As The Daily Wire’s Frank Camp previously reported, the Florida state legislature recently passed high-profile legislation prescribing a process by which more teachers will be able to lawfully carry firearms in school, if they so choose:
The Florida legislation lays out a set of rules by which public school boards, teachers, charter schools, and law enforcement authorities must abide before any such program can take shape.
The following are some of the requirements stated in the legislation:
A school board must vote “by a majority to implement a guardian program,” giving them ultimate authority in the matter.
Once a school board has voted in the affirmative, the county sheriff must set up its own guardian program, or allow the school board to “contract with another sheriff’s office that has established a guardian program.” …
Guardians have no law enforcement authority aside from stopping or hindering a school shooting.
Guardians must have a valid concealed carry license, and complete 144 hours of training, including a psychological evaluation and diversity training.
Guardians “must submit to and pass an initial drug test and subsequent random drug tests,” and “successfully complete ongoing training, weapon inspection, and firearm qualification on at least an annual basis.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Wednesday that’ll let more Florida teachers carry guns in school, the latest response to last year’s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
DeSantis signed the bill in private and issued no statement. The Republican-led Florida House of Representatives voted to send the bill to the governor last week, while the GOP-controlled state Senate passed the measure the week before.
The new law expands an existing school “guardian” program and allows any teacher to volunteer to carry a weapon if his or her school district approves. Would-be volunteers must undergo at least 144 hours of police-style training, psychiatric evaluation and drug screening. Under a previous law, passed immediately after the February 2018 Parkland shooting, only teachers who had another role at school, such as sports coach, were eligible to carry weapons on campus.
The bill faced stiff opposition from Democrats and teacher unions, as Fox News notes. But as NBC News reported in January, a safety commission established in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting affirmatively recommended arming teachers as one policy prescription to deter future school shootings:
The commission investigating a shooting massacre at a Florida high school unanimously approved its initial findings and recommendations Wednesday, including a controversial proposal that teachers who volunteer and undergo training be allowed to carry guns.
The 15-member Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission’s 446-page report details what members believe happened before, during and after the Feb. 14 shooting attack that left 14 students and three staff members dead and 17 wounded.
Many teachers in Florida seem willing and eager to arm themselves. Last week, Reuters reported that, “in anticipation of passage, school employees in 40 of Florida’s 67 counties already enrolled in or planned to take the 144-hour course.”
As The Daily Wire reported, the most recent tragic school shooting in America occurred this past Tuesday in Highlands Ranch, Colorado.
On Wednesday night Highlands Ranch High School students and parents walked out of a vigil (meant to honor victims and heroes of the shooting) after politicians and gun control activists politicized the event. Only ABC’s Good Morning America, on Thursday, covered the outrage over gun control activists hijacking the memorial.
The measure was one of several recommendations that came out of a panel authorized after the horrific shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
According to the Tallahassee Democrat…
DeSantis’ office announced the signing shortly after 6 p.m. without ceremony or comments about the bill, which was widely backed by House and Senate Republicans and heavily opposed by gun-control activists, Democrats and some students who survived the mass shooting last year at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
As usual, mainstream media outlets like the Tallahassee Democrat fail to recognize that some of the most prominent Parkland families were extremely vocal in their support of the measure, namely Andrew Pollack who lost his daughter Meadow in the shooting. Not surprisingly, others were co-opted by gun control obsessed Democrats who would rather disarm every American citizen than see policies implemented that would make our students safer.
The illegal alien accused of killing 22-year-old Pierce Corcoran in Knoxville, Tennessee, has been indicted on criminally negligent homicide charges but will likely never face trial because he has already been deported from the United States.
A Knox County Grand Jury indicted 44-year-old illegal alien Francisco Eduardo Franco-Cambrany on criminally negligent homicide charges in the killing of Corcoran, who died as a result of a crash caused by the illegal alien just days before New Year’s Eve.
Despite the indictments, Franco-Cambrany is likely never to face a criminal trial in Tennessee because federal immigration officials have already deported him to his native Guatemala.
Last month, Angel Mom Wendy Corcoran told Breitbart News that her son’s killer being deported was bittersweet because it mostly solidified that they would never see justice for their son, brother, and loved one.
“Now he’s returned home to his family, and it’s kind of a hard thing because our son is forever separated from us,” Wendy told Breitbart News. “It’s opened our eyes.”
In response to the indictment, Pierce’s brother — who runs a Twitter account dedicated to Pierce’s memory — wrote that there will not be justice for his family.
