Socialism Conference Plays out in Democrat Policy

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Primer: One of the breakout sessions was titled ‘Can we Organize Amazon’. Could it be that this was part of the Amazon walkout crowd too?

Consider a few of these other breakout sessions. Just a sample day.

So……While you were enjoying your Fourth of July weekend, I was attending a national conference on socialism, Jarrett Stepman that is…..

Why? Because socialism is having its moment on the left.

Since there’s often confusion as to what socialism really is, I decided to attend the Socialism 2019 conference at the Hyatt Hotel in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend.

The conference, which had the tag line “No Borders, No Bosses, No Binaries,” contained a cross-section of the most pertinent hard-left thought in America. Among the sponsors were the Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin, a quarterly socialist magazine.

The walls of the various conference rooms were adorned with posters of Karl Marx and various depictions of socialist thinkers and causes.

Most of the conference attendees appeared to be white, but identity politics were a major theme throughout—especially in regard to gender.

At the registration desk, attendees were given the option of attaching a “preferred pronoun” sticker on their name tags.

In addition, the multiple-occupancy men’s and women’s restrooms were relabeled as “gender neutral,” and men and women were using both. Interestingly enough, the signs above the doors were still labeled with the traditional “men’s” and “women’s” signs until they were covered over with home-made labels.

One of the paper labels read: “This bathroom has been liberated from the gender binary!”

While the panelists and attendees were certainly radical, and often expressed contempt for the Democratic Party establishment, it was nevertheless clear how seamlessly they blended traditional Marxist thought with the agenda of what’s becoming the mainstream left.

They did so by weaving their views with the identity politics that now dominate on college campuses and in the media and popular entertainment. The culture war is being used as a launching point for genuinely socialist ideas, many of which are re-emerging in the 21st century.

Here are six takeaways from the conference:

1. Serious About Socialism

A common line from those on the modern left is that they embrace “democratic socialism,” rather than the brutal, totalitarian socialism of the former Soviet Union or modern North Korea and Venezuela. Sweden is usually cited as their guide for what it means in practice, though the reality is that these best-case situations show the limits of socialism, not its success.

It’s odd, too, for those who insist that “diversity is our strength” to point to the culturally homogenous Nordic countries as ideal models anyway.

It’s clear, however, that while many socialists insist that their ideas don’t align with or condone authoritarian societies, their actual ideology—certainly that of those speaking at the conference—is in no sense distinct.

Of the panels I attended, all featured speakers who made paeans to traditional communist theories quoted Marx, and bought into the ideology that formed the basis of those regimes.

Mainstream politicians may dance around the meaning of the word “socialist,” but the intellectuals and activists who attended Socialism 2019 could have few doubts about the fact that Marxism formed the core of their beliefs.

Some sought to dodge the issue. One was David Duhalde, the former political director of Our Revolution, an activist group that supports Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and that was an offshoot of Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.

Duhalde said that Sanders is a creation of the socialist movement—having had direct ties to the Socialist Party of America in his youth—but hasn’t maintained an official connection to socialist political organizations throughout his political career.

Sanders’ position, according to Duhalde, is “anti-totalitarian” and that he favors a model based on “neither Moscow, nor the United States, at least in this formation.”

It’s a convenient way of condemning capitalist-oriented societies while avoiding connections to obviously tyrannical ones.

It was also difficult to mistake the sea of red shirts and posters of Marx that adorned the walls at the conference—or the occasional use of the word “comrades”—as anything other than an embrace of genuine socialism, but with a uniquely modern twist.

2. Gender and Identity Politics Are Ascendant

Transgenderism, gender nonconformity, and abolishing traditional family structures were huge issues at Socialism 2019.

One panel, “Social Reproduction Theory and Gender Liberation,” addressed how the traditional family structure reinforced capitalism and contended that the answer was to simply abolish families.

Corrie Westing, a self-described “queer socialist feminist activist based in Chicago working as a home-birth midwife,” argued that traditional family structures propped up oppression and that the modern transgender movement plays a critical part in achieving true “reproductive justice.”

Society is in a moment of “tremendous political crisis,” one that “really demands a Marxism that’s up to the par of explaining why our socialist project is leading to ending oppression,” she said, “and we need a Marxism that can win generations of folks that can be radicalized by this moment.”

