Has The Left Alienated Enough People Yet?

JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon has been used as a political punching bag for progressive democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

The billionaire leader of America's largest bank says he understands why he's in their sights, but tells Lesley Stahl he doesn't deserve some of the harsher criticism lobbed at him, especially accusations that he's not a patriot. Stahl's interview with Dimon will be featured on the next edition of 60 Minutes, Sunday, November 10 at 7 p.m., ET/PT on CBS.  
 "I understand that a person in this seat is going to be targeted in this day and age by certain politicians... but the notion that I'm not a patriot… that's just dead wrong," says Dimon.    

In the interview conducted Friday, Dimon says his critics shouldn't be vilifying people who work hard to accomplish things. "You know, most people are good, not all of them. You should vilify Nazis, but you shouldn't vilify people who worked hard to accomplish things. And so my comment is, American society – we're just attacking each other all the time."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jamie-dimon-jp-morgan-chase-ceo-speaks-to-60-minutes-sunday-2019-11-08/

One has to wonder, has the Democrat Party taken this Victim Politics too far? Has their Eat The Rich  Mantra from the 60's Radical Playbook reached a point where people finally say, enough is enough, we can't return these people to power until sanity returns to the party.

So far Bill Gates has spoken out and now Jamie Dimon, will Wall Street finally leave the Democrat Party? 

We know that the Middle Class is close to a tipping point and we might see a Civil War, but could it be fumed by Wall Street or averted by their leaving the Democrats alone until sanity returns?

Why Drug Legalization and Hugs...

The Federalist

Why Drug Legalization And Hugs For Terrorists Won’t Solve The Border Crisis

At best, Mexico is a failed state. At worst, it is a rogue state, hostile to regional peace. The silence from politicians who would have otherwise cried intervention speaks volumes.

Sumantra Maitra

As Thucydides hinted, often when people are either afraid or malicious, they have historically tried to garb their fear or malice in the language of rationalization. After the ghastly massacre of Americans miles from the southern U.S. border, the firebrand Mexican leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declined the help of Mexico’s northern neighbors in eradicating drug cartels.

“We have to act independently and according to our constitution, and in line with our tradition of independence and sovereignty,” he replied after President Trump’s tweet offering to “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth.” Obrador added, “War is irrational. We are for peace. It is a characteristic of this new government.”

This comes after his military was told to stand down and surrendered after losing an urban battle to El Chapo’s cartel last month. The rationalization then was similar: that war is brutal and there’s no point in risking life and blood to catch criminals. The criminals in this instance are those same gangs, which are now a law unto themselves.

This is nonsensical. Obrador’s policy since his election of “hugs not bullets” is similar to a lot of American progressives who believe in reformative justice. The reality is, of course, far more humbling. Mexico is now, at best, a failed state wherein large swaths of territory are controlled by different armed groups, similar to Afghan or Libyan warlords. There is no writ of the Mexican state or the Mexican army or police, and no law and order in these regions.

The drug cartels are as brutal as ISIS, if not more so. In the latest massacre, the cartels burned women alive inside their cars and shot kids while they were running away. That is the best-case scenario.

The worst case is that Mexico is a rogue state, actively hostile to regional peace. It is too early to ascertain which way it is, but the actions and rhetoric of the Mexican president after every massacre and episode of violence do not fill onlookers with optimism.

Left Tries to Tackle Crime with Appeasement

Mexico is a case study of what happens when progressivism is forced to face its own contradictions. Liberal (and some libertarian) policies, for example, prefer reformative justice, which uses reforms and social measures rather than more traditionally conservative punitive deterrence to deal with the roots of crime. Since the end of the Second World War, this concept has gotten more support, especially in the West.

The connection of societal factors behind a crime is dubious, to say the least, but nevertheless, this has become a conventional wisdom of sorts. The Labor administration of London ended police “stop and search,” claiming it targeted minorities. As a result, London now has one of the highest stabbing and homicide rates in the developed world.

The Swedish “gender-neutral” policing appeasement against rising gang violence is another example of leftist mumbo-jumbo. In New York, a U.S. congresswoman openly tweets her support against rail fare-dodging and for crowds who chant slogans equating the New York Police Department to the Klu Klux Klan. Then there’s the old idea that drug wars are going to fail, so we should decriminalize drugs.

