Minor League Baseball and Marvel Entertainment announced a promotional three-year partnership at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, home of the “Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes” exhibit.

Starting next season, the program will feature 96 different Minor League clubs across all four levels hosting one or more super hero theme nights involving popular Marvel characters -- complete with specialized jerseys, of course -- along with other Marvel-themed activities and promotions taking place throughout the games. The deal was facilitated by AthLife, Inc, Marvel’s longtime sports representative

The event series is officially called "Marvel's Defenders of the Diamond" and will also come with its own run of comic books, which will be distributed at participating ballparks. "Co-branded merchandise and other surprises will be unveiled in 2022."

"This partnership is more than about driving attendance -- it's about fans of the Minor Leagues and Marvel getting to experience baseball in a whole other way with Marvel character appearances, Marvel-themed uniforms, social media engagement, storytelling, in-stadium graphics to name just a few," said AthLife, CEO Jon Harris, "Of course, it would not be Marvel if we were not holding some things back, so expect some surprises along the way."

MLB vice president of Minor League business operations Kurt Hunzeker. added “MiLB’s new partnership with Marvel Entertainment brings together two storied brands who create memories that are passed down from generation to generation. The possibilities with this partnership are endless and we look forward to some incredibly creative content, merchandise and promotions."

Marvel has a long history of superhero team-ups, dating back to its first comic book in 1939 that introduced the Human Torch and Namor the Sub-Mariner. That began in the comics with the Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four and Guardians of the Galaxy, among many others, and has extended through the Marvel Cinematic Universe that began in 2008 with Tony Stark and Iron Man.

Like any good origin story, this is just the start of fans getting to know Marvel's Defenders of the Diamond. Twists and turns and endless possibilities await both Marvel true believers and Minor League Baseball fans in 2022 and beyond.

"We have only just started exploring the new Marvel’s Defenders of the Diamond universe of content," Hunzeker added, "and we cannot wait to explore the endless possibilities and potential integrating Marvel’s award-winning creativity with Minor League Baseball’s award-winning creativity to tell new stories about our players, teams, communities, and most of all our fans, starting with the 2022 season."

“Over the past few years, we have seen the fans of Minor League Baseball truly embrace Marvel-themed games, so having a nearly league-wide partnership will allow us to take creativity and storytelling to the next level,” said Mike Pasciullo, Marvel Entertainment’s Vice President, Product Development and Marketing – Brand, Franchise & Sports. “And it wouldn't be Marvel if we did not have a few major surprises to unveil along the way!”

As part of the wide array of custom content it will create for the new initiative, Marvel will create a “Marvel’s Defenders of the Diamond” comic book for MiLB fans that will be distributed in participating MiLB ballparks throughout the partnership. Co-branded merchandise and other surprises will be unveiled in 2022.

Our local Minor League Team ... Fort Myers Mighty Mussels will be participating in the Marvel partnership.

Fans may visit milb.com/marvel for the latest information/updates on the “Marvel’s Defenders of the Diamond” series.

Some Constitutional Amendments end up merely clarifying or adjusting elements of governance. Others were transformational. The 17th Amendment joined the latter group.

Article 1, Section 3 of the unamended U.S. Constitution established the method for selecting senators as follows: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof…” The 17th Amendment in 1913 revised the process: “…two Senators from each State, elected by the People thereof…” i.e. directly elected by the people.

Does the Amendment deserve continued support, or should we consider going back to the original process? Am I beating a dead horse by bringing this subject up? Perhaps, but more than any time in our history, today’s politics and governance seems nuanced, conflicted, and subject to examination.

These responsibilities are unique to the Senate: ratifying international treaties and agreements; approving Supreme Court justices and other presidential nominations; and conducting impeachment trials. Considering these unique responsibilities, along with their more familiar bicameral lawmaking duties, begs the question, “Who should be the Senate’s constituents?”

