I stayed up til 3:17AM writing this because so much I read today was, I believe relevant. Since I hope to be cruising in a week and will not send memos for 3 weeks, I urge you read this a bit at a time.
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Light humor
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The Economic Cost Of The Pandemic State By State
by Eric Hanushek via Hoover Education Success Initiative The Papers
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) now shows the significant impact of the pandemic on learning.
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by Eric Hanushek via Hoover Education Success Initiative The Papers
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) now shows the significant impact of the pandemic on learning.
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This is another personal view of how I see the market unfolding.
If Fed's goal is to arrest inflation they can return to target level of 2% rather than change to 4%, keep interest rate increases to three 25 basis points but keep rates higher than anticipated for a longer period. This would impact consumers . THIS MIGHT DRIVE THE ECONOMY INTO A MEANINGFUL or SOFT RECESSION.
The market currently seems to be figuring out the reduction this might cause on corporate earnings. Thus, the first half of the year after, perhaps after final extension of the current snap back rally, could be negative and volatile.
If ESG investing becomes a rear view event that would take some air out of the market as large pools of stocks begin to be sold off or money flows into them sharply reduced.
Furthermore, once the Fed signals, or appears to be doing so, that interest rate increases are over and earnings have adjusted moderately downward, the market could well begin to anticipate overall improvements, months in advance of the actual occurrence, setting the stage for a second half improvement.
Also China will have re-engaged their economy and possibly Europe could show some stability and off we go and a trotting type race could begin.
At the current time, I still favor the domestic energy, health sector and selective mid cap stocks with improving earnings, some with surprises, free cash flow and moderate multiples.
Representing favored stock in these categories could be BMY, FLNG, DVN and maybe two foreign special names like OMAB and ALIBABA (3BABA)
Obvious, Black Swan's remain, Biden consequences from continued poor policies, Ukraine War, China's re-aggression and Iran and always, of course, the unknowns that eventually become knowns.
Regarding my inquiry about survival guilt I understand what the two words mean but I was not aware you killed some one "a condition of persistent mental and emotional stress experienced by someone who has survived an incident in which others died. he escaped with his life but suffered from survivor's guilt."
As I always state but what do I know?
Then:
Larry Summers Says Can't Get Wage Inflation Down Without 'Meaningful' Slack In Job Market -- Believes Recession Prospects 'Certainly Lower'
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said< Continue reading...
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(Good afternoon!)
The South Sea has been tense for a while as China and Taiwan lay claim to it all.
And there’s another player involved, too.
Find out where things are headed…
Conservatively Yours,
Aaron Edwards)
And:
China Cements its Position in the Middle East - GATESTONE
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Player Who Stood Strong Against BLM 'Mandate' WINS BIGA former Virginia Tech women’s soccer player who refused to kneel in support of Black Lives Matter and was benched by her coach..Read More »
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And:
Belated revelation classified documents found in private Biden office turns legal, political tables
Source: Just the News
When Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Nov. 18 that he had named a special prosecutor to investigate former President Donald Trump's handling of classified documents found at the Mar-a-Lago compound, the government harbored a fresh secret: Just two weeks earlier, Biden's lawyers disclosed to government lawyers on Nov. 2 — just six days before the midterm elections — that they had found sensitive government documents with classified markings inside an office that Biden used at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington after he left office as Barack Obama's vice president.
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Obama’s Anti-Imperialist Fantasy Bears Bitter Fruit
By Mark Dubowitz
The eventual fall of the Islamic Republic of Iran will reveal the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement to have been one of the worst unforced strategic errors in the history of U.S. foreign policy. At home, the Islamic Republic is the enemy of perhaps 80% or more of its own people, who see it as a criminal entity that murders them in the streets. Abroad, the clerical regime sows further chaos and bloodshed, threatening the United States and its allies and earning the hatred of peoples across the Middle East. Locking the United States in a nearly decade long embrace of a failing theocratic totalitarian state is a policy disaster of unrivaled proportions, driven by no apparent external necessity. So why is the Biden administration finding it so difficult to move on?
Oddly, or not, the answers—or non-answers—to this mystery seem to reveal as much about the unique psyche of the American president at the time, Barack Obama, as they do about the decade long policy debate on Iran that continues to consume Washington. Yet for some of his supporters and detractors, Obama was simply a practitioner of fact-based geopolitics—even if the facts in the end were against him. In this view, Obama as president understood the Islamic Republic as posing a severe threat to American interests and forged a limited agreement to constrain a regime that would be even more dangerous with nuclear weapons. To these critics, he pursued the right goals, but was just remarkably bad at achieving them. A more experienced bargainer might have achieved a better deal.
Alternatively, to others, the explanation of what went wrong is rooted in the unique character and upbringing of the American leader himself. According to this reading, Obama’s choices were rooted in a personal distaste for Western imperialism and American power that was not shared by many of the deal’s supporters or its detractors. It was Obama’s own picture of the world, not any broader consensus view of how American power should be employed or conserved in the Middle East, that led him into a delusional engagement with anti-Western Sunni and Shiite actors, notably the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic, and into a strategic realignment that strengthened these American adversaries against America’s traditional allies, notably Saudi Arabia and Israel.
In life, as in politics, incompetence can often explain more than bad ideas. In this reading, Obama deserves more blame for his negotiating ineptitude with the mullahs than he does for some ill-conceived scheme of Middle East realignment that supercharged Persian regional power. The 2015 deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, was simply a bad deal that wouldn’t stop Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, not a bad idea rooted in anti-Western theories from the American faculty lounge, where Obama had spent considerable time. But then why are we still stuck backing such an obvious loser?
Even as the clerical regime publicly disintegrates, JCPOA supporters continue to argue for the merits of a limited agreement that would even temporarily put Iran’s nuclear program “back in a box,” as Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, put it. Opponents counter that, more than seven years later, a return to the 2015 agreement would be even more wrongheaded than the original deal. Sunsets kick in over a few short years, and the regime would receive a windfall of an estimated $245 billion in sanctions relief in the first year, and over $1 trillion by 2030 when Iran’s nuclear program would be free and clear from meaningful limitations—rescuing a tottering, ill-intentioned and widely hated regime by pumping it full of cash that it would use to build nuclear weapons and sow regional chaos. The arms control paradigm, in which supporters and critics argue back and forth over what would constitute “a better deal,” is preventing a clear acknowledgement of Obama’s failure—and blocking the development of a workable strategy for dealing with current developments in Iran and throughout the region.
