Archive for March, 2018

Almost 1 million prime-age Americans were dragged out of the 2015 labor force by Chinese-supplied fentanyl, Mexican heroin and U.S-made prescription opioid drugs, says a report by the American Action Forum, a business-first advocacy group.
The economic impact of this opioid drug disaster adds up to $91 billion in lost productivity during 2015, alongside 42,000 deaths in 2016, says the group, which also advocates for easier migration of foreign workers.

The report shows that 4 million prime American men and women — aged 25 to 54 — left the workforce between 1999 and 2015. The huge departure has been blamed on trade, on technology and the decline in blue-collar wages, and it accelerated in 2008 when the economy collapsed because of the government’s risky and bipartisan push to expand home-ownership.

“Let them call you racist,” the man widely credited with crafting President Trump’s nationalist message during the 2016 campaign told a far-right crowd in France last week.

“Let them call you xenophobes,” Steve Bannon continued. “Let them call you nativist. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.”

Bannon’s willingness to shoulder the racist label is striking because for decades even some of the boldest white supremacists rejected it. For instance, Chris Barker, a KKK leader, used racial slurs and said in a 2017 interview with Univision “we killed six million Jews the last time; 11 million [immigrants] is nothing.” When asked “are you racist?” he said flatly, “no.” He also said the KKK was not a hate group.

TPM Media writes:

A controversial Republican candidate challenging House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) announced Friday that his campaign hired Kevin MacDonald as its spokesperson, a former professor at California State University, Long Beach who is widely recognized as an anti-Semite.

Paul Nehlen said in a statement that he reached out to MacDonald “after reading some of Dr. MacDonald’s work.”

“We hit it off, and well, here we are,” Nehlen said. “When I broached the subject of Dr. MacDonald’s interest in joining the campaign with my current spokesman, Josh Smith, Josh’s reaction was, ‘The man is a legend. If he wants to help you, tell him yes immediately.’”

By Patrick J. Buchanan