What the Arizona Audit Really Shows—and Why Election Officials Should Be Embarrassed

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Critics of the forensic audit of Maricopa County, Arizona—including local election officials and many reporters—who are crowing that the audit confirms that President Joe Biden won the election in Arizona, either don’t understand the purpose of an audit or are trying to deliberately obscure the most worrying findings in the audit.

In fact, by concentrating on only one finding—that the hand recount essentially matched the machine count from last November—they are missing the forest for the trees. That is shown by misleading headlines such as that in the Washington Post: “Ariz. Ballot Report Affirms Biden Win and Lack of Fraud.”

No one doubts that the vote tabulation shows that Biden won the state. The fact, however, that the hand recount essentially matched the machine count from last November comes as no surprise to anyone with experience in election administration.

As a former county election official in two different states, I was involved in multiple recounts. Recounts almost always only show slight differences from the original ballot tabulation. The fact that the hand recount in Maricopa County matched the machine recount simply means that the computer scanners used to scan and tabulate paper ballots were working properly.

However, the key point all of the critics of the audit are missing is that a recount simply recounts the ballots that were cast–a recount does not investigate, examine, or review the legitimacy of those ballots.

A recount does not verify or check whether ballots were cast by registered voters who are actually deceased; who do not actually live where they claim to live; who cast multiple votes because they are registered more than once; or who are not entitled to vote even though they are registered because they are not U.S. citizens or are felons who have not yet had their right to vote restored.

A simple example illustrates this problem. If a homeowners’ association has an election and the new president wins with 51 out of 100 votes, a recount will no doubt confirm that she received 51 votes. But it will not reveal whether 10 of her 51 votes were cast by individuals who falsely claimed to live in the neighborhood when they actually live elsewhere.

Volume III of the Maricopa audit lists some disturbing findings. That includes 23,344 “mail-in ballots voted from a prior address;” 9,041 “more ballots returned by voter than received;” 5,295 “voters that potentially voted in multiple counties;” 2,592 “more duplicates than original ballots;” and 2,382 “in-person voters who had moved out of Maricopa County.”

Numerous other problems are listed, such as voters whose ballots were counted despite the fact that they registered to vote after the state deadline for registration had already passed.

These are serious potential problems that should be investigated by election officials with the involvement of law enforcement. For example, the individual voter files of the 5,295 “voters that potentially voted in multiple counties” should be pulled, and each voter should be investigated to determine if they have multiple registrations and, in fact, illegally cast more than one vote in the 2020 election.

In other words, all of the potential problems that the auditors found ought to be investigated to verify what actually happened in each case with each of these voters. That is the only way to determine whether there were 5,295 double votes cast in the election or whether some or none of these voters were, in fact, double registered. This claim might be found to be valid—on the other hand, an in-depth investigation might find that there is no validity to this claim or any of the other claims.

Contrary to what some seem to believe, the purpose of an audit is not to overturn an election. It is too late to do so. Every state has election laws that provide very short deadlines for a losing candidate to contest the outcome of an election. That deadline has long expired in Arizona and every other state.

Instead, audits are intended to determine whether voting machines worked properly; whether applicable state and federal laws and regulations were followed; whether the voter registration list was accurate and up-to-date and only allowed eligible individuals to vote; and whether all eligible voters were able to vote, that their vote was properly counted and that their votes were not voided or nullified by fraud, mistakes, or errors.

The results of such an election audit can then be used to correct any compliance issues, to prosecute anyone who engaged in intentional misconduct that violates state or federal election laws, to change election administration procedures that led to errors and mistakes by election officials, and to provide legislators with the information they need to make needed amendments to election laws to make sure any problems that were found do not reoccur in future elections.

What is most disturbing about the reaction to the audit report is that so many seem to think that this is the end of the review process since the hand recount showed that Biden won and, thus, nothing else needs to be done. This attitude is especially disturbing in Maricopa County election officials, who from the very start have done everything they could to obstruct the audit and who are now claiming that since their “canvass” was accurate, they don’t need to do anything else.

That attitude is wrong. The audit seems to have revealed that sloppy, careless, and chaotic procedures were utilized in Maricopa County during the last election. Officials, there have a duty to not only investigate all of the potential problems the audit found, such as potential multiple registrations by the same individual but to correct their procedures and implement better training for their election workers to ensure that such problems if confirmed, do not happen again.

Arizona law enforcement also has an obligation to investigate. Casting multiple ballots in the same election is a crime, as is registering and voting where you don’t actually reside. Failure of state election and law enforcement officials to fulfill their duties to investigate will reflect poorly on them.

Finally, opposing the conduct of election audits is unwise and unjustified. Audits are a routine occurrence in the business world for good reason. Conducting random or comprehensive audits after an election in every state should also be routine.

Contrary to the bizarre claim of election officials in Harris County, Texas, that audits are “an attack by officials on our communities’ trust in elections,” audits are a way of protecting voters, ensuring the security of the election process, and improving the confidence of the public in the integrity of elections.

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This article was published on September 30, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Covid-19 Is Not a “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated”

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On Friday, September 17, the CDC published a study that refutes the common claim that Covid-19 is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Coauthored by more than 50 MD’s and Ph.D.’s, the study contains data on the vaccine status of adults hospitalized with Covid-19 at 21 U.S. hospitals across 18 states during March to August of 2021.

Contrary to assertions from the Associated Press and Anthony Fauci that fully vaccinated people comprise only 1% of those being hospitalized or killed by C-19, the study found that 13% of patients hospitalized with C-19 had been fully vaccinated. Moreover, that 13% figure is just the tip of iceberg because the authors excluded from their study a large group of hospitalized C-19 patients, the bulk of whom were likely vaccinated.

About half of the omitted group and 27% of the C-19 patients in these hospitals were people with “immunocompromising conditions,” such as cancer, HIV, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, scleroderma, and Crohn’s disease. In the words of an FDA official and 18 other coauthors published in a medical journal, “immunocompromised individuals” were “prioritized for early immunization” and are “plausibly more likely to be offered and seek vaccination” because they are highly vulnerable to C-19.

On September 21, Just Facts asked Dr. Wesley Self, the lead author of the study, to release the data on the vaccination status of the C-19 patients with immunocompromising conditions. He has not replied.

The authors of the CDC study also excluded another 25% of all people hospitalized with C-19 because they were partially vaccinated, “received a Covid-19 vaccine other than Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, or Janssen [J&J],” or “received doses of two different Covid-19 vaccine products.”

Accounting for all of the C-19 patients in these hospitals, including those the authors excluded, a majority may have been fully or partially vaccinated against Covid.

Filling the gap left by vagueness of the CDC’s study, a precise measure of the vaccine status of people who died from the Covid-19 Delta variant is available from the United Kingdom, where the government keeps detailed healthcare records on nearly all citizens. Relevantly, the U.S. and UK have very similar C-19 death rates and had roughly equivalent vaccination rates over the period of the CDC study.

In the UK from February through August 2021, 62% of all Covid-19 Delta variant deaths were among the fully vaccinated. This amounts to a conclusive majority in a dataset with virtually every death included.

Seeing Through False Statistics

The story behind the talking point that Covid-19 is “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” is a textbook case of how false statistics are born and proliferate. Hence, it provides valuable insights about the dangers of blind trust and how to recognize deceitful rhetoric.

Late in June 2021, the Associated Press published an article titled, “Nearly All COVID Deaths in US Are Now Among Unvaccinated.” Written by Carla K. Johnson and Mike Stobbe, it was republished or cited by more than 100 media outlets and so-called fact checkers like PBS, Snopes, Bloomberg, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, FactCheck.org, Yahoo News, and WebMD.

The article claims the AP conducted an “analysis” that found only 1.1% of all C-19 hospitalizations and 0.8% of C-19 deaths in May were due to “breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people.” While using those decimal points that convey a false sense of precision, the authors slipped in this craftily worded admission: the AP calculated these rates based on “figures provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” but the CDC has not published such rates due to “limitations in the data.”

Those limitations, in the words of the AP, include the reality that “some” states are “more aggressive than others in looking for such cases.” The word “looking” is a coy way of saying that the states don’t have a comprehensive system to count these deaths, a fact that throws the entire analysis into doubt.

With a subtle nod to that reality, the AP confesses that the “data probably understates” the number of vaccinated people who died from Covid-19. Compare that softly worded disclosure to the CDC’s explicit warning that its data on breakthrough infections “relies on passive and voluntary reporting, and data might not be complete or representative.” On August 25, the CDC strengthened that language to make clear that the “data are not complete or representative.”

Put simply, the AP’s statistics are meaningless because they are based on materially incomplete data. That was evident from the outset from a close look at the AP’s methodology, and it is now undeniable given the CDC study and UK data detailed above. Again, these indicate that fully vaccinated people comprise about 50% of all Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths, not 1% as reported by the AP.

Nevertheless, Fauci appeared on the July 4th edition of NBC’s Meet the Press with Chuck Todd and parroted the AP’s bogus stat without mentioning any of its caveats. “If you look at the number of deaths,” declared Fauci, “about 99.2% of them are unvaccinated. About 0.8% are vaccinated. No vaccine is perfect. But when you talk about the avoidability of hospitalization and death, Chuck, it’s really sad and tragic that most all of these are avoidable and preventable.”

As Fauci uttered this misinformation, Todd, the political director of NBC News, never expressed a hint of skepticism. Acting like a mouthpiece instead of a journalist, Todd ended the segment by praising Fauci for “focusing” on his job and this “massive success story when it comes to vaccines and what this government-led effort did.”

Instead of correcting the AP and Fauci for misrepresenting CDC data, the director of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, amplified it. During a July 16th White House press conference with Fauci by her side, Walensky stated that “over 97 percent of people who are entering the hospital right now are unvaccinated” and that Covid-19 “is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

In turn, media outlets acted as megaphones for Fauci and Walensky without a word of critical analysis. This involved reports from the likes of ABC News, NPR, The Hill, CNN, Politico, Rolling Stone, USA Today, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, as well as three separate articles from the New York Times.

The Times later conducted its own analysis using the same ruse as the AP, reporting that fully vaccinated people were only 0.1% to 5% of Covid-19 hospitalizations across 40 states since vaccinations began. Buried near the end of the story, the Times revealed that it calculated these rates by lumping C-19 patients “with unknown vaccination status” into the “data for individuals who were not fully vaccinated.”

One week later, the Times began walking back those claims. On August 17, it alleged that reports from seven states with “the most detailed data” indicate that “breakthrough infections accounted for 12 percent to 24 percent of Covid-related hospitalizations.”

Despite those larger figures—which are still far removed from reality—the Times did not correct any of its earlier articles touting figures of 1% to 3% accompanied by quotes like this:

“The takeaway message remains, if you’re vaccinated, you are protected,” said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York. “You are not going to end up with severe disease, hospitalization or death.”

Implications

The most glaring lesson from this affair is that people entrusted to protect and inform the public are untrustworthy. Government officials with prestigious credentials and prominent media outlets repeatedly misreported the facts of this simple matter with life-or-death consequences. Thus, it is crucial to learn and apply proven methods to sort out the claims that surround important issues.

Secondly, Covid-19 still poses a considerable risk to some fully vaccinated people because a vaccine is only as good as each person’s immune system. Vaccines don’t directly attack virulent microbes in the same manner as antibiotics or anti-viral medicines. Instead, vaccines trigger people’s immune systems to react more quickly than usual and kill pathogens before they can do harm. If a person’s immune system is compromised by factors like poor general health, old age, obesity, immunosuppressing drugs, or lack of sleep, a vaccine will be less effective or ineffective.