That has broad implications for feminism, according to Westing, who said that it’s important to fight for transgender rights as essential to the whole feminist project—seemingly in a direct shot at transgender-exclusionary radical feminists, who at a Heritage Foundation event in January argued that sex is biological, not a societal construct, and that transgenderism is at odds with a genuine feminism.

She contended that economics is the basis of what she called “heteronormativity.”

Pregnancy becomes a tool of oppression, she said, as women who get pregnant and then engage in child rearing are taken out of the workforce at prime productive ages and then are taken care of by an economic provider.

Thus, the gender binary is reinforced, Westing said.

She insisted that the answer to such problems is to “abolish the family.” The way to get to that point, she said, is by “getting rid of capitalism” and reorganizing society around what she called “queer social reproduction.”

“When we’re talking about revolution, we’re really connecting the issues of gender justice as integral to economic and social justice,” Westing said.

She then quoted a writer, Sophie Lewis, who in a new book, “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,” embraced “open-sourced, fully collaborative gestation.”

3. Open Borders Is Becoming a Litmus Test

It’s perhaps not surprising that socialists embrace open borders. After all, that’s becoming a much more mainstream position on the left in general.

The AFL-CIO used to support immigration restrictions until it flipped in 2000 and called for illegal immigrants to be granted citizenship.

As recently as 2015, Sanders rejected the idea of open borders as a ploy to impoverish Americans.

But Justin Akers-Chacon, a socialist activist, argued on a panel, “A Socialist Case for Open Borders,” that open borders are not only a socialist idea, but vital to the movement.

Akers-Chacon said that while capital has moved freely between the United States and Central and South America, labor has been contained and restricted.

He said that while working-class people have difficulty moving across borders, high-skilled labor and “the 1%” are able to move freely to other countries.

South of the border, especially in Mexico and Honduras, Akers-Chacon said, there’s a stronger “class-consciousness, as part of cultural and historical memory exists in the working class.”

“My experiences in Mexico and my experiences working with immigrant workers, and my experiences with people from different parts of this region, socialist politics are much more deeply rooted,” he said.

That has implications for the labor movement.

Despite past attempts to exclude immigrants, Akers-Chacon said, it’s important for organized labor to embrace them. He didn’t distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants.

For instance, he said one of the biggest benefits of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was that there was a brief boost in union membership amid a more general decline in unionism.

Besides simply boosting unions, the influx “changed the whole AFL-CIO position on immigrants, [which was] still backwards, restrictive, anti-immigrant,” Akers-Chacon said.

“So, there’s a correlation between expanding rights for immigrants and the growth, and confidence, and militancy of the labor movement as a whole,” he said.

4. ‘Clickbait’ Communism Is Being Used to Propagandize Young Americans

The magazine Teen Vogue has come under fire recently for flattering profiles of Karl Marx and promoting prostitution as a career choice, among other controversial pieces.

It would be easy to write these articles off as mere “clickbait,” but it’s clear that the far-left nature of its editorials—and its attempt to reach young people with these views—is genuine.

Teen Vogue hosted a panel at Socialism 2019, “System Change, Not Climate Change: Youth Climate Activists in Conversation with Teen Vogue.”

The panel moderator was Lucy Diavolo, news and politics editor at the publication, who is transgender.

“I know there’s maybe a contradiction in inviting Teen Vogue to a socialism conference … especially because the youth spinoff brand is a magazine so associated with capitalist excess,” Diavolo said. “If you’re not familiar with our work, I encourage you to read Teen Vogue’s coverage of social justice issues, capitalism, revolutionary theory, and Karl Marx, or you can check out the right-wing op-eds that accuse me of ‘clickbait communism’ and teaching your daughters Marxism and revolution.”

The panel attendees responded enthusiastically.

“Suffice to say, the barbarians are beyond the gates. We are in the tower,” Diavolo boasted.

5. The Green Movement Is Red

It’s perhaps no surprise that an openly socialist member of Congress is pushing for the Green New Deal—which would essentially turn the U.S. into a command-and-control economy reminiscent of the Soviet Union.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti recently said, according to The Washington Post: “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.”

