Aug. 28, 2020
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
President Trump is bringing America back again, accepts Republican nomination as 2.9 million leave unemployment in month
President Donald Trump has once again accepted the Republican
nomination for President with the promise to fully reopen America as 2.9
million Americans have left continued unemployment claims in the past month,
according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of July 18,
on an unadjusted basis, 16.8 million Americans were on unemployment, but as of
Aug. 15, that number was down to 13.9 million, according to the Department of
Labor, a dramatic shift of 2.9 million back into the labor force as states
reopen in the aftermath of the spring lockdown response to the COVID-19
pandemic. That should build upon the 10.1 million jobs that have been recovered
since labor markets bottomed in April, according to the Bureau of labor
Statistics’ household survey, with the Sept. 4 unemployment report due out, in
what can only be called a miraculous turnaround that few but President Trump
saw coming. President Trump predicted the rapid recovery now underway, where
now the Atlanta Federal Reserve is projecting a more than 25 percent expansion
of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the third quarter.
Cartoon: Made In China
China expands their domestic manufacturing base.
Video: Kanye West and GOP convention speaker battle Planned Parenthood
President Donald Trump has been working to de-fund Planned
Parenthood for years now. Now, hip-hop star and stated presidential candidate
Kanye West as well as Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood employee are
speaking out about the group. Hear about the work to discredit them.
How Americans are unwittingly funding Chinese concentration camps via foreign investment
An estimated 3 million Muslims imprisoned in the vast network of
Chinese concentration camps. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and
Pacific Security Affairs Randall Schriver recently told a Pentagon briefing,
“The [Chinese] are using the security forces for mass imprisonment of Chinese
Muslims in concentration camps,” justifying the use of the term because “given
what we understand to be the magnitude of the detention, at least a million but
likely closer to three million citizens out of a population of about 10
million”. The Chinese government
surveilles these concentration camps using cameras provided by a company called
Hikvision, one of many Chinese companies that U.S. pension funds are invested
in. In total, American pension and mutual fund holders and other investors have
put more than $381 billion in Chinese and Hong Kong companies’ equities and
bonds held overseas, according to U.S. Treasury data. Many of these companies
engage in child and slave labor according to an annual report on child and
forced labor by the Department of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs. Unwittingly,
American pensioners are parties to and profiteers from the exploitation of the
victims of such cruel abuse.
Video: Jerusalem has always been the capital of Israel & Trump is the first President to fully recognize it
President Trump is the first president in U.S. history to fully
recognize Israel’s right to say where its capital is. Jerusalem has always been
the capital of Israel throughout its history, including the modern establishment
of the state in 1948, the unification of the city since 1967, and the officially
establishment as the unified capital by the Israeli Knesset since 1980.
President Trump has settled a long-held point of confrontation between Israel
and her neighbors, and creates a path forward in the region. In 1995,
Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act which declared Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel and said it should not be divided, requiring the U.S. embassy
to be moved to Jerusalem by 1999. It was President Trump who finally took action
to move the embassy.
President Trump is bringing America back again, accepts Republican nomination as 2.9 million leave unemployment in month
By Robert Romano
President Donald Trump has once again accepted the Republican nomination for President with the promise to fully reopen America as 2.9 million Americans have left continued unemployment claims in the past month, according to the latest data from the Department of Labor.
As of July 18, on an unadjusted basis, 16.8 million Americans were on unemployment, but as of Aug. 15, that number was down to 13.9 million, a dramatic shift of 2.9 million back into the labor force as states reopen in the aftermath of spring lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That should build upon the 10.1 million jobs that have been recovered since labor markets bottomed in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey.
That number had been as many as 25 million jobs lost, but with the Sept. 4 unemployment report due out, about half of those losses will have been cut in what can only be called a miraculous turnaround that few but President Trump saw coming.
President Trump cited the success in his speech, stating, “Over the past three months, we have gained over 9 million jobs, a new record.”
Here, Trump is citing the Bureau’s establishment survey, but it shows the same trajectory. Jobs are coming back to the U.S.—and fast.
The data is certainly welcome news for the Trump administration after its unprecedented response to the pandemic to shore up the economy and households by suspending foreclosures, temporarily expanding unemployment benefits, supporting and saving 5.2 million small businesses with the payroll protection program and protecting critical industries, states and local governments—all in a bid to encourage Americans to stay home during the spring.
