Mediaboss Marketing

A refugee who escaped communist Cuba issued a dire warning to Americans about the path the country is headed down. Maximo Alvarez declared that critical American institutions have already been infected with communism, including schools and the media.

Podcast host Lisa Boothe asked Alvarez on Wednesday if Americans have swallowed the communist poison pill. Alvarez responded, "Not only have they swallowed it, they digested it."

"Listen to the media. They're no longer objective. You can tell how much they hate this country," Alvarez said during an interview on "The Truth with Lisa Boothe" podcast.

"Look at our, our academia," Alvarez added. "Our kids are not being they're indoctrinated. They are taught that America is a bad country. That we're a bunch of racists. That we're bad people, and we have to pay back.

"If this country was racist, I wouldn't be here," the Cuban immigrant said. "If this country was a racist country, most of us wouldn't be here because even some people in your family came from another country. This country was made of immigrants."

Alvarez admitted that some Americans are flawed, but the United States as a country shouldn't be blamed for certain "bad people."

"Do we have racist people in this country? Of course we do. Do we have bad people? Yes, we do. Do we have bad teachers? Yes, we do. Do we have bad police people? Yes, we do," he stated. "But don't blame the country for that because we have a justice system that will penalize you and punish you if you are a bad person, if you are a racist.

"Look at how much money they're sending to Black Lives Matter," Alvarez said. "And people don't want to understand that these three ladies who control this company are bragging about Marxist Leninism. They're communists they tell you that. And nobody understands what that means."

Alvarez was referring to a 2015 video where Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors bragged that she and fellow BLM co-founder Alicia Garza are "trained Marxists."

"Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists," Cullors said in the 2015 interview. "We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories."

Alvarez said that communism has been seeping into the American way of life for years. He pointed out how American Catholics haven't been vocal in denouncing abortion, prayer being banned in school, and Democrats passing gun control measures.

"Gun control? Every time there's a shooting, you want to have gun control," Alvarez proclaimed. "You know why? Because they're afraid the only way out of this is a civil war."

"Make sure that kids are no longer educated, they're indoctrinated. Make sure that people hate each other. Envy, hatred. Make sure that the blacks hate the whites. Make sure that the rich hate the poor. Make sure that the people who live in the city hate the people who live on the farm," he explained. "It's all part of the Communist Manifesto, and Saul Alinsky points that out very, very well."

Alvarez, who is the founder and president of Sunshine Gasoline Distributors, fled Cuba for the United States in 1961. Alvarez took part in Operation Peter Pan, a covert program that transported about 14,000 Cuban children to the United States from 1960 to 1962 at the height of the Cold War.

Alvarez made headlines last summer when he delivered a gripping speech at the Republican National Convention about the dangers of far-left ideologies that many progressive Democrats have advocated.

"I've seen movements like this before. I've seen ideas like this before and I'm here to tell you, we cannot let them take over our country," the Florida businessman said at the RNC. "I heard the promises of Fidel Castro. And I can never forget all those who grew up around me, who looked like me, who suffered and starved and died because they believed those empty promises. They swallowed the communist poison pill.

"Those false promises spread the wealth, free education, free health care, defund the police, trust a socialist state more than your family and your community they don't sound radical to my ears," he said. "They sound familiar. When Fidel Castro was asked if he was a communist, he said he was a Roman Catholic he knew he had to hide the truth."

During a business roundtable last year which featured former President Donald Trump, Alvarez warned Americans about the promises of "free stuff."

"I remember all the promises that we hear today about free education and free health care and free land," Alvarez said. "My God, no freedom. But he never said that until after he was in power, got rid of all the police, got rid of all the military been there for the last 60 years and counting. And he destroyed each and every one who helped him."

In July, Alvarez joined Glenn Beck to warn Americans about the dangers of communism.

"This is the same old story. It doesn't change. We need to explain to people that the communist philosophy is based on the fact that the ends justify the means. The ends justify the means," Alvarez said on "The Glenn Beck Program." "They will do whatever is necessary to accomplish their objective. If they have to tell you they're Catholics, or they have to tell you they belong to certain religions, they will. If they have to kill you, they will they have. Just look at exactly what happened in Cuba."

