CLOSET MUSLIM, SERVANT TO MUSLIM DICTATORS Barack HUSSEIN Obama’s back door, however, was unique to him. Before prosecutors send some of the dimmer Hollywood stars to the slammer for their dimness, they might want to ask just how much influence a Saudi billionaire peddled to get Obama into Harvard. JACK CASHILL
Saturday, January 5, 2019
JACK HELLNER - BARACK OBAMA: AN UNAMERICAN TRAGEDY
The Results of Obama's Presidency Still Don't Matter to Journalists
I read frequently what a good or even great a president Barack Obama was, and how his administration was virtually free of scandals. We also frequently hear how bad a President Trump is and how corrupt he is.
Somehow when journalists and others spew forth with these generalities, I never see the examples of what makes Obamagood or great, and what makes Trump so bad. So, I thought it would be good to fill in some of the blanks, because results should be what makes a President good or bad. (Of course, Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing other than giving a speech, so he has been idolized for a long time for a blank slate).
In 2008 Terrorism deaths Worldwide were 15,708. In 2009 they were 15,310. By the last three years of Obama’s Presidency, terrorism deaths had risen to 32,763, 29424 and 25,722. The first two years of Trump’s presidency are back down to below 19,000. It is no surprise that terrorism deaths rose when Obama called ISIS the JV team and drew a fatuous red line in Syria, did everything he could to build up the terrorist-sponsoring Iran, and even stopped a U.S investigation into drug running by the terrorist Hezb’allah organization. Thank goodness we now have Trump instead of Hillary who even said, “What difference does it make?” when people died in Benghazi, and who was so lawless with classified information.
Terror-related deaths have fallen for the third consecutive year around the globe,
After peaking at about 34,000 deaths in 2014, terrorism-related deaths fell by 44 percent last year to 18,800,
Military defeats of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in Iraq and Syria and the Nigerian government “breaking the back” of Boko Haram are the main reasons for the drop in deaths related to terrorism, Killelea said. Afghanistan recorded the highest number of terror-related deaths among all countries.
Overall, deaths at the hands of the Islamic State dropped by 52 percent in 2017, according to the report. Killelea predicted that the group will no longer rank as the deadliest terrorist organization in 2018.
President Obama strengthened tyrants in China, Cuba, Iran and Russia throughout his eight-year presidency. He did little to stop North Korea. Trump, in contrast, is weakening the economies of tyrants throughout the World with sanctions, tariffs, getting out of the Iran deal and increasing oil production. He appears to have scared North Korea into stopping the threatening of its neighbors.
Tillerson and Kelly said they had to keep Trump from breaking laws, but they never accused him of breaking actual laws. Obama and those he surrounded himself with didn't care. Sanctuary cities and states and DACA are just two examples.
The Obama administration illegally spied on thousands of Americans, including political opponents. The Obama administration also illegally unmasked names of people surrounding Trump. We have seen nothing similar under Trump.
Obama’s policies gave us the slowest economic recovery in seventy years despite almost zero interest rates, massive federal injection of funds, substantial government spending increases and an increase of around $10 trillion in debt. Trump has given us the fastest annual growth since 2005. Obama gave us the lowest labor participation rate in forty years. Trump has brought the unemployment for all races, all education levels and all sexes to record lows.
Obama rewarded political bundlers with jobs and contracts. Trump has given almost 100% of U.S. taxpayers and businesses more money to improve the economy, whether they donated to him or supported him or not. Elizabeth Warren and others say, without evidence, that Trump’s policies only benefit the rich. What a crock. It appears that almost the only people that may pay more taxes are higher income people from high tax states that may lose some deductions. It is the Democrats who are trying to protect those rich people, not Trump. Democrats are also the ones that push the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles where almost all the credits go to wealthier people who pretend they care about the environment while they virtue-signal their neighbors.
Obama used the EPA, CFPB and Justice Department to blackmail companies and set up slush funds for political purposes and to reward supporters. The slush funds are gone after Trump was elected.
Obama took away freedom of choice on health care and premiums, and out of pocket expenses rose rapidly. Trump has given freedom of choice back and all of a sudden, prices are stabilizing in 2019. It must be a coincidence. Obama also illegally diverted funds, without going through the cumbersome legislative process, when Obamacare was coming up short. It also was Democrats who diverted Medicare funds to Obamacare, not Trump or Republicans.
Obama also violated freedom of speech rights of political opponents through IRS. He weaponized the Justice Department to protect people who violated laws who worked for him, while they were used to target Trump and those who surrounded him. Yet journalists overwhelmingly continue the fiction that no one was above the law during Obama’s eight years and that the Justice Department treats all of us equally.
A fictional Russian collusion narrative perpetuated by a fraudulent dossier created out of thin air and paid for by Hillary and the DNC is not about Trump corruption. The clear case of corruption resides with the Obama Administration colluding with the DNC and Hillary to elect Hillary and destroy Trump. The complicit media is a co-conspirator for perpetuating the fraud.
It is also not a campaign finance violation to use personal money to pay off blackmailing porn stars and Playboy bunnies. It should be a campaign finance violation to steal taxpayer money to hide scandals of members of Congress. If Pelosi actually wants transparency, she will release the names of all cases where taxpayer money was used to protect incumbents.
The egotistical, narcissistic Obama said he would stop sea levels from rising when he became President but he couldn’t even keep his promise to let people keep their Doctor, Plan and lower premiums.
I honestly can’t think of anything Obama did domestically or relating to foreign policy that made the U.S. or World safer and stronger. I wish these people that say that Obama was good or great would come up with a list of policies that were meant to make the U.S. as a whole better -- private sector. Obama came into office saying he wanted to remake America. I believe that is true. He wanted to remake America to weaken its power throughout the world and to make the government stronger and make more people dependent on it. Those are lousy goals.
"Along with Obama, they are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the eight years of that administration."
Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the twin nutters of Congress, were certain they could beat Trump at his own game, but have made fools of themselves, as usual. The stand-off is not over but with each passing day, the Democrats reveal more of their anti-American, pro-illegal immigration agenda. Conservatives have been sounding the alarm for years: Democrats do not care about American citizens!
We are an annoying inconvenience, especially those of us who do not buy what they are selling. We vote against them, which makes them angry. They lash out at us, call us names, impugn our intelligence with fervor. All of the late-night comics, the Bill Mahers of the comedy branch of the entertainment industry, are especially venal. Jimmy Kimmel has decried those who have contributed to the GoFundMe page to fund the border wall as meth addicts. It was begun by a Vet, Brad Kolfage, who lost three limbs and it's raised nearly $15m.
It appears that Democratic members of Congress are as snowflakey as millennials on our university campuses. They assume that anyone who opposes their ridiculous socialist, genderless, climate-alarmist, virtue-signaling directives is a Neanderthal, unfit to have an opinion. It is then thoroughly acceptable to malign such people, those of us who oppose every aspect of their anti-America-as-founded agenda, in any and every disgusting manner they can devise.
The left is all about identity politics. They assign all of us to a group -- racial, class, and/or all of their fabricated gender categories. The right is all about individuals, their character, their talent, their contributions to society. We do not care about skin color, economic class or sexual orientation. We do care about good vs. evil, right vs. wrong. This makes us quite villainous in the eyes of the left for whom everything is relative. For example, we do not think poverty causes crime, unlearned values of Western Civilization do. Try to steal an election? It is moral if it takes out an opponent. We are, it appears, the left vs. the right, very different on a neurological level.
Schumer and Pelosi have armed guards whenever they are amongst the public. But they are both fervent in their quest to deny us the right to bear arms and to prevent a wall on the southern border to protect us from the flood of lethal drugs that flow into the US. They are impervious to the crimes of the barbaric gangs like MS13, no matter how many innocent Americans they kill. They do not give a thought to the many illegals from terrorist nations that also seek to enter the country on a daily basis. Schumer, Pelosi and their willing subjects in Congress ignore completely the horrific hazards that cross the border every day. They want cheap labor, no matter how many Americans are left jobless, and they want, more than anything, a dependent underclass whom they mean to give the right to vote. They already vote anyway, thanks to the Left's rejection of Common-sense voter ID.
If there were a television program based on Schumer and Pelosi, it would have to be a comedy; the two of them are so inept, so childish. They would be Dumb and Dumber redux. Each of them seems to believe they run the country and can dictate to the president how he will govern. They demand that Trump abandon the wall. They have no intention of compromising; they only want to deny Trump and his supporters what they want -- border security that works. So enraged, so benighted, by Trump's presidency, they would rather see us overrun by migrants from third-world nations, like those who have destroyed the UK, Germany, Sweden, and the rest of Europe, than protect America as a sovereign nation.
The "government shutdown" is just a ploy, many times overused by now, relatively meaningless to the lives of most Americans. The Schumer & Pelosi show will do everything they can to hype it as a disaster, but we all know it is nothing of the kind. Trump must hold out for funding of the wall.
While there have been some bad actors in our government in the past, Schumer and Pelosi are the worst of the worst. They are equally arrogant, each thoroughly ignorant of reality beyond the bubble of wealth and privilege they inhabit. They both believe themselves to be smarter than the rest of us, when in fact they are both really dim bulbs, long past their sell-by date. Yes, Pelosi is good at raising money; how and why is a mystery. That each of them is repeatedly re-elected does not say much for their constituents' familiarity with the Constitution, the law, American history or the facts in their own communities.
San Francisco, Pelosi's district is now a hell-hole but for her walled compound. New York too, like California, is a state that residents are fleeing as fast as they can. Both states have been destroyed by moonbatty leftists; high taxes, dumbing down of education for political purposes, and the sacrifice of common sense to global warming alarmists. Schumer and Pelosi have for years been on board with every silly attempt to restructure, to transform, American society. They both jumped on the Obama bandwagon the moment he was elected. Along with Obama, they are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the eight years of that administration. While their constant appearances on television are so often humorous (Pelosi's silly, practiced hand gestures and Schumer's relentless badgering of Trump), they are not one bit funny. They are just loathsome.
Amnesty is all about keeping wages depressed and passing the true cost along to what is left of the America middle-class.
The huge inflow of migrants and asylum seekers forced officials to issue 400,000 work permits in 2017. That is roughly one new migrant worker for every 10 Americans who entered the workforce that year. The huge inflow has also jammed the immigration courts, ensuring that new migrants can work for a few years before a judge decides their case.
The inflow of asylum-seeking migrants, nonetheless, is far smaller than the inflow of legal immigrants and temporary visa-workers, which added roughly 2 workers in 2017 for every four Americans who entered the workforce.
Nationwide, the U.S. establishment’s economic policy of using legal migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor that blue collar and white collar employees.
The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Tucker Carlson pointed out a few days ago how the already insufferable leader of the Congressional Democrats has recently been "ordained….an archbishop in the church of progressive sanctimony." For a while now, Nancy Pelosi's been the country's expert on morality (e.g., border wall: immoral; abortion on demand: moral). She's now taken to telling the country how much she prays, and she's urging others to do it, too – at least that old sinner, Donald Trump. After last Thursday's televised squabble in the Oval Office, Pelosi shared with reporters how she told Trump she was praying for him and urged the president (whom she also called a "skunk" while ridiculing his manhood) to accept the Democrats' budget proposal with no funding for a border wall. "In fact," she said with stomach-turning piety, "I asked him to pray over it."
When a smug person ends an argument by telling you to "pray over it," she's really saying, "Ask God. He knows I'm right!"
Summarizing her and Chuck Schumer's meeting with Trump, she told the media, "I myself thought we should open the meeting with a prayer, which I did. I told him about King Solomon, when he was to become king of the Jews, he prayed to God, he said: 'I need you to give me great understanding and wisdom, Lord.'"