The faults of the JCPOA have been covered many times, including by this author. The Obama administration abandoned its negotiating leverage, provided mainly by a bipartisan Congress which passed biting economic sanctions on Iran between 2009 and 2012 over the objections of the Obama White House. The administration concluded a flawed interim nuclear agreement in 2013, and an even worse final agreement in 2015. The eventual deal trashed decades of bipartisan U.S. policy and multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to cease enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium on its soil. While it temporarily delayed Iranian nuclear expansion, the deal ceded the right to develop nuclear fissile material to the Islamic Republic and contained a series of sunset provisions under which nuclear restrictions disappeared. These sunsets permitted Tehran to develop, over time, an industrial-size enrichment program, near-zero nuclear breakout capability, and an advanced centrifuge-powered sneak-out capacity, as even Obama himself acknowledged after the deal was concluded.
Many critics of the deal argued that a longer, stronger, and broader agreement was possible if Obama had maximized the pressure on the regime, including through a credible threat of military force. Indeed, the Trump administration came into office promising to do exactly that. Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, imposed crushing sanctions that ravaged the Islamic Republic’s finances, and dealt a serious blow to Iranian regional power with the joint Mossad-CIA killing of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most competent military strategist and most feared battlefield commander.
Analysts and partisans continue to debate what could have transpired if this “maximum pressure campaign” had lasted longer than two years. But Biden reversed Trump’s pressure strategy, looked the other way as Chinese purchases of Iranian oil spiked, and waited too long before tackling a massive clandestine sanctions network that earned the regime tens of billions of dollars in hard currency. Predictably this “maximum deference” approach, meant to lure Iran back to the bargaining table, has failed to deliver any agreement, including even a return to a weaker version of the JCPOA. Instead, Iran’s nuclear program has rapidly and dangerously expanded under Biden’s watch, with no serious discussion about how to stop it—aside from stuffing the Islamic Republic’s pockets with more cash.
As protests continue to rage in Iran, with more than 2,000 demonstrations in over three months across all of Iran’s provinces and Iranians demanding regime change and “death to the dictator,” the place to start to answer the question of how we got ourselves into this mess is an earlier Iranian uprising: the 2009 Green Revolution. Then, the fraudulent reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in an even more blatant act of election manipulation than had been common in the Islamic Republic, led to massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Tehran.
The 2009 demonstrations were bigger in size than anything since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, including the current protests. The Green Revolution had clear leadership with support inside some elements of the regime itself; it arguably represented a more cohesive and threatening political opposition to the regime than this year’s leaderless street demonstrations. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself said that the 2009 protests had taken the clerical regime “to the edge of the cliff.” So why did the 2009 Green Revolution fail?
The key to the regime’s successful campaign of repression in 2009 was America’s decision to appease the Islamic Republic at the expense of the Iranian people. The demonstrators were clearly looking outward with the expectation of Western support, especially from the young, supposedly idealistic, newly elected American president. When Obama instead took pains to reassure the Iranian leadership of his commitment to engagement, he made it clear to the demonstrators that they were on their own against their jailers. Within a few weeks, the would-be revolution collapsed.
In the moment, many people outside Iran cut Obama considerable slack. It was just the beginning of his presidency, and his focus was clearly on getting out of Iraq, as he had promised. Yet, in retrospect, there is something disturbing about what Obama did in 2009 that looks even more troubling from the vantage point of Syria, Crimea, and the Donbas, and America’s continuing inability to forget about the JCPOA.
Why did Obama so comprehensively and demonstratively turn his back on the Iranian democracy protesters in 2009, in what was his first major foreign policy decision as president? It is a deep question, especially since Obama himself, after bipartisan and European support swung behind the 2022 protests, has belatedly acknowledged that his lack of support for the Green Revolution was a mistake.
The first set of answers again lies in the familiar area of realpolitik: Obama didn’t want any distractions in getting the United States out of Iraq, and he saw Iran as the keystone to a smooth withdrawal. Angering the Iranian leadership would only lead to greater American casualties, which could cause a political firestorm, with Obama blamed for getting U.S. soldiers killed. That would force him to surge in more troops to Iraq to assuage the Pentagon and Congress, rather than withdrawing them.
Yet Obama had a problem in carrying out his withdrawal from Iraq: Congress was passing tough sanctions on Iran over the objections of the White House. In response, he wrote letters to Iran’s supreme leader offering an end to U.S.–Iranian hostilities and greater political and economic engagement. As the regime took Obama’s messaging as a green light to rapidly increase its influence in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza, even as America’s Sunni allies warned of a “Shiite crescent” that threatened their own stability, Obama did little to confront Tehran.
Yet Obama’s strategic priority in 2009 was not to cement a U.S. deal with Iran at any cost. It was to engage with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was seen as the commander of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. Obama characterized Erdogan as the type of moderate Muslim leader that could help him stabilize a turbulent Middle East. Turkey was a NATO member and major Middle Eastern military power. Engaging with Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood also meant taking out Egypt’s authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak, who had repressed the Brotherhood, and stood in the way of the Arab Spring.
It is possible from one angle to see Obama’s support for the Arab Spring as support for democracy in the Middle East. Yet as his decision to turn his back on the Iranian pro-democracy protesters suggests, Obama was hardly a supporter of regional democrats. Nor was he particularly interested in supporting Iraq’s struggling democracy, which he saw as a tar pit that would only prolong U.S. engagement in the region—which he strongly opposed. In place of U.S. engagement, Obama supported anti-Western, “one election” Islamists who, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Erdogan in Turkey, and Khamenei in Iran, used and abused democratic mechanisms to gain and keep power. His preference was not for democrats per se, but for anti-imperialists who overthrew or sought to overthrow autocratic U.S. allies.
Yet the Arab Spring turned out very differently than Obama expected. When the Arab Spring in Egypt led to the takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian military, backed by many secular Egyptians who had demonstrated against Mubarak, launched a coup to restore secular authoritarian rule. In Syria, a democratic uprising led to a brutal crackdown by Bashar Assad, with support from Iran-backed ground troops.
The failures of the Arab Spring meant the collapse of Obama’s vision for a Middle East led by the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates. It was only after that vision collapsed that Obama sent his advisers Jake Sullivan and Bill Burns to Oman in 2013 to explore nuclear negotiations with the Iranians—in the hopes of finding another Middle Eastern power aside from Turkey that could “stabilize” the region in the wake of America’s withdrawal from Iraq.