Senators are ultimately accountable to those who select them. The U.S. is a republic, with checks and balances. The Constitution sets up centers of power and influence both among the three Federal branches of government, as well as between the U.S. government and states. This is clarified in the 10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United

States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The Founders set up our government as a republic, which allows for representative governance, rather than a pure democracy. It also features an element of “federalism” in which dual sovereignty is established between the federal government and states. And both are accountable to “we the people.” Superimposed on the three government branches is separation of powers and its inherent “checks and balances.”

The constitution clearly established dual sovereignty federalism. True to that form of governance, the Founders took the opportunity to build on the concept when setting up the selection process for representatives and senators. Members of the house were to be elected directly by the people of their state. Senators were to be selected by the state legislatures. Both represent an obvious bow to the Founders’ concept of dual sovereignty federalism.

Arguments favoring the original process for selecting senators make theoretical sense:

• Promotes federalism, state authority, guarding against federal overreach, and controls size of the federal  government.

• Enhances state sovereignty and influence relative to the federal government.

• Gives states a chair at the table of federal policy making. This is important because individual citizen’s      issues may be different than collective state issues.

• Amplifies the voice of the minority, thereby discouraging a tyranny of the majority.

• Encourages more deliberation (vetting) of potential senators.

• Promotes better legislative decisions because different power bases have to agree.

• Ensures more legislative deliberation than if senators were elected directly, thereby easily swayed by      momentary whims of the electorate.

• Enhances bicameralism, by differentiating senate characteristics from those of the House of Representatives, hopefully becoming more deliberative than the House.
Many arguments in favor of the 17th Amendment are heavily influenced by practicality:

• Prior to the Amendment, there were high levels of hostilities and wrangling surrounding the selection of senators by state legislatures.

• Prior to the Amendment, subtle adjustments of procedures were made to avoid conflicts, and soon the senator selection process resembled a quasi-direct citizen election.

• Direct election reduces the influence of party machines and special interests that some perceive in state legislatures.

• Direct election is intended to reduce the potential for corruption that was perceived prior to the Amendment.

• A directly elected Senator is considered more responsive – i.e. less deliberative.
My respect for the Founders’ objectives would cause my vote to be cast in favor of the unamended original Constitution. But the impracticalities and conflicts that led to the 17th Amendment are real, and the popularity of direct elections, along with the difficulty in getting approval of two-thirds of both houses and three-fourths of state legislatures, argue against the practical reality of any repeal. Attempts to change would be futile.

The 17th Amendment is under no threat of repeal.

myslantonthings.com

Steve Bakke,
Fort Myers

Washington DC is organized crime, working for and with the war, oil, banking, pharmaceutical, insurance, tech and social media industries. Mussolini called this system fascism.

As media distract us with DC intrigues, Antifa, mass shooters and CIA-driven foreign war-sparking decoys, the chieftains of industry laugh at our ignorance and pull celebrities’ puppet strings.

As Trump scratches the surface of the Deep State, Washington DC and these industries run our lives.

Only We the People can fix this; we must first repent, then begin to act tactically and make history by simply doing the chores.

TACTICAL CIVICS™ is a new way of life: ratify the original first right in our Bill of Rights, remove Congress from Washington DC, restore the citizen Grand Jury and constitutional Militia in each state, then take back all we have lost to DC organized crime.

After 60,000 hours’ R&D by 44 volunteers, TACTICAL CIVICS™ is the only full-spectrum solution; like no other organization. Not politics. Just We The People, enforcing the Constitution at last.

Working from our homes and mobile devices, we can do what no other population, including that of Washington DC, can ever do. These essays work through the challenges and opportunities for today’s American remnant, offering a clear path forward.

www.tacticalcivics.com

The ability to detect and react to the smell of a potential threat is a precondition of our and other mammals' survival. Using a novel technique, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have been able to study what happens in the brain when the central nervous system judges a smell to represent danger. The study, which is published in PNAS, indicates that negative smells associated with unpleasantness or unease are processed earlier than positive smells and trigger a physical avoidance response.

