mr. Iran) leads the opposition. And President Biden might not mind a little Israeli saber rattling, believing it helpful to empower the negotiation of his disastrous Plan B nuclear arrangement.
No one truly knows the Israeli red line for military action, although there’s little doubt that it’s approaching much faster than America’s. The Israelis believe the U.S. military has the luxury of waiting longer because of its capabilities for penetrating deep underground mountain-covered facilities. The “zone of immunity” for nuclear-weapons capability, therefore, comes much sooner for Israel than it does for the United States.
The conventional wisdom posits that Israel has long maintained the military capability to degrade Iran’s nuclear program but not to destroy it. That may or may not be true. As evidenced by its Hollywood-style covert actions in recent years, the Mossad has deeply penetrated the inner sanctum of the Islamic Republic, gaining an unknown treasure trove of intelligence along the way. Through a combination of bombs, electronic warfare, cyberattacks, and sabotage, the Israeli Air Force, Mossad, and Unit 8200 (Israel’s National Security Agency) might well be able to do considerable damage to Iranian nuclear infrastructure. Whether it can destroy it, rather than just set it back, remains an open question—as does whether it can reach Iran’s under-the-mountain enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom.
The Abraham Accords raise the possibility that Israel would no longer have to worry about the air-to-air refueling challenges that a sustained aerial bombing campaign would present, since Israeli jets could land on Arab desert airfields for quick refueling. Jerusalem, in recent days, expressed interest in buying America’s latest bunker-buster, a 5,000-pound bomb that can be launched from an F-15 fighter. The Biden administration should approve that request—and Congress should support it.
But Israel shouldn’t have to do the world’s dirty work. A nuclear-threshold terror-sponsoring regime with long-range missiles presents a grave threat to American national security. And while more creative and bolder than the American military at times, the IDF is no match for the power of the United States.
Mark Kirk was defeated for re-election in 2016. But Menendez is still there, and now the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We need another Menendez-Kirk moment a decade after the last. Who will stand up and take on the mantle?
Richard Goldberg is a Mosaic columnist and senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He has served on Capitol Hill, on the U.S. National Security Council, as the chief of staff for Illinois’s governor, and as a Navy Reserve Intelligence Officer.
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Warms your heart.
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I have some friends who got sucked in and I never bring it up and some stay quiet and some still hate Trump, maybe more, and are beyond comprehension.
Hypocrites... READ MORE
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Between Biden and MiIley and Israel's need to survive, I find it difficult to believe a war can be avoided and if it is it could be because Bennett is weaker than Bibi and unable to thwart/ stand up to the current administration.Biden to Start Nuclear Talks with Iran by Displeasing US Allies
Rich Goldberg, a former director of the National Security Council, warned the Biden administration pursuing a weaker nuclear deal with Iran would be a catastrophic approach.
Meanwhile, Ted Cruz, a GOP senator, advised the Democrat president not to lift all the sanctions against Iran at once.
Biden is about to start nuclear negotiations with Iran
Biden has been vocal about pursuing the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an Iran nuclear deal struck down by Trump in 2018.
Back then, Trump revealed the deal was incapable of stopping Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction. However, the deal was crafted by the Obama administration in 2015 when Biden was vice president, so Biden’s support of the treaty was inevitable.
Now, the Biden administration is going to initiate nuclear talks with Iran, starting on November 29 in Vienna. However, Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, noted a failure of talks will encourage the US to adopt “other options.”
Goldberg labeled these alternative options as “Plan B,” saying any weaker deal will pose a threat to the US and its regional allies. He further added Iran is having the upper hand in talks with the US right now, as all the sanctions upon them will be eased down, helping them make a bomb.
Goldberg asserted despite the US withdrawal from the JCPOA, the deal still exists, as Iran did not leave it; however, they are not complying with the deal at all.
The former national security official warned the president the expiration of sunset provisions in the agreement will allow Iran to develop nuclear capabilities after 2023.
US talks with Iran offended Israel, the only long-term US ally in the Middle East
Goldberg believes letting the time for sunset provision tick, even when the US is not in the JCPOA, is insane. It puts Iran in the driving seat in the nuclear negotiations.
Speaking to Fox News, Goldberg said withdrawing from the nuclear deal was the only option left with the Trump administration, as it brought Iran back to sanctions that did not allow them to develop economically.
Meanwhile, the pursuit of Iran’s nuclear deal by the Biden administration led the country to a conflict with Israel, a long-term ally of the US in the Middle East.
Israel publicly disapproved of the revival of the deal, saying even if the US reinstates the deal, Iran is likely to have a nuclear bomb in the next five years.