Unsurprisingly, Iran often seemed to exist for Obama not as a threat to U.S. interests but as a historical victim of Western imperialism, which supposedly overthrew a “democratically elected” Iranian prime minister and installed the shah. Iran’s repressive theocratic regime seemed less notable for its blatant offenses against its own people, or its efforts to destabilize neighboring states, than for its role as the bête noire of warmongering neoconservatives in the United States, who supported a regional structure that put America on the side of troublemakers such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. Faced with the choice between the Islamic Republic and its enemies, Obama found it surprisingly easy to take the side of the mullahs—putting himself and the United States crossways both to U.S. interests and the hopes and dreams of the Iranian people.
Obama’s big Iran play was neither ‘values-driven’ nor purely pragmatic.
Obama’s big Iran play, which continues to shape U.S. regional policy to this day, was therefore neither “values-driven” nor purely pragmatic. His apparent goal was to extricate the United States from a cycle of endless conflict—one of whose primary causes, as he saw it, was Western imperialism. In doing so, Obama sought to be the first anti-imperialist American president since Dwight Eisenhower, who had backed Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser against the British, French, and Israelis in the 1956 Suez war. (Eisenhower later admitted that backing Nasser and abandoning the United States’ traditional allies had been one of the biggest mistakes of his presidency.)
Yet the Iranians were not, in fact, powerful enough to play the “balancing” role Obama envisioned for them, as their failure to stabilize Syria proved. He therefore stood aside, willingly or not, as the Russians intervened on the Iranian side to bomb the Syrian resistance. For rescuing the Islamic Republic and its allies in Syria, Putin was allowed to invade Crimea and the Donbas with minimal opposition from the Obama administration.
Anti-imperialist narratives were clearly important to Obama, and make sense as products of his unique upbringing. The fact that they utterly failed to correspond to regional realities caused multiple problems on the ground in the Middle East. Obama’s policy of trying to put the United States on the side of his own preferred client states created a slaughter in Syria that in turn led to multiple other slaughters throughout the region. The rise of ISIS was fueled partly in response to vicious Iran-backed attacks against Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis. The shocking rise of the Islamic State required Obama to send U.S. troops into Syria and back into Iraq. It also emboldened Putin, who invaded Ukraine for the third time in 2022.
Obama’s ongoing and catastrophic policy failure, which has blocked the Biden administration from developing any kind of workable strategic vision for dealing with current realities in Iran and throughout the region, demonstrates that substituting American narratives about purity and guilt for hard-power realities is a dangerous business. Ideologically driven anti-Western narratives led the United States to place dangerous and wrongheaded bets on Sunni Islamists and Shiite theocrats at the expense of our own interests and friends. Poorly executed policy led to a fatally flawed nuclear agreement that continues to bedevil the Biden administration and America’s European and Middle Eastern allies. The JCPOA was a big mistake. The longer we refuse to admit that, the higher the price we will continue to pay.
And:
Netanyahu to AIPAC leaders on Iran: It's time to close ranks between Israel and the US
PM speaks to AIPAC leaders: Because of the brave men and women of Iran, the entire world sees what we've been talking about, that this is a terrible, repressive, terrorist regime.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, from his Knesset office, appeared before AIPAC leaders and activists by videoconference and thanked them for supporting the State of Israel and strengthening ties with the US.
The Prime Minister also held an open conversation with AIPAC President Betsy Korn in the context of which he discussed Iran, expanding the circle of peace and US-Israel relations.
On Iran, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that people are seeing the regime's internal repression of the people, as well as the executions of those demonstrating for freedom.
The Prime Minister said: "So now, because of the brave men and women of Iran, the entire world sees what we've been talking about, that this is a terrible, repressive, terrorist regime."
He added, "It's time to close ranks between Israel and the United States – and others. And I look forward to discussing this issue with President Biden and his team. I think there is more of a meeting of the minds today than there has ever been."
Prime Minister Netanyahu noted that he is working to expand the circle of peace and explained that he is optimistic because Arab leaders have changed their views regarding Israel and now see us partners, not enemies.
Meanwhile:
But Then:
Netanyahu: The Unexpected Moderate
by Amir Taheri
There are phrases that, as a student of history in the making, I never thought I would read, let alone write. Now, however, such a phrase is in full circulation and I feel no qualms about repeating it: Benjamin Netanyahu is a moderate politician! The "comeback kid" of Israeli politics certainly cuts a moderate figure in his new Cabinet. Some commentators even dub him "the only moderate" in that Cabinet.
Others see his return to power as a sign that, in the words of Alan Dershowitz, Israel is "a deeply divided state." Yet other commentators warn that the latest general election that ended with the victory of the right-wing parties has taken Israel "to the edge". "What has been built in 75 years may be dismantled in a very short time," says a writer who reminds us that she is a descendant of a Holocaust victim.
Israel's history as a recently revived state is full of "extremist" and "dangerous" figures that were transformed into paragons of moderation. The problem is that when it comes to Israel, the only yardstick for measuring moderation and extremism is a politician's stand on the "Palestinian issue".
Things become even more complicated when we remember that the "Palestinian issue" has never been properly defined. It has always been approached tangentially, first as a refugee problem with the "right of return" cliché as leitmotiv. That resulted in keeping a growing number of Palestinians in refugee camps in several countries without doing anything to resettle them. A straight return to what had become Israel was out of the question because for the right of return to operate you have to recognize the legitimacy of the state to which you wish to return. And that, of course, was out of the question as long as Arab states denied the very existence of Israel.
After decades, some genius pretended to have discovered the "two-state solution." That "solution", of course, had been offered by the United Nations and accepted by the Jews under the "extremist" David Ben Gurion in 1947, but rejected by neighboring Arab states. Its revival by Western powers, notably the United States, was an exercise in diplomatic wild goose chasing.
For decades now, almost everyone has paid lip service to that "solution" or even imagined "roadmaps" towards achieving it, without wondering whether the Israelis and the Palestinians actually want it. The fact is that repeated opinion polls and elections show that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians do not want the "two-state solution," I guess because it is not clear what it means. In Israel's new parliament (Knesset), only 10 out of 120 members say they support the formula. But even they don't say where one state would end and the other would begin.
With that gambit getting nowhere, the "Palestinian problem" was redefined as one of expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank. But even there, the curse of opacity continued. Supporters of settlements never said how far and wide they should be allowed while opponents never said how many of them should be dismantled. In any case, the dismantling of all settlements in Gaza never led to the peace expected.
