Thursday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

Good morning Deplorables, where has our country gone?

The Democrats’ Corruption of America’s Inner Cities

Via American Greatness

What are the real problems in America’s inner cities? Is it all about racism, or could it be a combination of several factors? According to a survey of Chicago parents by the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, poverty, violence, and crime are also some of the biggest concerns in their neighborhoods. Good jobs and capitalism could solve the poverty part of the problem, but if cities make it hard for businesses to come into town or for a local person to start a small business, citizens with little mobility stay poor.

Why wouldn’t these cities want the freest, most business-friendly laws and policies imaginable for their citizens? The answer is often that politicians care very little about their constituents but care deeply about their own power and money.

High taxes, crony capitalism (meaning favors for politicians and others who have the power to give the “right” companies the contracts), excessive regulations, and a culture of “it’s who you know” combine to crush entrepreneurs and small business owners who are not among those favored by the powers that be.

Remember, Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1931. In fact, not only is Mayor Lori Lightfoot a Democrat, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, Secretary of State Jesse White, Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, and Governor J.B. Pritzker are all Democrats. When one party is in power for such a long time, dissenting voices are not heard. The interests of the monopoly party trump the needs of the community.

In 2018, the University of Illinois at Chicago found that “Chicago [is] the most corrupt city in the country and Illinois [is] the third-most corrupt state.” Government corruption hurts communities in a variety of ways. Businesses don’t want to come to your city if it is corrupt. Corrupt politicians (many aldermen in Chicago’s case) have faced allegations and convictions of receiving kickbacks and favors for signing certain contracts to the businesses giving them the most goodies. These aldermen have had the power to deny building licenses or business licenses for companies unwilling or unable to pay up to the corrupt politicians. Of course, this hurts the poorest neighborhoods the most. Poor people cannot afford such dirty money dealings even if they wanted to engage in such depravity.

Violence and crime cause further poverty. “It can take years, even decades, for businesses to return to neighborhoods that were burned and looted . . . Having begun to emerge from poverty, these merchants are plunged back into it when criminals demolish overnight what they have worked so hard to build.” Without a strong police presence (and I would say moral change to the community), even if store owners are able to rebuild after devastation, they only risk being looted and burned again.

Read the entire article HERE.

Cancel the White Men — And What’s Left?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Can we all just get along?”

That was the plea of Rodney King after a Simi Valley jury failed to convict any of the four cops who beat him into submission after a 100-mile-an-hour chase on an LA freeway.

King’s plea came after the 1992 LA riots, the worst since the New York City draft riots in 1863 when Lincoln had to send in federal troops.

In the aftermath of today’s protests and riots after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, we hear similar calls. President Donald Trump must “reach out” and “unify the nation.”

But how?
Many of these calls for unity come from the same elites who are all-in on tearing us apart by pulling down statues of the famous men of American history whom they most detest.

A second war on the Confederacy is underway, to disgrace and dishonor all who fought for Southern independence in the war of 1861-65. A second Reconstruction is being readied.

The St. Andrew’s Cross, the battle flag of the Confederate army, though seen as a banner of heroism and honor to millions, is henceforth to be treated like the Nazi swastika. It has been already been banned at Nascar races, where it has been widely popular.

Liberals will fight for the right of Marxist radicals to burn the American flag to show their hatred of it but cannot tolerate working folks flying the battle flag of the Confederacy to show their love of it.

A second front in the campaign to cancel history is the renaming of U.S. army bases in Southern states that bear the names of Confederate generals, such as Forts Benning and Bragg. Trump has pledged to veto any defense appropriation bill that contains such a provision.

Third is the drive led by Nancy Pelosi and her allies to remove statues in the Capitol of any of those men of “violent bigotry” who were connected to the Confederacy.
First among them is General Robert E. Lee.

Gen. David Petraeus has put succinctly the crime of which Lee is guilty. Though “West Point honors Robert E. Lee with a gate, a road, an entire housing area, and a barracks,” writes Petraeus, “Lee… committed treason.”

The goal here is to impose the one-sided view of American history that is now ascendant, as official truth — that the cause of Southern secession was unlike the cause of American secession from Britain. It was an act of treason rooted in the ideology of white supremacy.