King Solomon is Pelosi's favorite Bible character, especially because he proposed solving a problem by cutting a baby in half.
Now Sister Nancy's praying for Trump to keep the government open so federal employees can finish their Christmas shopping.
It's an axiom that if a conservative says his faith informs his political decisions, he'll be condemned for establishing a state religion, while liberals get to veer back and forth over the church-state centerline as freely as those motorists who love to text while driving. Right now the liberal media are applauding the way Pelosi "schooled President Donald Trump about the Bible," but it's not clear why. It's not as if they're suddenly in favor of anyone being schooled in the Bible, especially anyone in a public classroom.
Pelosi never bats an eye without a political motive. This Saint Nancy act might be her attempt to occupy the spiritual high ground that, obviously, Donald Trump has shown no interest in occupying himself. Pelosi wouldn't dare try this with a president like George W. Bush, who, while he didn't boast about his piety on TV, was recognized as genuine in his Christian faith – prompting the left's usual reaction: Ross Douthat wrote in 2006 that "the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era."
Theology was less of an issue for liberals during the Obama years; he was their messiah, and they just worshiped him. Meantime, Obama conspicuously dissed orthodox Christians with everything from calculated snubs and criticism to gratuitously tormenting the Little Sisters of the Poor, all the while devotedly celebrating the unblemished virtues of Islam. In 2015, Hillary bluntly stated that "[d]eep-seated ... religious beliefs ... have to be changed" to accommodate the unlimited abortion license. Then, last year, Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez said it is "not negotiable" that "[e]very Democrat" support abortion. Pelosi tried to mitigate Perez's remarks by saying "of course" there's room for pro-lifers in the Democratic Party, but try to find one who's not actually voting Perez-style.
This year, Pelosi watched the Democrats lurch wildly to the extreme left. For decades before that, they were trusted allies in the left's war on conventional morality and religion (except Islam!) for being repressive, patriarchal, and counterrevolutionary. It may be that, alarmed that the Democrat brand has become too materialistic, amoral, and atheist, she thinks she can give it religion. Maybe she can draw an unfavorable comparison between the reprobate and undisciplined Donald Trump and herself: the "ardent, practicing Catholic," who exhorts the President to beg for "the great understanding and wisdom" that she (and Chuck Schumer?) have already been granted by God. Haven't Republicans marched under the banner of morality and Christian values long enough? Now that they've elected the unholy Trump, why can't the Democrats seize that banner for themselves?
For one thing, because no evangelical or conservative Catholic would ever buy it. Sure, the Democratic Party is crowded with Catholics, but the serious ones left years ago. The leading unserious Catholic is Pelosi herself, who professes her devotion to the faith but does it while living in open, willful defiance of the Church's crystal-clear teaching against abortion: "It is the teaching of the Catholic Church from the very beginning that the killing of an unborn child is always intrinsically evil and can never be justified."
When her duplicity threatened to become an issue in 2004, Pelosi pretended that, moved by her "ardent" devotion to the Church, she had been studying the Church's teaching on the beginning of life "a long time," and she stated falsely to Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press that the Church has never defined it. Asked when human life begins, she replied, "We don't know," and that "[t]he point is, that it shouldn't have an impact on the woman's right to choose" – the "it" being when a human life begins, which shouldn't have an impact on the decision to get an abortion. Easy mistake to make when your catechism is Roe v. Wade.
Later, when a reporter mentioned the Gosnell infanticides and challenged her own support for partial-birth abortion, an agitated Pelosi snarled back that "[a]s a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this[.] ... This shouldn't have anything to do with politics." But as a politician, she never stops talking about it, and the sacred ground she was talking about wasn't human life, but the exercise of a mother's "free will" to terminate her child. In response, New York's Cardinal Egan said, "Anyone who dares to defend that [the unborn] may be legitimately killed because another human being 'chooses' to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name." Her own bishop reluctantly corrected her misstatements in a public letter, necessitated by "the widespread consternation among Catholics" of her deliberate distortions of Catholic doctrine. Pope Benedict counseled her, in person, on the Church's express teaching, "which enjoins all Catholics, and especially legislators," to protect "human life at all stages of its development." Pelosi, " the respectful Catholic" who presumed to tell Trump to pray for wisdom, emerged from thatmeeting no wiser for it, obtusely extolling the "Church's leadership in fighting poverty, hunger and global warming."
Jesus warned against hypocrites who make a public display of praying "that they may be seen by men." The way Pelosi pretends to exemplify "prayerful" politics, and the way she told Trump "in private" that she's praying for him – and immediately announced it in a televised press conference – is pure Pelosi: cynical, addlebrained, phony. If it might hurt Trump, she'll pontificate how every MS-13 killer retains a "spark of divinity," then goes right back to her life's work snuffing out that spark from 60 million innocents and counting. The Bible never says it's intrinsically evil to build a wall or protect a border, but it's still got that commandment against murder.
Let the Democrats canonize this Pharisee if they need a patron saint. Her feast day can fall on January 22.
T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
"This is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the Mexican Militant. This is a common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN, belonging to Mexicans, which is taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and California through a LA Raza educational program funded by American Tax Payers via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA $800,000.00 in March of 2009!
The “zero tolerance” program was dismantled by Attorney General Erc Holder once it had successfully cut the transit of migrants by roughly 95 percent. Initially, officials made 140,000 arrests per year in the mid-2000s, but the northward flow dropped so much that officials only had to make 6,000 arrests in 2013, according to a 2014 letter by two pro-migration Senators, Sen. Jeff Flake and John McCain.
“The cost of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their media allies admit. Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would legalize at least 3.3 million illegals, according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy Institute.”