"The human avoidance response to unpleasant smells associated with danger has long been seen as a conscious cognitive process, but our study shows for the first time that it's unconscious and extremely rapid," says the study's first author Behzad Iravani, researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.

The olfactory organ takes up about five per cent of the human brain and enables us to distinguish between many million different smells. A large proportion of these smells are associated with a threat to our health and survival, such as that of chemicals and rotten food. Odour signals reach the brain within 100 to 150 milliseconds after being inhaled through the nose.

The survival of all living organisms depends on their ability to avoid danger and seek rewards. In humans, the olfactory sense seems particularly important for detecting and reacting to potentially harmful stimuli.

It has long been a mystery just which neural mechanisms are involved in the conversion of an unpleasant smell into avoidance behaviour in humans. One reason for this is the lack of non-invasive methods of measuring signals from the olfactory bulb, the first part of the rhinencephalon (literally "nose brain") with direct (monosynaptic) connections to the important central parts of the nervous system that helps us detect and remember threatening and dangerous situations and substances.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now developed a method that for the first time has made it possible to measure signals from the human olfactory bulb, which processes smells and in turn can transmits signals to parts of the brain that control movement and avoidance behaviour.

Their results are based on three experiments in which participants were asked to rate their experience of six different smells, some positive, some negative, while the electrophysiological activity of the olfactory bulb when responding to each of the smells was measured.
"It was clear that the bulb reacts specifically and rapidly to negative smells and sends a direct signal to the motor cortex within about 300 ms," says the study's last author Johan

Lundström, associate professor at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. "The signal causes the person to unconsciously lean back and away from the source of the smell."

He continues: "The results suggest that our sense of smell is important to our ability to detect dangers in our vicinity, and much of this ability is more unconscious than our response to danger mediated by our senses of vision and hearing."

Karolinska Institutet

In yet another desperate attempt to sell the public on his failing multitrillion-dollar spending agenda, President Joe Biden released a slideshow Thursday that inadvertently betrays how the modern Democratic Party views the family. And the news isn't good for fathers, mothers, children, communities, or the nation.

In Biden's slideshow, we meet a cartoon "Linda" from Peoria, Illinois. Linda, we are told, is pregnant with her son "Leo," but we are never told where exactly Leo's father is. We see one slide in which Linda and Leo benefit from Biden's direct payments to parents. We see another slide that shows the government helping Linda pay to put Leo in daycare. And we see another slide in which Leo is placed in government-run pre-K. But again, at no point do we see Linda or Leo with the father. It is as if he doesn't exist.

Which is disappointing, because in real life, decades of research have proven what anyone with an ounce of common sense has already known for centuries: Fathers matter.

Not only are married fathers proven to help their own children achieve higher levels of education, get better jobs, and earn more income, but neighborhoods with more fathers in them have proven to have more upward social mobility than those neighborhoods dominated by single mothers.

Neighborhoods with more fathers are also safer than neighborhoods without them. Families with fathers appear to help establish a climate of order that makes entire communities less violent.

That's right -- just the mere presence of more fathers in a neighborhood helps all children in the neighborhood.

Biden's decision to leave fathers out of the sales pitch for his family policy wouldn't be so bad, except that the actual policies in his family policy make it less likely that fathers will be there for their children.

For starters, his extended payments to parents would punish mothers such as Linda who want to marry the fathers of their children. According to the Tax Policy Center, a mother making $19,000 would lose almost $1,000 a year in payments from the government if she were to get married.

A young couple making $25,000 each and wanting to get married before starting a family would also face a $4,000 penalty under Biden's plan. Those penalties would only go up as the family had children. The child care subsidies in Biden's plan contain steep benefit cliffs that would punish couples who seek the stability of marriage.