These ideas are not all qualitatively similar, but they all stem from a flawed logic, that deterrence doesn’t work and appeasement does. The same arguments are popping up in Mexico and parts of the United States.

“This is no longer a war. It is no longer about force, confrontation, annihilation, extermination, or killing in the heat of the moment,” Obrador said after his forces capitulated to cartels. “This is about thinking how to save lives and achieve peace and tranquility in the country using other methods.”

“Other methods,” for those who are unaware, are the same old “holistic” approaches to tackling poverty and corruption. Likewise, the narrative of “drug legalization” never dies and is found in the most hipster-ish circles of the West. You can almost hear the vocal fry when you read the tweets or articles calling for drug legalization and decriminalization. The problem is that these progressive policies do not work.

Drug War Myth Won’t Die Despite Overwhelming Evidence

First, this idea that a drug war has been ongoing is a half-baked myth, both in the U.K. and in the United States, with the real devastating results of normalization of drugs only slowly coming to the forefront. Law enforcement against people flooding the West with narcotics is not a “war on drugs.” The real drug war is happening in the Philippines and Brazil, where crimes and drug addiction as well as rape and murder have dramatically fallen, something you might not hear in the mass media because of the controversial methods undertaken.

Second, to normalize criminal behavior because it will never be completely eradicated is to say one needs to normalize pedophilia, murder, and promiscuity because societies will always have vices. It is a juvenile argument prima facie.

Most importantly, drug legalization does not work, as research shows. A British Medical Journal report from 2007 warned something every conservative knew instinctively: greater availability is the mother of greater usage, a warning repeated by Australian medical organizations working to reduce drug usage. In 1997, Dr. Theodore Dalrymple warnedagainst legalization and the social costs of free drug use:

The philosophic argument is that, in a free society, adults should be permitted to do whatever they please, always provided that they are prepared to take the consequences of their own choices and that they cause no direct harm to others. … In practice, of course, it is exceedingly difficult to make people take all the consequences of their own actions — as they must.

Another paper warned against the government approach to help addicts, saying it would only result in devastating social and public expenditure costs, the effects of which are observable in the streets of California, which are filled with needles and human excreta.

The U.S. Must Take Action Against Mexico

Ultimately, however, this has nothing to do with debates over drugs. Debates about drug legalization are a peacetime luxury. This is not a time of peace.

The Mexican government has failed and refused to tackle the growing crime and warlord politics of the cartels, which are now taking advantage of lax American laws, border immigration programs, and partisanship and sanctuary city politics to form a base within the United States. What will happen once they have full power and control is anybody’s guess — look at what’s been happening in Mexico since 2011.

The American elites in D.C. are more concerned about whether the Kurds have a statelet in northern Syria, while the Zetas and Sinaloas have statelets in northern Mexico, which is far more brutal than ISIS. Not to mention, one of these borders is with the United States, with a direct effect on this side of the border, fueling a crisis within American cities and resulting in an annual death of more than 60,000 men and women.

President Trump won the election promising extrication from the Middle East and strong border control. The first is stuck in bureaucratic fiat. The second was dead before birth due to partisan politics. Unfortunately, a great power’s credibility relies more on retributive power close to home than far away in some uninhabited desert.

At the time of writing this, no Democratic leader has said a word about the massacred family in Mexico — not Julian Castro, or Beto O’Rourke, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the three most supportive of de facto open-border policies. They were, however, the first to raise hell when Trump said MS-13 gang members are animals. Nor are most Republicans vocal about this, when they would be the first to cry intervention had this happened somewhere between Algeria and Afghanistan.

The primary task of any government is to govern, not just to provide for security of citizens and residents within the borders, but to deter external threats as well. A failed state and anarchy south of the border is the definition of external threat, far greater than any Kurdish-Saudi-Turkish-Iranian proxy-war. If the politicians and the government are not willing to do what is needed, it’s only a matter of time before the public will take direct action. That is not a pleasant foreseeable scenario.

Sumantra Maitra is a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK, and a senior contributor to The Federalist. His research is in great power-politics and neorealism. You can find him on Twitter @MrMaitra.

The “Deep State” IS...

Jefferson Morley - The New Republic

The “Deep State” IS a Political Party

As an impeachment crisis looms, CIA and FBI veterans are taking a troubling lead in opposing Trump at the ballot box.