Also, the currently available C-19 vaccines create an immune response to only one part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the “Spike” protein). This produces narrower immunity than exposure to the actual virus. In accord with this fact, a study in Israel that has not yet undergone peer review has found that the Pfizer vaccine is much less effective in protecting against the Delta variant than naturally acquired immunity.

Third, none of the above means that C-19 vaccines are ineffective. Randomized controlled trials, which are the gold standard for determining clinical efficacy, have found that the C-19 vaccines significantly reduce the odds of having a bout of severe Covid-19. The Pfizer vaccine, for example, reduced the odds of severe C-19 by 71% to 100% for people who were not immunocompromised over a period of six months. Whether or not this protection lasts and if the benefits exceed the harms will be the subjects of upcoming articles.

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This article was published on September 27, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from Just Facts Daily.

Arizona Education Advocates Submit Signatures To Erase Tax Cuts

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Arizona’s teacher union and education advocates have submitted enough signatures, if they survive scrutiny, to put a repeal of tax cuts on the 2022 election ballot.

The Arizona Education Association, along with other public education advocates, submitted more than 340,000 signatures to the Secretary of State’s office hours before Tuesday’s 5 p.m. deadline.

“Today’s filing is an effort to stop another one of the Governor’s reckless attempts to hand out money to the wealthy while disregarding the will of AZ voters or the impact on our public schools,” AEA President Joe Thomas said.

The two referendums, which were filed July 2, aim to undo Arizona’s latest income tax policy that changes the state’s progressive income tax to a flat 2.5% rate and another law that caps the total rate of income tax a filer can pay at 4.5%. This change would affect high earners who would be subject to Proposition 208.

The organizations filed 215,787 signatures to veto Senate Bill 1828, the flat tax, and 123,531 signatures to invalidate Senate Bill 1783, the 4.5% cap.

Enacted at the ballot box in 2020, Prop. 208 adds a 3.5% income tax premium on single filers and pass-through entities earning more than $250,000. If the referendum fails, a high-earning taxpayer subject to the 3.5% tax would have their state income tax lowered to offset that burden.

Proceeds of that tax would go to increasing teacher pay, teacher retention and other public education initiatives. Supporters say the tax would raise more than $1 billion in annual tax revenue.

“Parents, teachers and citizens should not have to pound the pavement year-after-year to collect signatures on petitions to fund our schools,” said Beth Lewis, founder of Save Our Schools Arizona.

Supporters of the tax cuts say the petitioners misled residents into signing.

“The teachers union and an out of state interest group hired hundreds of paid circulators to go around the state lying to Arizona voters about the tax cuts passed by the state legislature,” said Scot Mussi, president of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. “They knew that voters wouldn’t want to sign a referendum that would block a tax cut for all Arizonans, so instead they told voters that the referendum would stop education funding cuts. This was simply false and shows that their reckless liberal agenda lacks support with the voters of Arizona. ”

The Arizona Constitution allows a law passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor to be vetoed at the ballot box. For the 2022 election, a referendum requires 118,823 valid signatures to make it on the ballot. The measure would then need a simple majority of votes to cancel out the law.

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This article was published on September 28, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

Critics Pan Biden’s Claim $3.5 Trillion Spending Bill Costs ‘Zero’

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President Joe Biden is taking fire for comments he made about his $3.5 trillion legislation just as the bill faces a deeply split Congress.

Biden made headlines for claiming the bill would cost “zero dollars,” despite media reports and members of both parties commonly naming the bill’s cost at $3.5 trillion for the last several months.

“My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars,” Biden wrote on Twitter. “Instead of wasting money on tax breaks, loopholes, and tax evasion for big corporations and the wealthy, we can make a once-in-a-generation investment in working America. And it adds zero dollars to the national debt.”

The administration argues tax increases will offset the bill’s expenses, something that is very much in flux given Democrats’ hesitancy about parts of the bill, and the taxes to pay for it.

Even still, critics took issue with the claim of a zero cost, even if Biden does manage to include enough tax increases to fund the legislation.

“The $3.5 trillion in spending and tax credits combined with at least $2 trillion in tax hikes will add to the debt and have a tremendous cost to the economy and to the health of American families,” David Ditch, a budget expert at the Heritage Foundation, said. “The taxes will hit families taking home as little as $30,000 per year, violating President Biden’s promise, reduce private sector investments that create jobs and opportunities for workers, and put America at a disadvantage with our global competitors. Huge increases in welfare spending will discourage work and make families increasingly dependent on government, which is exactly the wrong approach to increasing wealth for low-income households.”

“The bottom line is that the costs are real and deserve more attention from the media,” he added.

Earlier this month, Democrats proposed raising the top tax rates for individuals to 39.6% from 37%, and for corporations to 26.5% from 21%.

Some have estimated the package will exceed $3.5 trillion costs. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated the bill could cost $5.5 trillion over 10 years.

“All government spending consumes resources taken from the private sector and thus would generally shrink private GDP,” said Chris Edwards, an economic expert at the Cato Institute. “Contrary to Biden, $3.5 trillion more government spending would likely cost the private economy not just $3.5 trillion but probably more than that. That’s because extracting every additional $1 of taxes causes about $1.50 of damage or ‘deadweight losses to the private economy. When taxes rise, individuals and businesses reduce their productive activities and private output falls.”

The overall price tag has been a key sticking point for Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, both of whom have explicitly said they cannot vote for the measure because of its $3.5 trillion cost. A less expensive plan may be able to get their vote, they said.

“These are not indications of an economy that requires trillions in additional spending,” Manchin said. “Every elected leader is chosen to make difficult decisions. Adding trillions of dollars more to nearly $29 trillion of national debt, without any consideration of the negative effects on our children and grandchildren, is one of those decisions that has become far too easy in Washington. Given the current state of the economic recovery, it is simply irresponsible to continue spending at levels more suited to respond to a Great Depression or Great Recession – not an economy that is on the verge of overheating.”

Biden’s comments drew sharp pushback from Republican lawmakers.

“Joe Biden thinks his $3.5 trillion spending bill will cost ‘zero dollars,’” U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said. “Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi doesn’t want to ‘talk about numbers and dollars.’ Why can’t they just be honest? They’re going to raise your taxes.”

Business leaders also have criticized Biden’s spending plan, saying it poses a serious threat to the nation’s economy.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a six-figure ad campaign to warn Americans and lawmakers about the legislation.

“This reconciliation bill is effectively 100 bills in one representing every big government idea that’s never been able to pass in Congress,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Suzanne Clark said. “The bill is an existential threat to America’s fragile economic recovery and future prosperity. We will not find durable or practical solutions in one massive bill that is equivalent to more than twice the combined budgets of all 50 states. The success of the bipartisan infrastructure negotiations provides a much better model for how Congress should proceed in addressing America’s problems.”

Critics also pointed to the inefficiency of the federal government, saying the money taken from the private sector is often wasted by officials.

“Some new government spending may be worth more than the private spending it displaces, but I have not seen any detailed cost-benefit analyses showing that is the case with the Democratic plans,” Edwards said. “Democrats are simply guessing that their new spending is higher value than the private spending it will displace, but there is little or no evidence of that. Besides, if there was new, high-value spending that the government could do, then it would more efficiently be handled by state governments, not the horribly mismanaged federal government.”

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This article was published on September 28, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

FBI Narrative About the Jan. 6th Capitol ‘Insurrection’ Is IMPLODING

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Editors’ Note:  It appears that the two organizations often cited by Democrats as leaders of the “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, were not only penetrated by the FBI, but their top leadership were FBI informants. The most recent attempt on September 18th to revive the “insurrection”, provoked again ringing the Capitol with a giant chain link fence and caused a media storm, came and went with hardly a peep.  It would seem the only people who showed up were law enforcement agents and their informants. The latter event, now almost comical, belies a more serious and perhaps sinister development. Federal Agencies have been involved in citizen demonstrations, penetrated the leadership of these organizations, and may have been used by the Democrats to create a false narrative for political purposes. Our law enforcement agencies should not be involved in this kind of political intrigue.  \At the same time, some 174 riots were perpetrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter that did billions of dollars in damage. Yet according to the media and Democrats, Republicans supporting Trump or protesting terrible treatment of those arrested in the January 6th farce, are threats to national security. What the heck is going on?

 

An explosive report over the weekend claims to show that two alleged Capitol riot participants were actually government informants. The New York Times reported Saturday that “records, and information from two people familiar with the matter, suggest that federal law enforcement had a far greater visibility into the assault on the Capitol, even as it was taking place, than was previously known.”

The revelations in The Times reveal that there was no conspiracy on the part of the Proud Boys to storm the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, as alleged by the Department of Justice.

It’s already known that the Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, had been an FBI informant. The Times report concentrates on yet another FBI informant in the right-leaning group who reportedly warned his handler in real-time that some bad stuff was going on at the Capitol.

Recommended: Is It Any Wonder Americans Mistrust the Intelligence Community When They Pull Stunts Like This?

Though several Proud Boys are charged with a conspiracy, this latest informant maintains that there was never any plan by the group to violently storm the Capitol and, indeed, there’s evidence to back that claim.

Indeed, the paper concludes the obvious: that “the new information is likely to complicate the government’s efforts to prove the high-profile conspiracy charges it has brought against several members of the Proud Boys.”

Huh. You don’t say?

The report, based on documents seen by reporters, also raises questions about whether FBI Director Chris Wray lied to Congress about the FBI’s lack of foreknowledge of the melee. It also begs the question of why the FBI and other police agencies failed to harden the Capitol in advance.

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Continue reading this article at PJ Media.

Leftist Groups Pushing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act

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Naming the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 4) after the Georgia congressman who died last year may evoke the 1960s Civil Rights movement, but it would federalize elections almost as effectively as the similarly misnamed For the People Act (H.R. 1), which is why so many professional activist groups are trying to push it through the Senate.

H.R. 4, which the House passed in August on partisan lines (219-212), promises to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision to end federal preclearance rules for certain, largely southern states established in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The bill ostensibly looks to restore the federal preclearance rules. The Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder pointed out that preclearance was intended to ensure state in the Jim Crow era didn’t discriminate against minorities’ voting rights by requiring certain states to preclear all redistricting plans with the U.S. Department of Justice. The requirement was meant to be temporary, and the Court held in 2013 that it was no longer applicable.

Far from reestablishing the tyranny of Jim Crow, abolishing the outdated rule allowed North Carolina and other states to implement election integrity laws and purge voter rolls of citizens who hadn’t voted in six consecutive elections and failed to confirm their residency.

Reestablishing 1960s-era preclearance rules would allow unelected federal lawyers to block changes to voter ID laws, mail-in voting, and ballot signature matching. H.R. 4 would immediately threaten dozens of state election integrity laws passed in the wake of the 2020 election.

Restricting state control over elections and the congressional redistricting process—which is enshrined in the Constitution—has been a decades-long project for the Left, culminating in the For the People Act. Little wonder that many of the top groups behind H.R. 1 are also backing H.R. 4.