Democrats often complain that it is the Republicans who push an ideal vision of the American family on an unreceptive public. But the exact opposite is true. The public prefers a family in which the mother and the father are married, the father works full time, and the mother has the option of working full time, part time, or staying home. But the Biden agenda forces a different model on everyone.

First, it punishes all marriages, and then among those couples that are married, it gives far more benefits to the ones that have both spouses working. It gives less to families with a mother who works part time and nothing to families with a mother who chooses to work at home.

Not every family is perfect. Divorce happens. Fathers die. Single mothers work their tails off to make the best of a bad situation. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the very real benefits to children, mothers, and communities of having married fathers in the home. We should definitely NOT be enacting public policy that punishes families that do.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was scheduled to publish its recommended regulation plan for Lake Okeechobee this week, but announced late last week it would not have the 10-year proposal ready before Nov. 16.

The delay is praised by those who don’t like the plan and criticized by those who do, a schism defined by geography – east v. west, north v. south – instead of partisan politics.

After years of debate over where Lake Okeechobee discharges should flow, the Corps in July selected one of five proposals, Balanced Alternate Plan CC, to encode into its Lake Okeechobee System Operating Manual (LOSOM) for the 730-square-mile impoundment.

LOSOM was to be finalized in October and implemented by late 2022 after $2 billion in repairs to Herbert Hoover Dike are done and when the $1.3 billion, 240,000-acre-foot EAA reservoir is completed in 2027.

Generally, communities east of Lake Okeechobee are pleased because the plan reduces discharges into the St. Lucie Estuary and increases flows south into the Everglades by 52% during the dry season – tactics designed to stymie blue algae outbreaks that befouled the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers in 2019.

Generally, communities west of the lake say the new plan does not ensure water supplies for agriculture and for more than 7 million Floridians and increases discharges into the Caloosahatchee.

During a meeting Wednesday in Washington, D.C., with Florida’s congressional delegation organized by U.S. Reps. Vern Buchanan, R-Sarasota, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Sunrise, Corps Jacksonville District Commander Col. James Booth said after an Oct. 26 hearing, the agency had “much more feedback” than anticipated.

“It became clear we needed more time to look at that and adequately consider that information,” Booth said.

Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach, broke ranks with most “east side” reps – U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, R-Stuart, is among Plan CC’s biggest boosters – by calling for further delays.
"We’re happy about the delay. But we don’t understand why it was only a two-week delay and not enough time to take into the concerns of many of the other stakeholders who feel they have not had enough time to review the modeling information,” said Frankel, a former West Palm Beach Mayor who represents much of central and south Palm Beach County.

There is “both a quality and quantity issue in terms of what’s coming out of Lake Okeechobee” and into her district, she said, adding the plan “does not take into account what would happen to Grassy Waters,” a chief water supply source “not properly considered in the LOSOM process.”

Meanwhile, Everglades Foundation CEO Eric Eikenberg said the delay offers opportunities for “other forces to take us away from a positive result.”

Time is the essence in implementing a plan debated for a quarter-century, he said Wednesday at an event hosted by the Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce
“In our view, this is the last decade to get to restoration,” he said. “Then we pivot to perpetual protection. We know there are forces out there that are really going to slow you down. They’re going to ensure there’s foot-dragging on whatever progress is being made.”

Eikenberg said while LOSOM offers different impacts and benefits for those north, south, east and west of the lake, “the tension is unfortunate” because, overall, a great milestone is set to be achieved.

"I understand each community has their own concerns, but you also have to realize Monroe County, Miami-Dade County, Broward County, they’re also looking at this for their own benefit. And they’re the beneficiary of this,” he toldlorida Politics. “The hope here is that the east and west can come together to realize they don’t need the water, they don’t want the water.”

John Haughey
The Center Square

The Biden administration is reportedly considering payouts to those who crossed the border illegally. When asked about it at a press confrence, Biden didn't have any knowledge about it, (what a shocker) and said "That's not going to happen" but later his staff confirmed the possibility.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Biden administration is considering giving $450,000 to migrant children and parents separated at the border during the Trump administration. The money would go to each person, so a parent and child could receive almost $1 million, according to the WSJ’s sources. Some of the payouts could be smaller.