November 8, 2019

It was, in the eyes of Trump World, the very clubhouse of the Deep State: the plush, blue-carpeted, wood-paneled 13th floor auditorium of the National Press Club, located in the heart of the Washington swamp, just two blocks from the White House. The Halloween-eve panel discussion featured a line-up of heinous perps indicted by the “stable genius” of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: On the far left sat the bulky former CIA Director John Brennan (“the worst CIA Director in our country’s history,” according to Donald Trump); on the right, the winsome former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (“major sleazebag”). In between, two dutiful understudies held forth: former acting CIA directors Mike Morell (“total Clinton flunky”) and John McLaughlin, the only speaker on the stage not yet honored with a vilifying Trump call-out. At one point, McLaughlin said, “Thank God for the Deep State,” which RT and Fox News cited as proof of perfidy in the president’s critics.

Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest. “The CIA is not involved in domestic politics,” he said. “Period. That’s on the record.”

The event was, according to the participants themselves, a defense of the federal government, a gathering of the leaders of the American civil service—“a crown jewel of the American government,” in McLaughlin’s words. They occasionally threw shade on Trump while voicing justified concerns about election integrity in 2020; unqualified praise for the intelligence community’s commitment to truth-telling; and debatable claims about that community’s apolitical character. They encouraged the many young people in the audience to pursue careers in intelligence and law enforcement. “He won’t be president forever,” Morell said. 

The panel was titled “2020 Vision: U.S. Intelligence and the Presidential Election.” It enabled me to see something more clearly: The CIA is emerging as a domestic political party.

I don’t mean this in a conspiratorial sense (though it has conspiratorial implications), and I don’t mean it literally. Although there are three former CIA employees in Congress (and a fourth is running), the CIA does not resemble the Democratic or Republican parties. But in practice, the U.S. intelligence community, led by former officials, is developing into an organized political faction. Call it the Intelligence Party. Like other factions, at home and abroad, this faction is seeking to gain public support and influence the 2020 presidential election to advance its institutional and political interests.

For Trump World, the October 30 event embodied the dreaded Deep State in action. The president’s embattled defenders demonize the CIA as a secretive law-breaking organization, but seem unconcerned about the verifiable harm it actually does in the world (such as torture, arms trafficking, drone warfare, and regime change). Nor do Trump stalwarts commend the intelligence community for the good things it does (counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and counterproliferation). No, the CIA is the enemy because of its intellectual sophistication and lack of slavish loyalty to the president.

As these former administration officials see it, the U.S. intelligence community—composed of 17 different agencies with a combined budget of more than $80 billion a year—is defending the highest standards of public service, analytical thinking, and patriotic action by resisting the president’s anti-democratic impulses. What the intel community actually does—and whether it serves the interests of American democracy—is not explained in these leaders’ attacks on the ignorant real estate mogul who lives around the corner.

In the panel discussion, Brennan restated the Intelligence Party’s message on Russian interference in the 2016 election, calling it “a sweeping and systemic effort” that may or may not have changed the outcome of the election. McCabe stressed that Trump’s victory turned on tallies in four states, including Michigan, which was decided by 11,000 votes out of nearly 5 million cast. He noted that Paul Manafort, Trump’s felonious campaign manager, had shared polling data from those four states with Russian interlocutor Konstantin Kilimnik in August 2016. Looking ahead to 2020, the panel was not optimistic; Morell said the Russians were undeterred by the U.S. response to their 2016 interventions. “They are doing it here, right here, right now,” he said. 

Of course, the CIA has long been involved in domestic political affairs. In the 1950s, the agency fought off the Trump-like attacks of Senator Joe McCarthy while putting scores of U.S. journalists (and media executives) on its payroll each year. In the 1960s, agency operatives organized a PR campaign to discredit critics of the Warren Commission report on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination (and suppressed investigations into what the CIA might have known about it). In the 1970s, CIA operatives figured deeply in the Watergate affair. (Again, the details are murky.) In the 1980s, four top CIA officials were indicted for their role in the Iran-Contra conspiracy to bypass anti-interventionist legislation passed by a liberal Democratic Congress. One of their cases was dismissed when the U.S. government would not share classified evidence; the other three perps were pardoned by lame-duck Republican President George H. W. Bush, himself a former CIA director, who acted on the advice of an attorney general named William Barr.