“This is what you call too little too late,” Pierce’s brother wrote. “Thanks for nothing, [American judicial system] you don’t work for your own people.”
Since Pierce’s killing, in April, a 55-year-old illegal alien is wanted for the hit-and-run death of 52-year-old Debbie Burgess in Knoxville, as Breitbart News reported. Likewise, an illegal alien fugitive has been added to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s “Most Wanted” list for killing 37-year-old mother Shirra Branum in Jonesborough, Tennessee.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
During a Thursday “Fox & Friends” discussion about the situation at the United States’ southern border, 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) admitted there was a “crisis” going on.
“It is a crisis, and I think there’s a few things that need to happen,” Gabbard stated.
She continued, “One is there’s still lack of resources being sent there to deal with the large numbers of people who are seeking asylum or trying to come across our borders. That extreme shortage of resources continues to be a problem. I think we’ve also got to recognize that, as you say, for people to come into our country legally, our legal immigration is vastly outdated and broken.” Gabbard added that there are aspects of the “broken” immigration system that “end up hurting our economy and those that are contributing.”
Thursday on Hugh Hewitt’s nationally syndicated radio show, Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, explained why it was his view that taking a tough tack with China was in the best interest long-term for the United States.
Perdue argued the Obama administration had created a vacuum for China and others through policies of “retrenchment and withdrawal,” and now Trump was forced to act in what was the country’s interest, which was with tariffs.
“We had a decade under Barack Obama of retrenchment and withdrawal from the rest of the world, and it created an opening and a vacuum for China and Russia and Iran, for that matter, and North Korea, to do nefarious things,” he explained. “And so what we have right now is a president standing up, telling the world it’s going to be America first, but that doesn’t mean America only. The President’s doing what the last five presidents never did, and that is to tell the world what’s important, what is the national interest of America. And this is time in China. I lived over there. I’ve worked with these people. You know, they are going to push as far as they can.”
“And that’s what I said today,” Perdue continued. “President Trump has made it very clear — 25% tariffs are there if they don’t come in and show progress in these negotiations. And let’s remember, he gave them an offramp, a 90 day, and he extended that deal in going from 10% to 25% because they were showing progress. This retrenchment last week now, if they don’t correct that, we’ll end up with these 25% tariffs. And I know how onerous that’s going to be. There’s going to be some pain, Hugh, in the U.S. But who can argue with the President’s long-term agenda to get a level playing field with China?
Although the prospect of a tariff hike has loomed large in financial markets and the financial media this week, higher tariffs on imports from China will not likely have much of an impact on American consumers.
Evidence from tariffs on steel, aluminum, and Chinese goods already in place indicates that businesses have not been able to pass higher costs of goods and materials on to consumers. Even though wages are rising, prices have been remarkably steady. In March, the index of personal consumption expenditures–the Fed’s favored measure of consumer prices–showed prices up just 1.5 percent over 12-months.
One reason tariffs are unlikely to hurt U.S. consumers is that trade with China accounts for a very small fraction of U.S. spending. According to a recent study by an economist at the San Francisco Fed, imports make up around 11 percent of the $14.3 trillion of consumer spending in the U.S. Imports from China account for 16% of that, which translates into 1.76 percent of consumer spending.
The tariffs that the Trump administration plans to hike apply to only around 34 percent of consumer spending on imports from China, according to a different study from the San Fran Fed. In other words, just over half a percentage point worth of overall U.S. consumer spending.
If all of the tariffs were passed through to consumers–which has not happened judging by price data–the overall impact on prices would be a 0.1 percentage point rise, according to the San Fran Fred’s estimate.
In other words, without the China tariffs, our 1.5 percent inflation rate would be 1.4 percent.
Raising the tariff to 25 percent would roughly double the impact. So the personal consumption index rises to 1.6 percent.
Keep in mind that the Fed is trying to move inflation toward its 2 percent target. Assuming the Fed can effectively hit its target, this means that consumer prices will be accelerating over the next year or two anyway. If tariffs raise prices by two-tenths of a percentage point, that just gives the Fed less work to do.
In other words, our economy is well-prepared to sustain any costs of tariffs because we are in such a low-inflation environment.
Even if the Trump administration expands the 25 percent tariff to cover all goods, the impact on prices would be just 0.4 percentage points, according to the San Fran Fed.
That would move us closer to the Fed target–but we are headed there in any case. Tariffs may just eliminate some of the need to cut interest rates in order to accelerate inflation.