RELATED: Rapper Pitbull issues warning about communism, says Fidel Castro would have been jealous of lockdowns

More:
Cuban refugee warns Americans have swallowed the 'poison pill' of communism, says media hate this country - TheBlaze

That sort of rhetoric was often echoed by conservative media celebrities. In August of 2010, Ted Nugent called Obamas agenda Islamic, Muslim, Marxist, communist and socialist and said the president was a secret Muslim pretending to be a Christian so he can continue his jihad of America-destroying policies.

But at least on the surface, the Tea Party claimed to care deeply about government spending, deficits, and debt. Democrats: Dont Make ME Pay For Your Wasteful Spending, read another sign.

Over the next few years, the conservative Republicans who insisted they were concerned about government spending would actually shut down the government, and no GOP event was complete without charts warning about the exploding debt.

And then they stopped caring.

There are still groups out there that claim to be part of the Tea Party. But, for the most part, they have been co-opted by Trumpism.

As Biden pushes ahead with his transformative progressive agenda, its worth asking: What happened to the Tea Party?

One obvious answer is that the fiscal conservatism was never real; Republicans only pretended to care about it when Democrats were in office. And the Tea Party was less about freedom and spending than it was about denouncing the nations first Black president.

But the more immediate answer is simpler: Donald Trump killed it.

There are still groups out there that claim to be part of the Tea Party. But, for the most part, they have been co-opted by Trumpism more invested in a cult of personality and culture wars than anything resembling fiscal conservatism.

Although the GOP continues to hail him as a champion of the right, Trump is and has always been a man of no fixed principles who succeeded in draining the GOP of much of its political policy priorities.

No one really ever knew where he would come down on any particular issue: Socialism for farmers? Check. Unilateral tax increases for consumer goods? Check. Massive increases in the deficit? No problem.

Trump presided over the ballooning of the national debt from $19.9 trillion to around $28 trillion a staggering increase of over 35 percent.

In his final chaotic days in office, Trump wanted to push it even higher. Even as he was fighting to steal the presidential election, Trump demanded that Congress increase the second round of stimulus checks to $2,000 per person.

In a video posted to Twitter days before Christmas, Trump said I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000, or $4,000 for a couple.

His bid for fatter checks was overshadowed by the sedition that followed, but Trumps demand helps explain why the GOP is having such a hard time getting its base fired up over Bidens spending plans. After four years of Trump, the rights credibility on spending and the debt has been shredded. So the focus has shift to other grievances.

If there are rallies later this year, they are far more likely to be MAGA or Stop the Steal events than protests over deficit spending, or even health care.

That also reflects the ways in which the center of political gravity has shifted.

Polls suggest that Bidens spending plans are widely popular and the GOPs flirtation with populism has blunted its opposition to raising taxes on corporations and the rich. The stock market continues to boom despite dire warnings of socialism.

So, perhaps it is not surprising that the GOP would rather wage culture war and that the Tea Party is just a distant memory.

Visit link:
The Tea Party's silence on Biden highlights Trump's lasting impact - MSNBC

-Analysis-

Power and authority are not necessarily synonymous. Force is not authority, and can even indicate weakness. The philosopher Max Weber observed that dominance is only legitimate when people recognize and accept authority. In some democracies, rulers have compensated the fading of legitimacy with higher doses of authoritarianism. The pandemic has exacerbated this distortion.

This is the conjuncture facing several experiments in governance that are imperfect, populist or downright dictatorial. Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey all fit these labels to a greater or lesser extent.

In some of those cases, what's helped that big-stick-style authoritarianism survive is a setting where income distribution is at least consistent. China, fore example, breathed new life into its authoritarian system with the capitalist experiment begun by the late leader Deng Xiaoping. Its brand of modernization may have left the Chinese indifferent to the concept of communism, but not to the social mobility the system assures them.

Today, the People's Republic has the world's biggest middle class, with a per capita income that keeps growing. Vietnam has a broadly similar situation, while Saudi Arabia has spent big chunks of its oil fortune to bolster wages, pay subsidies and keep the peace.

Regimes without economic success can only rely on coercion.

Regimes without economic success can only rely on coercion, which has shown stark limitations. In Paraguay, the regime of General Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989) fell with the end of the generous funds spent on the Itaip dam. With no more "sweeteners" for his cronies, Stroessner was sent packing when another soldier, Colonel Lino Oviedo, marched into the presidential office holding a hand grenade.

