Government Outlaws Freelance Work

Freelance jobs are "feudalism," says California Assemblywoman

Lorena Gonzalez.

She persuaded California's legislature to pass a new law reclassifying freelance workers as employees. That means many people who hire them must now give them benefits like overtime, unemployment insurance, etc. Politicians said it would help freelancers a lot.

Of course, much of the media agreed. Vox called it "a victory for workers everywhere"!

Sigh. Young reporters just don't understand that stifling economic freedom always creates nasty side effects.

Actually, more understand now, because they got a very personal lesson. Once the bill passed, Vox media cut hundreds of freelance writing jobs.

When Gonzalez was asked if she felt bad about that, she sneered, those weren't "real jobs."

The arrogance of politicians! People choose jobs. Freelancers like flexibility. Politicians have no right to say certain jobs aren't good enough.

"You're thinking you're helping us, but you're not," says musician Ari Herstand in my new video. He says the anti gig-work law could "crash the California music economy."

Why? Before the law passed, if he played a gig where he'd hire a drummer, bassist and guitar player, "I just cut (each) a check for $200. Now, I have to take that drummer, put him on payroll, W2 him, get workers' comp insurance, unemployment insurance. I have to pay payroll taxes. I also have to now hire a payroll company."

All to hire musicians for one just night. The paperwork alone might cost more than the music.

The anti-gig-work law originally targeted rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft, because unions claimed the companies abuse drivers.

But now many rideshare drivers are upset because the law takes away their freedom.

"I liked being independent!" said one. "I don't want a boss to tell me when or where to drive."

Herstand says Uber and Lyft drivers would often tell him: "I'm a photographer and this is my fourth side gig. I want to do this when I want to do this, and if now I'm an employee, and I'm W2'd, they're going to dictate my hours. I don't want that. (The law is) preventing us from doing what we want to do."

The law upset independent truck drivers, too. After some nosily drove big rigs in front of the legislature, they got an exemption from the law. Other politically connected professions, like lawyers and realtors, got exemptions as well.

Now Herstand's working on getting an exemption for musicians, too.

"Why is that good law?" I asked him. "An exception for whoever is clever enough to get to the politicians?"

"It's definitely not the solution," laughed Herstand. "'Write us out of this law and help us out? Here's money for your next campaign.' No, that doesn't seem like that's a way to legislate."

But that's how it's often done. The more rules politicians pass, the more money they extract from people who are regulated.

Now other politicians want to copy California's law. New York, New Jersey and Illinois have their own versions of gig economy bills. The House of Representatives wants to nationalize the law. And, this week, Democratic front-runner Joe Biden cluelessly said such a law "will give workers the dignity they deserve."

Democrats do what unions ask them to do. Politico points out that just a few years ago, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called gig work "a great service for people, giving people jobs. I don't think government should be in the business of trying to restrict job growth." He even joked that Uber drivers might earn more than he does.

But now he wants to outlaw most gig work and calls it "exploitive, abusive!"

It's no surprise that Gonzalez's biggest political donors are unions. She talks a lot about "protecting our union jobs." But now that her bill is killing jobs, she wouldn't agree to an interview.

Neither would the California unions, or any of 75 law professors, political scientists, sociologists, etc., who published a letter in support of the law.

Yes, we contacted all 75.

Herstand says that's because the law now embarrasses its supporters, but politicians won't repeal it because "no politician ever wants to admit they did something wrong

Joe Biden Is an Angry Old Man Who Doesn't Like You

Well, so much for the "Joe Biden is such a nice guy, he'll bring back civility to the political discourse" argument.

Just hours before he declared a "revival of decency and honor and character" during his Michigan primary victory speech, he berated a Michigander as a "horse's a**" who was "full of s**t" for accurately quoting the presidential candidate's position on gun restrictions.

The interaction with a UAW member named Jerry Wayne is illustrative of multiple facets of the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, including his inability to recall his own position on something as critical as gun control. Or, perhaps, it demonstrates his blatant lies about his position on the matter. After all, Wayne cited that he wants to take guns away, and Biden did, in fact, affirm that fact to Anderson Cooper in an interview in August.

    COOPER: So, to gun owners out there who say, well, a Biden administration means they're going to come for my guns?

    BIDEN: Bingo. You're right if you have an assault weapon.

There are multiple disconcerting moments in the video like this one. Moments that display Biden's ability to lie to a voter's face, bully a voter with physical threats, throw profanities at a voter who challenges his positions and his aggressive "shushing" of a female campaign staffer trying to mitigate the damage of the confrontation. We could breakdown any one of these moments to illustrate Biden's mendacity or his possible mental instability.
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But, there is one over-riding takeaway form this exchange that not only meshes with other unfortunate encounters Biden's had on the campaign trail with everyday American voters ("look fat," "You're a lying, dog-faced pony soldier," etc.). And, this takeaway also meshes with his behavior as a U.S. Senator and as vice president over the past several decades.

