The Shadow Architecture of Electoral Politics 

“I have called you by name; you are mine.”-Isaiah 43:1

One of the hallmarks of neo-liberalism is its “namelessness,” that is to say that it largely operates anonymously, in the shadows, or by not calling something by its real name: “human rights,” “liberal democracy,” et cetera. It is power for cowards. To quote George Monbiot:

The rentiers and inheritors style themselves entrepreneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income. These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.[1]

When it comes to electoral politics, as I’ve written extensively for this site regarding Jewish mega-donors, corporations, and NGOs, money talks, which enables BS to walk. We are going to get into the byzantine gears of the neo-liberal machine here a little bit to see a prime example of how liberalism functions without calling something by its real name.

Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office and that only “an insubstantial amount of a 501(c)(3)’s activities [may] constitute lobbying,” however this does not stop them and there are numerous ways around this prohibition. One is that, as Erin Bradrick writes:

We unfortunately do not have a clear definition of “insubstantial” in this context…[and] many 501(c)(3) organizations have the option of making the election under IRC Section 501(h) to have their lobbying activities measured based solely on expenditures. Section 501(h) also offers fairly generous thresholds for permissible lobbying expenditures by an electing organization.[2]

The particular Catholic Charities donations referenced in “Do Not Pass NGO, Do Not Collect $200” for example represent individuals within or affiliated with the organization donating to a specific candidate or specific candidates at a technical remove from Catholic Charities, but in such a way that would still represent CCUSA’s interests and indicate the focus and priorities of Catholic Charities. Many 501(c)(3)s also establish their own 501(c)(4)s (“social welfare” organizations), which can engage in issue advocacy, though that all too often ends up as political advocacy. Their weighing-in during elections has been permitted as long as their primary activity is the “promotion of social welfare and related to the organization’s purpose.” According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 501(c)(4)s:

May engage in political activities, as long as these activities do not become their primary purpose. The IRS has never defined what “primary” means, or how a percentage should be calculated, so the current de facto rule is 49.9 percent of overall expenditures, a limit that some groups have found easy to circumvent. Donations to these groups are not tax-deductible [as opposed to those to 501(c)(3)s].

Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club are examples of 501(c)(4)s. 501(c)(4)s often function as “dark money” fronts because they are not required to disclose their donors. The “dark money” groups such as social welfare groups are allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money however they see fit.

Both dark money groups and SuperPACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, but SuperPACs are required to disclose their donors. That said, SuperPACs may in some cases also function as “dark money” groups because they can accept unlimited contributions from political non-profits and “shell” corporations who may not themselves have disclosed their donors. Per the Center for Responsive Politics:

In 2007, Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC freed nonprofit 501(c) organizations to spend directly from their treasuries to make “issue ads” mentioning a candidate in the weeks immediately before an election or a political convention—as long as they didn’t exhort voters to cast their ballots one way or another. That was new, and in the 2008 presidential election, nondisclosed spending hit a record $78.8 million. The other case was 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC, which made it possible for corporations, unions, nonprofit “social welfare” organizations and trade associations to take things a step farther by directly spending their treasury funds on advocacy expressly calling for the election or defeat of a candidate; these ads (or phone banks, or billboards, or opposition research, etc…) are known as “independent expenditures.” The result has been an upsurge in political spending by nonprofit 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations—which aren’t overseen by the FEC, but by the IRS…Occasionally, information comes to light that illustrates the kind of thing that could be happening on a larger scale—though there’s no way to know. The health insurer Aetna, for example, made public pronouncements that showed support for President Obama’s health care overhaul agenda in 2010, but it was later discovered that Aetna had contributed millions of dollars to two dark money organizations—the Chamber of Commerce and American Action Network—that engaged in a costly and sustained attack on the changes to the system that would become the Affordable Care Act. Many of the politically active nonprofits appear to coordinate their efforts, passing large amounts of money to one another. In doing this, they claim to be fulfilling their “social welfare” mandate…The lack of specific information that groups disclose on their IRS tax returns is one of the principal stumbling blocks faced by citizens and watchdogs who want to check the activities of politically active nonprofits. No detailed breakdown is required when groups report spending chunks of money on things like “issue advocacy,” “grassroots issue advocacy,” “media production/buys” or whatever general category they want to invent—all of which could contain political spending.[3]

Many of the loopholes and donation strategies from “The Way Life Should Be?” series[4] follow these lines and others, with campaign donations also taking different forms and from different sources. There is also unregulated “soft” money (which the Center for Responsive Politics defines as “political expenditures made by organizations and individuals other than the candidate campaigns themselves”) and political action committee loopholes abound. “Soft money” is contrasted with “hard money,” or traditional donations where donors must be disclosed and contribution limits apply. Corporations are often less circuitous at the state level because unlike the prohibitions from directly contributing money to candidates at the federal level, many US states permit direct contributions to candidates at the state level, albeit usually capped. There are, obviously, ways around this, too.

