President Joe Biden signed an executive order Sunday designed in part to increase voting and voter registration access for criminals in prison and on probation, according to the White House.
“The order will direct the attorney general to establish procedures to provide educational materials related to voter registration and voting, and to the extent practicable, to facilitate voter registration, for all eligible individuals in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons,” the White House states in a fact sheet on the measure.
The attorney general also must help former prisoners obtain appropriate identification to satisfy state voting requirements under the new law.
Biden also requested the U.S. Marshals Service include language in its contracts to facilitate voting by mail and provide eligible criminals information on voting and voter registration.
Biden’s plan was announced during a recorded address on the 56th commemoration of “Bloody Sunday,” the 1965 incident in which some 600 civil rights activists were viciously beaten by state troopers as they tried to march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama.
“Every eligible voter should be able to vote and have it counted,” Biden said in his remarks to Sunday’s Martin and Coretta King Unity Breakfast before signing the order. “If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let the people vote.”
Biden’s order directs federal agencies to expand access to voter registration and election information, calls on the heads of agencies to come up with plans to give federal employees time off to vote or volunteer as nonpartisan poll workers, and pushes an overhaul of the government’s Vote.gov website.
Democrats are attempting to solidify support for House Resolution 1, which touches on virtually every aspect of the electoral process. It was approved Wednesday on a near party-line vote, 220-210.
The voting rights bill includes provisions to restrict partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, strike down hurdles to voting and bring transparency to a murky campaign finance system that allows wealthy donors to anonymously bankroll political causes.
Democrats say the bill will help stifle voter suppression attempts, while Republicans have cast the bill as unwanted federal interference in states’ authority to conduct their own elections.
The bill’s fate is far from certain in the closely divided Senate. Conservative groups have undertaken a $5 million campaign to try persuade moderate Senate Democrats to oppose rule changes needed to pass the measure.
With his executive order, Biden is looking to turn the spotlight on the issue and is using the somber commemoration of Bloody Sunday to make the case that much is at stake.
Bloody Sunday proved to be a turning point in the civil rights movement that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“In 2020 — with our very democracy on the line — even in the midst of a pandemic – more Americans voted than ever before,” Biden said. “Yet instead of celebrating this powerful demonstration of voting — we saw an unprecedented insurrection on our Capitol and a brutal attack on our democracy on Jan. 6. A never-before-seen effort to ignore, undermine and undo the will of the people.”
Biden’s also paid tribute to the late civil rights giants Rev. C.T. Vivian, Rev. Joseph Lowery and Rep. John Lewis. All played critical roles in the 1965 organizing efforts in Selma and all died in within the past year.
Proponents say tax could help fund infrastructure programs, while Wall Street groups contend it would hurt investors
The wild volatility in GameStop Corp. shares this year has emboldened Democrats who support a tax on stock trades.
A financial-transaction tax, or FTT, would raise money by collecting a fraction of the value of securities trades. Proponents say such a tax could help fund programs like President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan, while reining in high-frequency trading and excessive speculation. Critics, including Wall Street lobbying groups, say it is a flawed policy that would hurt investors.
Left-leaning politicians such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have long advocated a transaction tax, with little success. Now, with Democrats holding the White House and narrow majorities in Congress, progressives have their best chance in years of enacting an FTT. Potentially, such a tax could be passed without Republican support, using the budget-reconciliation process that allows tax and spending bills to pass the Senate on a simple majority vote.
To be sure, the odds are still against an FTT passing Congress. There is broader support among Democrats for other ways to raise revenues, such as lifting the top individual tax rate or corporate tax rate, both of which were lowered under former President Donald Trump. Still, the idea of taxing trades has gained traction among more centrist Democrats in recent years, raising the hopes of FTT advocates.
“There’s much broader support and interest in the concept among members of Congress than there was a decade ago,” said Antonio Weiss, a Treasury Department official in the Obama administration who proposed his own version of a transaction tax last year.
Mr. Weiss’s plan calls for a 0.1% tax on stock, bond and derivative trades that would be phased in over a multiyear period. Such a tax could raise $60 billion a year, he estimates. Some lobbyists and tax-policy advisers see his plan as a basis for a bill that could win over Democratic moderates.
‘One way to ensure that this enormous wealth generated on Wall Street actually reaches the real economy…is to enact and look at proposals like a financial transaction tax.’— Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.)
Lately, the FTT issue has gained fresh visibility from an unlikely source: GameStop. After the furious rally and subsequent crash of the videogame retailer’s stock in January, politicians and pundits have stepped up scrutiny of high-speed trading and questioned whether the stock market is fair to small investors. Some progressives have seized the opportunity to promote an FTT.