These potential payouts would settle lawsuits against the government that allege lasting emotional damage from the separation policy.

The American Civil Liberties Union, (ACLU) which is involved in some of the lawsuits, claims the Trump administration separated around 5,500 children. Less than 1,000 claims have been filed so far, but that number will almost certainly increase if this settlement goes through.

In total, this agreement could cost taxpayers more than $1 billion.

No, this story didn’t come from a conservative parody site, like The Onion or The Babylon Bee.

Paying people who knowingly broke our country’s laws is a terrible precedent.

But along with the principle, the money involved is substantial. The military’s death gratuity program offers a service member’s surviving family $100,000. The top payout of the military’s life insurance program — which requires premiums — is $400,000. Think about the priorities here. The amount proposed per person is comparable to what the family of a soldier who died for his or her country would receive.

Then, there’s the role of liberal activist groups in creating this crisis. The Trump administration didn’t separate families to be cruel. It was required by the Flores Settlement, which the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals imposed in the 1990s. That required the government to release minors within 20 days if they weren’t deported. If someone claims asylum, it can take more than two months to process his or her claim. For almost two decades, the settlement only applied to unaccompanied minors. But after Central American migrants sued in 2015, the 9th Circuit said it applied to children in family units.

 The Obama administration’s solution was to release families who claimed asylum. When Trump wanted to discourage illegal immigration, he had to follow this settlement from the nation’s most liberal circuit court.

Now, the ACLU, a far left-of-center group, is suing the government for the consequences of abiding by it.

If you think illegal immigration is a problem now, just wait. The border is already a disaster. If the Biden administration approves giving checks to those who came here illegally, it will only get worse.

In my opinion, based upon the limited information available to me, here is what I believe is happening. Brian’s parents, to this point have been harboring their son, assisting him in all ways…money, car, food, clothing, and staying out of sight.

I do not believe that the “remains” can be positively ID'd until DNA, comes back. If it is undetermined, I would keep moving forward. If the dental is from a full skull with full upper and lower…that’s different but it doesn’t sound that way. I am a disbeliever because of how this unrolled. I suspect they may have some teeth!

Brian’s parents are completely untrustworthy, that’s why I have been calling for a Grand Jury Subpoena for them .When they plead the 5^th, give them both immunity, take them before a Judge and force them to talk, or go to jail! It’s simple.

Ask the parents to take a polygraph on the “finding” of the backpack and other items …when they refuse…Grand Jury time. What reason could they possibly have to refuse, except they planted them?

Once you are given immunity, anything you say is protected, unless you lie, or withhold information, that we prove through other means or that you did lie.  Then all bets are off and we can use everything against you. You have to be smarter than the bad guys to catch them…and a smart FBI Agent would use all the tools available and the GJ works…We’ve used it with the AUSA, of course, to make cases.

So…there’s other things that need to be sorted…when did Brian contact his attorney? If Gabby could have been alive and was left to die in the wild, that attorney may have problems. Once an attorney knows his client committed a murder, he has certain obligations…and if he screws up he could lose his license and be charged with a crime. He is supposed to tell his client to surrender. He cannot give him advice on how or where to hide, he cannot help him to mislead investigators.

Put his Attorney before a Grand Jury and ask anything you want…nothing Brian told him is protected anymore! There’s no lawyer/client privilege with a dead man!

This case must turn to the family and start treating them as subjects, they are making fools out of the FBI. I don’t understand why the FBI is allowing that.

We are to believe that, knowing what their son did, and there is no doubt they knew he killed her, after helping him to evade arrest, taking him away to a park to put together a plan,…they all of a sudden, took a drive to a snake infested swamp with killer spiders, alligators… to look around and …oh…look…here’s all Brian’s stuff…?! Bull Shit…they planted that…and some teeth?