Due to the upcoming talks between the US and Iran, Israel publicly indicated the country will seek military confrontation with Iran, in case Iran tries to upgrade its nuclear facilities.
Ted Cruz also spoke against lifting the sanctions in their entirety from Iran, asserting Republicans will reinstate these sanctions after seizing power.
Recently, semi-official reports indicated if the US-Iran talks succeed, all sanctions on Iran will be relieved, which raised the eyebrows of Republican lawmakers.
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I cannot count the times I constantly hear Trump gave a tax cut for the rich from my liberal friends who hate Trump.
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Did Democrats Break a Promise by Giving a Tax Break to the Rich?
By Don Purdum, Independent Political Analyst
(RightWing.org) – Vulnerable House Democrats who voted for the $1.7 trillion Build Back Better bill on Friday, November 19, should be very concerned. They voted for a bill that just made them more vulnerable. For years, Democrats proclaimed from the mountain tops they intended to tax the rich, take their money, and give it to the poor through taxes. It’s a Robin Hood-esque story, to be sure.
But, what if it’s all a ruse? Did you know that the single most significant proposal in Biden’s bill is a tax cut for the wealthy? That’s right, the party of taxing the rich isn’t being square with voters. While they say one thing, they do another.
Normally, that wouldn’t be a surprise, but someone should have flagged something this obvious and blatant before Democrats voted on the legislation. It wasn’t, and the reason is the House Democratic leadership needed high property-taxed members of Congress to vote for Biden’s bill. They threatened to vote against it if they didn’t get the wealthy tax cut provision inserted into the bill. So, at the last minute, the House leadership inserted the requirement to secure the votes they needed.
Democrats Seek to Increase SALT Deduction
So, what did the Democrats do? They offered the most generous tax cut for the wealthy in decades. After this vote, they should never campaign against tax cuts again. The plan spends $285 billion to raise the state and local tax (SALT) tax deduction from $10,000 to $80,000.
If that’s not bad enough, here’s the gimmick. Democrats set the SALT deduction increase to expire after five years to keep the perceived cost of the legislation down. The bill, as written, would reverse the deduction back to $10,000 after 2027. If at that point, Democrats are back in the driver seat, they will likely try to extend it permanently.
Democrats Hang Out Moderates to Dry
In 2017, the Republican-led Congress reduced the amount of state and local property taxes that one could deduct on their federal taxes to $10,000. The GOP argued that lower-taxed state residents were unfairly subsidizing high-taxed, liberal, Democratic-led states in the Northeast and the West Coast. Of course, Democrats in those states screamed that the measure was unfair to them, but it was an argument based on emotion, not fact. It was essentially a reverse social welfare benefit.
Over the last several months, Democratic moderates in the Senate and House drove the massive spending bill. They dwindled the semi-socialist and climate change legislation down from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion. In the last go-around, the House Democrats chose not to conference with the Senate so that any bill passed would align with what Senators could agree with. The result is the Democratic leadership hung House moderates out to dry.
As the 2022 midterm primary season gets underway in January, expect Republicans to pound away at moderate House members who voted to give the wealthy a tax cut. The last-minute insertion of the SALT gimmick was the most significant and consequential piece of the legislation.
Democrats broke their promise to voters. The left-wing base is outraged over the provision. Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said the increase of the SALT deduction is bad politics and policy. He stated the rich need to pay their fair share, not get a tax break. Sanders has the power to kill the provision in the Senate.
So, here we go again. House Democrats are causing chaos within the ranks. Who knows where this debacle will take us. This much is certain: it’s going to be a war inside the party.
Who will win or lose?
Stay tuned.
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I've just made a great discovery -- the U.S. has the most known gas and oil reserves in the entire world!! We have the equivalent of 264 Billion barrels of oil, Russia is next with 256 and Saudi Arabia has 212. Plus, with our technology we'll probably find even more.
I have to admit it, was hard to find that information, I had to go to Google and put in "who has the most gas and oil reserves in the World"!
Nevertheless, the important thing is that I can now email this information to President Biden and he'll be able to put thousands of American Oil workers back to work and bring the price of gas and oil back down to what it cost a year ago -- that's was $2.10 a gallon.
I'm very excited about this and once the President finds out about it, I'm sure he will be to!!!
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Social Security was never meant to be taxed, to be used by hypocrite politicians to cover costs of outrageous spending on legislation sought mainly by liberal progressives:
Politicians, in essence, are trustees of these funds. Were they not protected by laws they passed to cover their actions, they could be charged with fraudulent behaviour for having broken their fiduciary responsibilities.