Heather Mac Donald: OBAMA’S SABOTAGE of HOMELAND SECURITY
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
The “zero tolerance” program was dismantled by Attorney General Erc Holder once it had successfully cut the transit of migrants by roughly 95 percent. Initially, officials made 140,000 arrests per year in the mid-2000s, but the northward flow dropped so much that officials only had to make 6,000 arrests in 2013, according to a 2014 letter by two pro-migration Senators, Sen. Jeff Flake and John McCain.
WIKILEAKS EXPOSES THE OBAMA CONSPIRACY TO FLOOD AMERICAN WITH DEM VOTING ILLEGALS
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
Obama Funds the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA “The Race”… now calling itself UNIDOSus.
"This is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the Mexican Militant. This is a common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN, belonging to Mexicans, which is taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and California through a LA Raza educational program funded by American Tax Payers via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA $800,000.00 in March of 2009!
Previous generations of immigrants did not believe they were racially superior to Americans. That is the view of La Raza Cosmica, by Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico’s former education minister and a presidential candidate. According to this book, republished in 1979 by the Department of Chicano Studies at Cal State LA, students of Scandinavian, Dutch and English background are dullards, blacks are ugly and inferior, and those “Mongols” with the slanted eyes lack enterprise. The superior new “cosmic” race of Spaniards and Indians is replacing them, and all Yankee “Anglos.” LLOYD BILLINGSLEY/ FRONTPAGE mag
THE CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY
The Democrat Party’s secret agenda for wider open borders, more welfare for invading illegals, more jobs and free anything they illegally vote for…. All to destroy the two-party system and build the GLOBALISTS’ DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
Demonstrably and irrefutably the Democrat Party became the party whose principle objective is to thoroughly transform the nature of the American electorate by means of open borders and the mass, unchecked importation of illiterate third world peasants who will vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrats and their La Raza welfare state. FRONTPAGE MAG
The main objective of “political animals” like Obama and the Clintons is to
get elected; it’s not to fix a broken America, nor to protect her. There are
people who govern and there are people who campaign; Obama and the
Clintons are the latter. Just look at the huge Republican electoral gains under
Obama and the Clintons. It’s amazing that Democrats who still care about
their party still support the very people who have brought it down. Inequality, class and life expectancy in
America
A study by Brookings Institution economists released Friday documents a sharp increase in life span divergences between the rich and the poor in America. The report, based on an analysis of Census Bureau and Social Security Administration data, concludes that for men born in 1950, the gap in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of wage earners and the bottom 10 percent is more than double the gap for their counterparts born in 1920.
For those born in 1920, there was a six-year differential between rich and poor. For those born in 1950, that difference had reached 14 years. For women, the gap grew from 4.7 years to 13 years, almost tripling.
Overall, life expectancy for the bottom 10 percent improved by just 3 percent for men born in 1950 over those born in 1920. For the top 10 percent, it soared by about 28 percent.
Life expectancy for the bottom 10 percent of male wage earners born in 1950 rose by less than one year compared to that for male workers born 40 years earlier—to 73.6 from 72.9. But for the top 10 percent, life expectancy leapt to 87.2 from 79.1.
The United States ranks among the worst so-called rich countries when it comes to life expectancy. But its low ranking is entirely due to the poor health and high mortality of low-income Americans. According to the Social Security Administration, life expectancy for the wealthiest US men at age 60 was just below the rates for Iceland and Japan, two countries with the highest levels. Americans in the bottom quarter of the wage scale, on the other hand, ranked just above Poland and the Czech Republic.
Life-expectancy is the most basic indicator of social well-being. The minimal increase for low-income workers and the widening disparity between the poor and the rich is a stark commentary on the immense growth of social inequality and class polarization in the United States. It underscores the fact that socioeconomic class is the fundamental category of social life under capitalism—one that conditions every aspect of life, including its length.
The Brookings Institution findings shed further light on the catastrophic decline in the social position of the American working class. They follow recent reports showing a sharp rise in death rates for both young and middle-aged white workers, primarily due to drug abuse, alcoholism and suicide. Other recent reports have shown a dramatic decline in life expectancy for poorer middle-aged Americans and a reversal of decades of declining infant mortality.
It is no mystery what is behind this vast social retrogression. It is the product of the decay of American capitalism and a four-decade-long offensive by the ruling elite against the working class. From Reagan to the Obama administration, Democrats and Republicans alike have overseen a corporate-government assault on the jobs, wages, pensions and health benefits of working people. The ruling elite has dismantled the bulk of the country’s industrial infrastructure, destroying decent-paying jobs by the millions, and turned to the most parasitic and criminal forms of financial speculation as the main source of its profit and private wealth. Untold trillions have been squandered to finance perpetual war and the maniacal self-enrichment of the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent. The basic infrastructure of the country has been starved of funds and left to rot, to the point where uncounted millions of people are being poisoned with lead and other toxins from corroded water systems. Flint, Michigan is just the tip of the iceberg.
Under Obama, this social counterrevolution has been intensified. The financial meltdown of 2008 has been utilized by the same forces that precipitated the crash to carry through a reordering of social relations aimed at reversing every social gain won by the working class in the course of a century of struggle. A central target of the attack is health care for working people.
Obamacare is the spearhead of a worked-out strategy to reduce the quantity and quality of health care available to workers and reorganize the health care system directly on a class basis. Corporate and government costs are to be slashed by gutting employer-paid health care, forcing workers individually to buy expensive, bare-bones plans from the insurance monopolies, and rationing drugs, tests and medical procedures to make them inaccessible to workers.
The rise in mortality for workers and the widening of the life span gap between rich and poor are not simply the outcome of impersonal economic forces. In corporate boardrooms, think tanks and state agencies, the ruling class is working to lower working class life expectancy. In late 2013, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank with the closest ties to the Pentagon and the CIA, published two policy papers decrying the “waste” of money on health care for the elderly. The clear message was that ordinary people were living much too long and diverting resources needed by the military to wage war around the world.