With North Africa during the Arab Spring, rising food prices pushed people onto the streets to challenge the authority of their rulers. Anyone who claims ideology can make up for such pedestrian needs as food and personal fulfillment should listen to speeches made by Cuba's Ral Castro when he took over the presidency from his late brother, Fidel. The revolutionary veteran who announced his retirement days ago, aged almost 90 years, admitted in the middle of the last decade that the communist island's "insignificant wages" had cut through its youth's "revolutionary conscience."

The Cuban case confirms you can do a lot with history, except negate its dynamics. A section of Cuba's gerontocracy seems to have understood that history is not static, and understands what it means to fall into an abyss. The younger of the Castros warned his peers in the nomenklatura that unless things changed in Cuba, the communist polity would fall.

When Venezuela stopped sending it money, Cuba sought out historic negotiations with the administration of President Barack Obama, to break decades of isolation and attract vital investments. This dtente, later dashed by Donald Trump's erratic geopolitics, is now back on the table.

Castro's retirement and the handover of powers to his political godson Miguel Daz-Canel point in that direction. Castro has also taken with him some old party hands opposed to any glasnost. One is Ramiro Valds, who designed Venezuela's repressive apparatus of recent years.

Ral Castro took over the presidency from his late brother, Fidel Photo: Ernesto Mastrascusa/EFE via ZUMA Press

Castro and Daz-Canel made similar sounds at the recent Eighth Party Congress. Both spoke in favor of normalized ties with the United States, like those it maintains with other states including Vietnam, whose capitalist economy and communist political control is a model that Castro wants Cuba to follow.

Vietnam's economy has grown in leaps since the 1980s, when it dropped its opposition to the free market. It even grew 2.9% in the pandemic year of 2020, when Cuba's economy shrank 11%. Interestingly, Castro has admitted that 50 years of U.S. blockades were not the only reason for Cuba's economic failures.

Today, Cuba's "Fatherland or Death" motto may well morph into "Open Up or Die," as a columnist in the Spanish paper El Pas recently observed. Like Venezuela, the island nation is suffering an aggravation of inflationary trends that is fueling discontent, protests and repression. In 2020, the price of clothes and foodstuffs doubled or even tripled, while services like electricity quadrupled. The decision last January to have a single exchange rate contributed to this inflation.

For now, Cuba must wait before the seeds it has thrown at the U.S. germinate. The administration of President Joe Biden won't do anything with Cuba until after congressional elections of 2022. It must boost its legislative power and cannot afford to lose Florida, as it did in last year's presidential elections.

Florida's Hispanic, anti-communist voters don't want anything to do with Cuba whatever the subtleties. If the Democrats stumble in mid-term polls there, it means Trump could return. That might be good news for China in its race to become the world's paramount power, but would not in any case halt changes on the island.

Cuba's ally and pupil Venezuela might open the oil sector to private investments.

Cuba's ally and pupil Venezuela is also shifting its positions, beginning with its economy. Last year, on the advice of the Russian Economy ministry, a state commission discussed opening the oil sector to private investments.

The government of President Nicols Maduro is preparing legislation to end the state's monopoly on oil through the firm PDVSA. And in January, the state began talking to concessionary firms on how to broaden participation in exploiting the country's pharaonic crude reserves. With output having dropped below 500,000 barrels a day, Venezuela needs investments that can match their scale to revive a crucial source of revenues.

While U.S. sanctions are an immediate obstacle, there are ways private firms could take over Venezuelan assets without falling afoul of laws. The U.S. forbids any business with PDVSA, the Venezuelan regime and its helpers. In theory, independent firms could take over businesses no longer controlled by PDVSA. Bloomberg is already reporting anti-sanctions lobbying by big oil and financial firms in the U.S., concerned about losing Venezuela to competitors.

Washington might initially allow U.S. firms to swap fuel for Venezuelan crude, which Trump blocked. This might be done before the midterm elections, using humanitarian pretexts.

Many in the northern hemisphere think a process of dtente opens a straight path to regime change in Venezuela, while parts of Venezuela's middle class are already banking on a gradual transformation. And if Cuba begins heading in another direction and loosens its grip, Venezuela's regime may also do what it must, to survive.