One way or another, the money is either going to the candidate’s campaign or it is being spent in support of or in opposition to a certain candidate or candidates.

Consider the Republican Jewish Coalition, featuring Sheldon Adelson, Bernie Marcus, and Mel Sembler; Sembler personally took Mitt Romney to Israel in 2007 and told the Jewish Standard that Romney “gets it”:

Romney said that as president he would “enhance our deterrent against the Iranian regime by ordering the regular presence of aircraft carrier task forces, one in the eastern Mediterranean and one in the Persian Gulf region. I will begin discussions with Israel to increase the level of our military assistance and coordination. And I will again reiterate that Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is unacceptable.” He also said he would centralize U.S. Middle East policy to ensure “that the Arab Spring does not fade into a long winter.” The speech came a day after Romney published a list of his foreign policy advisers, including many who have been active in or are close to the pro-Israel community, such as Norm Coleman, the former U.S. senator from Minnesota who is now active with the Republican Jewish Coalition; Dan Senor, the co-author of a book on Israeli technological innovation who often works with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; and Dov Zakheim, a former top Pentagon official in various Republican administrations who also is active with the American Jewish Committee.[5]

Although the Republican Jewish Coalition does not contribute directly to candidates’ campaigns, it does donate money to different SuperPACs supporting politicians who “get it,” such as Team Graham (for Lindsey Graham), [David] Perdue for Senate, and the McConnell Senate Committee, which also received over $161,000 over the last half of 2019 from NorPAC, “a nonpartisan PAC with the goal of supporting members and candidates who demonstrate a genuine commitment to the strength, security, and survival of Israel.” Other recipients of Republican Jewish Coalition donations include Friends of John McCain, Ted Cruz for Senate, Rick Scott for Florida, Ben Sasse for US Senate, and Tim Scott for Senate. Sasse has received campaign contributions from Paul Singer, Rick Scott signed into law bill SB 86 — which prohibits the State Board of Administration from investing in companies that boycott Israel,[6] and Tim Scott is responsible for introducing the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act at the national level in 2019 and getting South Carolina to pass a state-wide Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in 2018, citing ADL statistics in the press release.

The use of bundlers is another “gray area” in campaign finance. Bundlers gather contributions from many individuals in an organization or community and present the sum to the campaign; as the Center for Responsive Politics notes:

The Obama campaign created its own definition of a “volunteer fundraiser,” which may not coincide with a common-sense understanding of what a bundler is. For example, celebrities George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker each raised millions by promising to have dinner with a certain number of people who donated to Obama. However, their names are nowhere to be found on the list…The amount raised by bundlers for winning presidential candidates has also grown: In 2000, it was at least $55.8 million; in 2004, at least $79 million; in 2008, a minimum of $76.25 million; and in 2012, the floor was $186.5 million… Hand-in-hand with the increasing sophistication of and reliance on bundlers is the heightened rate of return for those who bundle. According to Public Citizen, during his eight years in office, George W. Bush appointed about 200 bundlers to posts in his administration. An iWatch News investigation uncovered that President Obama had already appointed 184 bundlers to his administration in his first term alone. Further, it is clear that bigger bundlers get more recognition, as nearly 80 percent of those collecting more than $500,000 for the Obama campaign took “key administration posts” as defined by the White House. Similarly, the Center has identified 35 of Obama’s ambassador-level appointments as former bundlers for his campaign. The ambassadorships to France, the United Kingdom, and the European Union all went to campaign bundlers…There’s no law requiring disclosure of campaign bundlers, as long as the fundraisers are not currently active, federally registered lobbyists.[7]

Nevertheless, lobbyists also often work “off the record” for congressional campaigns by arranging fundraisers, assembling PACs, and seeking donations from other clients, and many lobbyists in practice do not register and instead function as “advisors” and “government relations specialists.”