The Groups Behind H.R. 4

Hundreds of left-wing groups have signed open letters urging the Congress to pass H.R. 4 representing Big Labor, Big Green, court-packing groups, get-out-the-vote groups, and litigation nonprofits, among others. The list is broken down into general blocs to chart which kinds of nonprofits are backing the legislation. See the Appendix for the full list.

Election “Reform” and Campaign Finance. Supporters include at least 30 groups focused on election “reform”—everything from replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote and warping the 2021–2022 redistricting process to court packing and gutting First Amendment rights to “save” the republic from money in politics. Major supporters include People for the American Way, the Fair Elections Center, and Demand Justice.

Get Out the Vote and Voter Registration. These nonprofits (22 to date) take advantage of IRS rules allowing nonpartisan voter registration to target youth, minorities, and unmarried women and other Democratic-leaning constituencies ahead of elections. Notables include State Voices, Mi Familia Vota, the Voter Participation Center, and Progressive Turnout Project.

Labor Unions and Labor-Aligned Groups. Unions provide a massive pool of activists for marching and holding protests outside the Capitol Building. At least 10 such groups are backing H.R. 4, most notably the National Education Association, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), A. Philip Randolph Institute, and the AFL-CIO.

Faith-Based or Secular. On the left, it’s common to see left-wing progressive religious outfits rallying alongside groups with groups like Freedom from Religion Foundation. At least 33 such groups are supporting H.R. 4, including Sojourners, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Faith in Public Life, American Atheists, and the National Council of Jewish Women.

Environmentalists. To date, 11 major environmental and climate-focused groups have endorsed H.R. 4, including Greenpeace, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

DC Statehood. Three groups support H.R. 4: DC Vote, 51 for 51, and Herd on the Hill.

LGBTQ and Feminist. A dozen left-wing advocacy groups with gender-identity target audiences have endorsed H.R. 4. Notables are the National Partnership for Women & Families, Lambda Legal, and Feminist Majority Foundation.

Litigation Groups. Reliably left-wing groups that primarily exist to file lawsuits on a broad range of issues have offered their support—at least 19, including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Think Tanks. Aligned think tanks include Center for American Progress, Demos, and Public Citizen.

Special Interests. Special interest is a broad category that captures a host of groups that push leftist policies related to income, race, age, etc. Most of the 60-odd groups are racial interest groups representing key Democratic-leaning constituencies: Color of Change, NAACP, UnidosUS, and the National Black Justice Coalition, to name a few.

General Advocacy. Few left-wing progressive groups are single-issue advocates. These groups are difficult to put in a single box, but they’re present whenever and wherever the larger Left needs them. Notables are Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Indivisible, and People’s Action.

Business. A coalition of companies have also lent their support to H.R. 4. It’s unclear who paid for it, but Business for Voting Rights is apparently run by Susan Klau, a consultant for the firm APCO Worldwide whose last job was with M&R Strategic Services. M&R caters to left-wing groups such as the Sierra Club and PETA and was founded by Donald Ross, an activist from Ralph Nader’s inner circle. Members include Amazon, Dropbox, Dell, Hershey, Facebook, Google, Intel, IKEA, Levi Strauss, Lyft, Microsoft, PayPal, Square, Salesforce, Starbucks, Target, Tesla, Zillow, and Zoom.

The Future of H.R. 4

In June, For the People Act failed 50-50 on party lines in the Senate, well short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. As it stands, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act looks ready to fall on the same horns as its predecessor. But that could change if Democrats obtained enough votes to end the filibuster. Traditionally, such a rule change requires two-thirds of the chamber, but with some finagling a simple majority could rewrite Senate rules to allow legislation to pass with 51 votes (the so-called nuclear option).

Some on the left believe that Senate Democrats will use their thin majority (including the vice president) to effectively gut the filibuster. What’s clear is that the future of the country’s elections increasingly hangs on the swing votes—and pro-filibuster pledges—of Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ).

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This article was published on September 24, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from Capital Research Center.

It is Enough Time; Biden Presidency is a Disaster

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We were told if we dumped the existing President and elected his opponent life would return to normalcy. The opponent was an experienced foreign policy person, and he would be a salve for the wounds of our angry allies. He would bring our domestic situation back to normal. This was all told to us by his friends in the MSM and his allies like Nancy, Chuck and Kammy, because he was holed up in his Delaware bunker emerging to utter a statement and slink back into darkness. Now we are paying the price for buying the proverbial “pig in a poke.” President Biden is a disaster of immense proportions.

Start with the utterly unbelievable realization that France — our oldest ally in the world and still a significant country in today’s world — withdrew their U.S. ambassador in protest of the Biden government’s actions. As pathetic as you may have thought the last President, he never had such a diplomatic failing. In fact, I cannot remember such a failing during my lifetime. How bad a screwup one must be to have France withdraw their ambassador to our country. And over something that could have easily been managed in a definitively better manner.

The disastrous and self-inflicted wound of the Afghanistan withdrawal shows Biden’s crippling incompetence. Not only was this a military blunder, but it was also a diplomatic disaster antagonizing our NATO allies. Then Biden has the unmitigated gall to tell America the entire matter was a success in a speech to the country. In Biden fashion he walked out without answering any questions after making that stupefying statement. 

Biden applauded the drone strike that supposedly killed the Kabul airport bomber and kept that lie going for three weeks. He had a military man quietly go out on a Friday afternoon (after Biden and the press had left for the weekend) and tell America all the reprisal did was kill ten Afghans– mostly children and no terrorists. Another disaster.

The world waited 25 years to see the Arab world’s expanding acceptance of Israel on the road to permanent peace and what does Biden do? He dumps it. His predecessor worked with Israel to establish the Abraham Accords and have full recognition of Israel by Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Other countries such as Morocco, Oman and Saudi Arabia were in line to be added. What did Biden do? He went begging to the pariah, Iran, to negotiate the return of the disastrous Iran Nuclear Deal while the Iranians have now rejected further negotiations. How pathetic can we be?

We have become accustomed to Biden being unavailable to our press for questions. We traded in a President who took question after question at every opportunity for a President who answers one question a week and virtually never has a press conference. Wake up Washington Post: Democracy Dies in Darkness, and you fools are too busy being blind idealogues to call Biden on it. 

“In her first interview since becoming first lady, Jill Biden, said it hurts her when Biden gets attacked — but she’s not giving up on their campaign dreams of unity, bipartisanship and saving the nation’s soul.”  She may not be giving that up, but he certainly seems to have given that up his first week in office. His 30 or so executive orders on Day One defined his true intentions. He has been as partisan a President as we have ever had, telling Republicans either get in line with what we Democrats (Leftists) want to do or we will move without you. 

Biden is even creating new crises or bringing back older ones. We have not had a problem with inflation in decades, but Joe “Jimmy Carter” Biden has brought back serious concerns about inflation. While he is handing out bundles of government money, his policies are undercutting the worth of those handouts along with the earnings of the people still working. No doubt that some of the inflation has been caused by COVID-generated bottlenecks. But there is every sign the Biden-created inflation is not transitory and will get worse if the trillions of dollars in spending packages get through Congress and he signs these debacles.

Then there is the granddaddy of domestic disasters – the border crisis. Secretary Mayorkas says there is no crisis. He says the border is closed. Surrogate President Psaki told us for months that the rush to the border was seasonal. It is seasonal indeed:  spring, summer and fall. It a crisis for all seasons. Illegal immigrants numbering 1.2 million have entered our country this year and none have been vaccinated for COVID. This is all Joe Biden’s doing — or should we say the “undoing” — of the splendid work his predecessor did on this issue. 

Matters have gotten so bad that even Trump haters like Chuck Todd have finally caved and become legitimate members of the press again. Todd on a recent broadcast made the following statements about Biden:

“I think he’s got a pretty big credibility crisis on his hands. Because all of these problems, in some ways, showed up after he said something basically the exact opposite.” 

“Afghanistan withdrawal wasn’t going to be messy. This wasn’t going to look like Saigon,” Todd continued. “The booster shots, he came out and essentially said eight months, and even indicated maybe we should start it as soon as five months. Now, we’re not sure if anybody under 65 is going to get a booster shot.” (The FDA advised against booster shots for people under 65 years old).

“And of course, the border— we can talk about the border problems and say they’re years in the making, but it’s pretty clear we have a bigger problem now than we’ve had in years,” Todd said. “These policies have turned into becoming a magnet.”

Translation into plain English – Biden is a disaster. 

We could go on and on. The 3.5 trillion (really $5 trillion) waste of money bill. That Joe, the moderate, has become Joe, the Leftist in his policy governing.  Joe’s solution to everything is hand out our money to cover every situation in the world.  That is what happens when you elect someone who has been on the government dole for 50 years.  It is clear we were lied to in the campaign and have been purposely deceived since that time. His foreign policy instincts are horrific, and his domestic policies are either dictatorial or Leftist.

*****

This article was published in FlashReport on September 26, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from the author.

Biden’s Wrecking Ball for Financial Privacy

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The Biden administration is seeking to compel banks to report to the IRS any bank account with more than $600 in transactions per year. This proposal is a linchpin of Biden’s American Families Plan, and will supposedly help generate almost $500 billion in federal revenue over the next decade. But previous catch-all financial reporting requirements have helped spur national disasters, complete with pervasive federal looting.

Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) denounced the Biden proposal as a “surveillance dragnet,” a “huge violation of privacy,” and “an egregious abuse of Americans’ right to due process by inferring that all U.S. taxpayers are guilty of evading taxes until proven otherwise.” Paul Merski of the Independent Community Bankers of America warns that the Biden proposal would be “be a historic invasion of financial privacy like we’ve never seen before.” Merski also declared, “The IRS is absolutely incapable of handling or processing this massive amount of new data, and they would admit as much — that’s why they’re asking for an additional $80 billion in this budget.”

Actually, federal money cops have long been overwhelmed by too many reports from banks. Prior federal reporting requirements buried bureaucrats in useless reports and became a de facto Terrorist Hijacker Empowerment Act . The 9/11 attacks were preceded by the biggest failure ever by U.S. financial authorities.

The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 made it a federal crime for banks to keep secrets from the government. This law obliged banks and other financial institutions to submit a currency transaction report (CTR) to the federal government for each cash transaction involving more than $10,000. The feds harvested 17 million CTRs in 2000; federal agencies were flooded with tons of paper that bureaucrats often never bothered to examine. Beginning in 1996, banks were also obliged to file a Suspicious Activity Report on any transaction that “has no business or apparent lawful purpose or is not the sort in which the particular customer would normally be expected to engage.” The feds were soon receiving two hundred thousand suspicious activity reports per year. Greg Nojeim of the American Civil Liberties Union observed, “Congress barred financial institutions from telling their customers that their bank had spied on them by reporting their transactions to the federal government.”

That deluge of reports provided a smokescreen for the 9/11 plotters. A 2002 United Nations report on terrorist financing noted that a “suspicious transaction report” had been filed with the U.S. government over a $69,985 wire transfer that Mohamed Atta, leader of the hijackers, received from the United Arab Emirates. However, the report noted, “this particular transaction was not noticed quickly enough, because the report was just one of a very large number and was not distinguishable from those related to other financial crimes.” Atta was on a terrorist watch list, but the avalanche of other reports the feds received targeting home buyers, boat buyers, and other innocuous transactions provided sufficient cover for the attack to proceed.