See more from World Affairs here

Go here to read the rest:
Raul Castro's Exit, Biden's Arrival And The Future Of Venezuela - Worldcrunch

In the May 18 primary election, both party-registered andindependentvoterscan vote onthreepotential amendments to the state constitutionincluding two that may changehow state government responds to future emergencies.

To influence and informlocal voters about these ballot questions, the Cambria-Somerset Tea Party is hosting a public information session at 7 p.m. on May 10 at the Masonic Temple in Johnstown, located at 130 Valley Pike.

Ashley Klingensmith, state director of Americans for Prosperity-Pennsylvania, is scheduled to attend. Bill Ragley of the Cambria-Somerset Tea Party said she'llexplaineach of the ballot questions under consideration.

"We're providing this as a public service to let people know what (the questions) are, sovoters can be informed and decide what they want to see happen," he said.

Klingensmith said the local meeting is one of about 36 similar events that have been held for voters across the state as part of their organization's #FinalSayPA voter awareness campaign.

"The first two (ballot questions) are about executive emergency powers and the third is about codifying in theconstitution (of Pennsylvania) protection from discrimination by the commonwealth,based on race or ethnicity," Klingensmith said.

"This presentation has resonated with folks from Erie to Philly, and we feel it's important to have Cambria and Somerset people exposed to this information as well. (We want) Pennsylvanians to have the final say when all is said and done."

If enacted, the constitutional changes would give the General Assembly authority to end disaster declarations such as the one made by Gov. Tom Wolf last year when the COVID-19 pandemicbroke out. Some Republicans have argued that it's unfair to givethe governor sole discretion over these declarations.

A fourth question on the ballot asks Pennsylvania voters if paid municipal fire departments and emergency medical services companies should be eligible to apply for a state loan funding program that is currently open only to volunteer organizations.

"We've only taken a position on questions one, twoand three," Klingensmith said. "Our organization is advocating for a 'yes' vote on these three, but we're not taking a position on question four."

Along with her presentation on the four ballot questions, Klingensmith said she will answer any questions voters have about the questionson the ballot. Yard signs and palm cards are also going to be available at the meeting for voters to take home or hand outat the polls.

See the rest here:
Why conservative groups may be voting 'yes' to amend the Pa. Constitution this month - Daily American Online

Yesterday, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen noted that, in this decade, uncollected federal taxes will amount to roughly $7 trillion. Former IRS commissioners Fred Goldberg and Charles Rossotti have calculated that, with proper levels of funding, the agency could collect about 20 percent of the lost revenue $1.4 trillion over a decade. Yellens Treasury Department proposes to collect 10 percent of the tax gap. Former Treasury secretary Larry Summers and economist Natasha Sarin have their own paper and split the difference, landing at around 15 percent.

Whatever the actual target may be, it is obviously extremely large. You would think such a vast pot of revenue would tempt lawmakers in either party. Senate rules require budget offsets to finance any new tax cut or spending program. Simply enforcing existing tax laws could finance generous new social programs or shiny new tax cuts. Instead of either, we are effectively spending the money on a subsidy for tax cheats, who are overwhelmingly affluent.

So why hasnt this change happened already? The answer is that Congresss budget rules dont allow it. Republicans have attacked the IRS and starved it of resources, driving down the agencys effectiveness, because that is what the rules incentivize them to do.

This perverse situation is the product of a series of inscrutable rules and traditions, layered atop each other, somewhat like an ancient city built upon ruins. Perhaps you have heard of budget reconciliation. Thats the Senates main work-around to the filibuster. Reconciliation rules allow Congress to pass major new laws with a majority, not the usual 60-vote threshold.

But reconciliation bills have to deal exclusively with tax and spending levels. More importantly, in order to be permanent, they cannot add to the deficit after a ten-year period. This puts an enormous premium on finding budget savings that can be used to finance new spending or tax cuts.

That incentive has led the CBO, the agency tasked with scoring all these bills, to set fairly strict rules to prevent Congress from gaming the system. Two of those rules No. 3 and No. 14, if you want to look them up for some reason prevent CBO from measuring the budget effects of increasing or decreasing enforcement. Suppose Congress decides to give the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services an extra $10 million to investigate and stop Medicare fraud. CBO can score the $10 million cost, but it cant score any savings it might yield, by preventing doctors and hospitals from ripping off Medicare. The same applies to the Social Security Administration investigating disability fraud, or HHS, or other agencies.