A woman dies at age 65 before collecting one benefit check. She and her employer paid into the system for almost 50 years and she collected NOTHING
Keep in mind all the working people that die every year who were paying into the system and got nothing.
And these governmental morons mismanaged the money and stole from the system, so that it's now going broke.
BEAUTIFUL!
And they have the audacity to call today's seniors "vultures" in an attempt to cover their ineptitude.
DISGRACEFUL!
The real reason for renaming our Social Security payments is so the government can claim that all those social security recipients are receiving entitlements thus putting them in the same category as welfare, and food stamp recipients.
By changing the name of SS contributions, it gives them a means to refute this program in the future. It's free money for the government to spend under this guise.
The Social Security check is now (or soon will be) referred to as a Federal Benefit Payment ?
I will be part of the one percent to forward this. I am forwarding it because it touches a nerve in me, and I hope it will in you.
Please keep passing it on until everyone in our country has read it.
The government is now referring to our Social Security checks as a "Federal Benefit Payment."
This is NOT a benefit.
It is OUR money, paid out of our earned income!
Not only did we all contribute to Social Security, but our employers did too! It totaled 15% of our income before taxes. (This should be enough for you to forward this message, if not read on.)
If you averaged $30K per year over your working life, that's close to $180,000 invested in Social Security.
If you calculate the future value of your monthly investment in social security ($375/month, including both you and your employers’ contributions) at a meager 1% interest rate compounded monthly, after 40 years of working you'd have more than $1.3+ million dollars saved .
This is your personal investment. Upon retirement, if you took out only 3% per year, you'd receive $39,318 per year, or $3,277 per month .
That's almost three times more than today's average Social Security benefit of $1,230 per month, according to the Social Security Administration. (Google it – it's a fact).
And your retirement fund would last more than 33 years (until you're 98 if you retire at age 65)!
I can only imagine how much better most average-income people could live in retirement if our government had just invested our money in low-risk interest-earning accounts.
Instead, the folks in Washington pulled off a bigger Ponzi scheme than Bernie Madoff ever did (or Lyndon Johnson).
They took our money and used it elsewhere. They "forgot"(oh yes, they knew) that it was OUR money they were taking.
They did not have a referendum to ask us if we wanted to lend the money to them...and they didn't pay interest on the debt they assumed.
And recently they have told us that the money won't support us for very much longer. (Isn't it funny that they NEVER say this about welfare payments ?)
But is it our fault they misused our investments? And now, to add insult to injury, they are calling it a benefit, as if we never worked to earn every penny of it.
This is stealing !
Just because they borrowed the money, does not mean that our investments were for charity!
Let's take a stand.
We have earned our right to Social Security and Medicare. Demand that our legislators bring some sense into our government.
Find a way to keep Social Security and Medicare going for the sake of the 92% of our population who need it.
Then call it what it is:
Our Earned Retirement Income .
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Cliff May hits Saule on the head but I do not believe he nailed Biden. I believe Biden did not make a conscious decision to turn into a radical. so he would be more impactful in a historical sense. I believe Biden is ignorant and incapable of deciding what is rational from stupid and tries to cover it up by lying.
I also find it very revealing that Saule is employed by Cornell. To have an avowed Marxist on your faculty teaching young pourous minds is also both stupid and seditious.
Biden’s left banker-------------------------Comrade Down: Senate Forces Biden to Dump OCC Nominee, Lenin Scholar
A nominee with a colorful story and ‘radical’ beliefs
By Clifford D. May
For decades, Joe Biden was known as a man of the center-left, a normal guy, a regular Joe. His views have changed. I’m going to venture a guess as to why.
He concluded – or was persuaded – that history will not regard a moderate president as a consequential president, or a transitional president as a transformational president.
So, he made his choice, turning to Bernie Sanders and other socialist firebrands for direction. This would explain his nomination of Saule Omarova as Comptroller of the Currency, the official who oversees most of America’s banks and is therefore one of the most powerful financial regulators in the world.
“My concern with Professor Omarova is her long history of promoting ideas that she herself describes as ‘radical,’” Sen. Pat Toomey said at the start of her nomination hearing last week. “I agree that they are radical. But I’d also describe them as socialist.”
“She wants to nationalize the banking system,” he continued, and create “a command-and-control economy where the government allocates resources explicitly, instead of free men and women making their own decisions about the goods and services they want to buy and sell in an open market. These are exactly the kind of socialist ideas that have failed everywhere in the world they've been tried.”
Ms. Omarova has a colorful story. She was born 55 years ago in Kazakhstan when that Central Asian country was part of the Soviet empire. At 18 she won a Lenin scholarship to Moscow State University (MSU), the most prestigious school in the USSR.