Rather than recognize how pointless reporting requirements swamped federal watchdogs, Congress responded to 9/11 by vastly expanding federal financial vacuum cleaners. On October 17, 2001, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) was the only member of the House to oppose the International Money Laundering Abatement and Antiterrorist Financing Act of 2001, which became Title III of the Patriot Act. Paul warned that the bill “has more to do with the ongoing war against financial privacy than with the war against international terrorism” and derided it as “a laundry list of dangerous, unconstitutional power grabs…. These measures will actually distract from the battle against terrorism by encouraging law-enforcement authorities to waste time snooping through the financial records of innocent Americans who simply happen to demonstrate an ‘unusual’ pattern in their financial dealings.”

Paul’s warnings were prescient. The Patriot Act turbocharged reporting requirements, and the feds are now receiving two million “Suspicious Activity Reports” a year. It would be worse than naïve to assume that all the reports that banks send to Washington will sit passively in federal databases.

Financial reporting requirements helped spur one of the most disgraceful federal looting sprees in modern times. The IRS has exploited the technicalities of the Bank Secrecy Act – which requires banks to report any transaction over $10,000 – to preemptively confiscate the bank accounts of innocent Americans. The IRS “enforced” the Bank Secrecy Act by presuming that anyone who deposited slightly less than $10,000 was a criminal. The IRS seized a quarter billion dollars because it disapproved of how businesses and individuals structured their bank deposits and withdrawals. IRS bureaucrats don’t even need to file a criminal charge before snaring citizens’ life savings.

Between 2005 and 2012, the number of IRS seizures for Bank Secrecy Act violations rose more than fivefold, but the vast majority of victims were never criminally prosecuted for structuring offenses. “One-third of those cases involved nothing more than making a series of sub-$10,000 cash transactions,” the Institute for Justice reported. A 2017 Inspector General report found no evidence in 91% of the forfeiture cases that the money came from illegal activities. The IRS chose to seize first, and ask questions later – if at all. IRS investigators simply looked at banking records and then confiscated the accounts of hundreds of people.

Most of the victims were “legal businesses such as jewelry stores, restaurant owners, gas station owners, scrap metal dealers, and others.” The IRS targeted businesses with legal sources of income because “the Department of Justice had encouraged task forces to engage in ‘quick hits,’ where property was more quickly seized… rather than pursuing cases with other criminal activity (such as drug trafficking and money laundering), which are more time-consuming,” the Inspector General reported.

Would the IRS behave as atrociously with a new $600 reporting requirement as it has in the past with the $10,000 reporting requirement in the Bank Secrecy Act? In U.S. Tax Court, IRS determinations of what citizens owe are “presumed correct,” with taxpayers bearing the burden to prove the feds wrong. Corporations with well-fed legal departments routinely defeat the IRS in court but few citizens can afford to fight a federal agency that appears to hold all the cards. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen declared, “Any suggestion that instead this reporting regime will be used to target enforcement efforts on ordinary Americans is wholly misguided.” Then why do the feds want the data on almost anyone with a bank account?

Biden’s new reporting requirement could be the Bitcoin Relief Act of 2021. Forty banking and financial associations sent a letter to Congress on September 17 warning that the Biden proposal “would create tremendous liability for all affected parties by requiring the collection of financial information for nearly every American without proper explanation of how the IRS will store, protect, and use this enormous trove of personal financial information.” American Banking Association president Rob Nichols warns that requiring “banks to police and report on the accounts of customers…will undermine trust in the banking system and erode the progress we have made reducing the number of unbanked and underbanked in the country.”

The Internal Revenue Service has perennially been the authoritarian means to paternalistic ends. The Washington Post reported that “the single biggest source of new revenue in the [Biden] plan comes from dramatically expanding the clout of the nation’s tax agency.” Biden relishes condemning tax-dodging billionaires but that $600 reporting requirement is a signal that IRS purgatory could soon be crowded with average Americans.

*****

This article was published on September 22, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from the AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

Phoenix To Use Federal Funding for Universal Basic Income Pilot

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One thousand lucky Phoenix families will get $1,000 in taxpayer funding a month in 2022.

The Phoenix City Council has approved $12 million for a “Financial Assistance for Phoenix Families Program,” a lottery-based form of universal basic income that will begin in January 2022 if not sooner.

The program, which has yet to be finalized, will send approximately 1,000 families a monthly stipend of $1,000 for all of 2022. According to a city document, the funds would be limited toward “basic household necessities” such as housing, childcare, food and other staples.

The city would load money onto a debit card that wouldn’t allow the purchase of a list of forbidden items like alcohol and tobacco.

All low-income families making up to 80% of the area median income – a sliding scale that would be just over $63,000 for a family of four – would be eligible. A representative of the city said in the Tuesday session that anyone on public assistance, in public housing, or receiving public housing vouchers would qualify.

“We’ve seen a lot of cities across the country doing this direct assistance and I’m glad that we’ll be joining them in giving money to folks,” Vice Mayor Carlos Garcia said. “It’s not just for rent or utilities, but if they do have child care needs, if they do have to get medicine, whatever it is, I think people know best what their needs are.”

The program is paid for by the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The city received $196 million this year and will receive another $196 million next year.

City documents say staff would recommend continuing this program with the second payout of ARPA funds in 2023.

Council members Jim Waring and Sal DiCiccio voted against the measure.

Phoenix joins a handful of other cities to test out the premise of universal basic income. California’s most recent budget includes $35 million to pay for a similar program. The cities of Los Angeles, Compton and Richmond, Virginia, have approved similar programs.

The city of Chicago is considering a similar program.

*****

This article was published on September 23, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

Essential Marxist Reading for Liberals and Conservatives

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A review and overview of The Cult of Smart, by Fredrik deBoer, All Points Books, 276 pages.

Fredrik deBoer is the author of The Cult of Smart, a book that unwittingly explains the sharp left turn of the Democrat Party and a growing number of young Americans. It also shows why the widening chasm between the far left and liberals and conservatives will never be bridged.

For those reasons alone, it’s a very important book and should be read by traditional Democrats and Republicans, although a root canal would be less painful. If the book had been published when I was younger, I could’ve learned about Marxist thinking without having to labor through Das Kapital.

At the leading edge of the millennial generation, Mr. deBoer is an avowed Marxist, a professor with a PhD from Purdue, a former high school substitute teacher, a contributor to the New York Times and other mainstream liberal publications, a descendant of “red diaper babies” (his words), and an admirer of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels. Also, like so many ideologues in history, he is the product of an apparent unhappy childhood, stemming from his mother dying when he was a child and his father dying when he was fifteen, after a life of alcoholism and depression.

The author lambastes both liberals and conservatives for believing in meritocracy and in the power of education to significantly reduce inequality. Liberals will no doubt applaud his rebuke of conservative values, and conservatives will applaud his rebuke of liberal values; but they should be aware that he wants to put a ticking time bomb of social revolution under the backsides of both of them.

Mr. deBoer goes so far as to write:

That education is the great economic leveler stands as one of the ubiquitous nostrums in contemporary politics. Barack Obama, the pope of modern American progressivism, repeated the trope endlessly, insisting that the American dream could only be secured through an invigorated education sector.

. . . we should reject the idea of education as an anti-poverty tool for being wrong on its face. Because education is not a weapon against inequality; it is an engine of inequality. Far from making society more equal, our education system deepens inequality, sorting winners from losers and ensuring even greater financial rewards for the former. Nowhere is this dynamic more prevalent than in college.

A major premise of The Cult of Smart is that intelligence is hereditary and inherited to the same degree across all races. Genes help to explain why some people excel in school and in abstract thinking and some people don’t. Of course, such factors as parental influence and socioeconomic class come into play in how someone does in life, but, according to deBoer, inherited intelligence accounts for about half of success, especially in this era of knowledge work, where those with lower IQ are being left behind in increasing numbers.

The author understands the danger of the premise being misunderstood and how it can lead to racism and had led to the eugenics movement of the first half of the twentieth century, a movement that he admits was led by progressives. He makes clear that inherited intelligence, or a lack thereof, does not vary by race.

According to deBoer, it follows from the premise that additional spending on education is mostly a waste of money, because more money cannot overcome a lack of inherited intelligence, and because more money is not needed for gifted students with inherited high intelligence who are going to succeed regardless of spending levels. This goes against the liberal belief in more education spending and the conservative belief that everyone can succeed through hard work, no matter their personal circumstance.

Taken to an extreme, the idea of inherited intelligence can also go against the foundations of Western moral philosophy, namely Judeo-Christian beliefs about right and wrong, sinning and redemption, and crime and punishment. The idea calls into question how much free will and agency humans really have when all of the factors of nature and nurture are considered. This is not a new philosophical question, but it is complicated by new science, especially cherry-picked science.

It’s undeniable that humans don’t reach adulthood with a blank slate. On the nurture side, behavioral choices and learning are strongly influenced by the circumstances of childhood—by parenting, neighborhood mores, environmental factors, and socioeconomic class. On the nature side, as science is revealing but has a long way to go, behavior and learning are influenced by hormones, other bodily chemicals, and the condition of the parts of the brain that control impulses.

Take a kid who has two Nobel Prize-winning parents, who have an innate ability to concentrate and control impulses, and who lives in a house full of books in a neighborhood of college graduates. Certainly, that kid has a wider range of good choices than a kid who has a single parent on drugs, who has an innate difficulty in concentrating and controlling impulses, and who lives in a household with no books but a lot of TV, in a neighborhood of drug dealers and crime.

To that point, some behavior is so self-defeating that it’s hard to imagine that it’s the result of rationality and thoughtful consideration of the consequences.

This commentary isn’t the place to debate such deep questions of moral philosophy, but a debate is needed elsewhere in order to develop a counterargument to Marxists like deBoer, one that is geared to the way that young people obtain and process information.

To continue with the book:

Mr. deBoer is merciless in his criticism of liberals who feign concern for the poor and social justice but engage in selective breeding and do whatever they can to get their kids into the best k-12 schools and into elite universities, so that their ticket is punched for the rest of their life—and, as deBoer’s Marxist thinking goes, at the expense of the less fortunate. He questions whether the education is any better at elite schools and posits that the schools are key members of the “Cult of the Smart,” where credentialing takes precedence over other considerations and leads to self-reinforcing and self-replicating elitism.

Naturally, being an academic, he buys into the progressive zeitgeist about white privilege, about the goodness of wokeness, and about America being racist, sexist, and classist. At the same time, he lambastes his “fellow leftists” (as he calls them) for their phony virtue-signaling. He writes that if they were “simply a new kind of nouveau riche with culturally liberal politics, they would probably be harmless, if somewhat obnoxious. But there’s a far larger problem: simply by living upper-middle-class lives, these woke go-getters perpetuate inequality.”

To those who have attended elite colleges, he says:

Privilege theory, intersectionality, cultural studies—each has value and important insights to impart, but more important for your lived experience is their signaling value. Peppering your speech with abstruse academic vocabulary these fields have developed demonstrates to your social peers that you believe in the right things, that you are politically enlightened, that you are woke. And to be woke has come, in the past decade, to confer considerable professional benefits.

He goes on to cite the inconvenient truth that locales with a high number of such people have the most income inequality.

Continuing the skewering, he says that “it’s essential to bear this thought in mind: many of those who are ostensibly part of a political movement to change our society are the ones who most benefit from the status quo and who hold back others simply through living the lives they do.” Then he administers the coup de grace: “I am persistently pessimistic when it comes to progressive social change.”