The agency’s defenders insist it has shed the legacy of its Cold War excesses. Yet in the 2000s, top CIA officials, including Brennan and Hayden, collaborated with the Bush administration in implementing a legally dubious, morally repugnant regime of torture, with only the most superficial approval of Congress and zero input from American taxpayers and voters. And when the Senate Intelligence Committee sought to publish its investigation into the abuses, the CIA, led by Brennan, deposited much of the report into the memory hole of official secrecy.

In the face of Russian meddling and Trump’s indifference to it, the Intelligence Party is mobilizing again. What is new is the open involvement of former top intelligence officials in electoral politics and the selection of a president. Trump’s assault on the U.S. governmental system gives them little choice: The president is a threat to their ethos and their budgets, because they are a threat to his dreams of omnipotence and multimillion-dollar business deals. Agency veterans, with ample experience in analyzing authoritarian governments and implementing regime change, know full well the danger that someone like Trump poses. For both parties, the 2020 election is the inflection point. This increasingly open power struggle between the secret agencies and an out-of-control president is not the only unprecedented feature of America’s constitutional crisis, merely the most puzzling.

The event’s moderator, Margaret Brennan—no relation to John “that we know of,” she joked—is a senior correspondent for CBS News, and she noted that she’s actually a work colleague of Morell, a national security contributor for the network. John Brennan and McCabe should probably pay rent on the chairs they occupy so often in the MSNBC and CNN studios, respectively. McLaughlin, too, has a perch, on The Washington Post editorial page. For many mainstream newsrooms, reporting on the CIA’s ubiquity in domestic political coverage is not a priority. It might lend credence to Trump’s ravings.

The Intelligence Party is threatened most immediately by its former ally, Attorney General Bill Barr. Last April, Barr said the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of multiple contacts between the Trump entourage and Russian state actors amounted to “spying.” Last week, the Justice Department let it be known that its probe into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, led by U.S. Attorney John Durham, is now a criminal investigation.

McCabe said he had expected to hear from Durham and that he would cooperate. “It’s on my list,” he said, to laughter. The problem, he continued, is that “some folks, and possibly even the attorney general, are bringing a set of preconceived notions and biases to that investigation”:

If that’s the case—and I don’t know that it is, but there are certainly some indicators that it might be, or that the purpose of the investigation is not really to get to the bottom of what did we know and why did we make the decisions we did, but it’s more to run out political conspiracy theories—that causes me great concern.

McCabe is right to worry. With Trump taking a beating on impeachment, the Democrats—and the Intelligence Party—have regained momentum lost after the damning but understated Mueller report dropped. The president needs a comeback, and questions about the factual basis of the Trump-Russia investigation offer an opening. But the Durham inquiry is not the biggest problem facing the Intelligence Party; based on the Mueller report, federal agents had ample reason to investigate Trump’s entourage.

The leaks that followed Trump’s election are probably the bigger legal vulnerability for the former spy chiefs. The Federalist, a Trump-friendly website with shadowy funding run by a Republican political operative and a serial plagiarist, has provided a narrative template that an aggressive prosecutor might be able to fill in with legal charges: In this account, Brennan and Co. orchestrated a “coup” via a series of leaks to the Washington Post, New York Times, and NBC News, designed to hamstring Trump’s presidency before it even began. These leaks, attributed to “U.S. officials,” involved classified information, namely the CIA-NSA-FBI assessment of Russia’s role in the election. The passing of classified information, depending on the circumstances, could be construed as a violation of the Espionage Act, the same law used to prosecute whistleblowers like Reality Winner and Edward Snowden. The former spy chiefs didn’t say it at the panel, but their body language betrayed the thought: Trump’s response to impeachment is likely to be indictments. 

At the reception afterward, I asked Brennan if he felt the attorney general was conducting the Justice Department investigation in a fair-minded way. “Are we on the record?” he asked. I said yes. “I’m not going to comment,” he said.

“Are you at all concerned,” I asked, “about the agency’s growing profile in domestic politics?”

Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest. “The CIA is not involved in domestic politics,” he said. “Period. That’s on the record.”

This he asserted confidently, at an event where he had just spoken about about influence campaigns on swing voters and implied that Hillary Clinton might be right in calling U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset. Even seasoned analysts, it seems, have their blind spots.

The Socialists vs...