To have that sole acceptable view predominate, our elites believe they must remove from public display the statues of any associated with the cause of Southern independence and stigmatize them all as traitors.

They have, however, a problem: Where do the elites stop when the radicals demand more?

Read the entire article HERE.

Corporate America’s Strategy Of Mob Appeasement Will Destroy it, Just As It Always Has

Via The Federalist

Twenty-six years ago, Morgan Stanley hired Marilyn Booker as their first diversity director, charged with overseeing corporate efforts from the firm’s New York City headquarters, a 685-foot, glass, Times Square skyscraper. Ten years ago, Booker left that post to work in their financial wealth management division. Seven months ago, Booker was fired.

But that was before video aired of George Floyd’s death, and spreading, national protests escalated into riots, violence, church burning, monument defacing, and occupations. How quickly things change. Now Booker is leading a group of black women in suing the company that employed her for a quarter-century, charging that the firm systematically discriminates against black employees.

The suit comes after a notably active week for the investment bank’s activism. Since Black Lives Matter blasted back into our Alzheimer’s-addled news cycle, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive, James Gorman, committed $25 million to a new internal “diversity” effort, sent $5 million to the NAACP, promoted two black women, and sent an email about it all to staff. For his efforts, he was personally named in Booker’s lawsuit.

But Morgan Stanley is not uniquely stupid for empowering an activist whose sole job was to call them racists. For decades, corporate America has launched similar efforts in the vain hope that money, press releases, and choice divestments could virtue-signal them out of the mob’s cross-hairs and even hurt their competitors. None of it saves them. On the contrary, moves to embrace the mob have placed corporations more clearly in their sights than they were before.

At root is the reality that corporations are cowardly, and there’s a reason for that. While conservative consumers are adept at patronizing companies that support their worldview, a la Chick-fil-A, they rarely target private industry for blatant Democratic partisanship. Liberal consumers and their media enablers, on the other hand, will boycott a company for the slightest connection to the slightest transgression.

Over the past 30 years, this has taught corporations like Nike that attacking conservatives has no consequence, while pushing left-wing values has no detriment. Until now.

We’ve seen this sort of suicidal partnership before — and recently — with the secret alliance between environmental radicals and energy companies. First, the energy companies went after their competition in the coal industry, with firms like Chesapeake Natural Gas sending more than $25 million to the Sierra Club. Now this is the model, and at the moment, major oil companies like Exxon are funding a Republican-staffed carbon tax effort that would disproportionately hurt their smaller competitors.

The list goes on, but one thing remains constant: Soon enough, as company after company and job after job are forced to climb to the guillotine, the corporations paying the bills get closer and closer to the front of the line.

Read the entire article HERE.

America’s Own Color Revolution

By F. William Engdahl

Color Revolution is the term used to describe a series of remarkably effective CIA-led regime change operations using techniques developed by the RAND Corporation, “democracy” NGOs and other groups since the 1980’s. They were used in crude form to bring down the Polish communist regime in the late 1980s. From there the techniques were refined and used, along with heavy bribes, to topple the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union. For anyone who has studied those models closely, it is clear that the protests against police violence led by amorphous organizations with names like Black Lives Matter or Antifa are more than purely spontaneous moral outrage. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans are being used as a battering ram to not only topple a US President, but in the process, the very structures of the US Constitutional order.

If we step back from the immediate issue of videos showing a white Minneapolis policeman pressing his knee on the neck of a black man, George Floyd, and look at what has taken place across the nation since then, it is clear that certain organizations or groups were well-prepared to instrumentalize the horrific event for their own agenda.

The protests since May 25 have often begun peacefully only to be taken over by well-trained violent actors. Two organizations have appeared regularly in connection with the violent protests—Black Lives Matter and Antifa (USA). Videos show well-equipped protesters dressed uniformly in black and masked (not for coronavirus to be sure), vandalizing police cars, burning police stations, smashing store windows with pipes or baseball bats. Use of Twitter and other social media to coordinate “hit-and-run” swarming strikes of protest mobs is evident.