It's this: Joe Biden is an angry man who just doesn't like you.

I know the mainstream media characterization of Joe Biden is that he's just an amiable, happy guy who everybody gets along with, and that may be true as it pertains to his fellow senators and members of the media with whom Biden wishes to curry favor. But his direct interaction with voters, especially voters who dare to question or God forbid challenge the former vice president, indicates that he has very little regard for our opinions or beliefs and, for that matter, our knowledge of the facts and issues that matter most to us.

This is not new.

Most American political observers cite the Robert Bork confirmation hearings as a turning point in modern political relations and behavior in Washington, D.C. The hearings represent a moment when a certain respect, collegiality, and deference was burned in a dumpster fire and left on the side of the road. The Bork hearings marked the beginning of the modern, cage-match style of D.C. politics where anything goes and any accusation can be hurled at a person, no matter how despicable or thinly supported by facts.

Joe Biden was the leader of the Bork inquisition. He is responsible for it and every other atrocious display of character assassination disguised as "advice and consent" ever since.

Before Bork, nominees for the Supreme Court, or any job on the federal bench, or for any cabinet position for that matter, were valued and respected if they had a long paper trail of decisions and experience and a documented track record of achievement. Because of Biden's behavior as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee overseeing the Bork confirmation, experience, track record and achievement is no longer valued, it is avoided.

Biden and his inquisitors ruthlessly combed through every line of Bork's writings and twisted his words to distort his views and his life's work. They bullied him at the hearings and treated him with contempt. Biden led the way. Just as he did several years later at the Clarence Thomas hearings.

You think Biden is a nice guy? Ask Clarence Thomas. Ask Robert Bork's family. Ask them how nice "lunch bucket Joe" is.

In 2012, one of his former aides, Jeff Connaughton, wrote a tell-all book describing Biden as an "egomaniacal autocrat" who was "determined to manage his staff through fear." That's not typical in Washington. There are a lot of jerks in this town, but it's rare for a former staffer to tell the world, in writing, about all the jerky things congressmen, senators, and presidents do. The fact that Connaughton did tells you something.

Watch some of the old videos of Biden's conduct as a senator on C-SPAN. It's enlightening. His attitude is imperious, condescending and arrogant, but always to those who dare to challenge or question him. He's happy-go-lucky "Uncle Joe" as long as you give him the deference he's sure you owe him. But if you dare to stand up to him, he's in your face.

I know, I know. Trump has some of the same characteristics. I know, Trump also uses foul language and can come across as belligerent. I know, people have written books and said what a monster Trump can be or has been in his decades in the business world. I know. Fine.

But Biden is running for president as some sort of "healer." He wants you to think that he's a kind man who is ready to bring our nation together, but his history (as well as his current behavior) informs us that he is everything but what he is claiming to be.

Do your own research. Check the archives yourself. See what kind of man Biden is. Go ahead. He has a long paper trail. And, just as Biden destroyed Robert Bork by combing through his vast record, perhaps it would be poetic justice to use the same tactic against Biden the bully

Is This How Europe Ends?

"Fortress Europe is an illusion."

So declares the Financial Times in the closing line of its Saturday editorial: "Europe Cannot Ignore Syrian Migrant Crisis."

The FT undertakes to instruct the Old Continent on what its duty is and what its future holds: "The EU will face flows of migrants and asylum seekers across the Mediterranean for decades to come."

Can Europe not repel this unwanted home invasion from the Global South?

It is "delusional" to think so, says the FT. Europe must be realistic and set about "providing legal routes for migrants and asylum seekers."

What occasioned the editorial was Greece's rough resistance to Turkish President Erdogan's funneling of thousands of Syrian refugees, who had fled into Turkey, right up to the border with Greece.

Erdogan is threatening to inundate southeastern Europe with Syrian refugees to extract more money from the EU in return for keeping the 3.5 million Syrians already in Turkey away from EU frontiers.

Another Erdogan objective is to coerce Europe into backing his military intervention in Syria to prevent President Bashar Assad from capturing all of Idlib province and emerging victorious in his civil war.

In the human rights hellhole that is Syria today, we may see the dimensions of the disaster wrought when Wilsonian crusaders set out to depose the dictator Assad and make Syria safe for democracy.

When the Arab Spring erupted and protesters arose to oust Assad, the U.S., Turkey and the Gulf Arabs aided and equipped Syrian rebels willing to take up arms. The "good rebels," however, were routed and elements of al-Qaida soon assumed dominance of the resistance.