“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti asked Sam Ricketts, climate director for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who is running for president in the Democratic primary. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

Economic transformation barely disguised as a way to address environmental concerns appears to be the main point.

One of the speakers on the Teen Vogue climate panel, Sally Taylor, is a member of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-oriented environmental activist group that made headlines in February when several elementary school-age members of the group confronted Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., about her lack of support for the Green New Deal.

The other speaker on the Teen Vogue climate panel was Haven Coleman, a 13-year-old environmental activist who has received favorable coverage for leading the U.S. Youth Climate Strike in March. She was open about the system change she was aiming for to address climate change.

She noted during her remarks that she was receiving cues from her mother, who she said was in attendance.

Haven said the answer to the climate change problem was moving on from our “capitalistic society” to something “other than capitalism.”

Interestingly, none of the glowing media profiles of Haven or the Climate Strike mentioned a link to socialism or abolishing capitalism.

6. Socialism Can’t Be Ignored as a Rising Ethos on the Left

According to a recent Gallup survey, 4 in 10 Americans have a positive view of socialism. Support among Democrats is even higher than among the general population, with a majority of Democrats saying they prefer socialism to capitalism.

But many who say they want socialism rather than capitalism struggle to define what those terms mean and change their views once asked about specific policies.

As another Gallup poll from 2018 indicated, many associate socialism with vague notions of “equality,” rather than as government control over the means of production in the economy.

What’s clear from my observations at Socialism 2019 is that traditional Marxists have successfully melded their ideology with the identity politics and culture war issues that animate modern liberalism—despite still being quite far from the beliefs of the average citizen.

Socialists at the conference focused more on social change, rather than electoral politics, but there were still many core public policy issues that animated them; notably, “Medicare for All” and government run-health care, some kind of Green New Deal to stop global warming (and more importantly, abolish capitalism), open borders to increase class consciousness and promote transnational solidarity, removing all restrictions on—and publicly funding—abortion, and breaking down social and legal distinctions between the sexes.

They were particularly able to weave their issues together through the thread of “oppressor versus oppressed” class conflict—for instance, supporting government-run health care meant also unquestioningly supporting unfettered abortion and transgender rights.

Though their analyses typically leaned more heavily on economic class struggle and determinism than what one would expect from more mainstream progressives, there wasn’t a wide gap between what was being discussed at Socialism 2019 and the ideas emerging from a growing segment of the American left.

Seizing el Chapo’s Money Likely Impossible

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Senator Ted Cruz and Sasse have co-sponsored legislation to seize the bank accounts of el Chapo Guzman to pay for the wall. While this is great in theory, some of that money should go to the victims as well.

el Chapo has been sentenced to live in prison plus 30 years and he is to forfeit his vast sums of money estimated to be as high as $12 billion. C’mon, this is likely not going to happen in total but there is a possibility to find perhaps some of it. Why?

Spain Is a Paradise (for the World's Most Powerful Drug ...

Guzman’s trial highlighted the methods Guzman Loera and his organization used to transport the cartel’s multi-ton shipments of narcotics into the United States, including fishing boats, submarines, carbon fiber airplanes, trains with secret compartments and transnational underground tunnels. Once the narcotics were in the United States, they were sold to wholesale distributors in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, Arizona, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Guzman Loera then used various methods to launder billions of dollars of drug proceeds, including bulk cash smuggling from the United States to Mexico, U.S.-based insurance companies, reloadable debit cards and numerous shell companies, including a juice company and a fish flour company.

Guzman built a global empire and that included hiring expert lawyers, accountants and investors. The Federal Court of New York in 2008 proved that HSBC, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America were directly related to money laundering. The same court found that HSBC had laundered at least $1.1 billion from Sinaloa.

Drug cartel leaders may be uneducated in the traditional sense, but as the agents pursuing them know all too well, they are wily strategists and extremely sophisticated business people. Because their business depends on identifying and exploiting loopholes in the world’s legal and financial systems, they hire the brightest talent they can find to help them achieve their goals, and pay them extraordinarily well. Of the many money-laundering methods utilized by drug cartels, “structuring” – depositing amounts smaller than $10,000 to avoid Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) reporting regulations – is the most popular, even though it’s also the easiest form of money laundering to detect. Structuring is the most common reason Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are filed by banks, but it’s also the most direct way to get money into a U.S. bank account. To push the odds in their favor, drug traffickers hire a veritable army of people to deposit small amounts of cash in banks all over the country, in cities large and small. Many get caught, but to the cartels, that’s simply the cost of doing business.