What has unfolded since the Minneapolis trigger event has been compared to the wave of primarily black ghetto protest riots in 1968. I lived through those events in 1968 and what is unfolding today is far different. It is better likened to the Yugoslav color revolution that toppled Milosevic in 2000.

Read the entire article HERE.

Fascist Fauci Inserts Himself as Major League Baseball Commissioner

By Chris Donaldson/Trending Politics

With the 2020 Major League Baseball season already on life support, Dr. Anthony Fauci may have just pulled the plug.

Initial optimism that MLB would have bolstered the nation’s morale by opening the season on or around the July 4th holiday has turned to ashes as acrimonious fighting between owners and the players union over money drags on.

In a bad sign for the prospect of any baseball at all, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told ESPN that he was “not confident” that there would be a resolution as summer will open without baseball for the first time in history.

Now Dr. Fauci has entered the picture and may have just delivered the kiss of death.

According to the man who has been hailed by politicians and media alike as the ultimate authority on the coronavirus despite having been wrong about nearly everything, MLB risks triggering a second wave if it plays past September.

Via CBS News, “Dr. Anthony Fauci says MLB should try to play ‘in the core summer months’ and avoid October”:

There have been two constants as MLB and the MLBPA haggle over the 2020 season: The players want full prorated pay and the league does not want to push the postseason into November. MLB wants the regular season to end on Sept. 27 as originally scheduled, and the postseason to be confined to October to avoid a second COVID-19 wave.

The MLBPA has indicated they believe this is a tactic to play fewer regular season games and thus pay the players less salary — one argument is the NFL expects to play in November — but at least one expert is on MLB’s side. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has advised against playing baseball deep into October.

Here’s what Dr. Fauci told Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times:

“If the question is time, I would try to keep it in the core summer months and end it not with the way we play the World Series, until the end of October when it’s cold. I would avoid that.”  

…

“Under most circumstances — but we don’t know for sure here — viruses do better when the weather starts to get colder and people start spending more time inside, as opposed to outside. The community has a greater chance of getting infected … (There is potential) overlap between influenza and the possibility of a fall second (COVID-19) wave.”  

The MLBPA’s original proposal called for a 114-game regular season that would conclude Oct. 31. The postseason would then be played in November, in neutral sites as the weather necessitates. Clearly, Dr. Fauci is advising against that.

With it already being mid-June with neither side willing to budge on negotiations and at least a month of “spring” training needed to get players into shape, the earliest that an abbreviated season would likely begin would be in August.

That would mean if Dr. Fauci’s advice was taken that it would be a very short season of around one month before the playoffs were to begin which is hardly worth the effort and time spent to begin a season that now appears destined for infamy.

Despite Fauci’s bad advice leading to the economic cataclysm of a national lockdown that is still ongoing in some Democrat-controlled states, he is still afforded with a credibility that he is undeserving of and remains a figure who is capable of triggering a state of mass hysteria that could lead to a second lockdown.

President Trump appears to have wisely sidelined Fauci along with fellow doomsayer Dr. Deborah Birx but the same can’t be said for the media, corporations and Democrats who are determined to inflict as much pain on Americans as possible to defeat Trump.

Check out all daily columns by Chris HERE.

Activists Fight Racism By Driving All People Of Color Out Of Pop Culture

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

U.S.—Activists are fighting racism by demanding that people of color be removed from all media, brands, logos, mascots, and anywhere else they might pop up.

“Anywhere we see a person of color, we see racism. So we must end racism by making sure people of color are not depicted anywhere,” said white liberal activist Petunia Faucett. “We will not rest until all pop culture icons of color are eliminated. Then, racism will be over.”

Activists across the country cheered as another pop culture icon of color was removed this morning. “We worked hard to achieve this goal, and the day is finally here,” Faucett said. “But our work is not done. We must be vigilant to hunt down people of color on butter tubs, syrup bottles, cartoons, and bags of rice, and take them out of the public consciousness.”

“When only white people are shown as mascots, cartoon characters, and brand logos, we will have truly arrived at our diverse, racism-free future.”

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on politics and culture HERE.

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