To put it slightly differently: the tariffs will have no impact on U.S. consumers because their worst-case scenario effect would be to move price increases toward where the Fed is determined to see them go anyway.
It is unlikely, however, that 100 percent of the cost of tariffs will be passed on to consumers. Some will be absorbed by businesses, others eliminated by U.S. importers sourcing materials from manufacturers outside of China. If just half of the hike to 25 percent is passed on, the impact on consumer prices would be a boost of just one-tenth of a percentage point.
Our trade relationship with China has had massive impacts on the U.S. and global economy and may be one of the most important determinants of our economic and political future. But boosting tariffs on $250 billion of imports by fifteen-percentage points will not be noticeable to most consumers.
The Chinese government has actively helped Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro control, censor, and shut down the Internet in his quest to keep the legitimate president of the country, Juan Guaidó, from governing, Rep. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told Breitbart News in an interview Monday.
China’s ruling Communist Party has used its foreign relations arms to subtly distance itself from Maduro this year. Unlike neighboring Russia, which openly boasts of having intervened militarily in the country on Maduro’s behalf, China’s Foreign Ministry has stopped short of referring to Maduro as the nation’s president since Guaidó took office in January and took nearly a week to issue an official statement on the military uprising Guaidó called for on April 30. When it did, it urged a “peaceful settlement” without offering any specific statement of support for either Maduro or Guaidó.
Rubio suggested that Beijing may be distancing itself from Maduro because the tide has shifted so definitively against him in Latin America that the rest of the region may sour on investments with China if it interferes to help him. That does not mean China is not helping Maduro, merely that it cannot afford the bad press, Rubio stated.
“The Chinese are very involved. First of all, they are owed a bunch of money, so they want to get paid,” he explained. “Number two is they are single-handedly helping conduct the Internet control operation. They have basically taken a commercial version of their great Internet firewall and given it to Maduro, and it is a service they are providing him, so they are the ones that are shutting down the Internet and access to social media.”
Maduro’s regime regularly cuts nationwide access to the Internet to prevent Guaidó and other opposition leaders from being able to communicate with the masses or organize rallies against him. Most Venezuelan opposition figures, like Maduro, are avid Twitter users. Last week, Guaidó used Twitter to broadcast live from La Carlota, an airbase outside of Caracas, and declare the final step in removing Maduro, which he branded “Operation Freedom.”
En el marco de nuestra constitución. Y por el cese definitivo de la usurpación. https://t.co/3RD2bnQhxt
Guaidó, according to Rubio, has “no access to the media. Any time he tries to speak or communicate on social media, they shut down the Internet. … Literally, every time he holds a rally, they shut down the Internet.”
As the Chinese are “single-handedly controlling the defensive cyber operations shutting down the Internet,” they are responsible for silencing Guaidó. Yet being more open about their role could jeopardize investments in other parts of the continent.
“The Chinese play a tricky game because on the one hand, they are trying to grow in influence and presence throughout Latin America, so they are seeing all of these countries supporting Guaidó, and they don’t want to … antagonize these countries by being cheerleaders for the Maduro regime,” Rubio noted.
“On the other hand, they view Venezuela as a place of strategic importance because they have an existing leverage relationship with him [Maduro], they’re there on the ground, and the notion in their mind is they need to be against what they view as any American efforts to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.”
“That is not the case here, but that is how they view it because they think that, if they allow that [re-democratization] to happen in one place, that would be a predicate for it to happen in other places, including, potentially, China itself,” he said. “So the game they’re playing is, they don’t want to upset the Colombians, they don’t want to upset the Panamanians, they look at the list of countries that are against Maduro, so they don’t want to harm their relationships with those countries by being too far out there.”
The lukewarm tenor of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s remarks on Venezuela continued Tuesday.
“On the Venezuela issue, China upholds the UN Charter and the basic norms governing international relations,” spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters. “We insist that this issue should be resolved through inclusive political dialogue and consultation under Venezuela’s constitution between the government and the opposition independently. We stand against external interference and unilateral sanctions.”
Geng once again did not name either Guaidó or Maduro. Instead, he claimed that China stood alongside the European Union, which backs Guaidó, and promised China would “step up communication and work together in a constructive manner with the international community including the EU for the political settlement.”
China has invested billions, officially and through its corporate entities, in Venezuela’s socialist regime, both under Maduro and predecessor Hugo Chávez. Maduro’s incompetent handling of the economy scared Chinese money away for most of 2017 and 2018, but, late last year, China agreed to hand Maduro a $5 billion loan in exchange for one million barrels of oil, according to Maduro himself.