One area where law enforcement and finance can help each other in the future is in identifying and recognizing evolving trends. For example, Europe is a popular place for Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers to conduct business now because there is a lack of coordination and communication between countries in the European Union that criminals are exploiting.

Recently, federal officials received word that teenagers in a small country in Central Africa called Equatorial Guinea were suddenly driving Maseratis and other expensive cars down the country’s dirt roads. Further investigation revealed that both the Sinaloa drug cartel and Colombia’s Medellin cartel are now using this small country as a trafficking gateway to Europe.

Why? Because the predominant language in Equatorial Guinea isn’t French or Portuguese – it’s Spanish. More here.

Why are the Sinaloa Cartel the World's Most Powerful ...

Once illicit money gets into the U.S. financial system, it can go anywhere, internationally and such is the issue with the Iran nuclear deal where John Kerry allowed Iran access to the American banking system. What about the Patriot Act you ask? In some cases it was finessed due to payoffs. And how about corrupt governments? Yup that too.

 

Google Manipulated Votes in 2016 for Hillary, Senate Hearing

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Now, who is Dr. Robert Epstein? He is a distinguished research psychologist and the former editor in chief of Psychology Today. He has authored 15 books and published 250 articles. He is a committed Democrat and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

So, you MUST watch this video clip from C-Span today before the Senate. More terrifying than even Russia interfering in the American election infrastructure.

Hat tip to Senator Ted Cruz.

Can you guess who was the top campaign contributor? Yes, Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

Update: The testimony of Dr. Epstein regarding Google’s collaboration with Hillary is also substantiated by a research paper found here and published in 2016.

WikiLeaks: Google's Eric Schmidt Planning Hillary's ...

Now, he published this piece about Google and it too is a must read.

Recognition is growing worldwide that something big needs to be done about Big Tech, and fast.

More than $8 billion in fines have been levied against Google by the European Union since 2017. Facebook Inc., facing an onslaught of investigations, has dropped in reputation to almost rock bottom among the 100 most visible companies in the U.S. Former employees of Google and Facebook have warned that these companies are “ripping apart the social fabric” and can “hijack the mind.”

Adding substance to the concerns, documents and videos have been leaking from Big Tech companies, supporting fears—most often expressed by conservatives—about political manipulations and even aspirations to engineer human values.

Fixes on the table include forcing the tech titans to divest themselves of some of the companies they’ve bought (more than 250 by Google and Facebook alone) and guaranteeing that user data are transportable.

But these and a dozen other proposals never get to the heart of the problem, and that is that Google’s search engine and Facebook’s social network platform have value only if they are intact. Breaking up Google’s search engine would give us a smattering of search engines that yield inferior results (the larger the search engine, the wider the range of results it can give you), and breaking up Facebook’s platform would be like building an immensely long Berlin Wall that would splinter millions of relationships.

With those basic platforms intact, the three biggest threats that Google and Facebook pose to societies worldwide are barely affected by almost any intervention: the aggressive surveillance, the suppression of content, and the subtle manipulation of the thinking and behavior of more than 2.5 billion people.

Different tech companies pose different kinds of threats. I’m focused here on Google, which I’ve been studying for more than six years through both experimental research and monitoring projects. (Google is well aware of my work and not entirely happy with me. The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Google is especially worrisome because it has maintained an unopposed monopoly on search worldwide for nearly a decade. It controls 92 percent of search, with the next largest competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, drawing only 2.5%.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to end the company’s monopoly without breaking up its search engine, and that is to turn its “index”—the mammoth and ever-growing database it maintains of internet content—into a kind of public commons.

There is precedent for this both in law and in Google’s business practices. When private ownership of essential resources and services—water, electricity, telecommunications, and so on—no longer serves the public interest, governments often step in to control them. One particular government intervention is especially relevant to the Big Tech dilemma: the 1956 consent decree in the U.S. in which AT&T agreed to share all its patents with other companies free of charge. As tech investor Roger McNamee and others have pointed out, that sharing reverberated around the world, leading to a significant increase in technological competition and innovation.