The social and economic chasm in America finds a political expression in the vast disconnect between the entire political establishment and the masses of working people. Neither party nor any of their presidential candidates, the self-described “socialist” Bernie Sanders included, can seriously address the real state of social conditions or offer a serious program to address the crisis.
In his final State of the Union Address last month, Obama presented an absurd picture of a resurgent economy. “The United States of America, right now,” he declared, “has the strongest, most durable economy in the world… Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.” In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton and Sanders are seeking to outdo one another in seizing the mantle of the Obama administration and praising its supposed social and economic achievements.
They cannot address the real conditions facing the masses of working people because they defend the capitalist system, which is the source of the social disaster. The remedy must be based on an understanding of the disease. It is the building of an independent socialist and revolutionary movement uniting the entire working class, in the US and around the world.
Billionaire Class Enjoys 15X the Wage Growth of American Working Class
The billionaire class — the country’s top 0.01 percent of earners — have enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as America’s working and middle class since 1979, new wage data reveals.
Between 1979 and 2017, the wages of the bottom 90 percent — the country’s working and lower middle class — have grown by only about 22 percent, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) researchers find.
Compare that small wage increase over nearly four decades to the booming wage growth of America’s top one percent, who have seen their wages grow more than 155 percent during the same period.
The top 0.01 percent — the country’s billionaire class — saw their wages grow by more than 343 percent in the last four decades, more than 15 times the wage growth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans.
In 1979, America’s working class was earning on average about $29,600 a year. Fast forward to 2017, and the same bottom 90 percent of Americans are earning only about $6,600 more annually.
The almost four decades of wage stagnation among the country’s working and middle class comes as the national immigration policy has allowed for the admission of more than 1.5 million mostly low-skilled immigrants every year.
(Public Citizen)
In the last decade, alone, the U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing American workers to compete against a growing population of low-wage workers. Meanwhile, employers are able to reduce wages and drive up their profit margins thanks to the annual low-skilled immigration scheme.
The Washington, DC-imposed mass immigration policy is a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates as every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an occupation’s labor force reduces Americans’ hourly wages by 0.4 percent. Every one percent increase in the immigrant workforce reduces Americans’ overall wages by 0.8 percent.
Mass immigration has come at the expense of America’s working and middle class, which has suffered from poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.
Four million young Americans enter the workforce every year, but their job opportunities are further diminished as the U.S. imports roughly two new foreign workers for every four American workers who enter the workforce. Even though researchers say 30 percent of the workforce could lose their jobs due to automation by 2030, the U.S. has not stopped importing more than a million foreign nationals every year.
For blue-collar American workers, mass immigration has not only kept wages down but in many cases decreased wages, as Breitbart News reported. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues importing more foreign nationals with whom working-class Americans are forced to compete. In 2016, the U.S. brought in about 1.8 million mostly low-skilled immigrants.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Wealthy cities and elite zip codes thrived under the slow-moving economic recovery of President Obama while rural American communities were left behind, a study reveals.
The Economic Innovation Group research, highlighted by Axios, details the massive economic inequality between the country’s coastal city elites and middle America’s working class between the Great Recession in 2007 and Obama’s economic recovery in 2016.
Between 2007 and 2016, the number of residents living in elite zip codes grew by more than ten million, with an overwhelming faction of that population growth being driven by mass immigration where the U.S. imports more than 1.5 million illegal and legal immigrants annually.
The booming 44.5 million immigrant populations are concentrated mostly in the country’s major cities like Los Angeles, California, Miami Florida, and New York City, New York. The rapidly growing U.S. population — driven by immigration — is set to hit 404 millionby 2060, a boon for real estate developers, wealthy investors, and corporations, all of which benefit greatly from dense populations and a flooded labor market.
The economic study found that while the population grew in wealthy cities, America’s rural population fell by nearly 3.5 million residents.
Likewise, by 2016, elite zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million jobs, which is more than the combined bottom 80 percent of American zip codes. While it only took about five years for wealthy cities to replace the jobs lost by the recession, it took “at risk” regions of the country a decade to recover, and “distressed” U.S. communities are “unlikely ever to recover on current trendlines,” the report predicts.
A map included in the research shows how rich, coastal metropolises have boomed economically while entire portions of middle America have been left behind as job and business gains remain concentrated at the top of the income ladder.
(Economic Innovation Group)
(Economic Innovation Group)
Economic growth among the country’s middle-class counties and middle-class zip codes has considerably trailed national economic growth, the study found.
For example, between 2012 and 2016, there were 4.4 percent more business establishments in the country as a whole. That growth was less than two percent in the median zip code and there was close to no growth in the median county.
The same can be said of employment growth, where U.S. employment grew by about 9.3 percent from 2012 to 2016. In the median zip code, though, employment grew by only 5.5 percent and in the median county, employment grew by less than four percent.
“Nearly three in every five large counties added businesses on net over the period, compared to only one in every five small one,” the report concluded.
Elite zip codes added more business establishments during Obama’s economic recovery, between 2012 and 2016, than the entire bottom 80 percent of zip codes combined. For instance, while more than 180,000 businesses have been added to rich zip codes, the country’s bottom tier has lost more than 13,000 businesses even after the economic recovery.
(Economic Innovation Group)
(Economic Innovation Group)
The gutting of the American manufacturing base, through free trade, has been a driving catalyst for the collapse of the white working class and black Americans. Simultaneously, the outsourcing of the economy has brought major wealth to corporations, tech conglomerates, and Wall Street.
The dramatic decline of U.S. manufacturing at the hands of free trade—where more than 3.4 million American jobs have been lost solely due to free trade with China, not including the American jobs lost due to agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS)—has coincided with growing wage inequality for white and black Americans, a growing number of single mother households, a drop in U.S. marriage rates, a general stagnation of working and middle class wages, and specifically, increased black American unemployment.
“So, the loss of manufacturing work since 1960 represents a steady decline in relatively high-paying jobs for less-educated workers,” recent research from economist Eric D. Gould has noted.