As the theme of the settlements began to appear shopworn, a new version of the "Palestinian problem" was put into circulation: "Israeli Apartheid." But that, too, was never defined. In South Africa under Apartheid, black and colored citizens were not allowed to vote or get elected.
In Israel, non-Jewish citizens can and do. Palestinians in the West Bank do not have those rights because they are not Israeli citizens. And to become Israeli citizens, their land must be formally annexed by Israel.
Whichever way you dance around the "Palestinian problem," you cannot get out of the maze of contradictions.
A majority of Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank seem to understand that. Palestinians know that no Israeli coalition, whether of left or right or center, could offer them a deal they can accept. They also know that the "Palestinian issue" is often used by ambitious Israeli politicians to cover their nakedness in terms of credible policies.
In 2000, Ariel Sharon went to the Temple Mount with a large retinue as opening shot in an election which led to his premiership. Now the new Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, stages a similar show as a downsized caricature of Sharon.
The fact that, like Sharon, Ben Gvir had visited the "holy place" on numerous occasions before entering the government is often overlooked. Ben Gvir and his outfit are more interested in milking the Israeli state's cow for this-worldly perks and handouts than offering credible policies to Israeli society at large.
Israel is not deeply divided. In fact, less than 11% of the electorate supported the so-called "extreme-right" bloc. The latest opinion polls show that only 31% of Israelis regard the "Palestinian issue" as their number-one concern. Opinion polls in the West Bank, too, show that bread-and-butter politics and cleaning corruption are the top concerns of Palestinians.
Fixation with the "Palestinian issue", a problem that contrary to Pollyannaish Cartesianism does not have a ready solution, has diverted from many here-and-now problems facing both Israelis and Palestinians.
A nation effervescent with creativity, Israel cannot be led to sclerosis by politicians like Ben Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich around the "Palestinian problem".
Life is richer than Ben Gvir's metaphysical conceits.
That problem might find a solution only if both Israelis and Palestinians are convinced that solving it is in their own interest. Whichever way one looks at it, that conviction isn't there yet. And even if, one day, that conviction materializes, there is no guarantee that those who have built whole carriers and national strategies around perpetuating it will allow a solution to be agreed and applied.
In the meantime, all we have is the status quo, and it is by pledging to maintain it that Netanyahu, warts and all, wins unlikely accolades as a moderate in a government of real or fake extremists.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.
This article was originally published by Asharq al-Awsat and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.
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Report finds critical theory is the framework' used to train teachers: K-12 public schools 'saturated' with CRT due to teachers' education
Started in California, where else!
Lenin in the Communist Manifesto said -- I'm paraphrasing, never mind the old people let we educate the children and by the next generation they'll be ours.
Think about it, how many people over the age of 40 do you know that want to live under Socialism or Communism? And make no mistake about it CRT is Communism wrapped up in a new package. They tried "workers against the Capitalist" that didn't work, so they changed it around to "privileged White men against poor Oppressed Black people".
Started in California, where else!
Lenin in the Communist Manifesto said -- I'm paraphrasing, never mind the old people let we educate the children and by the next generation they'll be ours.
Think about it, how many people over the age of 40 do you know that want to live under Socialism or Communism? And make no mistake about it CRT is Communism wrapped up in a new package. They tried "workers against the Capitalist" that didn't work, so they changed it around to "privileged White men against poor Oppressed Black people".
Started in California, where else!
Lenin in the Communist Manifesto said -- I'm parapharsing, never mind the old people let we educate the children and by the next generation they'll be ours.
Think about it, how many people over the age of 40 do you know that want to live under Socialism or Communism? And make no mistake about it CRT is Communism wrapped up in a new package. They tried "workers against the Capitalist" that didn't work, so they changed it around to "privileged White men against poor Oppressed Black people".
And:
Teacher OVERDOSES In Front Of Class - It's Getting Worse
A middle school teacher in New Jersey is facing several charges after he was found unresponsive on the floor of his classroom in front of his students, as the result of a fentanyl overdose.
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Once again Democrats are shielded by their mass media friends after they vilify Trump for something for which he was found innocent and Biden did but hid. I seriously fear nothing will come of this because his current corrupt AG will slow walk the matter and maybe eliminate/withhold anything incriminating.
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The liberal media’s cynical gaslighting on House probes into Hunter Biden
By Jonathan Turley
The media has already started labeling the House probe into Hunter Biden's business dealings a "partisan" investigation
“It does sound personal”: NBC’s “Meet the Press” host’s words Sunday capture the new narrative in Washington as the House readies the long-delayed investigation into the Biden family’s foreign influence peddling.
The media have spent months preparing to do damage control after falsely and repeatedly calling the Hunter Biden laptop “Russian disinformation.” Even after belatedly acknowledging the laptop’s authenticity two years after The Post’s October 2020 reveal, they continue to bury the story involving Russian, Chinese, Ukrainian and other foreign interests, including figures associated with foreign intelligence.
Now the details of one of the largest and most lucrative influence-peddling operations in history could be made public — along with their effort to conceal it.
Even in a city where influence-peddling is a virtual cottage industry, the Biden's took the corrupt practice to a truly Olympian level. The direct references to Joe Biden receiving money and benefits from these contracts should concern any citizen, let alone any journalist. Yet House Democrats blocked efforts to investigate any Biden influence-peddling.
This obstruction was only possible with an enabling and protective media downplaying the scandal. The press continued the effective blackout even as emails showed Biden repeatedly lied about having no knowledge of his son’s foreign business.
Such denials, however, are getting more difficult. The Associated Press had to withdraw its absurd recent claim there’s no evidence of Biden ever discussing his son’s dealings. There’s even audio of him leaving a message for Hunter specifically about coverage of those dealings.
Dozens of emails, pictures and witness accounts prove the president was not just aware but a possible beneficiary of this corruption. His personal interactions with his son’s business associates include at least 19 visits to the White House by Hunter’s partner, Eric Schwerin, alone from 2009 to 2015, when Biden was vice president.
Emails on Hunter’s laptop make repeated reference to not only Joe’s knowledge but efforts to hide his involvement. In one email, Biden associate James Gilliar instructed Tony Bobulinski, then Hunter’s business partner: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.” Bobulinski has given sworn statements that he personally met with Joe Biden to discuss these dealings.
Emails used code names for Joe Biden such as “Celtic” or “the big guy.” In one, “the big guy” is mentioned as possibly receiving a 10% cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm. There are also references to Hunter paying off his father’s bills from shared accounts.