But the largest impact this has falls on the Internal Revenue Service. According to CBO rules, funding enforcement cant produce costs or savings. If Congress wants to give the IRS an extra $1 billion, that increases the deficit by $1 billion. If Congress cuts money from the IRS hey, look, savings! Now you can spend that money on something more fun than government jobs for tax nerds.

The guidelines are meant to help the CBO and the other scorekeepers apply consistent methods and reach accurate results, Scott Levy explained for the Yale Law Journal, but they actually force the CBO to reach inaccurate results when scoring enforcement and program integrity activities.

Perhaps these rules made sense when they were first created in 1997 and CBO wanted to keep Congress from creating imaginary savings using trick accounting. But what happened almost immediately after this rule was a long war on the IRS.

In 1997 and 1998, Senate Republicans began staging splashy hearings to expose what they billed as systematically excessive enforcement by the IRS. The hearings were, by congressional standards, an explosive social phenomenon, displaying sympathetic citizens sharing painful stories about being hounded and threatened by an out-of-control agency. The most memorable moment came when John Colaprete told the Senate Finance Committee that IRS agents raided his restaurant and forced children to lie on the floor at gunpoint.

Media gave the hearings heavy, sympathetic coverage. President Clinton confessed the agency had been unaccountable and often downright tone-deaf, and submitted to restrictions on its enforcement to prevent any such abuses from occurring again.

It later turned out the testimony had been unverified, exaggerated, or outright false. The General Accounting Office found no corroborating evidence that the criminal investigations described at the hearing were retaliatory against the specific taxpayer, and could not independently substantiate that IRS employees had vendettas against these taxpayers. Colaprete, the star witness, eventually recanted his testimony and admitted he hadnt been present during the raid. Whenever theres a very emotional state, it doesnt necessarily lead to clear thinking on how you legislate, an IRS official told Tax Notes 15 years later.

The restriction and funding cutbacks produced a steep drop in enforcement and tax collection. The agency later recovered, but then plunged again after another wave of anti-government Republicans launched a new war on the agency.

In 2013, Republicans made new accusations against the agency. The IRS had targeted tea-party groups for undue scrutiny, they claimed. The charges again drove high-profile hearings with sympathetic coverage in the mainstream media. If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then thats outrageous. And theres no place for it, said an apologetic President Obama.

Obamas goal at the time was to rebut accusations that he, or his allies, had personally directed the targeting of the tea party for political ends. The first wave of investigations proved he didnt. Eventually, the agencys internal report found there was no targeting of right-wing groups at all. The IRS turned out to have applied the same level of scrutiny to progressive groups. They were simply trying to enforce somewhat hazy rules governing the abuse of nonprofit status for partisan organizing.

And yet this campaign helped gut IRS funding over the decade. All the political incentives lined up in the same direction. Republicans loved beating up the agency that, in their mind, symbolized Big Government run amok. And as Congress scrounged for savings, cutting funding from the IRS was not just politically easy, but also per CBO rules a cost-free way to reduce the deficit.

Some administrations have tried to quietly rebuild some of the damage the agency has suffered. Biden is the first president to make dramatic, public promises to fund the agency and ramp up its revenue collection.

The trouble is that Biden cant count on much revenue to pay for his new spending proposals, a handicap that discourages his incentive to fight for full funding. The administration thinks CBO rules will allow it to be credited for perhaps $500 billion in new collections through beefed-up reporting requirements, but not any additional revenue through tougher enforcement.

Changing those rules would require a majority vote in Congress. Its certainly possible 50 senators will vote to alter CBO rules. But Senate institutionalists (the most well-known being Joe Manchin) are famously fussy about overriding its procedures, however cryptic, pointless, or outright harmful they may be. An administration source I spoke with is aware of the hurdle posed by CBOs scoring, but believes changing the rules would be politically difficult.

In summary: The United States has bad tax administration because the Senate has a bad supermajority requirement that eventually created bad budget-scoring rules that a handful of powerful senators are unlikely to change because they hate changing rules. At some point, people in government are going to have to decide whether they care more about preserving its bizarre, misshapen systems, or making the government actually work.

Analysis and commentary on the latest political news from New York columnist Jonathan Chait.

Read more here:
Theres an Extremely Stupid Reason Congress Doesnt Want a Good IRS - New York Magazine