Then there’s  remains. Unless there is positive identification …and I’ll bet there won’t be DNA, Dental …nothing will be a positive ID. I don’t know where they got that body…but it’s NOT Brian’s…not possible…my opinion.

I would not quit on the case against Brian…unless there is positive, DNA ID and I would go after his parents for all the problems they caused…

GET THEM BEFORE THE GRAND JURY!

therightsidejgarydilaura.com

J.Gary DiLaura

FBI RED

Retired, Extremely Dangerous

With each passing week, it looks like World War III -- between America and China -- is coming sooner than we think. It's not going to be fought with bullets or aircraft carriers, although the Chinese are building up their military in an aggressive and threatening way.

This will more likely be an all-out economic war for global supremacy. The yuan versus the dollar. The Nasdaq versus the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Meanwhile, America is asleep at the switch -- at least, the Biden administration is. This is the worst possible time to be raising tax rates on American companies (Our business tax rates would be higher than China's under President Joe Biden's plan!), dismantling American energy (at a time when China is running 1,000 dirty coal plants with dozens more in construction), and running up the national debt (with China a major purchaser of the bonds).

Love Donald Trump or hate him, he was a president who put America first and recognized the predatory nature of the Chinese regime. He got tough with President Xi Jinping and overturned one-sided trade deals. His strategy was to do what former President Ronald Reagan did to win the Cold War: Make America tremendously prosperous by building up our strategic industries in a way that the Soviet Union or China couldn't compete with.

The danger is that we now have a president in Biden who thinks that climate change is a bigger threat to the world than the Maoists in Beijing.

And make no mistake about it; the communists are back in charge in China. Jinping has basically announced himself to be president for life, as democracy and free elections fly out the window. China is also sprinting back to command and control fascist government and industry "cooperation." That's a model that will eventually implode, but as we learned from the Soviet menace, they can do a lot of damage to peace and prosperity in the meantime.

It's no accident that China's economy and stock market are faltering. In the last year, as the U.S. stock market has risen by about 20% (thanks to Operation Warp Speed), China's Shanghai stock market went down 15%. They are sprinting toward socialism faster than we are... for now.

The Chinese stock market jitters reflect global investors' irritation with the more frequent political interventions in business affairs. As Foreign Affairs magazine recently put it regarding these iron-fisted interferences into the business activities of its largest companies: "Xi has placed China on a risky trajectory, one that threatens the (free market) achievements of his predecessors."

In short, events of recent months both militarily and economically confirm that the modern Maoists are firmly entrenched in Beijing, and capitalism is losing. Jinping's administration simply doesn't get what George H.W. Bush once so eloquently described as "that freedom thing." Militant social controls and restraints on individual liberty are now being matched with economic controls on Chinese megacorporations that are trying to vie for industry supremacy in technology, biology, manufacturing and transportation. Is all of this reminiscent of Japan circa 1939?

What is the Biden administration's response to these threats? The massive $5 trillion spend, tax and borrow bill he is steamrolling through Congress will impair American economic supremacy almost overnight. Under Trump, tax rate reductions led to a $1 trillion infusion of capital from around the world, coming back to these shores to build up our industrial might. Biden's tax policies will have the reverse effect: deindustrialization.

We are, as a nation, now back to importing tens of billions of dollars of energy from OPEC and Russia instead of selling the hundreds of years' worth of oil, gas and coal. Do the progressives who now run Washington really believe we are going to defeat the rising Communist China threat by building windmills? Do they think that redistributing income and wealth makes more sense than creating it?

Will we be in any economic shape to repel China's militaristic advances in the South China Sea, in India, in Africa and perhaps on to the shores of Taiwan with the policies in place in Washington today? Doubtful.

The war with China is on. Right now, only one country is fighting -- China. Let's not let another Afghanistan catastrophe happen in Asia.