Brendan Fischer has correctly identified the state of play as “effectively a legalized form of money laundering.” Soft money has been generally enabled by the Supreme Court’s decision in 2014 to eliminate some important campaign contribution limits in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission; this followed another major blow to election integrity from 2010, with Citizens United, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on “political communications,” though apparently the tech giants can censor your free speech rights on their platforms with impunity. Funny how that works. Generally the whole process can be extremely convoluted; as Elaine Godfrey wrote in 2018:

Across the country, dozens of Democratic candidates, from the democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the more moderate Conor Lamb, have proclaimed that they won’t accept campaign donations from corporate political-action committees… But that pledge, for many candidates, is mostly symbolic… Candidates can still accept donations from individual employees or owners of corporations, and those contributions can add up… Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign offers another example of how messy this PAC business can get…The JStreetPAC, which supports Democrats favoring a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has collected more than $170,000 from its members to be donated to O’Rourke’s campaign individually. In other words, the contributions were facilitated by a PAC, but didn’t come from it.[8]

For our purposes and as a logical human being, I will treat this donation and donations of a similar kind as coming from J Street. There are, though, plenty of single-candidate SuperPACs, which are often themselves recipients of donations from corporate PACs, and can spend in support of or against a candidate (running advertisements for example) but cannot donate directly to a campaign. As one example of the kind of shadiness of these SuperPACs:

The biggest single-candidate group at work in the House this year [2016] was Maryland USA, which spent $3.2 million in an unsuccessful effort to elect Republican Amie Hoeber in the 6^th Congressional District in Maryland. Democrat Rep. John Delaney, who secured his third term on Tuesday, filed a complaint against Hoeber’s campaign earlier this year, claiming the super PAC illegally coordinated with her campaign; almost all of the $2.1 million given to the group came from Hoeber’s husband, Mark Epstein. The Baltimore Sun reported that Hoeber’s campaign had listed Epstein as an assistant treasurer but removed his name shortly before the super PAC started spending.[9]

With corporations, it is senior management and ownership donating “as individuals” to advance their corporation’s interests, in addition to employees who are donating or pooling resources to donate, and the corporation itself can sponsor its own PAC. As Gregory Hamel writes, “Corporations can organize PACs to raise voluntary contributions for a select class of individuals, such as corporate managers and shareholders. A corporate sponsored PAC can then use those funds to contribute to political candidates.” Additionally, as Hamel expands, “Corporate employees can make contributions to political campaigns through corporate drawing accounts which draw personal funds against salary, profits or other compensation.”

In my “The Way Life Should Be?” series and subsequent exposés I have and will continue to generally be dealing with larger aggregate donation amounts as a kind of filter, albeit an imperfect one. Individual donations in the context we are discussing are seldom so straight-forward and innocent as a programmer for Google who wants to support Tulsi Gabbard and sends her campaign twenty bucks. The scale that concerns us here is far larger and with much more significant implications. When the organization chooses to obscure its donations through various means or using these individual donations as opposed to a PAC as a kind of built-in plausible deniability, in effect they are most certainly still donating to candidates on behalf of the organization, and this is before considering lobbying and all of the other various methods to influence elections and policies.

Let’s take a look at Thornburg Investment Management from “The Way Life Should Be?: Maine as a Microcosm of Jewish Activism.” For the 2020 election cycle thus far, the largest donation amount of over $17,000 in “individual donations” originating from Thornburg has gone to homosexual Democratic candidate for New Mexico’s Third District John Blair, who as the Department of the Interior’s Director of Intergovernmental and External Affairs during the Obama Administration “helped with the creation of the Paris Climate Accords and was on the team that helped make the Stonewall Inn the nation’s first LGBTQ National Monument,” favors mass immigration, and makes numerous overtures to the “rich Hispanic tradition” of New Mexico and blathers on about “Native Americans.” We also see significant donations to Xochitl Torres Small, Krishna Bansal, Beto O’Rourke, and Ben Ray Lujàn. In 2016, Thornburg-originating donations in the thousands of dollars went to both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. This would be defined as significant and reflective of Thornburg’s interests and ideological position; a $1 individual donation in the 2020 election cycle to Tulsi Gabbard is not significant, although the near-uniformity of Democrat recipients (91.2%) does reflect their corporate culture.