He also dislikes the wealthy, as evidenced by this bloodcurdling statement: “Certainly, if I had the power, I’d ensure that the very wealthy didn’t exist.”

As with Marxists of yesteryear, deBoer has antipathy for the upper middle class, or what the Bolsheviks characterized as the petite bourgeoisie. I would add that many of today’s leftists in academe, politics and the media extend that antipathy downward to the middle class, especially the members of the middle class who have “white” values about work and marriage. However, as with deBoer, they’re largely silent about Asians having the same white values and being at the top in income in America, with a median household income of $94,903, versus $74,912 for non-Hispanic whites.

Likewise, deBoer says nothing about the realities of Marxism and one-party authoritarian government in general. Left unmentioned are the purges, gulags, mass starvations, privileges for top party cadres and their families, and, as can be seen in China today, discrimination against minorities, women, and what the party has called “sissy boys.”

Mr. deBoer even buys into the old Marxist trope that a worker paradise could be built upon the existing industrial foundation of capitalism, leading to a second phase of communism in which workers would be self-actualized and not have to toil in jobs they didn’t like. The second phase has never been realized, however. Drudgery, bad management, immovable bureaucracy, and an out-of-touch hierarchy are just as alienating, if not more so, under communism than under capitalism.

To his credit, deBoer is honest about pre-kindergarten and after-school programs being ineffectual in the long run in improving academic results. Yet he supports these programs for reasons of social welfare and because they can be a stepping stone to the kind of society he envisions.

Surprisingly, he has an objection to a universal basic income. To wit: “It has the same problem that liberal social programs almost always do: it does nothing to strengthen the hand of the poor and working-class relative to the rich, to the bosses, and to political leaders.”

Not surprisingly, he supports nationalized medical care and free college. But the latter seems to contradict his belief that college doesn’t benefit those without the intelligence to succeed in college.

He also disdains charter schools, repeats the popular canard that public school teachers are underpaid for their abilities and hard work, and claims that teachers are unfairly blamed for not being able to improve the test results of students who don’t have the intelligence to do well. He says nothing about how Norway dramatically improved its test results by making a degree in education one of the toughest degrees to obtain and raising the pay of those teachers who met the higher standards.

Speaking of standards, deBoer wants to eliminate one-size-fits-all state testing standards and curricula for public schools, a point that I agree with in concept as long as it results in furthering the education of the less gifted students who need a curriculum tailored to their intellectual capacity, and as long as it doesn’t crimp the education of the more gifted students. Easier said than done, however, given the difficulties in determining a student’s IQ and potential, as well as the political challenge of telling parents that their child doesn’t have what it takes to succeed in college.

All of the foregoing is but a prelude to what deBoer really believes and wants. He really believes that equal opportunity will never be achieved, even if all differences in individual circumstances were to be eliminated. As such, what he really wants is for the existing political and economic order to be replaced with the Marxist idea of “from each according to his ability and to each according to his need,” so that equal outcomes are achieved. He doesn’t say how that would be achieved and who would decide, but he no doubt sees ideologues like himself in charge.

Make no mistake: I, too, want to eliminate poverty and think that it’s unacceptable for a rich country like the U.S. to have widespread urban slums and rural poverty; to have high crime, broken families, and drug addiction in those places; and to have large numbers of homeless people living and dying on city streets like animals. This is particularly unacceptable in light of the trillions of dollars we have spent on foreign wars.

On the other hand, the last thing I want is for people of deBoer’s ideology to be in charge. Unfortunately, that’s what a growing number of Americans seem to want, especially younger Americans taught by the likes of deBoer.

Democrats’ $3.5 Trillion Socialist Dream Is Tax-and-Spend Nightmare

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans a vote soon to push Sen. Bernie Sanders’ $3.5 trillion socialist dream budget one step closer to law

The news gets worse from there. Every other detail about this onerous legislation merits scorn, revulsion, and rejection.

The so-called Build Back Better budget resolution boasts a $3.5 trillion price tag. Taxpayers should be so lucky.

That figure assumes that several key initiatives, including the child tax credit, will expire in three to five years. Since government programs are virtually immortal, this is not wishful thinking. It’s pure fantasy.

Reasonably assuming that these programs grind on for 10 years swells the budget’s true price to $5.5 trillion. Add the Senate’s $1 trillion “infrastructure” bill, which most House Democrats hope to append, and Sanders’ budget hits $6.5 trillion.

Next, blend in $400 billion for interest payments on the exploding national debt. That pushes the “$3.5 trillion” package’s real cost to $6.9 trillion—nearly double its advertised price.

“Bernie’s budget is all about inserting the federal government into the daily lives of all Americans and spending as much money as possible while doing so,” warned Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., the ranking member of the House Budget Committee.

Democrats plan to underwrite this bachelor-party-like extravaganza by borrowing from the Chinese Communist Party and by hiking levies on America’s beleaguered taxpayers. Sanders’ budget constitutes the biggest tax increase since 1968—before man walked on the moon.

The Club for Growth Foundation counts $3.6 trillion in new taxes in this measure. Among them:

  • Higher revenues from growing the size and reach of the IRS: $266 billion.
  • A boost in long-term, combined capital gains taxes from 29% to 48.4%: $322 billion. (If the bill is enacted, investors seeking lower capital-gains taxes could find them in communist China.)
  • New IRS spying and subsequent taxes on transactions in bank accounts with balances of $600 or more: $463 billion.
  • A new global minimum tax on U.S. companies operating overseas: $534 billion.
  • A more-than-25% hike in the corporate tax, from 21% to 26.5%: $858 billion.

Add state levies on such enterprises, and U.S. companies would strain beneath the developed world’s highest tax burden. That’s dreadful for American businesses, jobs, and growth, and a boon to this country’s economic rivals.

Beyond spending and taxes, the Sanders budget would bludgeon the Land of the Free into a socialist “workers’ paradise.”

Among its far left social-engineering schemes:

  • An annual methane-emissions tax would cost dairy farmers an extra $6,504 per cow.
  • Tax credits for university “environmental justice programs”: $1 billion.
  • A $1,500 tax credit on electric bicycles that cost up to $8,000: $7.4 billion.
  • A $1,200 tax credit for “green” doors, windows, and skylights: $15 billion.
  • Individuals with incomes up to $200,000 could collect $82,000 in federal housing down-payment subsidies.
  • “Free” college: $50 billion
  • “The Democrat bill also shovels $3.5 billion of your money so D.C. bureaucrats can create something called the ‘Civilian Climate Corps’—a make-work program for young climate activists,” Americans for Tax Reform founder Grover Norquist said. “Perhaps they’ll knock on your door with a clipboard and tell you to put on a sweater instead of heating your home adequately.”

These taxpayer-funded eco-busybodies also would be unionized. And, of course, their union dutifully would kick back a chunk of their members’ mandatory dues into the Democratic Party’s campaign coffers.

“In the face of mounting inflation and economic instability, a rational Congress would enact pro-growth tax and spending reforms that pave the way to a smoother recovery,” Andrew Moylan, the National Taxpayers Union’s executive director said, adding, “Instead, current leaders are marching full speed ahead with the most sweeping expansion in the size and scope of government in decades. It’s like throwing a drowning child an anvil instead of a life preserver.”

*****

This article was published September 26, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

4 Ways to Understand Democrats’ $3.5 Trillion Spending Bill

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House Democrats have unveiled pieces of the $3.5 trillion spending bill over the past several weeks.

Most legislation focuses on specific issues, which makes it possible to have constructive debate. However, this bill covers welfare, immigration, taxes, energy, families, and much more, making it extremely difficult to comprehend.

Providing context on this tax-and-spend bill’s size and cost helps bring into focus just how radical it is, and why some Democrats are now pushing back against it.

1. $27,000 Cost Per Household
The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 data shows that there are 128.5 million households in the United States. If we divide the cost of the $3.5 trillion package across each household, the numbers are substantial in relation to a typical family budget.

This legislation would cost over $27,000 for every household in America. That’s more than the cost of a brand new Toyota RAV4 sport utility vehicle, or five years of groceries for a typical family, or 13 years of clothing purchases and tailoring for an average household.

The left tries to deflect from the exorbitant cost by pointing to tax increases focused on high-income households and businesses. Yet that fundamentally misunderstands how the economy works.

When the government increases taxes on investment, there is less incentive to start or expand a business, which is the source of the job creation and wage growth that all workers depend on.

In addition, the tax hikes in the massive spending bill would place American businesses at a severe disadvantage with our global competitors. Over time, high taxes mean lower wages, higher prices, and weak returns for individual retirement accounts.

In contrast, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (which would be gutted by the tax hikes) helped drive strong wage growth and low unemployment before the pandemic.

While we don’t yet know exactly how much the new legislation would add to the national debt, it would likely be somewhere between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. That burden would be layered on top of $28.4 trillion in existing debt, which amounts to $219,000 for every household in the country.

Adding recklessly to the debt would increase risks to the health of the economy and add to the immoral and unsustainable burden being handed down to future generations.

2. A 111-Year Spending Spree
Stores will occasionally have a contest where the winner gets to buy as much as he or she can over the course of a few minutes. Even under those circumstances, in most stores it would be impossible to grab $1,000 of goods per second.

The $3.5 trillion spending bill equates to spending $1,000 per second for 111 years straight.

Yet the spending would be crammed into just a decade, meaning that the legislation would enable a spending spree of over $11,000 per second for those 10 years.

What would Congress buy with all that money? An army of taxpayer-funded climate activists, new welfare programs that would disincentive work, corporate welfare for politically favored sectors like journalism and “green” energy, and an increased risk of 1970s-style inflation.

That’s not a good deal for the American public.

3. Far More Expensive Than Major Programs
The $3.5 trillion spending bill is enormous even when compared to other major pieces of legislation and long-term federal programs.

The inflation-adjusted cost of the interstate highway system through its completion in 1992 was $543 billion. The cost of veterans’ benefits from 1962 through 2020 was $2.9 trillion.

Amazingly, both decades-long federal efforts cost less than the $3.5 trillion spending bill.

A more recent example: The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, which was the key federal response to the COVID-19 outbreak, cost $1.9 trillion.

The initial 10-year cost of Obamacare was $1.1 trillion in today’s dollars. The cost of those two enormous bills falls well short of the current package.

4. Over 2,400 Pages of Jargon, Legalese

Although final legislative text is still in flux, what has been released by House committees weighs in at over 2,400 pages—and there will likely be some additions before it’s said and done.

Moderate Democrats have made a modest request: that they have at least 72 hours to review the bill before a vote on the House floor. Yet that would be nowhere near enough time to ensure that the final product doesn’t include big mistakes or hidden handouts.

Reading legislative text isn’t like reading a novel. Rather, legislation is a dense soup of legalese and references to existing federal laws that takes serious time to consider.

At a pace of five minutes per page, someone would need 202 hours straight—not 72 hours—to properly read such a mammoth piece of legislation.

This legislation is simply too long, too expensive, and would do too much damage to the economy to properly justify it.

Rather than rushing to centralize power and control in Washington, D.C., through a series of tax hikes and new entitlement programs, Congress should take a different approach: restraining spending, maintaining a pro-growth tax code, and reforming existing benefit programs to make them financially sustainable.

This would pave the way for a post-pandemic economic boom that would benefit all Americans.