“One way to ensure that this enormous wealth generated on Wall Street actually reaches the real economy…is to enact and look at proposals like a financial transaction tax,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) said at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee last month devoted to the GameStop episode.
A bill sponsored by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.) to impose a financial-transaction tax has attracted House Majority Whip James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, as a co-sponsor. The bill has 27 co-sponsors in all, including five who added their names after the Feb. 18 hearing. Further hearings on GameStop are planned later this month in the House and Senate.
In Albany, N.Y., some lawmakers are pushing to revive a New York tax on stock trades that the state hasn’t collected since 1981. Supporters say it would shore up a state budget battered by the coronavirus pandemic, but business groups and the New York Stock Exchange say it could prompt an exodus of financial firms, hurting the state economy. Similar pushback from Wall Street helped scuttle a bill to tax trades in New Jersey last year.
A bill sponsored by Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon to impose a financial-transaction tax has 27 co-sponsors in all.
At the federal level, it is unclear whether Mr. Biden would back a transaction tax. The White House has made no formal FTT proposal, and taxing trades wasn’t part of Mr. Biden’s campaign plan. As a candidate, he made contradictory comments on the issue, at one point saying an FTT would hurt the middle class, but later giving an interview where he appeared to endorse the tax.
The president’s team includes some vocal FTT supporters, such as Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and others who have criticized the idea, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Asked about a transaction tax last month, Ms. Yellen said: “It could deter speculation, but it might also have negative impacts.”
Wall Street and its congressional allies say a transaction tax would make U.S. capital markets less competitive and spur trading activity to shift overseas. They also accuse FTT proponents of making overly optimistic projections of how much revenue such taxes would raise.
“Wherever this has been tried in the past, it has ended up having negative consequences with respect to market liquidity, and it has never raised anywhere near the amount of revenue that was advertised,” Kenneth E. Bentsen Jr. , president of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said in an interview.
Groups like Sifma warn that brokerages would pass the cost of the tax to investors, and mutual funds would incur the cost of the tax each time they rebalanced. Even though the rate paid on each trade might seem tiny, it could add up to hefty costs over time, industry groups say.
In June, Vanguard Group released an analysis of how various types of transaction taxes would affect an investor putting away $10,000 annually for 40 years. For a portfolio with a mix of stock and bond index funds, Vanguard estimated that a 0.1% tax on purchases would ultimately cost the investor $25,705—or between 2% and 3% of his or her savings, which under Vanguard’s assumptions would grow to $1.2 million at the end of 40 years.
Proponents of a transaction tax say such industry studies are distorted to overstate the impact on Main Street investors. “Financial transaction taxes fall overwhelmingly on the rich,” said Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
It wouldn’t be unprecedented for the U.S. to tax stock trades. The government levied a similar tax from 1914 to 1965. Today, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s budget is supported by a small fee on trades, which brought the agency nearly $2.6 billion in the 2020 fiscal year.
Overseas, dozens of countries have FTTs, including France, Singapore, South Korea and the U.K. The global experience has been mixed: One tax imposed by Sweden in the 1980s led much of the country’s trading volume to migrate elsewhere, while Hong Kong has remained a global financial center despite charging a type of transaction tax called a stamp duty.
Last month, Hong Kong said it would increase its stamp duty to 0.13% from 0.1%, the first increase since 1993, as it confronts a record budget deficit.
America is entering its very own Mao-like Cultural Revolution. The iconoclasm of the left’s culture war isn’t a side effect, it’s the point.
r. Seuss has been cancelled. Some of his work has been deemed racist, and we can’t have that. On Tuesday, the entity that oversees the estate of Theodor Seuss Geisel announced it would no longer publish six of Geisel’s books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
Among the works now deemed unfit for children are Geisel’s first book under the pen name Dr. Seuss, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” published in 1937, and the much-beloved, “If I Ran the Zoo,” published in 1950. The former depicts a “Chinaman” character and the latter shows two men from “the African island of Yerka” in native garb.
There’s not much point in quibbling over whether these and other such illustrations in the condemned Dr. Seuss books are in fact racist or bigoted, or whether Geisel held racist or xenophobic views. By all accounts he was a liberal-minded and tolerant man who hated Nazis and, as a political cartoonist, mocked the antisemitism that was all-too-common in America during World War II.
He was also a man of his era. Later in life, he regretted some of his political work during the war that stereotyped Japanese Americans, which, as jarring as it might seem today, nevertheless reflected attitudes that were commonplace at the time.