Trump noted the small business protection, stating, “Thanks to our Paycheck Protection Program, we have saved or supported more than 50 million American jobs. As a result, we have seen the smallest economic contraction of any major western nation, and we are recovering much faster.”
Now, a V-shaped recovery is clearly forming in the data as daily COVID-19 cases temporarily stabilize and President Trump is likely to get credit for it politically as the presidential campaign is fully upon us.
President Trump predicted the rapid recovery now underway, where after the U.S. economy contracted an annualized, inflation-adjusted 31.7 percent in the second quarter according to the Bureau of Economic Analys, now the Atlanta Federal Reserve is projecting a more than 25 percent expansion of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the third quarter—a report that will be released right before the election.
More than anything, President Trump will be judged on his stewardship of the U.S. economy, where before the pandemic, unemployment had reached a 50-year low of 3.5 percent as he ended NAFTA, ratified the renegotiated U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), levied a 25 percent tariff on $250 billion of Chinese goods and another 7.5 percent on the remaining $300 billion of goods and still managed to secure a phase one trade deal with China as the trade in goods deficit with China collapsed by more than 17.6 percent in 2019, or $73.9 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
If anyone can get the economy back in a hurry, it’s President Trump. In his speech, he promised, “In a new term as President, we will again build the greatest economy in history — quickly returning to full employment, soaring incomes, and record prosperity.”
In the meantime, his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden is saying he’d shut down the economy again if that’s what scientists tell him to do. But maybe that’s just so he can get a head start on truly destroying the economy with his Green New Deal that seeks zero carbon emissions by 2035 by somehow replacing more than three-fifths of our electric grid and every gasoline-consuming automobile in the country.
Here, again, Trump tore into Biden, noting, “Biden has promised to abolish the production of American oil, coal, shale, and natural gas -- laying waste to the economies of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. Millions of jobs will be lost, and energy prices will soar. These same policies led to crippling power outages in California just last week. How can Joe Biden claim to be an ‘ally of the Light’ when his own party can't even keep the lights on?”
Making matter worse, Biden voted for NAFTA and permanent normal trade with China which uses child and forced slave labor in its factories and helped to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership. His record on trade is atrocious.
Here, Trump ripped his opponent, declaring, “Biden's record is a shameful roll call of the most catastrophic betrayals and blunders in our lifetime. He has spent his entire career on the wrong side of history. Biden voted for the NAFTA disaster, the single worst trade deal ever enacted; he supported China's entry into the World Trade Organization, one of the greatest economic disasters of all time. After those Biden calamities, the United States lost 1 in 4 manufacturing jobs… As Vice President, he supported the Trans Pacific Partnership which would have been a death sentence for the U.S. Auto Industry; he backed the horrendous South Korea trade deal, which took many jobs from our country.”
Trump added, “We'll make sure our companies and jobs stay in our country, as I've already been doing. Joe Biden's agenda is Made in China. My agenda is Made in the USA.”
In 2020, the choice is clear. While Biden will ship more jobs overseas, shut down the economy and destroy our energy industry, President Trump will bring more jobs back to the U.S., get better trade deals, reopen the economy and make the U.S. energy independent. Now, all eyes turn to the first debate between Trump and Biden on Sept. 29 as the campaign heats up. Stay tuned.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
Cartoon: Made In China
By A.F. Branco
Click here for a higher level resolution version.
Video: Kanye West and GOP convention speaker battle Planned Parenthood
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNALvR1Ef90
How Americans are unwittingly funding Chinese concentration camps via foreign investment
By Catherine Mortensen
As I stared at my computer screen full of facts, figures, links, and letters about the moral hazards of American investments in Chinese companies, I wondered how I could get people to care that their retirement pensions could be funding a vast network of concentration camps in the Xinjiang province where as many as 3 million Chinese Muslims could be imprisoned.
Not exactly click bait.
So, like any good writer, I left my office to clear my head. What happened next was totally unexpected.
As I drove through suburban Northern Virginia, a nondescript storefront caught my eye. It was a Uighur restaurant. Uighur is another name for Chinese Muslims. I couldn’t believe my luck! Standing behind the counter was a petite young woman with short black hair pushed back with an orange bandana and wearing round black-framed glasses on a makeup-less face. Her features didn’t look Chinese. She looked more like my Hispanic and Native American ancestors from New Mexico.
