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April 2021

Biden’s Stalin-esque 5-Year Plans

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/09/bidens-stalin-esque-5-year-plans/

In 1928, during his first year of what became known as the Stalin era, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin issued his first five-year plan, a centralized economic blueprint that focused on industrialization and collectivism. In 2021, during his first year as president of the United States, Joe Biden introduced a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan that both the White House and its cheerleaders have called “transformative.”

History tells us Stalin’s plans were transformative, too.

Before we go any further, we state here for the record that Biden is not Stalin. Not even close.

Yet we see policy parallels that should make Americans – at least those who still relish freedom from big government – mighty uncomfortable.

Biden is not unique in pitching an infrastructure plan. Donald Trump had an infrastructure plan. Most politicians, from president to members of the smallest city council in the country, like infrastructure projects. But Biden’s objectives are different. There’s more social engineering than civil engineering in his proposal.

Actually, there’s much more.

Of the $2.3 trillion Biden proposes to spend, only $921 billion would be dedicated to what most agree is infrastructure. As we noted earlier this week, the remainder “would go to pet Democrat projects, payoffs to unions and left-wing groups, squirrelly climate change projects, money for misgoverned and impecunious Blue States, and other waste.”

The Biden Plan for Economic Sclerosis American workers would suffer under his proposal to tax capital and subsidize green energy.By Kevin Hassett

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biden-plan-for-economic-sclerosis-11617907075?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

President Biden has proposed a back-to-the-future tax plan. When President Trump took office, the U.S. had the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world and had experienced a decade of slow growth, low investment and stagnant employment and real wages. The Obama economy was especially toxic for low-earning and less-educated groups. The assault on business was so widespread that capital’s contribution to economic growth was lower during the Obama expansion than it had been during any other period of growth since World War II.

The academic literature on corporate taxation pointed to the problem. High corporate taxes, a regulatory assault and social programs that discourage work and advancement led many U.S. multinational companies to locate their activity and profits overseas. This reduced or eliminated their tax in the U.S. while also reducing their demand for American labor. Wages dropped and tax revenue dropped, a double hit.

The idea of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was to make America an attractive location for capital formation again, and to drive wages up by increasing productivity. Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers estimated that wages for a typical family would grow about $4,000 over the first three to five years. Though the Obama administration proposed a corporate tax cut in 2015 for the same reasons, opponents of the bill ridiculed the Trump team’s numbers.

The economic data vindicated Mr. Trump. Actual gross domestic product by the end of 2019 was about $300 billion higher than the Congressional Budget Office had projected in July 2017. Business investment was about $100 billion higher and 2.8 million more workers were employed. U.S. firms repatriated $1.4 trillion in cash that was previously stuck overseas. And in the first two years after the tax cuts were passed, real median household income increased $4,900. Employment surged, especially among the long-term unemployed, the poor and minorities. Wealth for the bottom 50% of households advanced three times as fast as for the top 1%.

Holocaust Remembrance Day? By Marilyn Penn

http://politicalmavens.com/

Jews comprise 13% of the population of New York and have been here since the 17th century. There are approximately 1.5 million Jews in New York City, the largest population of anywhere outside of Israel. To get some idea of what Jews have contributed to our city, look at the names carved on walls at colleges, hospitals, libraries and Lincoln Center – these represent just the charitable contributions Jews have made without mentioning their othercontributions to our lives – the most recent of which is development of the Pfizer vaccine by the son of a Holocaust survivor.
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So it is with surprise bordering on disbelief that neither the NYTimes nor the Wall Street Journal called attention to the April 8th commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Instead, the Journal had a front page article about Muslims giving up coffee for Ramadan, including a picture of Palestinians at a festive Gaza Market on p. 18. The NYTimes chose to cover Biden’s cancellation of Trump’s boycott of U.S. funds for Palestinian “refugees” while they supported and rewarded terrorists. Instead, we will now afford them $235 million dollars of assistance. It’s interesting that both papers chose to deal with Muslims whose population in New York is roughly half that of Jews.