But context and nuance don’t factor into the inexorable logic of the woke left, which flattens and refashions the past into a weapon for the culture wars of the present. What’s important to understand is that this isn’t simply about banning six Dr. Seuss books. All of Geisel’s work is, in the judgment of left-wing academia, an exercise in “White supremacy, paternalism, conformity, and assimilation.” It might be easy for conservatives to laugh that off as nonsense, but they shouldn’t, because this isn’t really even about Geisel.
The Left Is Carrying Out a Cultural Revolution
To grasp how a man known as much for his messages of tolerance as for his artistic genius could be canceled for racism, you have to understand what’s actually happening here. The left’s war on the past, on long-dead authors like Geisel, isn’t really about the past, it’s about the future. It’s about who gets to rule, and under what terms.
There’s a predictable pattern to what we’re seeing now. It’s predictable because it has happened before in much the same way it’s happening now. During China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Chinese Communist Party, at the direction of Mao Zedong, called for the destruction of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. All of these stood in the way of Mao’s socialist ideology, so they had to be destroyed.
Children and students were encouraged by the communist government to inform on their parents and elders, to shame and condemn them in public. The guilty were forced to recant in “struggle sessions,” during which they were mocked and humiliated, sometimes tortured, sometimes murdered. Before it was over, millions were dead.
We’re obviously not there yet, but the woke revolutionaries who now run our elite institutions and exert outsized influence in the corridors of power are following this same pattern.
First, they come for the monuments, destroying the icons of the past and re-writing history to turn even our national heroes and Founding Fathers into enemies. The animating ethos of the mobs pulling down Confederate statues is the same as The New York Times editors who gave us the 1619 Project. And because there is no limiting principle to iconoclasm, they have moved on from Confederates.
The City of Charlottesville, for example, having removed or tried to remove every last Confederate monument, is now pleading for someone, anyone, to haul away a giant statue of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The 18-foot-tall bronze statue, which was erected in 1919 and depicts Lewis and Clark with Sacajawea crouched behind them, is free for anyone who can prove he knows how to move it safely—although at this point it’s a wonder the city doesn’t just dynamite the thing to rubble, Taliban-style.
Then they come for the books, destroying any ideas or literature that challenges their ideology—like Ryan Anderson’s 2018 book on the dangers of transgenderism, which Amazon summarily canceled last month. Even seemingly unobjectionable books can be targeted, if not for their content then for the race of their author. Just ask Jeanine Cummins, whose novel “American Dirt” drew the ire of the left last year simply because Cummins, who is white, wrote a book about Mexican drug cartels. The list goes on and on.
So much for statues and books. At some point, the left will come for actual people, because the ideology of revolution demands that dissent—and therefore dissidents—be silenced, by force if necessary.
If you think that’s an exaggeration, recall what happened all across the country last summer when Black Lives Matter “protesters” took to the streets. They didn’t just march and chant, they rioted. They attacked businesses, destroyed entire city blocks, and carried out a campaign of intimidation, harassing, and in some cases attacking random people if they didn’t kneel and repeat the slogans of the revolution. Dozens of people lost their lives in the chaos and violence that ensued.
The people behind the statue-toppling, the digital book burnings, and the street violence won’t stop until all three of these things—history, ideas, and dissidents—have been destroyed. These are all impediments to their cultural revolution, and they mean to eliminate them.
So forget about Dr. Seuss. Forget about the statues and the books. Those things are just the beginning. It could easily get much worse. The woke revolutionaries of the left can’t be bargained with or appeased. They believe this is a zero-sum game, that one side will win and one side will lose. And they’re right.
The petition needs just shy of 1.5 million verified signatures
The petition to recall California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has climbed above 1.9 million signatures with two weeks to go until its deadline, proponents announced Wednesday evening.
“We have cleared another milestone, and now we are entering the final stretch of this part of the official campaign to remove California Governor Gavin Newsom from power and office,” organizer Orrin Heatlie said in a statement.
After removing his mask to speak, California Gov. Gavin Newsom delivers comments while visiting one of San Luis Obispo County’s vaccination centers at Cuesta College, Tuesday March 2, 2021, in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Newsom was critical of other states that are dropping their masking requirements. (David Middlecamp/The Tribune (of San Luis Obispo) via AP)
The petition needs just shy of 1.5 million signatures – but they need to be verified as authentic and the recall movement expects Newsom to challenge many of them in court, so they’ve continued collecting names.