If twenty candidates have received individual donations, even smaller ones, from an organization or corporation, and eighteen are to Democrats, we can see the ideological position of the organization in question. Despite the campaign contributions possibly originating from multiple individual sources within or affiliated with Catholic Charities, its ideological bent is obvious and anything but heterodox, so these donations evidence a pattern and as such and in light of everything else we’ve discussed so far, we can consider these donations to come from Catholic Charities even if it is not necessarily an “official” donation that tracks from Catholic Charities “proper” at Point A to Candidate X at Point B. Rarely in neo-liberalism is anything quite so simple and straightforward. That is a major component of its success. On the corporate side, what this looks like is:

Based on Federal Election Commission data through the third quarter of 2019, includ[ing] money from the companies, their owners and employees and immediate families, as well as their PACs…Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple…have given over $5.3 million collectively in campaign contributions… Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and its employees have donated more than $2.1 million so far…and 81 percent of that—more than $1.7 million—has gone to Democrats…Amazon and its employees have given more than $1.7 million in the 2020 cycle, and 74 percent of that to Democrats…Apple and its employees have contributed…96 percent for Democrats… Facebook and its employees have donated $824,600 so far in the 2020 cycle, and 70 percent of that has gone to Democrats…High-profile Silicon Valley fundraisers [included] events co-hosted by top Facebook and Google executives for South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) and trips to the tech hub by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), The New York Times reported in June [2019].[10]

When we take a finer-toothed comb to that, Facebook campaign contributions in the 2020 election cycle take a variety of forms; fast-forwarding to a mid-April 2020 snapshot, we see $350,000 in “soft” money, $300,000 to PACs, and over $1.2 million in “individual” donations coming from Facebook as an institution, 85.8% to Democratic federal candidates and 81.7% to Democratic Congressional candidates.

Jewish representatives Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler have received the maximum amount allowed from Facebook’s PAC, but Nadler has only received $5 from “individual donations,” which speaks to his genuine versus corporate support, whereas Bernie Sanders received over $109,000, all from “individual donations.” 54.2% of Sanders’s 2020 donations came from donation amounts of less than $200, which seems to suggest genuine popular support, however consistent support for Sanders by big tech as an institution, rank-and-file and management alike, also speaks to his alignment with neo-liberalism despite the tough talk. In point of contrast, almost 62% of Joe Biden’s campaign contributions so far have been large contributions. We can therefore begin to see who the Establishment prefers: the ready-made Establishment vessel over the coopted faux-revolutionary. For 2020, almost half of Donald Trump’s donations have been of the less than $200 variety; in the 2016 election, almost 20% of Trump’s money came from his own coffers, and a paltry 14% of his campaign donations were large contributions, which shows just how extreme the Establishment’s disfavor for him was in the midst of that election.

With all of this considered, the donations to candidates coming from the organization in the context of elections which I will discuss and have discussed them therefore encompasses both the organization itself, as well as its subsidiaries, affiliates, ownership, management, and employees along routes both relatively straightforward and circuitous insofar as they can be determined. The individual contributions from rank-and-file employees rather than senior management are clearly not going to be as much of a factor though again may be reflective of an “activist” culture of a Google or a Facebook. Logically we should be treating a donation from the CEO as one from the corporation. As the Center for Responsive Politics notes:

The patterns of contributions provide critical information for voters, researchers and others. That is why Congress mandated that candidates and political parties request employer information from contributors and publicly report it when the contributor provides it. In some cases, a cluster of contributions from the same organization may indicate a concerted effort by that organization to “bundle” contributions to the candidate…Showing these clusters of contributions from people associated with particular organizations provides a valuable—and unique—way of understanding where a candidate is getting his or her financial support. Knowing those groups is also useful after the election, as issues come before Congress and the administration that may affect those organizations and their industries.

Where relevant, I will treat and have treated the campaign donations as coming from the organization or business directly (“Google donated to…” for example) because once we cut through all the noise, that is essentially where these donations originate and the interests they will further, just by necessity at a remove or through more indirect means, sometimes unilaterally, sometimes through pooled resources. I will therefore disregard the obscurantism and call a spade a spade, especially when it is clear that policy decisions are being influenced by these donations.

The benefits to these “outsourced” donations are many, not least of which, as the Center for Responsive Politics states, is the ability to “mask the true nature of a highly political organization through non-disclosure and to take donations from individuals and corporations that may not want shareholders or customers to know they’re taking a stand on a controversial topic.” Some don’t care. We see the same phenomenon repeated as reflective of the interests and “corporate culture” or ideological orientation of the organization(s) in question.