Such honors were not often granted to Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities. We may conclude that Ms. Omarova was very smart. We also may conclude that she had earned the trust of Communist Party officials.
In 1991, she was selected for a student exchange program – again indicating the Kremlin’s confidence in her – and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Then, “the Soviet Union fell apart,” she told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “So, there I was, a student without anywhere to go back.”
That doesn’t ring true. Nothing prevented Soviet citizens residing abroad from returning home. In any case, over the next few years, she did well in America, earning both a doctorate and a law degree. She is currently a professor at Cornell Law School.
While still in Moscow, she had written a thesis titled, "Karl Marx's Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in Das Kapital.” On October 5, Mr. Toomey requested a copy.
She didn’t comply. Instead, she gave media interviews stressing that she had written the paper “years ago in a system where there was absolutely no academic freedom. We had to write what we had to write in order to get our diplomas. It did not reflect my views then. It does not reflect my views now.”
Sen. Toomey pointed out that Ms. Omarova “chose to advertise her thesis on her resume right up through 2017.” She now says doesn’t have a copy. Nor are there copies at MSU, an official there told a British reporter.
In 2019, she tweeted, “Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’
In another tweet, she added that in the Soviet Union “people’s salaries were set (by the state) in a gender-blind manner. And all women got very generous maternity benefits. Both things are still a pipe dream in our society!”
Having been an exchange student and later a reporter in the Soviet Union, I can assure you that the Communist Party and the Politburo were not equal opportunity employers.
Ms. Omarova has said forcefully that she is not a Communist. She told Congress last week that she grew up “under a totalitarian regime presiding over a failing economy.” Stalin sent members of her family to Siberia where they perished. Their crime was that “they were educated Kazakhs who did not join the party.”
But no one is accusing Ms. Omarova of being a Stalinist. More plausibly, her views are Marxian, Marxist, neo-Marxist (I won’t go into the differences here) or some other variant of socialist – akin to those of Mr. Sanders, and members of the Democratic Socialists of America such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib.
For example, in an article titled, “The People’s Ledger,” published in a law review last month, Ms. Omarova proposed to “radically redefine the role of a central bank” and “effectively end banking as we know it.”
Of America’s oil, coal, and gas industries, she’s said: “We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change.”
She’s argued that “we need to make sure banks channel money and financial resources precisely where we, as the nation, as a community, really need it to go.” Guess who would decide what the nation and community need?
She’s proposed that the government have the power to block credit to “socially suboptimal industries.” Guess who would decide which industries fall into that box.
Senator Tim Scott cited her suggestion to create an “unaccountable bureaucracy called the National Investment Authority” that would allocate capital with the Federal Reserve buying and selling commodities to manipulate prices.
He told Ms. Omarova: “I cannot think of a nominee more poorly suited to be the Comptroller of the Currency based solely on your public positions, statements and the weight of your writings than you are.”
We must assume Mr. Biden knew all this and more. Those who voted for him thinking he was a moderate must be surprised – not pleasantly, I would venture to guess.
Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.
AND:
I repeat what I posted recently in previous memo:
I repeat what I posted recently in previous memo:
A sobering reminder. We are almost there!!!
I remember. Khrushchev's Prediction: (1959)
It's been almost sixty one years since Russia's Khrushchev delivered this. Many of you may not remember his quote or even were alive when Mr. Khrushchev of the Soviet Union made his remarks to President John F. Kennedy. ( I remember this well. I was only in my 20's in college; but I took it seriously, even then - unlike today's college kids!)
Do you remember September 29, 1959 ?
THIS WAS HIS ENTIRE QUOTE:
"Your children's children will live under communism.
You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won't accept communism outright; but we will keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you will finally wake up and find you already have Communism.
We will not have to fight you; We will so weaken your economy, until you will fall like overripe fruit into our hands."
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
Remember, socialism leads to Communism.
So, how do you create a Socialistic State?
There are 8 levels of control; read the following recipe:
1) Healthcare - Control healthcare and you control the people.
2) Poverty - Increase the poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them.
3) Debt - Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control - Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government that way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare - Take control of every aspect (food, housing, income) of their lives because that will make them fully dependent on the government.
6) Education - Take control of what people read and listen to and take control of what children learn in school.
7) Religion - Remove the belief in God from the Government and schools because the people need to believe in ONLY the government knowing what is best for the people.
8) Class Warfare - Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. Eliminate the middle class. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with the support of the poor. A perfect parallel to the Democrat agenda!!!!!
I remember this very well. He also said, "We will bury you".
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