438,500 Americans lost their lives in World War 2. When our G.I.’s liberated the Ohrdruf concentration camp, General Eisenhower insisted that members of Congress and journalists be summoned to see and report on the atrocities that were performed there. Eisenhower’s statement was: “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, we know what he is fighting against.”
Anti-semitism in America is on the rise and is part and parcel of Black Lives Matter. Local t.v. news has headlined the vicious attacks on Asian people but few channels covered the attack on a Chasidic family pushing a baby carriage in Brooklyn a few days ago. They were assaulted by a man who slashed the father, mother and year old baby on their faces. It would seem that we are in very desperate need of remembering what happened to six million Jews and nearly half a million Americans who lost their lives during the Holocaust. How shameful that the editors of New York’s most important newspapers chose to forget them.

The Best Tonic for Restoring the GOP: Overreaching Democrats Republicans have a record fundraising quarter, no thanks to corporate PACs. Kimberley Strassel

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-tonic-for-restoring-the-gop-overreaching-democrats-11617920447?st=rpc564ajay1a49a&reflink=article_email_share

The media has reveled this year in the frequent, gleeful penning of obituaries for the Republican Party. The GOP is described as broken, fractured, befuddled about its identity, dying or already dead, not to mention up an unprintable creek, after corporate donors cut money following the Jan. 6 riot.

Or maybe not.

The obits are hard to square with a surprising new number from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s political team: $27.1 million. That’s the amount they tell me Mr. McCarthy single-handedly raked in during the first quarter of 2021. It’s the most money any Republican representative has ever raised in a quarter.

It’s even more notable given it was accomplished mostly in two months: January was rough for Republicans. And it was done almost entirely without big-business support. Only about $450,000, or less than 2%, came from corporate political-action committees. How big is a $27.1 million quarter? Mr. McCarthy raised about $100 million over the entire previous two-year cycle, or an average of $12.5 million a quarter.

The National Republican Congressional Committee announced on Thursday that it raked in $33.7 million in the first quarter (about $5 million of which came from Mr. McCarthy). It pulled in $19.1 million in March alone—an odd-year fundraising record. And the National Republican Senatorial Committee, under Florida Sen. Rick Scott, had one of its healthiest Februarys in years, bringing in $6.4 million—despite a precipitous drop in corporate PAC donations. (It has yet to report quarterly numbers.)

America’s elites want a racial apocalypse The narrative of racial conflict peddled by politicians, Big Business and progressives threatens social peace. Joel Kotkin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/04/08/americas-elites-want-a-racial-apocalypse/

Jamil Ford still recalls the disorders of late May. ‘It was like Baghdad’, he recalls, even as jurors listen to the arguments during the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of killing George Floyd. ‘I constantly think about it. The past history does not go away’, the African-American architect recalls, noting with trepidation possible National Guard deployments. ‘The mental part is still there.’

I know how he feels. In 1992 we went through this same process in Los Angeles when the police were exonerated in the beating of Rodney King. This unleashed a three-day explosion of often violent protests, resulting in $1 billion in damages and over 50 fatalities. In the end, the disorder led to some necessary shifts in police procedures but ultimately left the area relatively poorer and considerably less black than before.

Will things be different this time around? No politician in American history owes more to African-American leadership and voters than Joe Biden. His flailing campaign was rescued from the respirator by South Carolina’s heavily black Democratic electorate. African Americans sustained his path through states such as Texas. Since taking office, Biden’s commitment to battling the ‘sting of systemic racism’ and encroaching ‘white supremacy’ has accompanied his early actions and seems to have shaped many of his appointments.

The left’s and the media’s embrace of racial apocalypse, both in the US and in Britain, remains sadly selective. The recent Atlanta murders, given exhaustive coverage, appear to be the product not of Trumpista brownshirts but a singular, screwed-up madman. Meanwhile, attacks on Asians historically have come in large measure from minorities, largely African Americans. The most recent attack on Capitol Hill came not from Trumpistas but a follower of the ultimate anti-white, Louis Farrakhan.