Fast-forward to the modern economy and the wage trend has been the opposite of what it was during the peak of manufacturing in the U.S. An Economic Policy Institute studyfound this year that been 2009 and 2015, the top one percent of American families earned about 26 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent of Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
WILL WE EVER GET THE TRUTH ON OBAMA-HOLDERS’S ARMING OF THE MEX DRUG CARTELS???
ICYMI: Feds Want to Keep Any Mention of 'Fast And Furious' Out of El Chapo's Drug Trafficking Trial
One of the most disgusting things to come out of the Obama administration was "Operation Fast and Furious," where members of the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed illegal gun sales to go through – commonly referred to as "gun walking" – in order to track buyers and sellers they believed were connected to the Mexican drug cartels. Nearly 2,000 firearms were sold and were eventually found throughout the United States and Mexico. Two of them were used to kill Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. BETH BAUMANN
According to the New York Daily News, Brooklyn prosecutors are doing everything in their power to keep any questions relating to "Fast and Furious" from being mentioned during witness testimony. In fact, they're asking a federal judge to block defense attorneys from asking questions relating to the highly-publicized botched campaign.
"The defense strategy is transparent. Given the substantial number of articles that have been written about the Operation, many of which criticize the government’s handling of the movement of weapons from the United States into Mexico, the defense is attempting to use the well-known operation to place the government on trial," United States Attorney Richard Donoghue said in a letter to the court. "While the government wil lseek to introduce at trial seized weapons that had been identified by ATF agents within the scope of the Operation, any details about the Operation itself are completely irrelevant to the issues at trial under Rule 401 of the Federal Rules of Evidence and should be excluded on those grounds alone."
Judge Brian Cogan has yet to rule on the request.
According to witness testimony from former trafficker Tirso Martinez Sanchez, he ran El Chapo's train operation from 2000 to 2003 and made roughly $20 million. During that time, trains would pull into special warehouses in Mexico. Workers would fill hidden compartments with kilos of cocaine and then add oil to the train to throw off bomb-sniffing dogs at the border. This technique also discouraged border patrol agents from conducting physical searches.
Sanchez estimated that between 30 and 50 tons of cocaine, with a value of upwards of $800 million, was smuggled into the United States. Between seven to eight shipments a day made their way on the train lines to New York City.
The trains would drop off the smuggled drugs at a warehouse in New Jersey. Trucks would then come to transport the drugs to various distribution locations between Queens and Brooklyn.
Various kilo packages were hidden in secret compartments of cars and trucks. They were then distributed at different meetings at fast food locations.
"He testified about three seizures – one at a train warehouse in Queens and one involving two tons of cocaine seized at a Brooklyn warehouse in 2002 – and said the heat they generated made him reconsider his career choice," the Daily News reported. "He was arrested in Mexico in early 2014 and extradited to the U.S. a year later. He pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and distribution and is facing 10 years to life."
Call it Saddiq Khan's London. Call it Jeremy Corbin's London. The right call is to note the unmitigated gall of the Financial Times, the bible of the securities marketplace, having bestowed its "Person of the Year" honoraria upon fellow globalist George Soros.
While The Hague fiddles as George Soros ages (currently 88), with nary an interested tribunal convened for his participation in the Holocaust, his is a case deserving of dispensing charges related to "crimes against Humanity," the "smoking gun," his own "undisputed truth" offered during a CBS 60 Minutesinterview (Sunday, December 20, 1998), concerning his youth as a willing "aide de camp" to a non-Jewish "godfather" – a serf in Hungary's Ministry of Agriculture, having groomed a willing Soros to accompany him on his appointed rounds delivering deportation notices and cultivating lists of the properties confiscated from Soros's fellow Jews – Soros with requisite clipboard, the Jews on their requisite death march to Auschwitz. In the interview, Soros offered no less than soulless quips, defending his conduct of complicity under the Reich.
When questioned by correspondent Steve Kroft as to his activities, Soros maintained, "My character was made because I thought ahead anticipating events," adding, "The confiscations weren't difficult at all."
Since one cannot teach a young sociopath new tricks, a movement to beatify Soros at eighty-eight is in full swing, as noted with his being honored by The Financial Times. Even his son Alexander, a student at UCLA Berkeley, has come out of the shadows, seeking to ban negativity toward his father, having written an op-ed for The New York Times, "The Hate That Is Consuming Us" (October 24, 2018), wherein the reader, at first glance, would think Alexander's screed concentrates on the crime at large against his father, whereby a mad bomb-maker and sender chose the elder Soros as one of his victims. Instead, the crux of the article showcases Alexander focusing his wrath on President Donald Trump, the man and his populist politics, crucifying an innocent via the Pontius Pilate playbook, as the son offers his own rendition of "The Executioner's Song." Note: Alexander, by offering the determined flippancy of the nefarious particulars surrounding his father's life and times in 1944 Budapest, merely states, "My father grew up in the shadow of the Nazi Regime in Hungary." Whether Alexander was conscious or not, his sin of omission opened a can of worms over his father's life and times in 1944 Budapest. In the meantime, George Soros has shown he's still not finished with the Jews.
Soros's purse strings direct his Open Society Foundation to fund such myriad anti-Israel agencies as J Street and Human Rights Watch, while his anti-America money order financed the likes of Lynne Stewart, best remembered as of counsel to Abdel Rahman, known as "The Blind Sheik," convicted of terrorism. Stewart was convicted and disbarred for aiding Rahman, communicating on his behalf with his fellow terrorists. Obviously, Soros has a lust for anarchy. Even CNN's house Marxist, Van Jones, receives funding from Soros for his Climate Action Project.
To wit, the ACLU reeks of Soros, having become the poster agency defending every pregnant illegal and Caravan extortionist – the same ACLU who once appointed Bernardine Dohrn to its advisory board, she the wife of Obama bestie Bill Ayers. (The couple led the infamous Weathermen domestic terrorist organization, having committed several bombings on American soil.)