Doesn’t Google already share its index with everyone in the world? Yes, but only for single searches. I’m talking about requiring Google to share its entire index with outside entities—businesses, nonprofit organizations, even individuals—through what programmers call an application programming interface, or API.

Google already allows this kind of sharing with a chosen few, most notably a small but ingenious company called Startpage, which is based in the Netherlands. In 2009, Google granted Startpage access to its index in return for fees generated by ads placed near Startpage search results.

With access to Google’s index—the most extensive in the world, by far—Startpage gives you great search results, but with a difference. Google tracks your searches and also monitors you in other ways, so it gives you personalized results. Startpage doesn’t track you—it respects and guarantees your privacy—so it gives you generic results. Some people like customized results; others treasure their privacy. (You might have heard of another privacy-oriented alternative to Google.com called DuckDuckGo, which aggregates information obtained from 400 other non-Google sources, including its own modest crawler.)

If entities worldwide were given unlimited access to Google’s index, dozens of Startpage variants would turn up within months; within a year or two, thousands of new search platforms might emerge, each with different strengths and weaknesses. Many would target niche audiences—some small, perhaps, like high-end shoppers, and some huge, like all the world’s women, and most of these platforms would do a better job of serving their constituencies than Google ever could.

These aren’t just alternatives to Google, they are competitors—thousands of search platforms, each with its special focus and emphasis, each drawing on different subsets of information from Google’s ever-expanding index, and each using different rules to decide how to organize the search results they display. Different platforms would likely have different business models, too, and business models that have never been tried before would quickly be tested.

This system replicates the competitive ecology we now have of both traditional and online media sources—newspapers, magazines, television channels, and so on—each drawing on roughly the same body of knowledge, serving niche audiences, and prioritizing information as it sees fit.

But what about those nasty filter bubbles that trap people in narrow worlds of information? Making Google’s index public doesn’t solve that problem, but it shrinks it to nonthreatening proportions. At the moment, it’s entirely up to Google to determine which bubble you’re in, which search suggestions you receive, and which search results appear at the top of the list; that’s the stuff of worldwide mind control. But with thousands of search platforms vying for your attention, the power is back in your hands. You pick your platform or platforms and shift to others when they draw your attention, as they will all be trying to do continuously.

If that happens, what becomes of Google? At first, not much. It should be allowed, I believe, to retain ownership and control of its index. That will assure it continues to do a great job maintaining and updating it. And even with competition looming, change will take time. Serious competitors will need months to gather resources and generate traffic. Eventually, though, Google will likely become a smaller, leaner, more diversified company, especially if some of the other proposals out there for taming Big Tech are eventually implemented. If, over time, Google wants to continue to spy on people through its search engine, it will have to work like hell to keep them. It will no longer be able to rest on its laurels, as it has for most of the past 20 years; it’s going to have to hustle, and we will all benefit from its energy.

My kids think Google was the world’s first search engine, but it was actually the 21st. I can remember when search was highly competitive—when Yahoo! was the big kid on the block and engines such as Ask Jeeves and Lycos were hot commodities. Founded in 1998 amid a crowded field of competitors, Google didn’t begin to dominate search until 2003, by which time it still handled only about a third of searches in the U.S. Search can be competitive again—this time with a massive, authoritative, rapidly expanding index available to all parties.

The alternative is frightening. If Google retains its monopoly on search, or even if a government steps in and makes Google a public utility, the obscene power to decide what information humanity can see and how that information should be ordered will remain in the hands of a single authority. Democracy will be an illusion, human autonomy will be compromised, and competition in search—with all the innovation that implies—might never emerge. With internet penetration increasing rapidly worldwide, do we really want a single player, no matter how benign it appears to be, to control the gateway to all information?

For the system I propose to work fairly and efficiently, we’ll need rules. Here are some obvious ones to think about:

Access. There might have to be limits on who can access the API. We might not want every high school hacker to be able to build his or her own search platform. On the other hand, imagine thousands of Mark Zuckerbergs battling each other to find better ways of organizing the world’s information.