Frontpage mag

The Socialists 

vs. 

Billionaires Democrat Primary

Bloomberg joining the primaries from hell will make them even worse.

November 8, 2019

Joe Biden is running out of money.

He blew too much cash on private jets while blowing away debating opponents with his confused mumbling and bleeding eye. Now Joe’s down to the single digit millions, while Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are in the double millions. Unless Joe can wangle a job on the board of a corrupt Ukrainian gas company, he’s not going to be able to afford private jets or a political campaign.

Kamala Harris is cutting staff and scaling back her campaign. Julian Castro is supporting his staff as they look for new jobs in a successful campaign. Too bad there aren’t many of those left. The only candidates still polling as if they're in the running are Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg, in a distant fourth place, buoyed by donations from vegan restaurateurs who don’t care if he actually wins or not.

Between them, Sanders and Warren command about 40% of the Democrat vote. Biden’s dying campaign has been shrinking from a third to around a quarter. And it’s largely dependent on black voters associating him with Obama. A project that’s gotten zero help from the actual Obama.

It’s time for the one thing the Dem dogfight desperately needs. More terrible candidates.

As money becomes the central factor, it’s the candidates with a fanatical following, the two radical socialists, Warren and Sanders, and the candidates with money to burn, who can stay in the race.

Tom Steyer, an eco-billionaire, bought his way into the primary, onto the debate stage, and was even accused of trying to buy endorsements. He’s blown through $47 million without batting an eye. With $1.6 billion to play with, Tom can keep this up a whole lot longer than Joe Biden can stay awake.

And, just to make matters more interesting, Michael Bloomberg appears to be jumping into the race. The former New York City mayor is rich enough to outspend Steyer 25 to 1. One of his political advisors had warned last time around that he had spent $100 million just to win reelection in New York City. Democrat apparatchiks have been suggesting that he was ready to spend $500 million on this election.

A bidding war between Bloomberg and Steyer for Democrat voters is just the thing to kick the economy into even higher gear and ensure President Trump wins reelection.

Steyer and Bloomberg can outspend and outlast Biden and all the other candidates who aren’t militant socialists glomming off the tsunami of socialist cash flowing through ActBlue to anyone willing to call for eliminating private health care and sending everyone who misuses transgender pronouns to a gulag.

And that could turn the primaries into a grueling battle between the millionaire socialists, who want to take away everyone’s health insurance, and the eco-billionaires, who want to make everyone eat gruel.

The socialists who are merely millionaires, (Warren’s net worth is $12 million while Bernie recently joined the 1%), will attack the billionaires as pernicious examples of income inequality. Why should some people have billions while others have mere millions to spend on their three homes?

Class warfare is going to be an uphill battle when your qualification to be one of The International’s “wretched of the earth” is not being able to afford to fly private jets outside of a presidential campaign.

But that won’t stop Warren and Sanders from claiming to be members of the working class even though the latter has never worked a day in his life and the former was paid six figures to teach a single class.

At Harvard.

If that’s the working class, what the hell is the average American slaving away at a 9 to 5 job?

On the other side of the great class divide between seven figures and ten figures, Steyer and Bloomberg are duplicative candidates. Both are old billionaires obsessed with environmentalism while projecting all the human warmth of Greta Thunberg in her native Swedish habitat. Aside from their mutual platform of banning all forms of energy that don’t depend on sunny days or windy nights, Bloomberg is also obsessed with banning sodas, salt and guns, while Steyer is fixated on impeaching Trump.

Neither is a good fit for inheriting Biden’s base of black voters. But then neither are Warren and Sanders.

If Biden’s campaign collapses, black voters would have to choose between four other old white people they don’t like, and Buttigieg, a candidate who consistently pulls in fewer black voters than the KKK.

That’s going to be a problem because black voters are a huge part of the Democrat base.

If the Dems go in to 2020 without a presidential candidate who stirs passion or at least some enthusiasm among black voters, they might as well just give up now and fly their private jets into the Gulf of Mexico.

And can you imagine anything more likely to stir interest among black voters than Bloomberg, Sanders, Warren, and Steyer, arguing over which of them is more oppressed on account of having less millions?

The good news for the socialists is that Bloomberg and Steyer’s obsession with destroying human civilization to save the planet is likely to turn off black voters even more than Sanders and Warren turning every debate into a Marxist faculty meeting at some obscure New England college.