“The people of California are speaking loud and clear, and we will continue to work tirelessly until the People of California become the final judge and jury on this recall,” said Mike Netter, of the RecallGavin2020 organization, the group behind the recall effort alongside the California Patriot Coalition.
On Feb. 20, when the petitioners had collected about 1.1 million signatures, more than 670,000 had been verified.
The deadline for organizers to submit signatures is on March 17. If the effort succeeds, a recall election would likely occur later this year.
A spokesperson for Newsom did not immediately respond to Fox News’ requests for comment.
In addition to the recall effort, Newsom is facing a low point in his approval ratings as well as criticism over his handling of the state’s coronavirus response and vaccine rollout.
He even got sued by a high school student last month over his pandemic-induced ban on scholastic sports.
Although Californians have tried to recall their governors dozens of times over the years, the Golden State’s only other chief executive recalled from office was Gray Davis, also a Democrat, in 2003. He was replaced by the action movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.
BGI Genomics—the Chinese Communist Party-linked genomics firm flagged by U.S. officials as “mining” the DNA of Americans—has collaborated extensively with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The National Pulse can reveal.
The company has recently come under fire following a 60 Minutes exposé on the company’s use of COVID-19 tests to “collect, store and exploit biometric information” on American citizens, according to former U.S. intelligence officials. What’s more, a recent Reuters article linked the firm to the Chinese Communist Party’s military.
In addition to the Obama administration enabling the firm to gain a foothold in the U.S., the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation played a critical role in BGI’s American expansion.
In September of 2012, the Microsoft founder’s foundation signed a “Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to form a collaboration on global health and agricultural development with the goal of achieving common objectives in health and agricultural development.”
The co-founder of BGI praised the agreement, celebrating the forthcoming “scientific breakthroughs in the areas of human, plant and animal genomics.” He also revealed that the collaborative efforts focused on sequencing genomes—the precise activity flagged for national security threats in the 60 Minutes segment:
“Having contributed to the Human Genome Project as well as sequencing the genomes of many critical plant and animal species and human diseases, including the initial sequencing of the rice genome as well as our involvement in the Rice 10,000 Genome Project, the 1,000 Plants and Animals Genome Project, the International 1,000 genomes project, the 1,000 Rare Diseases Project, the International Cancer Genome Project, Autism Genome 10K, among others, BGI looks forward to partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in this significant collaboration to apply genomics research to benefit global human health.”
The memorandum predates Gates’s 2010 visit to BGI’s China-based headquarters, where he witnessed the company’s genetic sequencing operation as described by the Financial Times:
In 2010, Bill Gates visited an unremarkable building in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Shenzhen, China. With row after row of high-tech machinery humming inside, the place could easily be mistaken for an anonymous data warehouse. But Mr Gates and Ray Yip, head of the Gates Foundation’s China operation, saw something else that day. As they toured the BGI headquarters, the two men were stunned by the ambition of the scientists working at the biotech company. Inside, more than 150 state of the art genetic sequencing machines were analysing the equivalent of thousands of human genomes a day. The company is working towards a goal of building a huge library based on the DNA of many millions of people. BGI executives see this not as the end-game, but as the springboard for new drug discoveries, advanced genetic research and a transformation of public health policy.
Yip praised the endeavor as “out-of-the-box,” “open,” and “liberal”:
“We were taken aback. We never thought we would find such an out-of-the-box approach. They are in their own league — open and liberal. Most people only see them as a service provider for DNA analysis. It is the database they are building that will make them formidable.”
The Gates Foundation has also funded BGI projects relating to genome sequencing alongside Chinese Communist Party bodies such as the Ministry of Science and Technology and Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
Similarly, Dr. Tadataka Yamada, the former president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s global health program, serves as the Chairman of BGI’s Scientific Advisory Board.
GATES AND BGI RESEARCHERS.
And in 2016, BGI launched a U.S.-based office in Washington—the home state of Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
BGI’s ties to Washington also appear to have influenced the firm’s decision to target the state with its COVID-19 test kits, part of the company’s plot to “mine” the data of Americans.
“Early last March, the state of Washington was the site of the first major coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. As COVID rates and the need for tests were spiking, BGI Group, the world’s largest biotech firm—a global giant based in China—approached the state of Washington with an enticing offer. In a strikingly personal letter to the governor, BGI proposed to build and help run state-of-the-art COVID testing labs,” 60 Minutes summarized.
But officials ultimately turned down the offer at the request of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence over BGI’s ties to the Chinese government.
Glenn explains how The Great Reset may soon influence EVERY financial aspect of your life — from car loans, business loans, mortgages, and more.