Code names, cuts for “the big guy” and millions in mysterious foreign transactions would ordinarily send the media into a frenzy. But the Biden's adeptly enlisted the press into suppressing the story. Many in the media became “made men” and women who proved their loyalty. If this is a corruption scandal, there’s little the media can do to spin their own role in concealing it from the public.
Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show President Biden being involved in business deals and referred to as the “big guy.”
For their part, Biden allies are gearing up to attack possible witnesses against the Biden's. For the media, however, it’s hard to acknowledge let alone pursue a scandal that you actively suppressed for years.
That’s what made Chuck Todd’s interview with incoming House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer so revealing. Todd spent most of the interview dismissing the committee’s work as a “political” exercise in targeting opponents. Comer’s efforts to detail the evidence of the president’s role was met by a smirking dismissal from Todd, who ended the interview by saying, “Well, it does sound personal, at that.”
So investigating millions of dollars flowing from foreign interests, including some connected to foreign figures or intelligence operatives, is just a personal attack.
If you’re wondering how the media would have reacted to even a fraction of such concerns being raised about Trump business deals, you don’t have to. They spent years drilling down on every foreign deal, and Todd was one of the most vocal in raising the alarm over foreign influence.
For example, in 2018, Todd doggedly pursued interviews with figures like former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff on Trump foreign deals and bank loans with Russian figures. Schiff declared without contradiction by Todd that “if Trump’s [business dealings] are a form of compromise, it needs to be exposed.”
Todd conducted a similar interview in February 2019 on influence-peddling allegations involving the Trump family. As Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general, breathlessly announced a Russian-collusion indictment of Trump “could be coming,” Todd asked whether foreign business deals “compromised” the president.
Todd was right to ask if Trump was “compromised” by foreign deals like a Trump Tower in Moscow in 2019. It was neither personal nor political to raise such questions.
But it is now. Totally personal and political. Unlike Schiff, who was heralded for his efforts to uncover evidence of “compromise,” Comer was given only two choices by Todd: Will he “de-partisanize” his investigation or “do you expect it to be partisan?”
The problem is that not only will the details of these dealings be made public; the public wants to see those details. Various polls show Americans want an investigation into the matter and believe Congress should address social-media censorship of such stories.
In other words, it’s not working. The public is not going to dismiss this influence-peddling scandal with a smirk and a shrug. There will be a public accounting, and it will not be confined to the Biden family.
Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.
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The Two Men Destroying America - Ad
New Documentary From Porter Stansberry: The Two Men Destroying America. Inside the secret plan to decimate the savings, investments, and way of life for millions of unsuspecting Americans.... Continue reading..
And:
Dear Richard ,
The establishment wants this banned.
It’s a shocking new documentary that exposes, for the first time ever, the sinister attack the establishment elites have engineered against the American economy.
An attack that threatens you, your freedom, and your finances.
Porter Stansberry
Watch it now because I believe they’ll attempt to scrub it from existence because it lays bare the attack they’ve been plotting for over two decades.
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Joe Biden, the El Paso Kid
It was naive to think a border visit would force the president to change his approach.
By William McGurn
He came. He saw. He squandered.
Joe Biden’s stop in El Paso, Texas, was an opportunity to rally Congress to address the crisis on the southern border. Sunday’s visit came after pleas from leaders of communities overwhelmed by the surge in migrants, including Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who represents another Texas border district. It also comes after the Democratic mayor of El Paso, Oscar Leeser, embarrassed the president in December when he issued a disaster declaration after the White House pressured him not to.
But Mr. Biden’s visit is a reminder to politicians to be careful what you wish for. Up till now, the president has largely ignored the border and the press did so along with him. Those who badgered him to go were calculating that if only Mr. Biden were to come face to face with the conditions created by the large numbers crossing illegally, he would be forced to propose something serious in response. And the press would have to cover it.
But the opposite was always likely. Having checked the box his critics wanted him to check, the president can go his merry way. He has even emerged with a new line of attack on Republicans for his 2024 run for re-election.
President Biden made little effort to hide the pro-forma nature of the visit. Although he gave no public remarks in El Paso, he did speak Friday at the White House. In those remarks he outlined the modest steps he is taking to try to restore order—which had some of his left-wing critics howling about a return to the Trump-era approach. The new initiatives include an asylum app called CPB One that is designed to relieve numbers at the border by allowing migrants to schedule asylum hearings before they leave their home countries.
But the more telling feature of the president’s remarks was his attempt to wash his hands of any responsibility. Yes, Republicans share responsibility for our broken immigration system going back years. But Democrats controlled Congress for the first two years of Mr. Biden’s presidency, when the numbers exploded. And Mr. Biden gave the game away by peppering his remarks with words such as “hate,” “extreme Republicans” and “MAGA Republicans.”
The belief that a border visit would change his approach was naive. Indeed, the new immigration policies were announced before Mr. Biden left for El Paso.
The union representing Border Patrol agents, moreover, noted that El Paso was prettified in time for Mr. Biden’s visit. Migrants who were sleeping on the streets because shelters were full were cleared out in the days before his arrival. “We suggest just landing in Des Moines, Iowa and telling him it’s El Paso,” the union tweeted. “He’ll never know the difference.”
But the surest sign that a border visit would relieve rather than increase the pressure to act was the example of Kamala Harris. When Mr. Biden tapped his vice president to run point for the White House on the “root causes” encouraging so many Central Americans to flee north, Republicans quickly tagged her the “border czar” and then relentlessly chided her for avoiding it.
This was a strategy designed to embarrass, and it worked—up to a point. During a June 2021 interview with NBC News while Ms. Harris was in Guatemala, Lester Holt asked her point blank whether she had any plans to visit the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We’ve been to the border,” she said three times. When Mr. Holt corrected her—“You haven’t been to the border”—Ms. Harris offered up her trademark nervous giggle and then said, “I don’t understand the point that you’re making.”
Ms. Harris’s gaffe had its effect. Before the month was out, she visited the border, also at El Paso. But few noted what came next: nothing. And Ms. Harris hasn’t been to the border since, nor has she been under any pressure to go.
We can expect much the same this time. For Mr. Biden’s visit to have any real effect would require consistent coverage of the situation at the border—as well as the president’s claim that the border chaos has nothing to do with his reversal of Mr. Trump’s policies. He made that reversal without any thought of what signals he’d be sending. Now he asks Americans to believe that the problems are entirely the fault of the party that was out of power in Washington while the border unraveled.