Ecology is not a selling point for black voters.

On the other hand, Bloomberg won elections in a minority city by buying support on a scale and with a directness that would stagger even Steyer. His allies included the likes of Lenora Fulani, an anti-Semitic black nationalist associated with an alleged Marxist cult. The support of black leaders and black voters is not the same thing. That’s what Hillary Clinton found out twice the hard way. And it may not matter.

Black voters don’t have to ‘blexit’ their way to Trump. They just have to shrug. That happened in 2016.

And Hillary, unlike Warren, actually had an extensive pipeline to black voters. She also had Bill, a guy who, like Biden, could campaign in the black community as a natural. If Biden goes, the only remaining turnout hope will be mobilizing angry lefty middle class suburbanites on an unprecedented scale. And it’s one thing to do that in local and midterm elections. And a very different thing to do it nationwide.

President Trump understood that Biden and Warren were the weak points in the Dem 2020 lineup.

Biden’s fall and Warren’s rise set off a civil war between rich and super-rich Democrats, between socialists and Wall Street, and that conflict between the socialists and billionaires could cripple them.

The financial fallout of that conflict opened the door for Bloomberg’s seeming quixotic bid. It’s gotten Bill Gates to talk about withholding his money. And he’s not alone. In a primary battle between unlikable socialist millionaires and eco-billionaires, the only winners will be the campaign consultants and Trump.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Benjamin Wittes ‘White-knights’ For Lisa Page

Earlier today Lawfare founder Benjamin Wittes sent a curious tweet appearing to defend former DOJ lawyer Lisa Page; who was previously assigned to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.   The tweet comes out of the blue; and there’s nothing currently in the public sphere or headlines about Ms. Page.   It seems rather odd:

(Link to Tweet)

My hunch is Ms. Page may have spoken honestly to Horowitz or Durham about her experience as part of the ‘small group’.  If accurate, and considering McCabe threw Page under the bus to protect himself against an internal investigation about his media leaks, Ms. Page’s current disposition may very well be adverse to the interests of the coup plotters.   [Additionally, Ms. Page had no involvement with the FBI FISA construct.]

Michael Bromwich is Andrew McCabe’s attorney.  Bromwich is a Lawfare member.

Perhaps the former Deputy Director is being positioned as the ‘fall guy’.

INTELLECTUAL TAKEOUT

The Fall of the Wall 

and 

the Rise of Political Correctness

Thirty years ago this month, there occurred one of those amazing historical moments that stunned the world. The Berlin Wall ceased to exist:

On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist Party announced a change in his city’s relations with the West. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country’s borders. East and West Berliners flocked to the wall, drinking beer and champagne and chanting ‘Tor auf!’ (‘Open the gate!’). At midnight, they flooded through the checkpoints.

Within days, some of those shouting “Tor auf!” took pickaxes to the wall, knocking down the barbed wire and concrete that had separated East and West Berlin for decades. Tens of millions worldwide celebrated the beginning of the end of communism in East Germany.  

Within weeks, communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union began to die. In Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Albania, and Romania, communist regimes fell to stouthearted freedom fighters. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself was voted out of existence by the Supreme Soviet.

This collapse seemed to signal the end of communism and socialism worldwide. Western liberal values, many believed, would reign triumphant, and democracy would spread among the nations of the world.

Alas, no.

Governments in countries such as Cuba, North Korea, China, and Venezuela remain communist. Other nations are dictatorships of one kind or another. Meanwhile, the ideas of communism and socialism continue to survive in many other countries, including the United States. 

Look, for example, at some of today’s presidential candidates. Despite a booming economy, many of them savage capitalism. They demand the federal government take greater control of our market system. Candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren no longer fear being labeled socialists, instead embracing the name, and proposing programs for medical care, education, and our environment that, if enacted, would bankrupt an America already deeply in debt. 

These politicians are emboldened because they have discovered their ideas appeal to a large segment of voters, especially younger ones. These voters are products of an educational system teaching socialism and political correctness. They want the freebies promised by such politicians, believe the hysteria about global warning, and dream that a centralized state might bring about heaven on earth.

On October 27, a man died who knew first-hand the foolishness of utopian dreams. Vladimir Bukovsky had long opposed the corrupt governments of the Soviet Union and the Russia that emerged from the fallen USSR. Bukovsky was a brave man, a dissident who suffered for his beliefs but who never yielded an inch to dictators. 