Facing defeat, Syria's president put out a call to his allies -- Russia, Iran, Hezbollah -- to save his regime. They responded, and Assad, over four years, recaptured all of Syria west of the Euphrates, save Idlib.

There, the latest fighting has pushed 900,000 more refugees to Turkey's southern border.

The 21st-century interventions and wars of the West in the Islamic world have not gone well.

George W. Bush was goaded into invading Iraq. Barack Obama was persuaded to overthrow Colonel Moammar Gadhafi in Libya and the Assad regime in Damascus. Obama ordered U.S. forces to assist Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in his war to crush Houthi rebels who had ousted Riyadh's resident puppet in Yemen.

And what has the West reaped from our Mideast wars?

In Syria and Yemen, we have helped to create two of the world's greatest human rights disasters. In Libya, we have a new civil war. In Iraq, we now battle Iran for influence inside a nation we "liberated" in 2003.

In Afghanistan, we have concluded a deal with our enemy of two decades, the Taliban, that will enable us to pull our 12,000 troops out of the country in 14 months and let our Afghan allies work it out, or fight it out, with the Taliban. America is washing its hands of its longest war.

In five wars over 20 years, we lost 7,000 soldiers with some 40,000 wounded. We plunged the wealth of an empire into these wars.

And what did these wars produce for the peoples we went to aid and uplift, besides hundreds of thousands of dead Afghans and Arabs and millions of people uprooted from their homes and driven into exile?

Now, Europe is being admonished by the FT that, having done its duty by plunging into the Mideast, the continent has a new moral duty to take in the refugees the wars created, for decades to come.

But if the EU opens its doors to an endless stream of Africans and Arabs, where is the evidence that European nations will accept and assimilate them?

Will these migrants and asylum seekers become good Europeans? Or will they create in the great cities of Europe enclaves that replicate the conditions in the African and Middle East countries whence they came?

The history of the last half millennium tells the story of the rise and fall of a civilization.

In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, Spain, Britain, France and Portugal, and then Belgium, Italy, Germany and America, all believing in the superiority of their civilization, went out into the world to create empires to uplift and rule what Rudyard Kipling derisively called "the lesser breeds without the law."

After two world wars, the rulers of these empires embraced a liberalism that now proclaimed the equality of all peoples, races, creeds, cultures and civilizations. This egalitarian ideology mandated the dismantling of empires and colonies as the reactionary relics of a benighted time.

Now the peoples of the new nations, dissatisfied with what their liberated lands and rulers have produced, have decided to come to Europe to enjoy in the West what they cannot replicate at home. And liberalism, the ideology of Western suicide, dictates to Europe that it take them in -- for decades to come.

The colonizers of yesterday are becoming the colonized of tomorrow. Is this how the West ends

Bernie Sanders, the Last Jewish Bolshevik.

For anyone who spent at least some part of their sentient years in the former Soviet Union, listening to Bernie Sanders delivering his sermons brings a sense of unsettling déjà vu.

The style of his rhetoric, the cadence of his speech, his choice of words from the hardcore Marxist vocabulary, his Leninist polemical style, his grotesquely nonsensical grandiose plans maddens the listener.\

All of that, like a magic carpet, takes you back through the decades to the world we all hoped would be remembered only by the old timers, as material in history books serving as a cautionary lesson for the future generations.

Bernie gesticulating from the Democratic Party presidential hopefuls podium reminds us of Lenin from innumerable Soviet movies about the Bolshevik Revolution. His popularity infuriates us, the few remaining survivors of the most brutal social experiment in human history.

Yet I personally - and many friends with a similar background - are surprised to find a soft spot for that old crazy revolutionary. I may laugh at Bernie. I may mock him and call him names. But I cannot get angry at him. Last election I started asking myself: Why?

The answer is difficult and simple at the same time. For every Jewish family in the old Soviet Empire had one member we can call Boris. He (though it could as easily be her) was a dedicated and forever faithful party member. Nothing could change his beliefs in the true path of the Party, and the holiness of its leaders. Boris was a man of faith and, as such, could not be swayed by pitiful reality.

A hundred years ago Jewish boys and girls from Pinsk, Minks, Dvinsk and Glupsk joined the Revolution. A century and a half of Tsarist persecutions, culminating in the pogroms, formed their entire world view. There could be nothing worse than the regime they were about to crash and burn, and nothing better than the new world of absolute equality of people and nations.

They abandoned their religious studies in the yeshivot of the Pale of Settlement and other institutions of higher education. They replaced one unbreakable faith with another, and left behind forever all vestiges of their past: their religion, their family ties, their heritage, their history. They changed their names: Berel became Boris.