Ask yourself: When was the last time the mainstream press challenged a Democratic president trying to blame Republicans for the bad consequences of his own policies?
Now that Mr. Biden has met his critics’ challenge by going to El Paso, it’s back to business as usual. All of which only further reduces the prospects for what he purports to want: a secure southern border that is part of an orderly, rational and more generous legal immigration regime.
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Where’s the outrage over Biden comparing illegal immigrants to Holocaust victims? | Lapid, Gantz call for public unrest amid ‘brewing civil war’ | The year Iran lost normalcy
And:
Biden did a photo op, learned what he came to learn and will probably do very little to solve this Gordian Knot which is out of hand and ruining our country.
And:
How does Gov. Newson play out?
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How Will Newsom Play in the Rest of the Nation? - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
By Steven Greenhut
The California governor’s victory says little about his national chances, but his record should give national observers a clue about his priorities.
California’s general election results were anticlimactic. Governor Gavin Newsom was reelected by a nearly 58 percent to 42 percent margin over state senator Brian Dahle, a standard-issue Republican from California’s rural northern region. No one expected Dahle to have a chance, and he ran a dogged but ultimately unimpressive campaign.
In recent years, the Republican Party’s main goal has been to field candidates who won’t embarrass the party and obliterate its down-ticket candidates. And by down ticket, I mean way down the ticket. No California Republican has won a statewide race since 2006, so the focus has been on not losing too many state legislative and congressional races. Dahle essentially took one for the team.
As I pointed out in my election postmortem at The American Spectator, even the most qualified and energetic Republican statewide candidates did only marginally better than those candidates who ran no campaign whatsoever — and were little more than a name on the ballot. The state is too Democratic to elect a Republican to a statewide post.
Newsom’s winning percentage varied little from the winning percentage of other statewide Democrats, meaning that any generic Democrat would likely have matched his totals. But Newsom didn’t have to run much of a campaign, so it’s unclear how well he would have done had he tapped into his enormous campaign chest and run more than a pro forma race.
Republicans took their shot at Newsom in an ill-fated recall election, in which 64 percent of voters wanted him to stay in office. The second gubernatorial recall election in state history came in 2021, following the COVID-19 shutdowns, an unemployment-payment scandal, and rolling electrical blackouts. But the replacement candidates — most notably talk-show host Larry Elder — ran hard to the right in a state that tilts hard to the left.
There’s little question that Newsom has his eye on the White House, as evidenced by the television ad he ran imploring Floridians to move to California to pursue freedom. That was a head-scratcher. On almost every measurable issue (regulations, taxes, property rights), the state fares poorly on any freedom index. That campaign suggests that Newsom doesn’t understand how non-Californians view our state.
A presidential candidate has to run in the entire nation, and it’s easy to see how Newsom’s style of San Francisco progressivism might play elsewhere: not well. During the latest session, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have allowed some municipalities to allow safe-injection sites. Most Sacramento political observers viewed that tilt to the center in the light of his possible national campaign, but he has offered few similar nods.
Looking on the good side, Newsom also has recently floated a reasonable plan for developing more water storage, although critics are right to note that he waited until the state was in the midst of a grueling drought. And, with Newsom, one must take a “trust but verify” approach. He sometimes says the right things, but there’s rarely any follow-up.
The water issue is important because, under his watch, Californians have feared for the provision of their basic infrastructure needs. Local water districts are rationing water. In the midst of wildfires, the state’s main electrical utilities have been shutting off the power. I can already envision the anti-Newsom “lights out” campaign ads.
The state made national news — of the “you’ve got to be kidding” variety — when the Independent System Operator implored Californians not to charge their electric vehicles the same week that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) announced its “groundbreaking” road map to ban internal-combustion vehicles by 2035.
The Newsom governorship is overseeing the state’s continued decline. The progressive wing of the California Democratic Party views our suburban lifestyles as unsustainable. In their view, we use too much water. We rely too heavily on automobiles. They are committed to phasing out fossil fuels — even before affordable and plentiful alternatives are online. They see a future of rationing and cutbacks.
California has given up building new freeway and road infrastructure — preferring instead a fruitless scheme to push Californians onto our declining transit systems. I have agreed with Newsom on some of his housing policies. For instance, the governor signed laws that eliminate single-family-only zoning, remove parking requirements for many construction projects, and rezone old shopping centers for housing development.
I support these laws because they are deregulatory in nature — they remove onerous zoning requirements, rein in California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) lawsuits, and essentially shift more decisions to the private marketplace. The state’s progressives promote these laws because they will increase housing density. It’s part of their broader agenda, which attempts to combat urban sprawl.
Yet decades of progressive land-use policy have driven up the cost of housing throughout the state, with a statewide median north of $800,000. This has actually generated sprawl, as residents of the Bay Area and Los Angeles in particular increasingly endure megacommutes to the Central Valley and Inland Empire, respectively, as they seek out more-affordable housing.
These are crucial issues as Republicans prepare for a potential Newsom candidacy. The state’s majority party has long touted grandiose goals yet failed to account for unintended consequences. Even as California hopes to prod other states and nations into embracing its climate goals, it has failed to tend to the basics of government — such as ensuring that the lights stay on, the taps are flowing, and the roads can handle normal levels of traffic.
Newsom isn’t to blame for all of this, of course. Numerous California governors and legislatures have created our current mess. But Newsom has championed all of these policies — and more so than his predecessor. Former governor Jerry Brown was a fanatic on the climate change issue, as he routinely prattled about human extinction. But he was more of a pragmatist who at least tended to the basics.
Brown was stuck with a $30 billion budget deficit and was rather creative — in some good ways and some bad — in filling the gap. He eliminated the state’s obnoxious redevelopment agencies (good) and led the charge for a large tax increase (bad). By contrast, Newsom enjoys an enviable $97.5 billion budget surplus and therefore inherited the role of Santa Claus.
Newsom doubles down on progressive nostrums even in the face of their real-world results.
Instead of using that windfall to significantly pay down unfunded liabilities or to upgrade California’s long-neglected infrastructure or to reform a tax system that is destructively dependent on capital-gains boom-and-bust cycles, he’s been rewarding public-employee unions, building unneeded projects (a bullet train!), and creating new programs. He’s squandering a historic opportunity — but there’s no political price to pay.
Others of Newsom’s decisions probably won’t play well elsewhere. He signed Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), which largely banned companies from using independent contractors. I’ve written about this regularly in these pages. This union-backed disaster targeted ride-sharing drivers for companies such as Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash but threatened to destroy the entire freelance economy.