Years ago, Bukovsky predicted that political correctness in the West, along with the overturning of tradition, would lead to ruination and repression of human rights. In his lecture “Can Political Correctness Be Worse Than Leninism?” he makes statements about feminism, grievance culture, Western political corruption, and American social experiments, that would likely brand him today as some sort of radical right-winger. Near the beginning of that lecture, Bukovsky offered these thoughts on 1989 and the continued rise of socialism:

But what happened after the collapse of communism? All over the world, especially in Europe, left wing politicians and parties come to power. Therefore, the move was clearly to the left, which seems illogical to me. Moreover, no hopes cherished back in 1989 (which were so high) ever came true. Communism survived. Francisco Fukuyama could have said that it was the end of history, but history proved otherwise – Cuba, Vietnam, China, North Korea remained communist. And in the very post-communist countries the processes did not go too far either. All what happened there were in fact cosmetic, exterior changes. Several personalities were replaced with others, who also happened to come from the communist establishment. Those countries appeared to be not free, but rather densely meshed by the remains of the nomenclature (communist establishment). But it was what happened in the West that surprised me most. It is at this time that the utopian ideologies appeared in the West. If we were to pinpoint when political correctness came into being, I could specify precisely – it came into being at the beginning of the nineties of the 20^th century.

“Utopian ideologies” remain alive and well in the United States. Our present presidential candidates seem in a race to outdo one another with their unhinged proposals. As for the political correctness Bukovsky addresses, here too our system has taken on the face of dictatorship. Suggest that transgendered men should be disqualified from playing women’s sports, and you will be labeled a bigot. Raise concerns about co-ed combat outfits in our military, and you will be dismissed as a misogynist. Stick up for the Second Amendment, and you are a terrorist.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the freedom that followed for Eastern European countries deserves celebration, but what if Bukovsky and others are correct? What if homegrown communists and socialists are eroding our own liberties?

President Trump Dismisses Reports of China Tariff Rollback

As we warned yesterday, about taking the propaganda of the Beijing panda mask…

Well, today President Trump pummels that narrative when he was asked about it during an impromptu press conference at the White House:

Q On China, can you tell me whether a tariff rollback will be part of the phase-one China deal?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, they’d like to have a rollback. I haven’t agreed to anything. China would like to get somewhat of a rollback — not a complete rollback, because they know I won’t do it.

But we’re getting along very well with China. They want to make a deal. Frankly, they want to make a deal a lot more than I do. I’m very happy right now. We’re taking in billions of dollars. I’m very happy. China would like to make a deal much more than I would. (link)

[…]  Q Have you figured out where you’re going to sign the phase-one trade deal yet? Do you have a location yet?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we’re looking at different — assuming we get it. You know, I never like to talk about things until we have them. But it could be Iowa or farm country or someplace like that. It will be in our country, but it could be — it could be someplace like that, John.

Q Mar-a-Lago?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I don’t think so. I think we’d go more in the farm belt.

[…] Q Do you have a date yet — do you have date yet, sir, for your meeting with Xi Jinping? Is it definitely going to be this year?

THE PRESIDENT: We’ll see what happens. Okay? We’ll see what happens. We’re getting along very well. They want to make the deal far more than I do. I will tell you, they want to make it far more than I do, but we’ll see what happens.

We’re taking in, right now — and you know — as a reporter of finance, you know what I’m saying. They’ve devalued their currency and they ate this tariff. We’re taking in billions of dollars in tariff money from China. I like our situation very much. They want to make a deal much more than I do, but we could have a deal.

Beijing is proposing acceptance of U.S. demands, but only if that acceptance also delivers a removal of the tariffs that created their diminished status.

USTR Lighthizer isn’t stupid, he’s not going to give back two-years of hard won position.

While they hate it, Beijing internally also understands the U.S. position, this is why they consider Trump such a formidable adversary.

So the latest position from Beijing is to say “a phased reduction in tariffs”, in exchange for a “phased acceptance” of terms.  From the Chinese position, they view this as their version of how they project the Western mindset of win-win into the negotiations.

None of the principals can say this directly; to make such an admission would be akin to losing face amid a history of thousands of years of specific Chinese strategy.  So they send out spokespersons to promote such a proposal.