It’s all thanks to the partnership between America’s biggest banks, the federal government, and global groups like the World Economic Forum…and it has already begun: The Heartland Institute’s Justin Haskins describes how Merrill Lynch now assigns ESG credit scores for customers.
It may not affect you yet. But soon, a low score — based on things like products you buy or how much electricity you use — could SIGNIFICANTLY impact your life.
Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum Klause Schwab explains his plan to implement these ESC credit scores:
ZURICH—Austrian authorities have suspended inoculations with a batch of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine as a precaution while investigating the death of one person and the illness of another after the shots, a health agency said on March 7.
“The Federal Office for Safety in Health Care (BASG) has received two reports in a temporal connection with a vaccination from the same batch of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the district clinic of Zwettl” in Lower Austria province, it said.
One 49-year-old woman died as a result of severe coagulation disorders, while a 35-year-old woman developed a pulmonary embolism and is recovering, it said. A pulmonary embolism is an acute lung disease caused by a dislodged blood clot.
“Currently, there is no evidence of a causal relationship with the vaccination,” BASG said.
Austrian newspaper Niederoesterreichische Nachrichten as well as broadcaster ORF and the APA news agency reported that the women were both nurses who worked at the Zwettl clinic.
BASG said blood clotting wasn’t among the known side effects of the vaccine; it is pursuing its investigation vigorously to completely rule out any possible link.
“As a precautionary measure, the remaining stocks of the affected vaccine batch are no longer being issued or vaccinated,” it added.
An AstraZeneca spokesman said: “There have been no confirmed serious adverse events associated with the vaccine,” adding that all batches are subject to strict and rigorous quality controls.
Trials and real-world experience so far suggests the vaccine is safe and effective and it had been approved for use in well over 50 countries, he said.
AstraZeneca also said it was in contact with Austrian authorities and would fully support the investigation.
European Union regulators at the end of January approved the product, saying it was effective and safe to use, while the World Health Organization (WHO) in mid-February listed the product for emergency use.
Adverse reactions seen in trials were short-lived for the most part and blood clotting issues weren’t reported.
A safety assessment by Germany’s vaccine regulator of more than 360,000 people who received the Astra vaccine in the country between the launch in early February and Feb. 26 concluded that adverse reactions were in line with the safety profile described in clinical trials.
Death-row murderers and terrorists are getting $1,400 stimulus checks from the package passed by the Senate on Saturday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., tweeted in condemnation.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Bomber, murdered three people and terrorized a city. He’ll be getting a $1,400 stimulus check as part of the Democrats’ ‘COVID relief’ bill.”
“Aaron Shamo was sentenced to life in prison for selling ‘1 million fentanyl-laced fake oxycodone pills to unsuspecting buyers.’ He’ll be getting a $1,400 stimulus check while in prison from the Democrats’ ‘COVID relief’ bill.”
Cotton’s rebuke came after Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., proposed an amendment that the checks should not go to inmates, but Senate Democrats voted it down 50-49.
Cotton also rejected the provisions that permits a $1,400-per-week check to federal employees who refuse to send their kids to school.
“They’re going to give a lot of Americans a $1,400 check,” Cotton told Fox News last week. “Federal employees are going to get that same check. They’re also going to get $1,400 a week, every single week, if their kids aren’t in school.
“So if you’re working in the middle of the country hard to make a living, you get one $1,400 payment once. If you’re a federal bureaucrat in Washington where your schools are still closed, you get one every single week. Talk about the swamp looking out for itself.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Saturday announced Operation Lone Star, which he said would integrate the state’s own resources to try to contain damage from the new migrant surge that’s struck the Biden administration.
Mr. Abbott said the operation is aimed at the smuggling cartels, which control the routes for getting drugs and people across the border.
The Republican governor squarely blamed President Biden’s moves to undo former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies for inviting the surge.
“The crisis at our southern border continues to escalate because of Biden Administration policies that refuse to secure the border and invite illegal immigration,” he said in a statement.
He said the situation has become “a humanitarian crisis.”
The Biden administration has declined to label the situation a “crisis,” instead calling it a “challenge” that the administration insists it is meeting.
Illegal immigrants are being caught by Border Patrol agents then quickly released directly into Texas communities, without any coronavirus testing.
Some communities are doing COVID testing themselves, although they said it’s nearly useless because of the conditions and the incubation period. Besides, officials say, even if migrants do test positive there’s little they can do to stop the migrants from getting on buses and trains anyway.
One local official involved in testing said the migrants usually leave within a day of being released by the Border Patrol, regardless of their test results.