In addition to allegedly controlling the Venezuelan Internet, the Chinese government used telecommunications giant ZTE to build a replica of its “social credit system” – which allots points to individuals based on how much the government likes them and prevents them from access to basic societal services if their point totals drop too low – for Maduro.
The socialist government branded the new system the “Fatherland Card.” It gives the regime control over what Venezuelans buy and helps track Venezuelans’ public statements, social media, and anything that can be interpreted as political activity. Without the card, Venezuelans cannot access the little food, medical care, and fuel left in the country.
Outside of Venezuela, Beijing has worked to promote its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Latin America. While the BRI is nominally intended to rebuild the Ancient Silk Road – the major trade route connecting Asia to Europe – Chinese officials have convinced several Latin American nations to agree to major infrastructure projects in the region. As the preeminent communist country in the region, Cuba has taken the lead in promoting BRI, but 18 Latin American countries have joined to varying degrees, agreeing to pay China to build ports, roads, and railways.
In February, Adm. Kurt Tidd, the head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, described Belt and Road as providing “ample opportunity for China to expand its influence over key regional partners and promote unfair business and labor practices.”
“Increased reach to key global access points like Panama create commercial and security vulnerabilities for the United States, as do Chinese telecommunications and space ventures with dual-use potential, which could facilitate intelligence collection, compromise communication networks, and ultimately constrain our ability to work with our partners,” he warned.
Politico is touting a trickle of “voluntary departures” by illegal migrants back to their homelands, even as Central Americans use loose border rules to flood into the U.S. labor market.
“The number of immigrants who have applied for voluntary departure has soared since the election of Donald Trump, according to new Justice Department data obtained by The Marshall Project,” says Politico. It continued:
Last year, voluntary departure applications reached a seven-year high of 29,818. In the Atlanta court, which hears cases of Irwin detainees like Zamarrón, the applications multiplied nearly seven times from 2016 to 2018.
But the “surge,” up to almost 30,000 in 2018, is a tiny share of the nation’s population of illegal migrant workers, estimated to be at least 8 million. That total is 266 times the 29,818 people who agreed to a “voluntary departure” instead of forced deportation.
Moreover, the volume of departing migrants is a trickle compared to the flood of migrants entering U.S. communities.
In April, which is just one month of 2019, roughly 109,000 migrants were registered as they crossed the southern border. Several tens of thousands of other migrants began overstaying their visas or successfully sneaked over the border, while the federal government also welcomed a vastly larger flood of legal immigrants, temporary visa-workers, and work-permit workers.
Politico‘s article led with a sympathetic portrayal of one illegal immigrant who agreed to accept the plea deal of “voluntary departure” once immigration officials began the process of deporting her. But the article did not mention the many ordinary Americans who have lost jobs, wages, or homes, or who have been injured or killed by the establishment’s tacit support of illegal migration. According to Politico:
Alejandra Garcia Zamarrón, a mother of three American citizens, had lived in the United States for nearly 20 years when a police officer pulled over the unregistered vehicle she was riding in.
Georgia was her home, the place where she’d lived for years and raised her family. But when she found herself locked in the Irwin County Detention Center, she had few options to stay. She’d been brought to the U.S. as a child, but her protected status as a childhood arrival had expired. And she had given a fake name and date of birth to the police officer who stopped her, a misdemeanor that put her at greater risk of deportation.
Zamarrón, 32, initially vowed to fight her removal from the U.S. as long as she could. But as the months in detention dragged on, she changed her mind and asked for “voluntary departure,” which would allow her to leave the U.S. without a deportation on her record. “My family decided the best bet was for me to leave and fight from the outside,” Zamarrón said in a phone call from the detention center, before she returned to Mexico in November.
But there are many other examples of “voluntary departure” worth noting.
Nineteen Telugu students who had enrolled with Farmington University, a fake institution floated by the federal police in Michigan, US, to expose a “pay-to-stay” racket, have been granted permission for voluntary departure to India by a local court.
In all, 20 students have been under detention at two centres – 12 at Callahan County detention centre and eight at Michigan Monroe detention centre — since January 31. Of the 20, three students – two Telugus and a Palestinian — got the departure permission last Saturday. The remaining 17, all Telugus, were granted the permission by a Michigan court on Tuesday.