In the face of blowback from ordinary Californians who lost their jobs and musical troupes that had to shut down their performances, the legislature ultimately exempted more than one hundred industries from the legislation’s provisions. But the measure still rears its ugly head. Over the summer, truckers shut down the Port of Oakland to protest AB 5’s attack on their owner-operator model.
By the way, the governor dawdled during recent backups at those ports, refusing to suspend AB 5 even though the shortage of truckers exacerbated the crisis. Newsom suspended hundreds of laws during COVID-19, but he refused to suspend AB 5 even though people couldn’t pay their bills and the state was forbidding them from tackling freelance pursuits.
The bottom line: Newsom doubles down on progressive nostrums even in the face of their real-world results. Newsom did indeed criticize the teachers’ unions for resisting school reopenings, but he also passed a series of educational laws that make it far more difficult for the state’s successful charter schools to open new campuses — a sop to those same unions.
Brown advocated for charters — and even started the Oakland Military Academy — but Newsom reversed those gains. The teachers’ unions knew that they had a friend in the new governor, and they quickly took advantage of that alliance. The school-choice movement is growing nationwide, so it’s hard to see how Newsom would make inroads elsewhere as the anti–school choice candidate
California has long been a Democratic state, but the move from Brown to Newsom signaled the move from a traditional liberal Democrat to a Bay Area progressive. The difference is stark. Past Democrats understood that they needed to tend to the basics of government as they pursued their bigger climate, labor, and other dreams. Now the tail wags the dog.
Whereas Brown was the “last adult in Sacramento,” Newsom might be the first nonadult to take the helm — despite a few token nods in Brown’s direction. As a result, we’re seeing the kind of shortages and economic disruptions that one might expect. As the general election and failed recall showed, there’s no price to pay for this in California. But how will it play out.
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Reporter 'Exploring Legal Options' Against Adam Schiff After Twitter Files Reveal
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I never knew this incredible story. How beautiful.
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World War Two history.
Six Boys and 13 Hands... A videographer’s account...
Each year I am hired to go to Washington, DC, with the eighth-grade class from Clinton, WI where I grew up, to videotape their trip. I greatly enjoy visiting our nation’s capital, and each year I take some special memories back with me. This fall's trip was especially memorable.
On the last night of our trip, we stopped at the Iwo Jima memorial. This memorial is the largest bronze statue in the world and depicts one of the most famous photographs in history -- that of the six brave soldiers raising the American Flag at the top of a rocky hill on the island of Iwo Jima, Japan, during WW II.
Over one hundred students and chaperones piled off the buses as we headed toward the memorial. Once there, I noticed a man standing alone at the base of the statue, and as I got closer, he asked, “Where are you guys from?”
I told him that we were from Wisconsin. “Hey,” he said, “I'm a Cheese Head, too! Come gather around, Cheese heads, and I will tell you a story.” (It was James Bradley who just happened to be in Washington, DC, to speak at the memorial the following day. He was there that night to say good night to his dad, who had passed away. He was just about to leave when he saw the buses pull up. I videotaped him as he spoke to us and received his permission to share what he said from my videotape. It is one thing to tour the incredible monuments filled with history in Washington, DC, but it is quite another to get the kind of insight we received that night.).
When all had gathered around, he reverently began to speak. Here are his words that night. “My name is James Bradley and I'm from Antigo, Wisconsin. My dad is on that statue, and I wrote a book called 'Flags of Our Fathers'. It is the story of the six boys you see behind me.
“Six boys raised the flag. The first guy putting the pole in the ground is Harlon Block. Harlon was an all-state football player. He enlisted in the Marine Corps with all the senior members of his football team. They were off to play another type of game. A game called 'War.' But it didn't turn out to be a game. Harlon, at the age of 21, died with his intestines in his hands. I don't say that to gross you out, I say that because there are people who stand in front of this statue and talk about the glory of war. You kids need to know that most of the boys in Iwo Jima were 17, 18, and 19 years old - and it was so hard that the ones who did make it home never even would talk to their families about it.
Pointing to the statue he said, “You see this next guy? That's Rene Gagnon from New Hampshire. If you took Rene's helmet off at the moment this photo was taken and looked in the webbing of that helmet, you would find a photograph...a photograph of his girlfriend. Rene put it in there for protection because he was scared. He was 18 years old. It was just boys who won the battle of Iwo Jima. Boys. Not old men.
“The next guy here, the third guy in this tableau, was Sergeant Mike Strank. Mike is my hero. He was the hero of all these guys. They called him the 'old man' because he was so old. He was already 24. When Mike would motivate his boys in training camp, he didn't say, 'Let's go kill some Japanese' or 'Let's die for our country'. He knew he was talking to little boys. Instead, he would say, 'You do what I say, and I'll get you home to your mothers.'
The last guy on this side of the statue is Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona. Ira Hayes was one of them who lived to walk off Iwo Jima. He went into the White House with my dad. President Truman told him, 'You're a hero.' Ira told reporters, 'How can I feel like a hero when 250 of my buddies hit the island with me and only 27 of us walked off alive?'
“So, kids, take your class at school, 250 of you spending a year together having fun, doing everything together. Then all 250 of you hit the beach, but only 27 of your classmates walk off alive. That was Ira Hayes. He had images of horror in his mind. Ira Hayes carried the pain home with him and eventually died dead drunk, face down, drowned in a very shallow puddle, at the age of 32 (ten years after this picture was taken).
“The next guy, going around the statue, is Franklin Sousley from Hilltop, Kentucky. A fun-lovin' hillbilly boy. His best friend, who is now 70, told me, 'Yeah, you know, we took two cows up on the porch of the Hilltop General Store. Then we strung wire across the stairs so the cows couldn't get down. Then we fed them Epsom salts. Those cows crapped all night.' Yes, he was a fun-lovin' hillbilly boy. Franklin died on Iwo Jima at the age of 19. When the telegram came to tell his mother that he was dead, it went to the Hilltop General Store. A barefoot boy ran that telegram up to his mother's farm. The neighbors could hear her scream all night and into the morning. Those neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.
“The next guy, as we continue to go around the statue, is my dad, John Bradley, from Antigo, Wisconsin, where I was raised. My dad lived until 1994, but he would never give interviews. When Walter Cronkite's producers or the New York Times would call, we were trained as little kids to say 'No, I'm sorry, sir, my dad's not here. He is in Canada fishing. No, there is no phone there, sir. No, we don't know when he is coming back.' My dad never fished or even went to Canada. Usually, he was sitting there right at the table eating his Campbell's soup. But we had to tell the press that he was out fishing. He didn't want to talk to the press.