One has to wonder whether Soro's post-WWII wallet paid for him to be safe from deportation from the USA when others who also worked for the Reich were investigated and returned for punishment once litigation ended. While Hungary has wanted the U.S. to send Soros home so they can try him in court, his efforts to quell and quash the matter appear to be in his favor.
Twenty years have passed since the 60 Minutes interview, with a salvo from the broadcast offering commentary from a money-manager in Soros's employ. When asked about his boss, he renders his observation: "George Soros is Donald Trump without the humility."
Unfortunately, the Financial Times chose someone less than human as its "Person of the Year.
THE OBAMA YEARS: A LEGACY OF SCANDAL AND DECEPTION
Joe Biden’s bizarre disconnect regarding his scandal-ridden former boss.
On December 13, former vice president, Joe Biden, appeared on CBS with the hosts of “This Morning” where he peddled his new book and showered his former boss with praise. During the course of the interview, he was asked about his relationship with Obama and responded with the following; “I’ve served with eight presidents and I’ve gotten to know four of them very well. I’ve never met any president that has more character, more integrity, and more backbone than this guy does.” Then he went completely off the rails when he absurdly added; “And eight years, not a hint — not a hint — of a scandal.”
What was perhaps even more outrageous than the statement itself was the fact that none of This Morning’shosts challenged the veracity of that statement and allowed it to pass without a scintilla of scrutiny, exposing yet again an extreme bias existing within elements of the establishment media. In fact, the Obama administration was among the most corrupt and scandal-ridden in recent memory. Biden’s comment merits further examination so let’s buckle up and take a stroll down memory lane.
Solyndra Scandal – The Obama administration provided this failing solar company with a $535 million stimulus-funded loan, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Taxpayer money kept pouring in despite the fact that the Office of Management and Budget warned that Solyndra was not a profitable or viable company. But it gets worse. The family foundation of billionaire George Kaiser, an Obama fundraiser, was one of Solyndra's main investors. Can you say quid pro quo?
Veterans Affairs Scandal - Over 40 veterans needlessly died while waiting to be seen by doctors at a Phoenix VA facility. Another 1,700 veterans were forced to wait for months before being seen by medical personnel. An audit of the VA confirmed that VA officials systematically altered records and appointment schedules in a deliberate and methodical VA scheme to manipulate data to meet fabricated goals.
Operation Chokepoint Scandal – The Obama DOJ utilized the power of big government to pressure banks to cease doing business with industries with which the administration had ideological differences. Gun manufacturers and gun stores were prime targets even though they had not violated any laws. Eventually, the FDIC admitted to misconduct, bowed to pressure and significantly curtailed the discriminatory regulations after affected businesses threatened legal action.
Gibson Guitar Scandal – Armed federal agents executed four search warrants on Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., seizing guitars, electronic files and other inventory including wood that was purchased in India and Madagascar. The DOJ alleged that Gibson’s had violated an obscure law known as the Lacey Act which made it a crime to violate the environmental laws of another country. Gibson produced an affidavit from government officials in Madagascar stating that Gibson had violated none of that nation’s laws. Gibson also alleged that the DOJ was misinterpreting Indian law. Gibson’s CEO was a major donor to the GOP but his competitors, who purchased the same materials and were not GOP donors, were untouched by Obama’s DOJ. As part of a settlement to drop criminal charges, Gibson was required to pay a $250,000 fine and was required to donate $50,000 to an environmental group. Gibson was eventually able to retrieve its inventory from the clutches of the DOJ.
Fast & Furious Scandal – A scheme concocted by the Obama administration that went horribly wrong. The administration lost track of some 1,400 guns that made their way into the stream of criminal enterprises including those of the Mexican drug cartels. Two of the guns were found at the scene of the shooting of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Attorney General Eric Holder was cited for contempt of Congress for failing to turn over documents relating to the scandal. It was the first time Congress had taken such an action against a sitting Cabinet official. Seventeen Democrats joined Republicans in voting in favor of the criminal contempt resolution.
DOJ-James Rosen Scandal – FOX News journalist, James Rosen became the target of Obama’s DOJ in yet another example of extreme government overreaching. Believing that Rosen was responsible for a leak concerning a policy decision on North Korea, AG Eric Holder sought a subpoena for Rosen’s emails claiming that Rosen had broken the law “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” The government’s affidavit also accused Rosen of possibly violating the Espionage Act. It appeared that the DOJ was acting like the East German Stasi in chasing fictitious enemies of the state. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, Holder was roundly criticized from all sides of the political spectrum and Holder himself was later forced to acknowledge that he regretted the episode.
Gruber-Obamacare Scandal – To establish Obamacare’s validity, Obama hired economist and academic Jonathan Gruber to give the plan his seal of approval. Gruber was later caught on video and audio making several disparaging remarks about Americans, stating that Obamacare’s passage rested on the “stupidity of the American voter.” Democrats later tried to distance themselves from him and tried to minimize his role in formulating Obamacare but there was no debating that he was one of Obamacare’s chief architects and was paid nearly $400,000 for his services. Gruber confirmed what most of us already knew; that Obamacare passed as a result of a concerted effort by the administration to deceive the American people.
Skolkovo Scandal – While serving as secretary of state, Clinton oversaw a program meant to “reset” relations with Moscow and improve ties. The program centered around the Russian city of Skolkovo near Moscow with the stated aim of “identifying areas of cooperation and pursuing joint projects and actions that strengthen strategic stability, international security, economic well-being, and the development of ties between the American and Russian people.” The program transformed Skolkovo into a technology hub akin to a Silicon Valley. Sensitive American technology was transferred to the Russians, substantially enhancing their military and cyber capabilities. The US Army and the FBI concluded that Russia had exploited the program for military applications. The FBI warned American technology companies doing business in Skolkovo that the Skolkovo project was a means by which the Russians would acquire dual use technologies and apply them for military ends. According to investigative author Peter Schweizer, Russian and American companies and individuals involved in the Skolkovo fiasco “had major financial ties to the Clintons.” Moreover, during the Russian reset period, those entities provided the Clintons with “tens of millions of dollars” in the form of “contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties.”