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This article was published on September 23, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Eliminating Crude Oil Is Like Jumping Out Of A Plane Without A Chute

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The world and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are proposing banishment of fossil fuels and are focused on reducing emissions from fossil fuels at any costs, but a safety net of having a viable replacement should be in place before we jump off that cliff.

Banning oil imports, fracking, and ceasing oil production to focus on the symbolic renewable energy as the fossil fuels replacement is fooling ourselves as that “clean energy” is only electricity generated from breezes and sunshine.

Before the healthy and wealthy countries abandon all crude oil fracking and exploration that will eliminate the supply chain to refineries and put an end to that manufacturing sector, we should have a safety net to live without the crude oil fuels and derivatives that are manufactured from that energy source. Without any clones to access everything we get from crude oil; the termination of its use could be the greatest threat to civilization.

The more than 6,000 products including asphalt roofing, asphalt roads, fertilizers, and all the products in hospitals that come from the derivatives manufactured from crude oil are more important than the various fuels to the world to operate planes, trucks, militaries, construction equipment, merchant ships, cruise ships, and automobiles.

Electricity alone can recharge your iPhones and EV batteries, but wind turbines and solar panels cannot manufacture the derivatives that are needed to make the parts of those iPhones and Tesla’s and the components in solar panels, wind turbines, and automobiles.

Reliance on intermittent electricity from breezes and sunshine is unfathomable as electricity by itself is unable to support the prolific growth rates of the military, airlines, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, trucking infrastructures, and the medical industry that is already about 90 percent dependent for the products from petroleum, to meet the demands of the exploding world population.

Only healthy and wealthy countries like the USA, Germany, Australia, and the UK can subsidize electricity generation from breezes and sunshine, and then, its only intermittent electricity at best. The 80 percent of the 8 billion on earth living on less than $10 a day cannot subsidize themselves out of a paper bag.

Those poorer countries must rely on affordable and abundant coal for reliable electricity, while residents in the healthy and wealthier countries pay dearly for those subsidies with some of the highest costs for electricity in the world.

Before the healthier and wealthier countries cease all oil production, they need to focus on an answer to what safety parachute exists to replace what we get from crude oil.

  • Before the 1900’s we had NONE of the 6,000 products from oil and petroleum products. By ceasing oil production and fracking, the supply chain to refineries will be severed and there will no need for those manufacturing refineries.
  • Without refineries we would be terminating the manufacturing of the derivatives that make the thousands of products used in our daily lives and terminating the manufacturing of the various fuels for transportation infrastructures and the military.
  • Without crude oil, the world would be in desperate need for “clones” to those oil derivatives that provide the thousands of products from petroleum that are essential to our medical industry, electronics, communications, transportation infrastructure, our electricity generation, our cooling, heating, manufacturing, and agriculture—indeed, virtually every aspect of our daily lives and lifestyles.
  • The world has had more than 100 years to develop clones or generics to replace the crude oil derivatives. Without replacements for those derivatives manufactured from crude oil, there will be gigantic reductions in living standards of the population in the so-called industrial countries, and any attempt to develop the colonial countries would come to a dead stop.
  • The “green” preachers have yet to promote the need for clones to the oil derivatives that are the basis of billionaire’s lifestyles and worldwide economies.
  • Wind turbines and solar panels are not only incapable of manufacturing any such derivatives, but the manufacturing of the components for wind and solar are themselves 100 percent dependent on the derivatives made from crude oil, the same crude oil that the world wants to eliminate from our economies.

Energy is more than electricity from breezes and sunshine. Electricity by itself cannot provide the thousands of products from petroleum that are essential to our medical industry, transportation infrastructure, our electricity generation, our cooling, heating, manufacturing, and agriculture—indeed, virtually every aspect of our daily lives and lifestyles. Nor can electricity alone, support the military, airlines, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, and trucking infrastructures.

The greatest threat to civilization would be from the elimination of crude oil as that commodity is manufactured into the oil derivatives and transportation fuels that can bring the poor out of poverty and are the reasons, we have healthy and wealthy developed countries. Going cold turkey to electricity from breezes and sunshine is not the wisest move without a safety net to rely upon that can support worldwide lifestyles and economies as we now know it.

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This article was published on September 22, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

American Investors Are At Risk If Congress Continues To Give Fraudulent Chinese Companies A Pass

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Beijing’s refusal to comply with U.S. law while continuing to access our capital markets has subjected U.S. investors to the risk of enormous financial losses.

Concern this week about the possible collapse of China’s Evergrande, which has a massive debt burden of $305 billion, highlights one more reason Congress needs to act to protect U.S. investors from Chinese companies.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 mandates the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) inspect audit paperwork of all companies that issue securities in the U.S. The goal is to “protect investors and further the public interest in the preparation of informative, accurate, and independent audit reports.” More than 50 foreign jurisdictions comply with this U.S. law. But in the name of national security concerns, the Chinese government has prevented both domestic and foreign auditors of Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges from submitting audit reports to PCAOB and the SEC for inspection.

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler issued a warning to Chinese companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges recently: comply with our audit rules or be delisted. But Gensler’s threat came with a caveat: Chinese companies will have a three-year grace period before they may have to face any consequences. Given all the known risks of investing in Chinese companies, Kyle Bass, Hayman Capital founder and a vocal critic of China, said the SEC’s delayed enforcement would allow Chinese companies to have an “open season on U.S. investors” for three more years.

For decades, Chinese companies have successfully tapped into the U.S. capital market and U.S. investors have helped fund China’s astonishing economic growth. As of May 2021, there are 248 Chinese companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, with a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion.

Past Fraud at Chinese Companies Listed on U.S. Stock Exchanges 

U.S. regulators have good reasons to be concerned about investors’ risk exposure because corporate fraud in China is a well-known epidemic. In 2018, auditors in China declined to endorse 219 annual reports prepared by Chinese companies because the auditors either found problems with these companies’ financial statements or had expressed concern about the companies’ likelihood of survival.

Last year, Luckin Coffee, a Chinese startup that went public on NASDAQ in May 2019, disclosed that several of its employees, including its chief operating officer, had fabricated the majority of the company’s 2019 sales. Two months later, NASDAQ delisted Luckin stock. At the time, Luckin’s share price was only $1.48, a stunning 97 percent decline from its all-time high of $51 per share less than a year ago. Investors of Luckin stock suffered massive losses.

Shortly after Luckin’s financial fraud was exposed, another U.S.-listed Chinese company, TAL Education Group, one of the largest education providers in China that offer K-12 after-school tutoring services, revealed that one of its employees had inflated the company’s sales by “forging contracts and other documentation.” The share price of TAL dropped 23 percent in one day. The accounting scandals of Luckin and TAL renewed the concern that Beijing’s refusal to comply with the U.S. law while continuing to access U.S. capital markets has subjected U.S. investors to significant investment risk.

A succession of U.S. administrations has engaged many rounds of diplomatic negotiations with Beijing, hoping that China would comply with U.S. law and let PCAOB and SEC inspect audit reports for Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges. Beijing never budged. In 2012, a frustrated SEC filed administrative proceedings against five Chinese accounting firms (all of them global firms’ Chinese subsidiaries), for failing to hand over audit records of the Chinese companies under SEC investigation. The five firms claimed that if they followed SEC’s order, they would violate Chinese laws.

Even if PCAOB or SEC were granted access to Chinese companies’ auditors, another ongoing concern is that some of China’s homegrown accounting and auditing firms are just as unreliable as their corporate clients. Rather than acting as gatekeepers, these firms have turned a blind eye to their clients’ fabricated financial statements to maintain lucrative business relationships. For example, Chinese regulators launched investigations of China’s accounting firms Ruihua and GP in 2019. The regulator found that one of GP’s corporate clients inflated its cash holding by $4 billion, and one of Ruihua’s corporate clients overstated its profit for four years by $1.7 billion.

Shell Companies Are Another Risk

Widespread corporate fraud of Chinese companies and lax oversight from Chinese auditors are only some of the many known problems investors and U.S. regulators have to deal with. Another significant problem is Chinese companies’ circuitous corporate structure.

Since Beijing bars foreigners from taking ownership in what it deems strategic sectors of the Chinese economy, many large Chinese companies created offshore holding companies or variable-interest entities (VIEs) to raise capital outside of China. Since these VIE shares do not represent ownership, they offer foreign investors minimal legal rights or protections. According to Paul Gillis, an economics professor at Peking University, in the event of any dispute between foreign investors and VIEs, foreign investors “risk finding themselves owning shares in a shell company with no assets and no business if the contracts fall apart.”

Chinese Communist Party Influence on Chinese Companies

While foreign investors do not have ownership of Chinese companies they invested in, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has vast influence over Chinese companies and their management. For example, between 2016 and 2017, more than 30 Hong Kong-traded Chinese companies required their boards to consult Communist Party committees before making major business decisions.

Yet, Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges have yet to disclose either the CCP’s ownership stake or its power to influence their business operations. Without such disclosure, foreign investors in these Chinese companies are in the dark regarding the magnitude of risks they are exposed to.

Congress Must Authorize the SEC to Act Now

U.S. lawmakers sought to protect U.S. investors and address China’s decades-long refusal to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by passing the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act (HFCAA) in 2020. President Trump signed it into law. HFCAA stipulates auditors of foreign public companies must allow PCAOB to inspect their audit reports of non-U.S. operations, and if “a company’s auditors fail to comply for three consecutive years, then the company’s shares would be prohibited from trading in the United States.”

The lawmakers clearly aimed at China when they drafted HFCAA, but a three-year grace period is too long to address problems we have known of for decades. While the SEC is still drafting new rules to implement HFCAA, new challenges from China have emerged.

Less than two months ago, foreign investors who have funded China’s economic growth by investing in Chinese companies had suffered their most significant loss since the 2008 financial crisis. The CCP launched a crackdown on China’s largest technology firms, private education businesses, video game makers, and food-delivery companies. Bloomberg estimates that the Chinese government’s action has wiped out $1.5 trillion in value of these companies. Even investors who do not own these stocks directly suffer losses because many mutual funds hold these Chinese stocks in their investment portfolios.

There are indications the CCP hasn’t finished its crackdown yet, as its leader Xi Jinping is determined to reshape China’s economy by will and consolidate power and control in his own hands. Xi announced in early September that China would launch a new stock exchange in Beijing to help small to medium-sized companies raise capital. China already has three stock exchanges: Shanghai, Shenzen, and Hong Kong. The establishment of the Beijing stock exchange is the latest indication that China intends to develop its own capital market further and reduce Chinese businesses’ reliance on foreign capital markets. The SEC would have very little leverage left if it waited three years to delist Chinese companies that don’t comply with U.S. law. By 2024, China’s capital market will be mature enough that these Chinese companies probably will be more than happy to take their businesses back to China and re-list on Chinese stock exchanges.

The U.S. Senate passed the Accelerating Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act this summer, which, if enacted, would reduce the three-year grace period to two. But even two years in the investment world is still a long time. American investors continue to face the risk of enormous financial losses as Beijing stonewalls U.S. laws. To truly protect American investors, the U.S. Congress needs to authorize the SEC to take action now, not two or three years from now.

*****

This article was published on September 22, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

Arizona Audit Flags Thousands Of Suspect Ballots, Kicking Issue To State’s Attorney General

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As Attorney General Mark Brnovich vows full probe, Democrats cheer findings while a key Trump lawyer calls for decertifying Arizona’s election results.

