Free Republic

An investigative report on Black Lives Matter (BLM) published four and half years ago foretold current events in many respects. The report, Reds Exploiting Blacks: The Roots of Black Lives Matter by James Simpson at the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, is the best source I've found as to BLM's origins, tactics, funding, and goals. The report begins with this: The Black Lives Matter movement casts itself as a spontaneous uprising born of inner-city frustration, but is, in fact, the latest and most dangerous face of a web of well-funded communist/socialist organizations that have been agitating against America for decades....

Major union leaders in Los Angeles County Monday pledged their support to the Black Lives Matter agenda working toward defunding the Los Angeles Police Department and redirecting those funds to community organizations. Leaders from United Teachers Los Angeles, Service Employees International Union and others came out to a peaceful protest in front of City Hall calling for an end to systemic racism. “It’s really just bound to ideologies that all of America operates on, ideologies that have been inherited from generation after generation, ideologies that tell one group of people that they are more dominant and in a position of...

The Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) casts itself as a spontaneous uprising born of inner city frustration, but is, in fact, the latest and most dangerous face of a web of well-funded communist/socialist organizations that have been agitating against America for decades. The Black Lives Matter movement claims that only whites can be racists. And while justifying violence to achieve “social justice,” the movement’s goal is to overthrow our society to replace it with a Marxist one. Many members of the black community would be shocked to learn that the intellectual godfathers of this movement are mostly white Communists, “queers”...

I'm hearing on email and on the web that California State government employees are going to take a 10% pay cut and perhaps be forced to take two unpaid days off every month. No talk at all of cutting aid for illegals or cutting any other vote-buying social programs.

The 39 million N95 masks the Service Employees International Union announced it had discovered turned out to be an elaborate scheme, according to the FBI. In late March, the union rushed out a press release: The union launched an exhaustive search for masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) five days ago in response to pleas from frontline healthcare workers that they need more protection and feel unsafe on the job as they treat the growing number of COVID-19 patients. SEIU-UHW has 97,000 members who work in hospitals across California. Within 48 hours of painstakingly calling leads and potential suppliers,...

The union that represents healthcare workers in California announced it had arranged the purchase of 39 million N95 masks for hospitals and government agencies that badly need the protective equipment. Among the intended recipients was Kaiser Permanente, which placed orders for 6 million masks. A week later, none of those masks have materialized, and Kaiser is cooperating with a federal fraud investigation into the deal, a spokesman for the health plan confirmed.

I laughed at this tweet by Tom Elliott: “There’s a non zero percent chance the mafia is involved here.” It feels right. We’re a third-world country now in many respects. Our nurses wear trash bags because our leaders were too shortsighted and slovenly to stockpile PPE before a pandemic broke out. We’re governed by a nationalist strongman whose battle plan against the virus seems to be to give everyone some hydroxychloroquine and tell them to get back to work. Of course a society at that late stage of decline might need to turn to the mafia as a key distributor...

President Trump lead another Coronavirus task force briefing from the White House on Monday evening. The President was joined by Vice President Mike Pence, US Attorney General Bill Barr and others. Trump signed a second executive order to providing authority to address hoarding and price gouging that threatens the supply of medical supplies. Attorney General Bill Barr put hoarders on notice and said they will get a knock on the door if they are sitting on a large amount of supplies. “We have started to see some evidence of potential hoarding and price gouging,” said Barr. “So, earlier today the...

U.S. regulators Friday approved the first treatment for smallpox — a deadly disease that was wiped out four decades ago — in case the virus is used in a terror attack. Smallpox, which is highly contagious, was eradicated worldwide by 1980 after a huge vaccination campaign. But people born since then haven’t been vaccinated, and small samples of the smallpox virus were saved for research purposes, leaving the possibility it could be used as a biological weapon. Maker SIGA Technologies of New York has already delivered 2 million treatments that will be stockpiled by the government, which partially paid for...

Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work. Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world's richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

Hospital and health care workers are launching union drives and protests across the country to demand higher wages and improved working conditions. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) chapter covering Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Kansas told The Guardian that it is putting together a campaign to organize workers advocating to extend a $15 minimum wage beyond Chicago. The group said there are roughly 50,000 low-wage hospital workers in the Chicago metropolitan area, with about 10,000 of those workers represented by the union. “We’re trying to make sure every hospital worker across the city has a voice when it comes to...