The same media that hypes anti-Asian violence by whites usually ignores that by other ‘people of colour’. When the perpetrator is a Muslim jihadi, as was the case in Colorado, coverage has been less, even if the body count was twice as high. The ‘people of colour’ solidarity that bleeds over the pages of mainstream media has little room for nuance. It tends to ignore the fact that many Asians, and many Hispanics, oppose such things as quotas to selective high schools and colleges.

Similarly, most minorities seem not to share common ground with posturing politicians, and progressive intellectuals, who have excused looting as a form of racial redress. Minority business people generally don’t regard random violence as justice; the impact on business enterprises is felt particularly keenly in Minneapolis. A focus on police abuse is clearly needed, but the vast majority of Americans – including millennials and minorities – do not favour defunding law enforcement. They may be more concerned with the resurgence of violent and other crime in our core cities, even though it is often downplayed in the media.

Israel stands in silence with Holocaust Remembrance Day siren Traffic came to a stand still as the nation stood in place

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/israel-stands-in-silence-with-holocaust-remembrance-day-siren-664490

The State of Israel went quiet apart for a single, constant tone on Thursday morning as the two-minute siren rang through the streets, marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The siren is heard from every corner of the country. The public rises on its feet and stands in silence in a two-minute break meant to allow the country to keep those who were murdered during the Holocaust in their minds.

Israelis stop to stand for Holocaust Remembrance Day, from offices to schools to highways and city streets.

America Must Go Beyond Wishful Thinking About China By John Horvat II

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/america_must_go_beyond_wishful_thinking_about_china.html

America and the West’s policy of “constructive engagement” with Communist China make up the most egregious case of wishful thinking in history. For almost fifty years, the West has pumped trillions of dollars into the Chinese experiment and now has little to show for it except a much stronger China. Fortunately, many Americans are now waking up to the dangers of dealing with the Chinese dragon. It is not a moment too soon.  

Ever since President Richard Nixon’s infamous 1972 trip to China, the West has deceived itself into believing that being nice to Red China is a win-win proposition.  The policy’s underlying reasoning was that opening China up would expose the communist nation to freedom, which would induce its dictators to change and do what is best for the Chinese people. Alas, how wrong the West has been.

Several Myths

The wishful thinking revolved around several myths about China.

The first myth is that by introducing a free market system into the country, the leadership would gradually adopt a capitalist-like scheme that would be communist in name only. The West has long asserted that the Chinese have abandoned Marxist ideology and embraced world markets. 

However, the Chinese have never stopped insisting that they are genuinely communist. The more the West claims that China is not communist, the more the Chinese openly say they are. The recent hardline developments of the Xi dictatorship have dashed the hopes of Western optimists. Hong Kong and the persecution of the Catholic Church now offer bitter testimony that nothing has changed.

China Boycotts Western Companies Over Uyghurs by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17258/china-western-companies-uyghurs

Companies are being pressured to scrub from their websites language about corporate policies on human rights, reverse decisions to stop buying cotton produced in Xinjian, and remove maps that depict Taiwan as an independent country.

In October 2020, the Geneva-based Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), an influential non-profit group that promotes sustainable cotton production, suspended licensing of Xinjiang cotton, citing allegations and “increasing risks” of forced labor. The statement has since been scrubbed from the BCI website, and, disturbingly, also is not accessible on the Internet Archive.

In March 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, in a report, “Uyghurs for Sale,” revealed that Uyghurs were working in factories — under conditions of forced labor — that are in the supply chains of more than 80 well-known global brands in the clothing, automotive and technology sectors.

“China’s government, increasingly keen to punish critics of their Xinjiang policies, is forcing foreign companies to make a choice they have been studiously trying to avoid: support China or get out of the Chinese market…. The Communist Party views itself as increasingly able to exert economic pressure on others, using the ‘powerful gravitational field’ of the world’s second-largest economy…. The choice between the lucrative Chinese market and the values firms profess in the rest of the world is becoming unavoidable….” — The Economist, March 27, 2021.

“German companies account for a good one-half of the EU’s exports to China. The German export industry has little interest in tarnishing this balance sheet with moral zeal…. The economic dependence on China, however, further weakens the already low impact of moral arguments. As long as Europe, and in this case Germany in particular, is not prepared to reduce this dependency, complaints about human rights violations in China will, at best, continue to trigger sloppy defensive reactions from Beijing.” — Die Welt, March 24, 2021.