FBI busts company which allegedly helped get ‘Optional Practical Training’ work permits via fraud for roughly 1,900 Chinese grads, to steal jobs & salaries from American grads. More to come, despite media silence on white-collar job theft #HR1044https://t.co/VsSjAVsXNi
A Mexican national in the Bexar County jail on murder and arson charges connected to a June 18, 2018 incident was previously released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
20-year-old Ernesto Esquivel-Garcia is accused of killing 20-year-old Jared Vargas at an apartment on Jones Maltsberger Road on June 18. Police say he set the body on fire at an apartment. ICE confirmed at the time there was an immigration hold on Garcia, which indicates that he is in the country illegally.
…
The full statement from ICE reads:
On June 18, 2018, deportation officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) placed a detainer with Bexar County (Texas) Jail on Ernesto Esquivel-Garcia, from Mexico, following his arrest the same day by San Antonio Police Department on murder and arson charges. Esquivel-Garcia remains in state custody pending the outcome of his criminal case.
ICE first placed an immigration detainer on Esquivel-Garcia on March 1, 2017, after his criminal arrest for driving while intoxicated (DWI) and another misdemeanor. Esquivel was placed into removal proceedings. He posted bond granted by the immigration judge and was released from custody. On May 21, 2018, an immigration judge issued him a voluntary departure, contingent on posting a departure bond. On May 25, when Esquivel-Garcia tried to pay his bond, ICE turned him over to Bexar County after discovering that he had an active arrest warrant for obstructing highway. Four days later, Bexar County transferred Esquivel-Garcia back to ICE, and the same day he posted the departure bond that was set by an immigration judge May 21.
Before departing ICE’s office May 29, 2018, ICE deportation officers instructed Esquivel-Garcia to leave the United States by July 20, 2018, as imposed by the immigration judge’s voluntary departure order.
Armed with guns and backed by helicopter air support, more than 100 US immigration agents swooped on the employees of Fresh Mark meat packaging plant on a summer day in the small Ohio town of Salem.
The huge raid on 19 June resulted in 146 arrests, most of them Guatemalans suspected of being in the countryillegally, in a show-of-force raid that likely brought back violent memories of the militarized country many had fled years ago for new lives in America.
…
An Ice spokesman said he could not provide details on what had happened to the 146 people arrested in the raid. Some are believed to still be in detention, while a few have returned to Guatemala through “voluntary departure.”
ICE gave the following statement to 41 Action News:
Syed Ahmed Jamal, 55, from Bangladesh, initially legally entered the United States at Los Angeles in August 1987 on a nonimmigrant visa. After he overstayed that visa, a federal immigration judge allowed him voluntary departure until Aug. 26, 2002. He abided the judge’s order and departed for Bangladesh on July 24, 2002.
Three months later, Jamal legally re-entered the United States at Cincinnati, Ohio, on Oct. 25, 2002, on another nonimmigrant visa. He again overstayed his visa, and a federal immigration judge allowed him voluntary departure until Oct. 26, 2011. However, Jamal violated the judge’s order and failed to depart the United States, and the voluntary departure order instead became a final order of removal (deportation).
Politico‘s article does not mention those example of “voluntary departure” in the article about Zamarrón.
Nor does Politico or the authors at the Marshall Project seek to follow the money through the nation’s immigrant labor supply.
During Zamarrón’s two-decade stay in the United States, she was one tiny drop in the establishment’s ocean of cheap labor which helped ensure that Americans’ wages stalled and that Wall Street’s value accelerated, that housing prices spiked and then crashed, and that productivity grew a snail’s pace.
Washington’s establishment created the labor supply and it welcomed this resulting cheap-labor bubble — but now recoils as President Donald Trump tries to restore some balance to the earnings from wages and capital gains, and to the employment of native youths and migrant workers.
Good US/Guatemalan survey shows 1 million Guatemalans would like to quickly accept the Democrats’ tacit offer of ‘humanitarian’ migration into US jobs. But Dems’ ‘Great Awokening’ may prevent reforms before Nov. 2020. https://t.co/dcAxC26pFx
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including roughly one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment from the heartland to the coasts, explodes rents, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest and rewards investors for creating low tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
Goldman Sachs says Trump’s tight labor-market policy (AKA ‘Hire American’) gave 4% raise to blue-collar/middle-class in 2018. But upper-income graduate salaries lagged – maybe b/c of 1.5 million visa-worker graduates who work for spaghettiOs & green cards https://t.co/g6jtv9BS81