Here come the hyper-partisan hounds. A new nonprofit called American Oversight launched this week to combat President Trump's "culture of impunity." The outfit declared itself "nonpartisan" and claims its crusaders will fight for a "transparent and ethical government." But like Waylon Jennings once crooned, "Baby, that dog won't hunt." These Democrat operatives aren't interested in accountability. Their mission is to attack, obstruct and destroy their political opponents at all costs. Executive Director and Obama donor Austin Evers is certainly familiar with the "culture of impunity." He worked as a lawyer at Williams and Connolly -- the firm representing Hillary Clinton...

What follows is a close look at the leftist lawfare campaign of uncivil agitation as it unfolded in Denver last week. Denver, like other cities that have Occupy manifestations, is faced by a core of protesters from anarchist groups, labor unions, and communist organizations, often obscuring their affiliations, mixed in with a mishmash of confused students, concerned citizen activists, children, and all sorts of evil clowns.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) attended a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) event on Friday and told reporters that there is already enough evidence to impeach President Donald Trump and convict him in the Senate. The Massachusetts senator and White House hopeful told reporters at the SEIU event that she has, in fact, seen enough evidence to convict Trump in the Senate, if the inquiry leads to that. “Yes,” she said, adding that the “evidence is clear.” “When Donald Trump released the transcript in which he solicited a foreign government to interfere in the 2020 elections, he broke the law and...

LOS ANGELES, California — Joe Biden continued his attacks on President Trump after speaking at a union conference on Friday afternoon, calling the president "unhinged" and saying he was "concerned" over what he will do next. "We gotta get something straight: All this talk from the president about corruption comes from the most corrupt president we've had in modern history. He's the definition of corruption," Biden said at the Unions for All Summit hosted by the Service Workers International Union in Los Angeles, California. He added: "I worry about what he's going to do, not about me and my family....

The 24,000 public employees represented by the Service Employees International Union 503 reached an agreement on Wednesday to a new contract with raises up to 15 percent over the next two-year budget cycle. The deal includes larger cost of living adjustments then previous years, but some are concerned this raise in wages could, over time, weaken the controversial public pension (PERS) reforms Governor Kate Brown signed recently. The average “step increase” in wages (automatic raises applied after a certain length of time in the job) for public employees would be 4.7 percent. There are also no increases in health insurance...

Pick a state, any state where rank-and-file public employees differ with the political agenda of their union leadership, and they can make a clean break from the union if they choose. That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that nonunion government workers can’t be compelled to pay dues or other fees to support a union. A year after that decision, though, attorneys and policy analysts who spoke with The Daily Signal say they find that too many Americans remain unaware of their First Amendment rights in the workforce. They also express concern that union operatives and their allies in government...

Service Employees International Union Local 775, it seems, would do anything for a buck, including continuing to collect dues from a former member. It’s now learned its limitations. On March 29, the Seattle-based union reached an out-of-court agreement with a Spokane home caregiver, Cindy Ochoa, following its admission that one of its canvassers had forged her signature on a membership card. Ochoa, with the help of a nonprofit legal group, the Freedom Foundation, had filed a lawsuit in federal court in October alleging the union had violated her First Amendment rights, unlawfully withheld part of her wages, and caused emotional...

California on Monday filed its 50th lawsuit against the Trump administration in a case challenging a federal rule that bans states from deducting union dues from the paychecks of hundreds of thousands of workers who provide in-home care to low income, disabled and elderly people. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra argued that the new rule – which puts up barriers for taking employee medical benefits and voluntary union dues out of workers’ paychecks – not only harms the home care workers who have joined a union, but also the people these workers serve. “With this rule, the Trump administration is...

Think the IRA has stepped off the world stage? Their role is closer to that of ringleader. One of America’s most influential terrorist enemies traces its lineage back some thirty years — and it isn’t a Muslim organization.In splinter groups like the Continuity IRA and more recently the Real IRA, Irish terrorists have positioned themselves at the center of a network connecting revolutionary FARC rebels in Colombia, Hezbollah in the Middle East, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Taliban forces in Afghanistan currently fighting and killing American troops. The IRA and PFLP have trained together and coordinated attacks, weapons smuggling, and other...