Reagan was right. Strong at home. Strong abroad. Today, are we either?

            Stephen Moore

Last Friday, in a triumph for transnationalism, 136 nations, including the U.S., agreed to mandate a global corporate income tax for all nations that will not be allowed to fall below 15%.

"Virtually the entire global economy has decided to end the race to the bottom on corporate taxation," said Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who negotiated the pact.

Betraying a nervousness as to how such a minimum corporate tax, dictated by globalists, will be received in Congress, Yellen urged that it be adopted "swiftly." Yellen is right to be nervous.

The tax proposal is a giant leap forward toward a globalism that America has rejected, and its defeat should be made a priority of libertarians, conservatives, populists and nationalists alike.

What is this "race to the bottom" that so terrifies Yellen and her globalist allies? Simply the worldwide competition of independent nations to offer lower tax rates to entice successful companies to relocate to their shores and bring their jobs with them.

Yellen's "race to the bottom" is as American as apple pie.

High tax rates, corporate and personal, in states such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California have proven to be incentives to companies to pick up and relocate to low-tax states such as Texas and Florida.

That 15% global corporate tax rate is designed to prevent this competitive taxation, the beneficiaries of which are companies that have moved to countries such as Ireland, which has a corporate tax rate of 12.5%. The Irish corporate tax rate is less than half of the 28% Yellen and President Joe Biden have in mind to impose on the USA.

Why would free-market and free-enterprise Republicans vote to lock into U.S. law a corporate tax rate dictated by agents of the New World Order?

To sign on to this 15% minimum tax would be to surrender our freedom of action to set our own tax rates in accordance with the values and beliefs of the party and administration the people vote into power.

Why would a great nation, especially this nation, agree to give up its freedom of action and have its surrender written into its national law and ratified by treaty?
Why forfeit a sovereign right to cut corporate taxes when and to whatever level we wish? Why deny ourselves a competitive advantage that can be gained by unilaterally cutting corporate tax rates?

Assume the rest of the world embraces this minimum corporate tax of 15% and the U.S. -- to recapture and restore a manufacturing base we gave away to China -- answered the world with a corporate tax rate of 7% or 8%.

Transnational companies would beat a path back to America's door.

While globalists might be appalled, why would nationalists give up irrevocably the freedom to act?

In the Trump era, a cut in the U.S. corporate tax rate to 21% helped to create one of the great booms of the modern era, before the pandemic struck in March 2020. Earlier that year, unemployment in all categories was at record lows.

As Ronald Reagan taught, corporations do not pay taxes; they collect them. They get them out of the revenue they receive from the customers who buy their products and services.
The corporate taxes of Ford and General Motors come out of the prices that are charged to buyers of Ford and GM cars and trucks.

And the corporate profits are a primary source of higher wages and salaries, bonuses, and the investment capital companies need to grow and create new jobs.

It is an article of faith among Republicans that lower taxes, personal and corporate, generate greater economic activity and prosperity. And that tax hikes are the ways and means by which rapacious governments consume the seed corn of an economy.

A second provision to which the 136 nations agreed is to have the profits of the world's largest corporations reallocated to the countries where their goods are sold and services are provided, not to the countries where they are located.

"Under the agreement," The New York Times writes, "technology giants like Amazon, Facebook and other big global businesses will be required to pay taxes in countries where their goods or services are sold, even if they have no physical presence there."

Adds the Times: "The separate tax aimed at the technology giants will reallocate more than $125 billion of profits from the home countries of the 100 most profitable firms in the world to the markets where they operate."

Why would an America First party inside the USA, home country to more tech giants than any other, sign on to a plan that would transfer tax revenue away from the U.S. Treasury into the exchequers of foreign lands?

The GOP should use this moment to re-declare our independence when it comes to our internal taxation on individuals and institutions in the United States, and reassert that we will decide the proper rates here, and not subject to the veto of any other nation. The U.S. is not the EU.

Patrick J. Buchanan