Speed. Google must not be allowed to throttle access to its index, especially in ways that give it a performance advantage or that favor one search platform over another.

Content. To prevent Google from engineering humanity by being selective about what content it adds to its index, all parties with API access must be able to add content.

Visibility. For people using Google to seek information about other search platforms, Google must be forbidden from driving people to itself or its affiliated platforms.

Removal. Google must be prohibited from removing content from its index. The only exception will be when a web page no longer exists. An accurate, up-to-date record of such deletions must be accessible through the API.

Logging. Google must log all visits to its index, and that log must be accessible through the API.

Fees. Low-volume external platforms (think: high school hackers) should be able to access the index free of charge. High-volume users (think: Microsoft Corp.’s Bing) should pay Google nominal fees set by regulators. That gives Google another incentive for maintaining a superior index.

Can we really justify bludgeoning one of the world’s biggest and most successful companies? When governments have regulated, dismembered, or, in some cases, taken ownership of private water or electricity companies, they have done so to serve the public interest, even when the company in question has developed new technologies or resources at great expense. The rationale is straightforward: You may have built the pipelines, but water is a “common” resource that belongs to everyone, as David Bollier reminded us in his seminal book, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth.

In Google’s case, it would be absurd for the company to claim ownership rights over the contents of its index for the simple reason that it copied virtually all those contents. Google scraped the content by roaming the internet, examining webpages, and copying both the address of a page and language used on that page. None of those websites or any external authority ever gave Google permission to do this copying.

Did any external authority give Google permission to demote a website in its search results or to remove a website from its index? No, which is why both individuals and even top business leaders are sometimes traumatized when Google demotes or delists a website.

But when Google’s index becomes public, people won’t care as much about its machinations. If conservatives think Google is messing with them, they’ll soon switch to other search platforms, where they’ll still get potentially excellent results. Given the possibility of a mass migration, Google will likely stop playing God, treating users and constituencies with new respect and humility.

Who will implement this plan? In the U.S., Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice all have the power to make this happen. Because Google is a global company with, at this writing, 16 data centers—eight in the U.S., one in Chile, five in the EU, one in Taiwan, and one in Singapore—countries outside the U.S. could also declare its index to be a public commons. The EU is a prime candidate for taking such action.

But there is another possibility—namely, that Google itself will step up. This isn’t as crazy as you might think. Likely prompted by the EU antitrust investigations, the company has quietly gone through two corporate reorganizations since 2015, and experts I’ve talked to in both the U.S. and the U.K. say the main effect of these reorganizations has been to distance Google’s major shareholders from any calamities that might befall the Google search engine. The company’s lawyers have also undoubtedly been taking a close look at the turbulent years during which Microsoft unsuccessfully fought U.S. antitrust investigators.

Google’s leaders have been preparing for an uncertain future in which the search engine might be made a public utility, fined into bankruptcy, frozen by court orders, or even seized by governments. It might be able to avoid ugly scenarios simply by posting the specs for its new public API and inviting people and companies around the world to compete with its search platform. Google could do this tomorrow—and generate glowing headlines worldwide. Google’s data analysts know how to run numbers better than anyone. If the models predict that the company will make more money, minimize risk, and optimize its brand in coming years by making its index public, Google will make this happen long before the roof caves in.

Several Democrat Presidential Nominees Hire Perkins Coie

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You know that law firm, the one that hired Fusion GPS. Swell huh….

Okay let’s review where they are so far shall we?

As a primer: Hillary was on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. She defended Marc Elias and hiring Fusion GPS.

Clinton defended the approach that her campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, took to the work of Fusion GPS, a research firm that compiled a dossier about Trump before recruiting former British spy Christopher Steele to conduct more research. (Politico barely reported this and the substance is thin)

Image result for hillary clinton trevor noah

Senator(s) Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren were first to hire Perkins Coie. Campaign disclosures so far show Elizabeth Warren has paid two invoices to date totaling $320,000. Kamala Harris has paid Perkins Coie $90,000 but the top lawyer over there is Marc Elias and he has assumed the role of Harr’s campaign general counsel. Pssst, Elias was general counsel to Hillary’s campaign.