Anyone who has an understanding of the Chinese outlook should take all of the media reporting on this with a grain-of-salt.  Beijing uses spokespersons as panda masks, and Team Trump know the distance between the Chinese principal and a Chinese spokesperson is part of their strategy.  The unspoken space between words is more important than the words themselves.  Inside this space is where cunning exists.

Regardless of the proposal, if it doesn’t come directly from a principal it doesn’t exist…. it is a false promise, or more panda mask.

This is what happened when the May 2019 talks collapsed.

Special trade envoy of Chairman Xi, Vice-Premier Liu He, quickly turned from a principal to a panda mask as soon as Beijing weighed in -and rebuked- Liu He’s negotiated terms.

Vice-Premier Liu He was stripped of his “special envoy” designation; and Beijing used the distance they just created with He as the justification for dismissing the May ’19 terms of agreement.  That example was very typically Chinese.

The point is, Beijing does not want to accept any new terms that diminishes their prior one-sided benefit.  China is communist, they don’t have a direct constituent group they are accountable to…. they are willing to incur suffering so long as they don’t lose position.

Losing less is not considered a position of benefit.  China cannot even contemplate such a position; it just isn’t done.  So any and all reporting on the discussions should be viewed through the prism that any deal is almost impossible to assemble unless, somehow, Beijing can view a deal as a win.   That is a deal President Trump is not going to accept.

IMF: “U.S. Removing Tariffs on China Will Improve Global Economy”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has a statement out today that underlines why so many global forces are against President Trump: “there are trillions at stake”

(Reuters) – An interim U.S.-China trade deal that rolls back some tariffs has the potential to improve the International Monetary Fund’s baseline economic forecasts, which show the two countries’ trade war slowing global growth significantly this year, an IMF spokesman said on Thursday. (read more)

The baseline for the position of the IMF is the open secret amid global economic that few will ever discuss openly.  The U.S. economy generates approximately $21 trillion in total activity; roughly 20 percent of total global economic activity.

When the U.S. maintains a $500 billion per year trade deficit with China, essentially we are sending China trade dollars Beijing then uses to purchase industrial products from the EU an other nations.  Any reduction in the U.S-China deficit means China has less dollars to distribute; as an outcome the global economies have access to less U.S. wealth.

The process to retain U.S. dollars inside our own economy, President Trump’s “America First” economic agenda, is the heart of what most call the global economic slowdown.  As a result the position of the IMF is better when the U.S. maintains a deficit, and the position of the IMF is weakened by any process that stops that exfiltration of wealth.

This is why so many countries are pouring money into Washington DC, and into any political activity within the United States, with the intention to derail President Trump’s policy.   By using U.S. proxies, essentially lobbyists, the multinationals are trying to stop President Trump.  There are trillions at stake.

An example would be China -and others- funding the Brookings institute.  The Brookings Institute then funds the activity of the Lawfare group.  Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler hiring Lawfare members as contractors for their impeachment effort then boils down to China subsidizing the impeachment process.  This is one example; however, there are many more.

Stopping or stalling ratification of the USMCA is another example.  The USMCA supports more U.S. wealth and weakens U.S. investment in China. It’s all connected.

Simultaneously, from coast to coast those same multinational interests are funneling massive amounts of cash into any election that is part of the domestic “resistance”.

The U.S. Wall Street multinationals, globalists and multinational banks all hold a vested financial interest in stopping President Trump.   The alignment of these interests is what gives rise to candidates like Michael Bloomberg.  It is all connected.

Hundreds of millions from multinational corporations are pouring into the coffers of K-Street lobbyists who are in turn purchasing politicians to maintain the adverse position against President Trump.  [Lobbyist Spending Here]

Once you see the strings on the marionettes you can never go back to the time when you did not see them….

So far, in 2019 (three quarters): SOURCE LINK

U.S. Chamber of Commerce = U.S. Multinationals on Wall Street.  Tom Donohue.

Open Society Policy Center = George Soros.

Amazon = Jeff Bezos, Washington Post, CIA.

Business Roundtable = U.S. Multinationals on Wall Street.

Northrop Grumman = Syria war policy influence.

Boeing Co = Where did DOJ-NSD FISA Lawyer, Tash Guahar, go to work?  {Go Deep}

…”there are trillions at stake”… “it’s all connected”…