With that in mind, in the 2020 election cycle, per the Center for Responsive Politics, we see Catholic Charities’ institutional support for the neo-liberal system through donations to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, Susan Collins, John James, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Joe Kennedy III, Kirsten Gillibrand, Adam Schiff, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Ilhan Omar, Jared Golden, Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez, John Lewis, Rashida Tlaib, Richard Blumenthal, Eric Swalwell, Ayanna Pressley, and Donald Trump. With three exceptions, we see all Democrats, and readers of “The Way Life Should Be?” series will recognize Maine Senator Collins as Establishment all the way. John James is a Republican of the Turning Point USA variety, in other words an “as long as they come here legally even if it’s the entirety of India” Republican.

Regarding lobbying, let’s consider the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS); in 2010, their lobbyists were focused on the passing of the following, per the Center for Responsive Politics:

• Comprehensive Immigration Reform DOS Reauthorization CIR ASAP (HR 4321) Supplemental Security Income for Refugees Haitian TPS Increase of Reception and Placement (R&P) funding for refugees Resume HIV testing for refugees Repeal the “shout test” for Haitians Humanitarian parole for Haitians Reuniting Families Act (S 1085/ HR 2709) HELP Act (HR 4616; S 2998) Increase appropriations for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) Increase appropriations for Health and Human Services (HHS) Increase appropriations for Migration and Refugee Assistance (MRA) account Increase appropriations for State and Foreign Ops Increase appropriations for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Family reunification for Somali refugees Refugee Protection Act of 2010 (S 3113)
• Refugee Protection Act (S.3113) Appropriations for MRA, ORR, IDA, and ERMA Comprehensive Immigration Reform Supplemental Security Income for Refugees Haitian Immigration Domestic Refugee Reform LGBTI Refugees HELP Act DREAM Act
• Refugee Protection Act State and Foreign Ops Appropriations Extending SSI Benefits Haitian Migration Comprehensive Immigration Reform Leahy Bill on Expedited Processing and Group Referrals DREAM Act (S. 3827) Colombian Refugee Resettlement
• Refugee Protection Act State and Foreign Ops Appropriations Extending SSI Benefits Comprehensive Immigration Reform DREAM Act (S. 3992) Leahy Bill on Expedited Processing and Group Referrals Darfuri Refugee Resettlement Immigration Reform

For Catholic Charities, pretty much every year they’re lobbying for “comprehensive immigration reform,” and we all know what that means.

Some of J Street’s 2019 lobbying priorities included:

• R. 1837 – United States-Israel Cooperation Enhancement and Regional Security Act – Codifying the Obama-Netanyahu memorandum of understanding on US assistance to Israel.
• R.6/S.874 – American Dream and Promise Act of 2019 – To authorize the cancellation of removal and adjustment of status of certain individuals who are long-term United States residents and who entered the United States as children and for other purposes.
• Res 299 – Condemning White Supremacist Terrorism and the Anti-immigrant Rhetoric that Inspires It Resolution -Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that immigration makes the United States stronger.
• R.2214/S.1123 – the National Origin-Based Antidiscrimination for Nonimmigrants Act or the NO BAN Act – To repeal the three versions of the Administration’s Muslim ban, strengthens the Immigration and Nationality Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion, and restores the separation of powers by limiting overly broad executive authority to issue future travel bans.
• Omnibus Appropriations – The final appropriations package provided the full $3.8 billion in annual military aid for Israel promised under the Obama Memorandum of Understanding.
• R. 4009/S. 852 – Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2019 – Extends protections of Title VI to groups who share a common faith, and includes the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, to also include the [c]ontemporary examples of antisemitism identified in the IHRA definition.
• R. 336 – Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019 – To penalize activity related to boycotts directed at Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
• Res. 236/S.Res 120 – A resolution expressing Congressional opposition to the global BDS movement

For Google, their 2013-4 lobbying along immigration lines looks like support for the following:

• Immigration Innovation Act of 2013 or the I-Squared Act of 2013 – Amends the Immigration and Nationality Act to establish an annual cap on H-1B visas…at between 115,000 and 300,000 visas depending upon market conditions and existing demand [would be an increase from the standard quota of H–1B visas of 65,000, whichwas temporarily increased to 115,000 for fiscal years 1999 and 2000 only; The first 20,000 petitions filed on behalf of beneficiaries with a U.S. master’s degree or higher are exempt from the cap]; Directs the Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) to: (1) authorize the accompanying spouse of an H-1B alien to work in the United States, and (2) provide such spouse with an appropriate work permit; Provides for the recapture of unused employment-based immigrant visas from FY1992 through the current fiscal year; Eliminates the per country numerical limitation for employment-based immigrants and increases the per country family category limit. Applies such provisions beginning with FY2014; Prohibits the Secretary of Homeland Security from denying a petition to extend the status of an H-1B or L-visa (intra-company transferee) nonimmigrant involving the same alien and petitioner unless the Secretary determines that: (1) there was a material error in the previous petition approval, (2) a substantial change in circumstances has taken place that renders the nonimmigrant ineligible for such status, or (3) new information has been discovered that adversely impacts the eligibility of the employer or the nonimmigrant; Directs the Secretary of State to authorize a qualifying alien admitted under an E-visa (treaty traders and investors), H-visa (temporary workers), L-visa (intracompany transferees), O-visa (extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, athletics, or the arts or films or television), or P-visa (athletes, artists, and entertainers) to renew his or her nonimmigrant visa in the United States; Eliminates the foreign student visa requirement that an individual has no intention of abandoning his or her foreign residence; Excludes from employment based immigrant limitations aliens: (1) who are the spouse or child of an employment-based immigrant; (2) who have a master’s or higher degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, and math) from a school qualified under the Higher Education Act of 1965; and (3) for whom a priority worker petition for an employment-based immigrant visa has been approved.
• A Chuck Schumer-sponsored bill which includes provisions like: “Makes 5,000 immigrant visas available in FY2014-FY2016 for individuals who were born in Tibet and have been continuously residing in India or Nepal prior to enactment of this Act. Considers a person to be a native of Tibet if such person was born in Tibet or is the son, daughter, grandson, or granddaughter of an individual born in Tibet”; “Increases the number of annual U-visas”; “Authorizes the spouse or child of a refugee or asylee to bring his or her accompanying or joining child into the United States as a refugee or asylee”; “Directs the Secretary of Labor to establish an H-1B recruitment website”; and which would raise the H-1B visa cap as well.

Liberal democracy in action, folks!

Americans (and to quote Revilo P. Oliver, “When I use that word, I mean Americans, descendants and heirs of the creators of the Western world; I do not mean all featherless bipeds that, ‘regardless of race, color, or creed,’ happen to be on our soil at the present time”) must decide what kind of nation—if one at all—they want moving forward.

[1] Monbiot, George, “The Zombie Doctrine,” April 16, 2016. The Guardian.

[2] Bradrick, Erin, “When Should a 501(c)(3) Consider Creating an Affiliated 501(c)(4)?” November 28, 2016. Nonprofit Law Blog.

[3] The Center for Responsive Politics, “The 10 Things They Won’t Tell You About Money-In-Politics.”

[4] Which is being expanded into a book with a wealth of new research with a foreword by Dr. MacDonald out on Ostara Publications later this year. Hopefully the reader will forgive such shameless self-promotion!

[5] “Jewish backers enjoy Romney’s rise,” October 23, 2011. Jewish Standard.

[6] The law “requires the State Board of Administration to identify all companies that are engaged in a boycott of Israel; requires the public fund to create and maintain the Scrutinized Companies that Boycott Israel List; and prohibits a state agency or local governmental entity from contracting for goods and services if the company has been placed on the Scrutinized Companies that Boycott Israel List.” According to Governor Scott: “For many generations, Florida and Israel have been close partners and allies. When I was first elected, I led a trade mission to Israel because it is imperative that we further our economic growth between Florida and Israel. I applaud Sen. Joe Negron, Rep. Ritch Workman, Rep. Jared Moskowitz and the many legislative leaders who honored our relationship with the Jewish people by sponsoring SB 86.”

[7] Ibid.

[8] Godfrey, Elaine, “Why So Many Democratic Candidates Are Dissing Corporate PACs,” August 23, 2018. The Atlantic.

[9] Kim, Soo Rin, “Mine, all mine: Single candidate super PACs, creeping down-ballot,” November 10, 2016. The Center for Responsive Politics.

[10] Gangitano, Alex, “Tech industry cash flows to Democrats despite 2020 scrutiny,” December 19, 2019. The Hill.