The Chinese government is boycotting Western clothing retailers for expressing concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang, China’s biggest region. The companies are being pressured to scrub from their websites language about corporate policies on human rights, reverse decisions to stop buying cotton produced in Xinjian, and remove maps that depict Taiwan as an independent country.

The escalating fight comes after the European Union and the United Kingdom on March 22 joined the United States and Canada to impose sanctions on Chinese officials for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, a remote autonomous region in northwestern China.

Human rights experts say at least one million Muslims are being detained in up to 380 internment camps, where they are subject to torture, mass rapes, forced labor and sterilizations.

Western companies doing business in China increasingly face an unpalatable dilemma: how to uphold Western values and distance themselves from human rights abuses without provoking retaliation from the Chinese government and losing access to one of the world’s biggest and fastest-growing markets.

The current dispute revolves around allegations that the Chinese government is forcing more than 500,000 Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic and religious minorities to pick cotton in Xinjiang, which produces 85% of China’s cotton and one-fifth of the world’s supply. Roughly 70% of the region’s cotton fields are picked by hand. The allegations of forced labor affect all Western supply chains that involve Xinjiang cotton as a raw material. Both the European Union and the United States import more than 30% of their apparel and textile supplies from China.

In October 2020, the Geneva-based Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), an influential non-profit group that promotes sustainable cotton production, suspended licensing of Xinjiang cotton, citing allegations and “increasing risks” of forced labor. The statement has since been scrubbed from the BCI website, and, disturbingly, also is not accessible on the Internet Archive.

MY SAY: MARTHA GELLHORN (1908-1998)

PBS and Ken Burns have made a docu-series on the life of Ernest Hemingway. Of far greater interest to me is the life of his wife Martha Gellhorn, arguably the finest war correspondent and journalist. Compared to today’s news readers and tyros who write and comment on evolving conflicts and politics, Gellhorn was informed, articulate and principled.

For affirmation please read:

https://www.military-history.org/feature/world-war-2/war-reporters-martha-gellhorn.htm

 War Reporters: Martha Gellhorn

The outbreak of the Second World War is likely one of the most written-about topics in history. It is difficult to imagine what more new and original could be added to the already profuse literature on the tumultuous events of the 1930s.

But going back to one of the earliest accounts of the rise of Hitler’s Germany provides a different experience. Reading Martha Gellhorn’s reporting from Czechoslovakia in 1938 is like watching the war rise from the ashes of Depression-era Europe with new eyes.

https://www.dw.com/en/the-liberation-of-dachau-75-years-ago/a-53270700

The liberation of Dachau, 75 years ago

When US soldiers reached the gate of the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, they had no idea what horrors awaited them. War reporter Martha Gellhorn shared what she saw with the world.

You can also read her myriad columns on Israel’ history and legitimacy…..rsk

Wealthy and Woke Apparently to rant about “privilege” means the less you need to worry about your own. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/07/wealthy-and-woke/

Ed Bastian makes $17 million a year as chief executive officer of Delta Airlines, Georgia’s largest employer. 

Bastian just blasted Georgia’s new voting law. He thinks it is racist to require the same sort of ID to vote that Delta requires for its passengers to check-in.  

Yet most Americans believe voting is a more sacred act than flying Delta and, moreover, may have noticed that Delta has all sorts of partnerships with a systemically racist China. So polls show Americans approve of voter IDs.  

Bastian fears the woke mob more than the majority of Georgia residents who support the law. Apparently, his theory is that the greater numbers of average folks won’t threaten his multimillion-dollar perch as much as fewer but more powerful left-wing elites. 

The most privileged CEOs of corporate America—those who sell us everything from soft drinks and sneakers, to professional sports and social media—now jabber to America about its racism, sexism, and assorted sins. 

The rules of cynical CEO censure are transparent. 

First, the corporation never harangues unless it feels it has more to lose—whether by boycotts, protests, or bad publicity—than it stands to gain in staying neutral and silent.