Benghazi Scandal - U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed during an attack on the American consulate office. The Obama administration initially denied that the attack was terror related and instead peddled the now false and discredited narrative that it was triggered by a reaction to an anti-Muslim film. However, emails later confirmed that administration officials were well aware that it was a well-orchestrated, premeditated attack planned by Islamist terrorists and had nothing to do with an internet film. In addition, a congressional committee found that the delay in deploying military assets to the theater, which it attributed to needless bureaucratic bungling, almost certainly cost those men their lives.
IRS Exemption Scandal – IRS officials, taking their cues from the White House delayed, ignored or rejected nonprofit status applications from groups deemed to be right-wing or pro-Israel. Eventually, Former IRS senior executive Lois Lerner, one of the key actors in the scandal was held to be in contempt of Congress, though Holder’s DOJ refused to prosecute.
Iran Ransom Scandal – In deal to secure the release of four Americans held hostage by Iran, the Obama administration gave the Iranian government $1.7 billion in unmarked, untraceable cash, stacked in pallets. The money promptly went to finance Iran’s terrorist activities. Attorney General Loretta Lynch was required to sign off on the ransom deal but no paper bearing her signature was ever produced despite congressional calls compelling her to do so.
Bergdahl-Guantanamo Scandal – Obama released 5 hardened Taliban terrorists for convicted deserter Bowe Bergdahl. The release of the terrorists was in violation of the National Defense Authorization Act. Obama was required to provide Congress with 30-days’ notice prior to releasing the Guantanamo detainees but he only provided notice on the actual day of the exchange. Consequently, the chief counsel for the Government Accountability Office determined that the Pentagon had illegally spent the money used to facilitate the prisoner exchange. In addition, like Benghazi, the administration tried to spin the story and portrayed Bergdahl as a soldier who “served with honor and distinction.” Lastly, at least 3 of the 5 detainees released for Bergdahl have reverted to their terrorist habits placing America and its allies at risk.
Dossier Scandal – Elements within the FBI and DOJ who were hostile to Trump and friendly to Clinton obtained a salacious and unverified dossier on Trump which was compiled by a British foreign agent from Russian sources. In addition to being unverified, unreliable and based exclusively on Russian sources, the dossier amounted to opposition research because it was obtained by agents and operatives working directly and indirectly for the Clinton campaign. Despite this knowledge, the FBI dressed up the dossier to appear as if it was a legitimate intelligence document and then used it to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on American citizens.
Clinton Email Server Scandal – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used an unsecured bathroom server to send and receive classified information. It is a virtual certainty that many of Clinton’s emails were compromised by foreign, hostile governments. Over 33,000 emails belonging to the State Department were deleted and some of Clinton’s state department emails ended up on a registered sex offender’s laptop. Clinton was criminally exonerated by the FBI and Loretta Lynch’s DOJ blindly accepted the FBI’s findings and recommendations without conducting an examination of its own. FBI agent Peter Strzok, who maintained a visceral hatred toward Trump and was deeply involved in the email investigation, later changed the wording of a memo exonerating Clinton to “extremely careless” from “grossly negligent.” The change was significant because the latter language tracked the wording of the criminal statute. FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was also involved in investigating Clinton, failed to disclose that his wife had accepted $500,000 for her state senate campaign from long-time Clinton ally, Terry McAuliffe.
Uranium 1 Scandal – While serving as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton signed off on a deal that allowed Russia to acquire 20 percent of America’s uranium mining capacity. While other members of the Obama cabinet were also required to sign off for approval of the deal, Clinton was the only cabinet figure to obtain direct pecuniary benefit, to the tune of millions of dollars, from entities with vested interests in seeing the acquisition completed. She never disclosed this conflict of interest when giving her authorization. Once in Russian hands, some of the uranium, the foundational material for nuclear bombs, was exported abroad.
Loretta Lynch-Bill Clinton Tarmac Scandal – While Hillary Clinton was being criminally investigated by the FBI, Loretta Lynch, the nation’s top law enforcement official met with Bill Clinton for 30 minutes at a Phoenix tarmac where she says they discussed “grandchildren” and “golf.” Later, it was revealed that she instructed FBI Director James Comey to refer to the investigation as a “matter” rather than an investigation, tracking the Clinton campaign’s talking points. Finally, Comey testified in a closed session before the Intelligence Committee, that he confronted Lynch with a sensitive document in which it was suggested that Lynch was going to use her authority and power of her office to thwart prosecution of Clinton irrespective of the FBI’s findings. Lynch reportedly stared at the document and then “looked up with a steely silence that lasted for some time, then asked him if he had any other business with her and if not that he should leave her office.”
Project Cassandra Scandal – In an effort to curry favor with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Obama administration delayed, obstructed and ultimately shut down a DEA initiative aimed at thwarting Hezbollah arms trafficking, drug trafficking and money laundering schemes. As a result, Hezbollah continued to import drugs into the United States, continued to supply anti-American insurgents with deadly Explosively Formed Projectiles and continued to engage in massive money laundering schemes.
The level of corruption and scandal witnessed during Obama’s tenure rivals, and perhaps even surpasses that of the Nixon years. The administration’s legacy leaves a long and wide trail of lies, deception and government overreaching. Biden’s comment on This Morning would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad. Lastly, whether one opposes or favors Trump, all can acknowledge that but for Trump’s victory, many of these scandals would have never come to light because the Clinton administration would have happily swept all the filth under the rug.
good or great, and what makes Trump so bad. So, I thought it would be good to fill in some of the blanks, because results should be what makes a President good or bad. (Of course, Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing other than giving a speech, so he has been idolized for a long time for a blank slate).
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