 

Editors’ Note: The release of the audit information to the Arizona State Senate and the public is a mixed bag.  Democrats have seized upon one part of the presentation, and that is that the hand count performed by the auditors did not differ markedly from the announced  election count. Hence, Biden won and the whole process was useless.  See, we told you so.

While that is true, few expected the results to reverse the election, if even such a thing is possible.

What the audit did find are numerous errors. To keep your head clear on this you must distinguish between the counting of votes and the issue of what votes are being counted. A forensic audit is not just a recount. It is additionally an examination of the votes being counted. For example, if you count 10 votes of dead voters twice, and come up with the same number, that does not mean the election was fine. You should not be counting dead voters in the first place. A correct tabulation of illegal votes is not an honest election.

Trump supporters have seized on that part of the presentation that indicates errors were sufficient in number that are likely five or six times the number of votes that gave Mr. Biden his margin of victory in Maricopa County alone.

Finally, it is clear the forensic audit process could not be fully analyzed and completed because the Maricopa Board of Supervisors did not cooperate nor did Dominion, the firm that sold the counting machines. Now it is in the hands of the Arizona Attorney General.

Below is what we feel is an objective article that appeared in Just The News.

 

Long-awaited and engulfed in controversy from start to finish, the Arizona Senate’s election audit gave America a split decision while leaving the question of whether illicit ballots were improperly cast or counted to the state’s attorney general.

The audit released Friday afternoon through painstakingly technical testimony concluded the final count of votes in the state’s largest county of Maricopa showing President Joe Biden won Arizona was accurate, but it also included tens of thousands of ballots that were suspect and require more investigation.

The more than 50,000 ballots flagged by auditors for more investigation involved concerns ranging from people voting from addresses from which they had already moved to residents voting twice. The total in question was nearly five times the 10,400 vote margin that separated the two presidential candidates, giving Donald Trump’s troops fresh reason to call for more scrutiny.

The job of resolving the question now falls to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican who has ambitions of winning a U.S. Senate seat in 2022.

Brnovich immediately seized the opportunity, announcing his office’s election integrity unit would review the questionable ballots to determine if further action was warranted.

“I will take all necessary actions that are supported by the evidence and where I have legal authority,” Brnovich tweeted a short while before the final official audit results were to be released. “Arizonans deserve to have their votes accurately counted and protected.”

Across the country, Republican efforts to audit results in states like Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania got a glimpse of what may be in store politically as well as a roadmap for what issues to review. Democrats and their media allies declared the election integrity issues to be over, while some prominent Republicans called on Arizona to decertify its results.

“There were significant and widespread irregularities and lawlessness in thousands of ballots, sufficient to overcome the margin of difference between Trump and Biden,” said Jenna Ellis, a key lawyer for Trump and chairwoman of the Election Integrity Alliance, which is aiding states in reviewing election issues.

“The 2020 election was irredeemably compromised, and Arizona’s legislature must do now what they failed to do in November — use their plenary authority under the U.S. Constitution and reclaim their delegates by decertifying the results, acknowledging that the certifications were based on incorrect accounting,” Ellis told Just the News. “We are in a constitutional crisis that demands accountability for the American People and election justice.”

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Continue reading this article at Just the News.

 

From Diseases to Recessions, Government Failure Is Endemic

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Massive government intervention in the aftermath of the global financial crisis has not prevented the Great Recession, but had actually deepened and prolonged it until the covid-19 pandemic and government lockdowns sent the economy into a tailspin in 2020. Larger monetary and fiscal growth stimuli followed, exacerbating previous economic distortions. In the same way that countercyclical macroeconomic policies have turned the financial crisis into depression, the authorities’ health response has been good at crippling markets but never seems to deliver what is promised.

A Counterintuitive and Risky Health Response

Early on, governments embraced an overambitious paradigm of reaching herd immunity via hard lockdowns and vaccination. The famous “flatten the curve” slogan promoting lockdowns as the only solution to avoid a collapse of the health infrastructure quickly morphed into “lockdown until vaccine.” Convincing arguments that hard lockdowns are not producing better health results, but unduly restrict civil liberties, create economic havoc, and cause severe social and health long-term problems were largely ignored. Most governments in the West kept the lockdowns into place until late spring 2021, when the mass vaccination campaign was well underway.

Vaccination has been the main pillar of the government’s health response while doctors were discouraged from experimenting and using early treatments. When confronted with a problem, most rational individuals are looking for a quick, simple, and cost-effective solution. But not the Western health bureaucracies. Inexpensive early treatments pioneered with promising results were dismissed and outright prohibited.

The only early treatment promoted by Anthony Fauci and endorsed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was Remdesivir, a drug with unproven efficiency and likely side effects. The drug is also very expensive at about $3,500 per treatment. This raises serious questions about unorthodox financial interests and the role of Big Pharma in steering the government health response.

The almost exclusive reliance on vaccination in the middle of the pandemic seemed over-optimistic and risky to many experts from the very beginning. It takes many years to develop an efficient vaccine for a virus that may suffer rapid mutations, and lengthy testing is also necessary to ensure vaccine safety, in particular for an epidemic with a low mortality rate. Such concerns have not been heeded by the health authorities, which poured dozens of billions of US dollars into subsidizing the development of covid-19 vaccines. About 5.6 billion doses have already been administered globally and billions more have been ordered to cover all population and booster jabs. Pfizer/BioNTech alone expects to produce 3 billion jabs this year and 4 billion next year, with sales estimated at about $50 billion in 2021 only. If corona vaccination becomes periodical like flu vaccination, it would become a highly lucrative business worth hundreds of billions of US dollars for the Big Pharma.

Mass Covid-19 Vaccination Is No Silver Bullet

Government health experts touted mass vaccination as the only way to cut the transmission of the virus and overcome the pandemic. Yet, other scientists doubted it, because the coronavirus mutates rapidly and vaccines were not certain to block its transmission. Experts such as Dr. Joseph Mercola, Dr. Robert Malone, and others even argued that “leaky” vaccines, i.e., those preventing the disease without stopping infections, would incite the virus to evade the stronger immune response in vaccinated people and mutate into more virulent strains. In other words, individual benefits of a lower risk of hospitalization and death could be counterbalanced by more dangerous virus mutations worsening the pandemic.

It is obviously not easy for the general public to assess the scientific evidence regarding the pros and cons of covid-19 mass vaccination. Governments have not allowed such a debate to take place in the mainstream mass media, anyway. In any case, the rapid spread of the delta variant in countries with high vaccination rates has raised serious doubts about whether mass vaccination could end the pandemic, in particular, if vaccine efficacy drops to worrisome levels after about six months and both the vaccinated and unvaccinated can show similarly high viral loads of the delta variant that are able to spread around.

If covid-19 vaccines have more therapeutic benefits rather than stopping the infection, then how could herd immunity ever be achieved? And if herd immunity cannot be reached, why segregate people by vaccination status or vaccinate children and teenagers, who are known not to get seriously ill from covid-19? These are relevant questions also due to the large number of immediate severe adverse effects and deaths linked to covid-19 vaccination in the US and the EU, and potential long-term side effects entailed by the use of relatively new vaccine technologies.

What Next?

Several experts advocate a shift in focus from mass vaccination to building up immunity and early treatments that reduce the number of patients developing severe symptoms. Voluntary vaccination should be recommended primarily to vulnerable people for whom benefits clearly exceed risks.

Yet many health authorities continue pushing for mandatory mass vaccination. Several countries, such as Israel, the UK and the US, have already started offering booster shots, while adjusting accordingly the validity of sanitary passes and extending vaccination to children. Recently, President Biden has unveiled plans to force all companies with more than a hundred workers to require coronavirus vaccinations or test employees weekly. This mandate would affect as many as 100 million Americans and has been criticized as both authoritarian and unconstitutional. President Biden claims that the vaccine is “safe, effective and free” and yet nearly 80 million Americans remain unvaccinated, allegedly undermining the government health response. This seems to defy reality given that the vaccine doesn’t prevent infection or transmission of the disease, loses its efficiency within a few months, and has been associated with numerous side effects and deaths. It is not “free” either, because the cost of the vaccination campaign, going into dozens of billions of US dollars, will be paid eventually by the American taxpayer, who is pressed hard to take the shot. By the way, when was the last time millions of consumers refused a useful good or service offered to them for free?

The covid-19 health strategy leaves us with an acute sense of déjà vu. Governments have stubbornly tried to “stimulate” economic growth for almost fifteen years to no avail. All along, mainstream economists have remained blind to arguments that government intervention is making things worse by prolonging resource misallocation and fostering long-term impoverishment. We can only hope that a similar story is not playing out with far more severe consequences in the medical field.

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This article was published on September 20, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Harry and Meghan – “influential” eco frauds

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Prince-in-name-only Harry Windsor and his wife Meghan Markle really, really care about the planet and climate change.

We know this because they often tell us.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex (who reside eight time zones away from their monarchical fiefdom) now grace the cover of the latest issue of Time magazine for being among the “100 Most Influential People.”

This, after last July when they received an environmental “award” from the group, Population Matters, for stopping at two children, which is further evidence they care.

As the familiar expression goes, talk is cheap.

The fact that Harry and Meghan live in a 9-bedroom, 16-bathroom mansion in the Montecito enclave of Santa Barbara, California, drive a Cadillac Escalade SUV, and still use private jet travel evidently are beside the point. They made the choice of stopping at two children so as to not add to their family’s long-term carbon footprint. This begs the question, why does a family of four need triple the number of bedrooms? Would not, say, five bedrooms be enough to obviate bunkbeds and host visitors?

Their extravagant home looks like an upgrade from their royal digs when they lived in London as newlyweds, at the Frogmore Cottage.  Though their Montecito pad has one fewer bedroom, it appears to have more appurtenances.

The upshot is that you can be awarded as an influencer for having only two children ostensibly to help the planet, even as you amass square footage and consume energy sufficient to support a Cub Scout pack.

In reality, Harry’s and Meghan’s actions reveal they care as much about the climate as they do about their privacy – meaning, not at all.

This couple, who uncannily fits the definition of critical mass narcissism, interviewed with that famous media personality, the one and only Oprah Winfrey, where they were assured a series of softball questions and millions of viewers (they got both). During this televised spectacle, they played the victim and trashed the British royal family.

They are not done. Harry is working on a tell-all memoir for mega-bucks that will plunge the knife deeper into his family, revealing more dirty laundry. This is one of the ways he earns a living; after all, it’s expensive to maintain a mansion, use private jets and play polo – all while preening concern about the planet’s sustainability.

This current issue of Time magazine, that once-great media organ that has long since jumped the shark, has a dolled-up cover photo of Ms. Markle standing prominently with her quasi Prince dutifully in his place behind her. The article describes them this way:

“Springing into action is not the easy choice for a young duke and duchess who have been blessed through birth and talent, and burned by fame. It would be much safer to enjoy their good fortune and stay silent… That’s not what Harry and Meghan do, or who they are. They turn compassion into boots on the ground through their Archewell Foundation. They give voice to the voiceless through media production.”

This reads like a parody, written by their friend, Jose Andres.  If he was not paid handsomely by Harry and Meghan for such propagandistic drivel, he should have been because he earned it.

If these two poster-children for narcissism and excess were serious, principled people, they would eschew such recurring vanity, go about their business and, in Harry’s case, renounce his title of Prince and whatever ancillary royal titles remain.