Okay there is more. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and amy Klobuchar have each spent $85,000 for legal services to Perkins Coie. Jay Inslee and John Hickenlooper also paid for legal services as has Julian Castro.

A few other law firms of interest and being paid for legal services include Senator Michael Bennet as well as Inslee and Castro are also using the law firms of Wilmer Cutler Pickering, Hale and Door while Joe Biden has hired Covington & Burling. One of the partners at C & V is Robert Lenhard, a former Federal Election Commission chairman is also advising Biden.

Hey, we cant leave out Mayor Pete Buttigieg. He so far appears to have spent the most ($320,000) of legal services for his campaign. He hired Jenner & Block. What about Bernie Sanders? He has spent $260,000 in legal fees to Garvey Schubert Barer.

The rest of the candidates such as Beto, Tulsi Gabbard, de Blasio have not spent all that much. Why, their respective campaigns have little campaign money in their war chests.

Anyway back to Perkins Coie and Mr. Elais. Campaign officials for the Hillary camp did not do any oversight on the money Elias was allowed to spend and where. As Fusion GPS produced opposition research on Trump via the dossier, it appears that the Hillary operation and Perkins Coie did not hesitate to publish unverified claims. You gotta wonder if the top floor of the FBI collaborated with Perkins Coie on the whole matter. Seems the FBI trusted Christopher Steele not to question his work and perhaps the same can be said of Perkins Coie…maybe due to Hillary herself…

Image result for hillary clinton marc elias

Oh, remember when Facebook terminated thousands of accounts due to they claim they were the product of Russian actors? Facebook was forced to disclose some of this information and guess who provided some of that legal work for Facebook? Yuppers, Marc Elias. Another sidebar to all of this is John Podesta. In September of last year, Podesta provided a closed door interview before the Senate Intelligence Committee staffers. Who sat next to Podesta? Right again, Marc Elias. Podesta claimed at the time he had no knowledge of payments to Fusion GPS. Next question is did Perkins Coie offer some office space to Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS? That answer appears to be yes. Oh, another item of interest is Marc Elias has as part of his resume voting rights cases. These cases were funded by George Soros where election recounts resulted in highly contested states and districts.

Remember that Senator Robert Menendez case on federal bribery and financial disclosures that the senator paid to a good buddy doctor friend? Who provided the legal services to Senator Menendez? Ding ding ding, you would be right, Marc Elias. Add in the fact that John Kerry hired Elias for his 2004 presidential campaign as did Harry Reid in his 1998 contested senate election.

Imagine the discussions that Marc Elias has with his newest politician, Kamala Harris….just imagine the campaign roadmap Mr. Elias has crafted for Kamala. Consider, she does sound a lot like Hillary on the campaign trail.

 

Whoa, Meet Eric Kessler and Arabella

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Who you ask?

Eric Kessler is founder, principal, and senior managing director of Arabella Advisors, a Washington, D.C.-based philanthropic consultancy that caters to left-leaning clients. Arabella Advisors also manages a number of center-left funding and fiscal sponsorship organizations, including 501(c)(4) Sixteen Thirty Fund, 501(c)(3) New Venture Fund, 501(c)(3) Hopewell Fund, and 501(c)(3) Windward Fund. Kessler himself is closely involved with these organizations, often serving as the founder, principal officer, or board member in them.

Kessler is closely involved in Democratic Party and left-wing politics. He is a former Clinton administration White House appointee and previously served as national field director for the League of Conservation Voters. [1] Kessler later served as a member of the now-defunct Clinton Global Initiative. [2]

Kessler chairs a committee on culinary advocacy for the center-left James Beard Foundation and is co-founder of the Chef Action Network. He also serves on the board of directors of the National Democratic Institute. [3]

Image result for eric kessler

Okay so what?

Well, when it came to the paid choreographed operation against Brett Kavanaugh, enter Arabella Advisors. While there were other well funded organizations, Kessler is someone to continue to watch. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse spoke often about the dark money supporting the Kavanaugh confirmation.