“You see, like Ira Hayes, my dad didn't see himself as a hero. Everyone thinks these guys are heroes, 'cause they are in a photo and on a monument. My dad knew better. He was a medic. John Bradley from Wisconsin was a combat caregiver. On Iwo Jima, he probably held over 200 boys as they died. And boys died on Iwo Jima, they writhed and screamed, without any medication or help with the pain.
“When I was a little boy, my third-grade teacher told me that my dad was a hero. When I went home and told my dad that, he looked at me and said, 'I want you always to remember that the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who did not come back. Did NOT come back.'
“So that's the story about six nice young boys. Three died on Iwo Jima, and three came back as national heroes. Overall, 7,000 boys died on Iwo Jima in the worst battle in the history of the Marine Corps. My voice is giving out, so I will end here. Thank you for your time.”
Suddenly, the monument wasn't just a big old piece of metal with a flag sticking out of the top. It came to life before our eyes with the heartfelt words of a son who did indeed have a father who was a hero. Maybe not a hero for the reasons most people would believe, but a hero, nonetheless.
One thing I learned while on tour with my 8th-grade students in DC that is not mentioned here is… that if you look at the statue very closely and count the number of 'hands' raising the flag, there are 13. When the man who made the statue was asked why there were 13, he simply said the the13th hand was the hand of God.
Great story - worth your time - worth every American's time. Please pass it on.
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Bernie Marcus speaks out again.
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Entrepreneurship Will Lift Minorities Up
Big government is a far heavier burden to those who start out without privileges and advantages.
By Bernie Marcus
No one has seen entrepreneurship help minorities improve their economic circumstances more than I have—and that’s not only because I’m 93.
I saw the power of entrepreneurship firsthand after co-founding the Home Depot. My experiences led me to believe that preserving and expanding entrepreneurship is the key to advancing racial and economic equality.
Entrepreneurship offers all Americans, no matter their background, a way to achieve financial independence and the American Dream. Entrepreneurship rewards goods and services that the market values independent of the financial resources, SAT scores or personal pedigrees of the people selling them.
I didn’t start out in the home-improvement industry. I worked my way up the corporate ladder only to be fired by a capricious boss. When I found myself unemployed at 49, I had every reason to be bitter. But I turned to entrepreneurship, which made my life’s second act far better than I could have imagined.
With almost no money, I had the idea to open a hardware store, a lumberyard and a garden store all in one. What began as a single store in Georgia grew to more than 2,000 locations nationwide and made me a billionaire in the process. Only in America could a member of an ethnic minority from a poor immigrant family write that kind of success story.
The financial rewards pale in comparison to the emotional rewards of seeing my company help others become financially independent through entrepreneurship. The Home Depot democratized the home-improvement, landscaping and building trades so that anyone willing to work up a sweat and learn some basic skills could immediately start a sole proprietorship or small business serving some of the nation’s 80 million homeowners.
You can see the entrepreneurs driving around town in their trucks full of tools and material. Many of them are minorities. They don’t consider themselves victims of racial wealth or income gaps; they are actively overcoming economic disparities through work.
That isn’t happening only in building and landscaping. In almost every part of the economy, you’ll find entrepreneurial minorities breaking through difficult circumstances to achieve and live the American Dream. Accelerating this process is the key to bridging the country’s economic divides.
Unfortunately, government is moving in the wrong direction, erecting hurdles to entrepreneurship. My company wouldn’t have succeeded if it had started in today’s climate of regulations and taxes that disproportionately burden small businesses. The Home Depot almost went bankrupt several times in its first decade, and today’s policy environment would have tipped us into insolvency—as it does to countless entrepreneurs each year.
The biggest victims of bad government policy aren’t the elite; they will always be able to get into good schools and get their foot in the door of corporate America. The people hurt most by big government are those who lack advantages in becoming economically independent, often minorities.
“Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said in 1967. “It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.”
Celebrating the stories and successes of minority entrepreneurs can generate the public support needed to defend the free-market economy against big-government threats. These ordinary entrepreneurs are the heroes of modern-day America, even if they are frequently treated as villains by government officials who siphon their resources to fund their latest social-policy aims.
Americans should treat minority entrepreneurs with the respect they deserve and consider how bad public policy prevents them from surviving and thriving. A newfound respect for minority entrepreneurs, who have done so much with so little, can provide the societal foundation needed to ensure the next generation of Home Depots. It can lay the groundwork for even more minority entrepreneurship success stories than I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Entrepreneurship is freedom. By defending the former, we can preserve the latter for generations.
Mr. Marcus is the retired co-founder of the Home Depot and founder of Job Creators Network. This essay is adapted from his foreword to the new book “The Real Race Revolutionaries: How Minority Entrepreneurship Can Overcome America’s Racial and Economic Divides” by Alfredo Ortiz.
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Can McCarthy survive the "Play Bill" he wrote and thus, to which, he became his own victim?
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TH-Red-VIP
After days of voting, and an almost fight on the floor of the House, Kevin McCarthy was elected Speaker of the House late Friday night.
Though it took 15 ballots, the fight and wait were worth it, as rule concessions made by McCarthy to conservatives will make this Congress different from any in the last decade – one that takes power away from the Speaker and gives it back to the People.
Now that the political infighting is over and the sausage is made, it's time for Republicans to unite with one cause and fight back against Joe Biden and his radical administration.
The GOP has promised to investigate Biden family corruption, the Border, Big Tech censorship collusion, the origins of Covid, the FBI and Intel Agencies' attack on the American people, and more.
It's time to hold them to those promises.
Here at Townhall, we won’t let up on holding them accountable. We unapologetically fight back against the radical left and squishy RINOs in Congress who fail the people. We bring you the truth and go to war against Biden's woke, communist agenda.
But we need your help. By becoming a Townhall VIP, you can help us in this battle for our country.
Just look at the House Dems’ leader Hakeem Jeffries. He's just another divisive, radical leftist, and his communist "Sesame Street" speech proves it.
If Republicans don't halt the Biden agenda and conservative media fails to hold them accountable, it could mean the end of our great country.
And:
Dear readers,
It's my pleasure to bring you the Resist the Mainstream morning newsletter. Here are the stories I've prepared for you today. I hope have a great day! — Alexa
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