If Harry and Meghan were sober-minded and committed, they also would live more modestly and set a better personal example for environmental stewardship. Two years ago the radical group, Friends of the Earth, requested that Meghan “consider less carbon-intensive modes of travel.”

Not a chance.

Incessantly carping about climate change while consuming exponentially more energy than an average family to air-condition a 15,000-square foot mansion and much more does not make for ideal spokespersons for the cause.

If the climate cottage industry writ large was serious, and the “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” was really about a healthy environment and saving Earth, it would not be spearheaded by indulgent, wealthy hypocrites like the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, former Vice President Al Gore, Jane Fonda, Leo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, et. al.

All of this reminds us that the climate change agenda is not, and has never been, about the environment and preserving the planet. It is about a political agenda of power and control; about governing society to subjugate the masses while the elite class preserves and enjoys their possessions and virtue signals to the rest of us in order to feel good about themselves.

That arrangement of elites controlling societies has largely prevailed throughout history, from ancient to feudal times; and through communist and dictatorial nations in modern times.

The United States as a mostly free society has largely deviated from that historical condition. Climate change politics threatens to remove such American exceptionalism – if we allow such. Pushing back includes calling out craven influencers like Harry and Meghan who obtain publicity for all the wrong reasons.

*****

This article was published on September 20, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

We Need The Constitution Now More Than Ever

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These are fraught days for Americans. History is said to be cyclical but there is widespread concern that we are in inexorable decline.

Our leadership role in the world which seemed secure three decades ago is under serious threat. Polls show that confidence and love of country are in decline, especially among the young. Traditional American values like freedom of speech, free-market economics and responsible fiscal policy are openly attacked.

Meanwhile, e Pluribus Unum is facing replacement by a culture obsessed with racial identity. MLK’s dream of a society where skin color doesn’t determine our judgments of each other is now itself deemed racist.

America, though, is the longest-running liberal democracy in history for a reason: our Constitution. Our great freedom document connects us to our roots, the sources of our strength. It can direct us away from hyperpartisanship toward mutual respect and agreement on shared principles – if we respect its authority.

But the Constitution has been repeatedly ignored and abused in our recent history. Many argue it is an 18th-century construct unsuited to governance in the 21st-century. Others claim it should be seen as a “living” document that means whatever someone says it means without regard to its actual content.

Since the Constitution prescribes limits on governmental powers, it particularly vexes Big Government types wishing to centralize power and enlarge their span of control. For example, a century ago President Woodrow Wilson was an early leader of the Progressive movement, which held that modern government should be guided by administrative agency experts.

Wilson thus opposed the separation of powers doctrine. He cautioned against “the error of trying to do too much by vote“, given the ignorance of the common man.

His legacy of disdain for the Constitution is reflected in today’s administrative state, in which unelected bureaucrats make binding rules (laws), direct the enforcement of those rules and adjudicate violations.

FDR later also regarded the Constitution as a problematic document requiring workarounds for him to be successful in establishing the social welfare programs and regulations thought necessary to rescue America from the Great Depression. He was so frustrated by the Supreme Court striking down his unconstitutional power grabs that he infamously tried to expand the court to15 members.

Roosevelt was temporarily rebuffed but eventually was able to secure so much of his agenda that the role of government in Americans’ everyday lives changed dramatically. Safeguards to liberty like enumerated powers and federalism suffered permanent damage.

Recent presidents have taken the constitutionally curious position that they should be permitted to exceed their normal powers when Congress won’t act as they prescribe. Barack Obama, a former constitutional law professor, correctly stated many times that he wasn’t authorized to suspend DACA deportations through executive order. There were “laws on the books“ and “I am not king“, he pointed out.

But he eventually caved, unilaterally granting work permits and legal status to first millions of illegal immigrants who entered as minors, then later to adults (later struck down). The legal fate of DACA is still pending, despite its continuing unconstitutional status.

Joe Biden used the same logic when confronted with the need for extension of the eviction moratorium passed as an emergency pandemic measure by the Trump administration. Biden acknowledged that the Supreme Court had already ruled that an extension would require congressional approval. But to appease his party’s lefties, he did it anyway, expressly ignoring the Constitution.

Donald Trump was also loathed to let the constitution interfere with what he wanted to do anyway. His most egregious transgression was pressuring Vice President Pence to reject the electoral ballots lawfully submitted by the states in the 2020 presidential election.

Pence, clearly lacking the constitutional authority to do so, refused. Fortunately, unlike previous miscreants, Trump was so thoroughly rebuked that no precedent for similar actions was created.

Part of the reason America is in trouble is that we are not protective of our Constitution, not outraged when it is abused. Judicial nominees, charged with upholding the Constitution, are vetted instead based on their political agenda.

We demean our constitution at our considerable risk. It is our bulwark against the corruption and chaos that plague impoverished nations around the world.

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Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.

How the Left Is Spreading Global Warming Alarmism on the Right

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If there’s one thing the Left knows cold, it’s deception. From Vladimir Lenin to Saul Alinsky, leftists are unparalleled masters of the art of victory through hoodwinking: Defeating opponents by fooling them into false agreement.

Owning the battlefield in this war starts with controlling the language. We’ve seen this play out in the debate over abortion access, with pro-choice activists redefining “pro-life” to mean anything but the conviction that life begins at conception—and swindling unwitting Christians into their ranks.

Now it’s spreading to the debate over climate change, with environmental activists claiming there’s nothing “partisan” about their one-sided campaign to fundamentally transform America. Radicals, socialists, and authoritarians know that global warming offers them the best chance to weaponize Big Government and dictate where Americans live and work, what they drive, eat, and buy, and even what beliefs they’re allowed to hold—all through fear.

Truth-loving skeptics are all that stand in their way. So what better way to defeat them than by undermining the skeptics’ unity with false promises?

Meet the “eco-Right,” the collection of lobbying, litigation, and activist nonprofits that identify themselves as free market yet who have bought the Left’s argument that the Earth is getting dangerously hot and we’re to blame. Groups like ClearPath, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, and the Climate Leadership Council disagree over specific policies—some want a devastating carbon tax to reduce emissions, others want federal subsidies for expensive lithium batteries—but all want skeptical Republicans to compromise with uncompromising leftists on their global warming policies.

By doing so they threaten to undermine both affordable energy in America and the future of the conservative movement—which is why they’re often funded by the likes of George Soros as well as the Ford and Hewlett Foundations.

My colleagues and I at the Capital Research Center first broke the news on the secret liberal mega-donors bankrolling the eco-Right in order to rebrand radical environmentalism as “conservative.” Our new report, Rise of the Eco-Right, compiles years of research and investigative reporting to expose the funders, leadership, and lobbying of the eco-Right, exposing a web of overlapping boards and shared donors in service to a destructive and cynical agenda.

We’ve studied the professional Left for decades and are all too familiar with activists’ use of deception and misdirection to camouflage their agenda to the casual glance. Unlike Activism Inc., we believe that Americans should be free from fearmongering to listen to arguments from both sides and come to their own conclusions in the global warming debate. Rise of the Eco-Right aims to make it clear that climate-conscious conservatives cannot compromise with the Left because activists aren’t interested in anything less than a “green” socialist revolution.

Don’t take my word for it—that’s the crux of an open letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) signed by 263 activist groups in November 2019, urging Congress to pass the Green New Deal—arguably the most sweeping legislation ever proposed in America—to combat “increasing income/wealth inequality and rising white nationalism and neo-fascism” in America.

Today’s environmentalists are more interested in “environmental racism” and “restitution for Black and Indigenous farmers” than the environment, and they’re no longer hiding it behind the fig leaf of saving the planet from greenhouse gases.

Recall the explanation that Green New Deal author Saikat Chakrabarti’s gave to the Washington Post: “Do you guys think of [the Green New Deal] as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

Here’s the bottom line: carbon taxes, “green” tech subsidies, and greenhouse gas pledges will never be enough for Big Green because the debate isn’t really about those things, but power. Activists know this, which is why they’ve abandoned these “market-friendly” proposals for the ultimate prize: the utopia of socialized medicine, federal jobs for everyone, slavery reparations, and more.

The eco-Right offers the Left a backdoor for the kind of statist policies that conservatives would never support—if they weren’t falsely labeled. It’s a siren’s song that promises free-market answers to climate change but will only result in tyranny. Conservatives, you have nothing to gain and everything to lose by listening to the eco-Right—so don’t give up the ship.

*****

This article was published on September 17, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from Capital Research Center.

Gen. Mark Milley: China’s Man In The Pentagon?

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Hi all, I’m sorry to have been away from the keys, but I was tied up all day filming a PragerU segment about Live Not By Lies. And the Internet keeps going on and off at this hotel. Flying back home tomorrow.

Anyway, I was stunned by the news about Gen. Mark Milley today. By now you will have read that the Joint Chiefs head phoned his Chinese counterpart twice during the final months of the Trump administration, to reassure the Chinese that the US wasn’t planning to attack China — this, because Milley was worried about Trump’s mental stability. The first time was right after January 6 of this year. Here’s the second time:

Milley also reassured Chinese Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army that the U.S. had no intention of launching a strike against China, according to the paper. It was one of two secret phone calls shared with Li on the issue.

The first took place on Oct. 30, 2020, after Milley reviewed intelligence suggesting China believed the U.S. was preparing for an attack due to military exercises in the South China Sea and Trump’s antagonism toward the country, according to The Post. But Milley told Li he would be warned of an impending attack.

“General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years,” he said, according to the paper. “If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

The top US general called the man who would be his worst enemy in the event of war — and called him on October 30 of last year! — and told him that he would telegraph the US attack ahead of it happening. What the hell?! In what kind of country does the Joint Chiefs head call America’s No. 1 enemy and assure them he will let them know if we plan to attack them? In what kind of country does the top military leader violate the chain of command like this?

If Milley was so afraid of the president’s mental state that he felt compelled to phone the top Chinese general not once but twice, why did Milley not warn Congress and the American public? This makes no sense. Where was Milley during the second impeachment trial? Milley thought he was working for a deranged Commander in Chief capable of starting a war with nuclear-armed China in a fit of pique, but he didn’t want to go public with this concern. Incredible.

Milley had to have been a source for this information. If so, then he was proud of what he did, and figured it would make him look good. I don’t care how bonkers Trump might have been, the head of the US military cannot go around the civilian Commander in Chief — especially not to do his own foreign policy negotiations with our chief foreign rival. Again: if things were as bad as Milley believed they were, he should have publicly threatened to resign, and then gone to Congress to spill the beans. If memory serves, this kind of thing is why Truman fired Gen. MacArthur. I don’t care if you hate Trump, Milley has to go.

One more time: you can think that it was appropriate for him to have called China under these circumstances, but if Milley had any guts or any sense of responsibility to the country he has sworn to defend, he would have gone public with this at a time when it would have cost him something, but might have spared the country a disaster. But he waited to tell it to Bob Woodward after he (Milley) was safe from Trump, and presumably to ingratiate himself to the people whose admiration he craves. The nation’s military chief doing something like this is beyond extraordinary. He seems like a double creep, Milley does: he didn’t make it public when it could have stopped what Milley regarded as a grave danger to world peace, but when it also would have cost him something; now he’s revealing that he carried out an act radically destabilizing of the civilian chain of command, when doing so could not do any good, but also wouldn’t hurt Milley, and might actually boost his personal stock.

Some character that one has.

*****

This article was published on September 15, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.

 

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