The restaurant was empty of customers, so I took the opportunity to ask her a few questions. I thought she might be able to put me in touch with someone from the Uighur community for my story. Very quickly I learned she herself was a Uighur who fled China with her younger sister four years ago.
In remarkably good English, she told her story.
In her country she said she could never get a job or get an education because “I am different.” When she was 19-years old, her parents got travel visas to America for her and her 16-year old sister. Both have since been granted political asylum.
Ameera did not want me to share real her name for fear that her parents back in China would be killed if the Chinese government learned she’s talking about the abuses of Uighurs in Xinjiang.
“The Chinese government will force the Muslim girls to marry a Chinese man and if they refuse, their family is threatened,” Ameera said. “In 2009 a lot of our people were killed, including some of my family’s friends and relatives. That is when my parents decided to send me and my sister away.”
Ameera’s boss, also a Uighur, came out from the back of the restaurant and joined in the conversation. Asim (not his real name) said he had a brother who had traveled to Mecca once to fulfill his religious obligations as a Muslim. Asim said fifteen years after his travels, the Chinese government questioned him about it and threw him in prison. “Many of us are taken to prisons, and the Chinese do terrible things to us. When my brother came out of that prison, he was sick for a long time. Everyone who is in those prisons gets sick, no one knows what it is. But they die.”
Asim’s brother was one of an estimated 3 million Muslims imprisoned in the vast network of Chinese concentration camps. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs Randall Schriver recently told a Pentagon briefing, “The [Chinese] are using the security forces for mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps,” justifying the use of the term because “given what we understand to be the magnitude of the detention, at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens out of a population of about 10 million”.
The Chinese government surveilles these concentration camps using cameras provided by a company called Hikvision, one of many Chinese companies that U.S. pension funds are invested in. In total, American pension and mutual fund holders and other investors have put more than $381 billion in Chinese and Hong Kong companies’ equities and bonds held overseas, according to U.S. Treasury data. Many of these companies engage in child and slave labor according to an annual report on child and forced labor by the Department of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs.
“Unwittingly, American pensioners are parties to and profiteers from the exploitation of the victims of such cruel abuse,” wrote Rick Manning, President of Americans for Limited Government, in a letter earlier this month to state treasurers, comptrollers, and governors. Manning is part of a national coalition urging federal and state authorities to rid their pension funds of Chinese investments, to delist Chinese companies from U.S. exchanges and to have the Department of Labor deem that non-transparent Chinese state-owned companies are unsuitable for 401(k) and other pension investments under ERISA.
In May, that coalition succeeded in getting the Trump administration to immediately halt all investing of federal Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) assets in Chinese companies. The TSP is a retirement savings and investment plan for federal employees and members of the uniformed services.
Steve Alberts, 50, a real estate broker in Williamsburg, Virginia recently took a closer look at his state pension fund to determine if he was invested in Chinese companies. “After the whole Covid virus from China, I said, ‘I’m through. I’m done with buying anything from them.’”
Alberts said as he searched through the various investment indexes in his fund, he had a hard time figuring out what he was looking at. “It’s not easy trying to figure out what all the three-letter codes are. I want to know where my money is invested because it could come crashing down,” Alberts said. “If it is in volatile foreign investments, I don’t want it.”
Alberts went on to explain, “This is not a right-wing conspiracy. I don’t want to support the slave labor market for tennis shoes and iPhones. I don’t want to hear this is xenophobic. I simply don’t like my money being invested in companies that don’t follow the same code of ethics that I do.”
Back at the Uighur restaurant, I tried explaining to Ameera and Asim about the story I was writing. They both immediately understood the implications of U.S. investments in China and were pleased Americans are taking steps to divest. “We like that Trump is getting tough with China.”
As I left, I wanted to make sure I had understood Ameer correctly when she told me she’d never see her parents again. “Ever, ever?” I asked. Her eyes began to well with tears. “I will never see them again.” Ignoring Covid cautions, I hugged her. What else was I to do?
Catherine Mortensen is the Vice President of Communications at Americans for Limited Government.
Video: Jerusalem has always been the capital of Israel & Trump is the first President to fully recognize it