The most visible liberal organization was Demand Justice, formed only a few months before Kennedy’s retirement by veteran Democratic operatives with experience in the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Obama administration. If money given to the Judicial Crisis Network is “dark” because JCN’s annual 990 tax filings don’t disclose its donors, Demand Justice’s bank account is a black hole. “Fiscally sponsored” by the Sixteen Thirty Fund, an under-the-radar liberal intermediary group that passes money from donors to dozens of liberal organizations, Demand Justice doesn’t even file the disclosure forms that “dark money” groups do. Senator Whitehouse couldn’t put it on one of his pie charts if he tried. Both the donors to Demand Justice and the amount of money they contribute are completely invisible.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund does file an annual Form 990, but it does not reveal the identities of its donors. Although its budget dwarfs that of the Judicial Crisis Network and the Federalist Society combined, it has failed to pique Senator Whitehouse’s interest. In 2017 it brought in $79 million and ended the year with $43 million in assets, growing by an astonishing 1,547 percent in only eight years. In pursuit of its cryptically worded mission—“promoting social welfare, including, but not limited to, providing public education on and conducting advocacy regarding key policies”—the fund bankrolls liberal groups focused on everything from judicial appointments, organized labor, and abortion to Senator Whitehouse’s own favorite dark-money heavyweight, the League of Conservation Voters. They also fund Majority Forward, a 501(c)(4) group closely tied to Senator Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC. Majority Forward alone accounted for one-third of all the dark-money spending in the 2018 election, giving liberals a comfortable dark-money lead over conservatives.

Eric Kessler, a former White House aide to President Bill Clinton, serves as senior managing director of Arabella and as president of Sixteen Thirty. Both groups have the same Washington, D.C., address.

The approach appears typical of the company’s approach to such initiatives. Kessler told Worth magazine in 2017 that Arabella often assumes core management functions for its client charities.

“First and foremost, we support family philanthropists, family foundations, by providing staffing,” Kessler said. “What that means is, there’s a whole bunch of foundations with assets between about $30 million and $300 million whose address is my office. We are their executive director, their program officer, their grant manager.”

But hold on there is more. Where did all this mass incarceration issue come from? Yup, Arabella.

As part of a report on their website:

  • Supporting research to map the network of companies involved in the prison-industrial complex in greater detail. Such mapping can raise awareness of the prison-industrial complex, identify and expose its harmful practices, and empower advocates to counter the influence of those seeking to advance policies tied to profits rather than to preserve and protect communities.
  • Supporting organizations and initiatives that are working to counter the advocacy efforts of politically active corporations that profit from mass incarceration. Various companies within the prison-industrial complex provide money to lobbying groups that strengthen and perpetuate policies that help drive mass incarceration. Those working for better policies need financial support to overcome potential opposition from groups that benefit from the continuation of “business as usual” in the sector.
  • Divesting from egregious actors and investing in positive solutions. As in other sectors, divestment can help isolate and stigmatize entities that are engaged in harmful practices and can potentially motivate other corporations to cease doing business with them unless and until they reform. Meanwhile, investment in positive solutions can begin to help rebuild damaged communities.
  • Using the power of endowment capital to engage in investor activism and capital market strategies targeting companies in the prison-industrial complex. Donors and investors can use their capital and influence to take equity positions in companies that are associated with the prison industry from which they can raise awareness and push companies toward reform from within.

There is also the matter of climate change and the condition of natural disasters so key cities are being pressured to comply with reforms for urban areas. The matter of the hurricanes in Puerto Rico is of particular note.

One notable project is in San Juan where we are part of the effort, led by The Solar Foundation and the Clinton Foundation, for the installation of solar and energy efficiency upgrades of the Plaza del Mercado de Río Piedras in San Juan, the largest produce market on the island, responsible for the livelihoods of 200 small business owners. Since Hurricane Maria, the energy situation has led to an unstable business environment. A $600,000 grant from The Hispanic Foundation and a $500,000 grant from CDP will cover the cost of the purchase and installation of the first phase of solar panels, battery capacity and LED lighting. Our grant also creates an apprenticeship program for local workers to learn skills related to solar installation, roofing and electrical work which will help promote local workforce development. The project is being done at the request of, and in close coordination with, the Municipality of San Juan.

What about this debate on gender equality and internet access (digital divide) for everyone? Yup, that too.