To admit the Revolution failed was to say their absolute sacrifice for the cause was in vain. They and the Revolution were one and the same.

First Lenin, and then Stalin, were their Gods. Uncle Boris would read "Pravda" and discover the truth in its every single sentence.

But as with today's Bernie, Uncle Boris of yesteryear had no familiarity with the world he was about to flip upside down. Boris knew about the Russian peasant and his hardships from Tolstoy and Nekrasov. Bernie knows about the "inequalities" of today's America from the New York Times and the mass rallies of spoiled well-to-do's he holds across the country.

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2020 US Democratic Presidential hopeful US Senator for Vermont Bernie Sanders speaks on-stage during the Democratic National Committee's summer meeting in San Francisco, California on August 23, 2019AFP

As Uncle Boris, back in his youth, managed to infect many unsuspecting Russians with his revolutionary influenza, so has Bernie poisoned the minds of the young and naive. They are both Jewish "prophets": they pretend to possess the ultimate truth, and every lost argument just makes their convictions stronger.

Indeed, Bernie is that last living link that connects the 21st century Jewish present with the events of the early 20th. He is Trotsky riding his military train through the Russian steppe, only to be suddenly transported through time and space into present-day America. The train’s gear may be lost but the message and the fervent pitch of the Red Army commander is still intact.

You don't need to go to the library to find a history book about all the mistakes the Jews made in the 20th century. You only need to listen to Bernie’s speeches. He is a living encyclopedia of all the most catastrophic decisions made by Jews. It is sad and fascinating how Churchill never comes back from the dead, but Trotsky does.

When I hear Bernie speak, I start shouting at the TV screen. Although I am watching Bernie, in reality I am screaming at Uncle Boris. I am incensed with his naivete, orthodoxy, religiosity, self-righteousness and a fair amount of masochism.

I am angry with him because even after spending his entire life talking about the good and defending the evil he is still unable to see the truth. And after millions of innocents slaughtered, he is unable to admit even one mistake.

Still, even as I rage, somewhere deep inside me there is a tiny bit of warmth for that last Jewish Bolshevik. Indeed, he is the last Boris – and this is a family affair.

Bernie is the world we all hoped had long gone, yet he is resurrecting, in front of our eyes, the terrifying ghosts of yesteryear, evil packaged as nostalgia and a blazing pursuit of "justice."

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Bernie Sanders a Leninist Communist

    CNBC’s Jim Cramer believes Wall Street should be much more afraid of Bernie Sanders in the White House of than of Elizabeth Warren.
    Sanders is “basically doing a socialist agenda,” says Cramer. “It has a Leninist feel to it.”
    The “Mad Money” host calls the senator’s ideas for taxing the wealthy “just wholesale redistribution.”

Cramer: Street should be more afraid of Bernie Sanders than Elizabeth Warren

CNBC’s Jim Cramer believes Wall Street should be much more afraid of Bernie Sanders in the White House of than of Elizabeth Warren.

Sanders, a Vermont senator who describes himself as a democratic socialist and is seeking the Democratic Party presidential nomination, wants to “make people who are billionaires lower than billionaires,” Cramer said Wednesday on “Squawk on the Street.”

Sanders is “basically doing a socialist agenda,” Cramer said. “It has a Leninist feel to it,” calling the senator’s ideas for taxing the wealthy “just wholesale redistribution.”

Cramer spoke Wednesday before the Sanders campaign revealed that the senator was recovering from an artery blockage procedure. All Sanders campaign events and appearances have been canceled until further notice.

Meanwhile, the Sanders campaign was not immediately available to respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Cramer’s remarks.

In making a “Leninist” comparison, Cramer was referring to Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary and leader, who created the Soviet Union and contributed to the concept and practice of a state-controlled economy.

Analyzing the current political climate, Cramer pointed out that impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump could imperil his reelection, which then begs the question of who among the Democratic presidential candidates have a chance of winning. Sanders cannot be discounted, the “Mad Money” host added.

Sanders, who polls in third place behind former Vice President Joe Biden and Warren, has raised the more money in the third quarter, over $25 million, than any of the other 2020 Democratic candidates who’ve reported their numbers. Biden and Warren have not disclosed their Q3 haul yet.

“I’m not as fearful of Elizabeth Warren as Wall Street is,” Cramer reiterated Wednesday, a day after he said that fears of Warren among banking and corporate CEOs are “getting overblown.”

“I want to stop the fear of Sen. Warren. I really think that’s a mistake,” Cramer also said Tuesday. Last month, Cramer first reported that he’s hearing the financial community saying, “She’s got to be stopped