03/26/2014
For legal reasons, as Craig Ferguson likes to say, I’m not accusing GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (whose obvious weaseling on the Establishment-backed Amnesty/ Immigration Surge has resulted in his being primaried by economics Professor Dave Brat), Mrs. Eric Cantor, or anyone mentioned below of accepting bribes as defined by the US Code, or even honest services fraud.
I am accusing them of treason, but that’s a political statement — justified by the fact that I can show that they’re betraying their country by supporting an actual invasion, of millions of foreigners, and then legalizing them to make them voters.
The influence of donors in American politics is paradoxical — the banking, agribusiness, and tech industries give hundreds of millions of dollars one way or another, and politicians seek them in order to keep their “phony baloney jobs”, but the salary of a Congressman like Eric Cantor is only $193,400. That’s because he’s Majority Leader — a regular Congressman gets $174,000. And that’s all they’re allowed to keep.
If they spend campaign funds on themselves, they get in trouble. In a typical case (in more ways than one) Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr was sent to jail for spending campaign contributions on a Rolex watch, Martin Luther King and Michael Jackson memorabilia, and a bunch of similar expenses,
Saying he used his campaign fund as “a personal piggy bank,” a federal judge sentenced former Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. to 2 ½ years in prison for misusing $750,000 in campaign money to fund a lavish lifestyle.
Both Jacksons Going To Prison For Misusing Campaign Funds, CBS Chicago, August 14, 2013
So you can see that if plutocrats want to reward loyal supporters in Congress, they’re going to have to be subtle. You may remember Hillary Clinton’s sudden, extremely fortunate windfall in cattle futures, a result, apparently, of the Governor of Arkansas’ loyalty to Tyson Foods Inc. interests.
Tyson didn’t actually give Hillary any money, it gave her an opportunity to make money, and seems to have ensured that that opportunity paid off. [Hillary’s Bull Market | Was that $100,000 profit from cattle futures a bribe? By Claudia Rosett, Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2000]
That’s why it was fascinating to read recently how much money immigration enthusiast Eric Cantor was receiving (outside of any campaign contributions that he’d have to give back) from fast food giant Domino’s Pizza
Domino’s has delivered cash, stock, and stock options currently worth more than $3 million to Diana Cantor since October 2005 — all for her part-time work as a director. She has collected or cashed out more than $1.7 million of that money and is sitting on another roughly $1.4 million in Domino’s holdings, as the stock hovers near an all-time high.…
The Cantors, who have been married since 1989, were millionaires before Diana Cantor joined the board of Domino’s, but the company’s success has nonetheless dramatically swelled their wealth. In 2006, her first full year on the board, the Cantors had a net worth of between $1.97 million and $6.51 million, according to calculations by the Center for Responsive Politics.
That means her $3 million in Domino’s compensation has boosted their total net worth by roughly between 50 percent and 150 percent since 2006.
[Domino’s Pizza Delivers Big for Eric Cantor, By Shane Goldmacher, National Journal, June 13, 2013]
Of course, for this to be considered a reward for the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge, I would have to show that Domino’s wanted the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge, a somewhat complicated question. Domino’s profiteers off cheap labor, like all fast food chains. In England, the CEO of the British arm of the pizza company was rebuked by the British government, for saying that the UK needed to import cheap labor for pizza shops.
“There are a huge number of jobs at the bottom end of the service industry, and not enough people in the U.K. who want to work for them,” complained [Domino’s] CEO Lance Batchelor, who is a British graduate of Harvard’s business school.
“He should perhaps pay his staff a little more, then he might find it easier to recruit them,” responded Mark Harper, the immigration minister. “If he’s having trouble recruiting labour, I don’t think we should import relatively unskilled labour from outside [Europe] just so that he can keep his wages low,” Harper told a parliamentary hearing
[No more low-wage immigration, U.K., Canada, tell CEOs, By Neil Munro, Daily Caller, February 16, 2013] Links in original
Domino’s hasn’t had a PAC since 2008, although Domino’s Chairman David Brandon was finance co-chair for Mitt Romney in 2008. [Red Plate, Blue Plate: Fast Food By Political Persuasion, By Laurie Bennett, Forbes, July 23, 2012]
But I see that, for example, a guy named Dale Ranson said on Facebook that “I own 4 Domino’s Pizza stores and I support immigration reform including a path to citizenship.” He writes that
there are more than 1100 individual franchise owners of Domino’s Pizza stores, many of them 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. I am going to write to Congressman Cantor.
If there are a lot of immigrant franchise owners, that may be because of Small Business Administration loans for minorities. But there are definitely a lot of immigrant employees.
Just before Christmas, 20 Domino’s workers in New York were fired after they pulled a weekend walk-out to protest low wages. The New York Daily News described them as “mostly young, Spanish-speaking immigrants who pedal through the streets dropping off the pies” and noted that one of them had to speak to a reporter through an interpreter. (Which is why your deliveryman can’t explain why they got the toppings wrong.) [Pizza revolt: Washington Heights Domino’s consumed with worker uprising, By Simone Weichselbaum, New York Daily News, December 9, 2013]
So immigration reform/Amnesty would good for Domino’s bottom line, even if it’s not good for the country. But that really why Cantor is doing it?
I want to give Cantor the benefit of the doubt. I think it’s more likely that he is what I called in my 2013 expose of the “ugly roots” of immigration enthusiasm an “ethnic agenda monger.”
I believe Cantor has got Ellis Island Fever and is projecting his ancestors’ immigration struggles onto Mexicans. See my blog item Eric Cantor’s Speech Mentions The Russian "Programs" Of 1903.
I should add, somewhat defensively, I suppose, that this “ethnic agenda” thing is not exclusively Jewish. You see a lot of it with Irish and Italian politicians, too.
What they all have in common: none of their ancestors were Mexicans. That means that Cantor would probably be taking this position even if it cost him money. (Of course, it certainly doesn’t cost his party money: see Cantor’s Dream Amnesty Betrayal: Did Sheldon Adelson’s $5 Million Play A Role? and Cantor’s KIDS Act — The “D” Stands For “Donor”.
Still, there’s a moral to be learned from Diana Cantor’s Domino’s stock option windfall.
One of my favorite stories is the old joke about a large multinational dog food company which comes out with a new dog food, approved by nutritionists, the sales and marketing staff, the CEO and the board, but which totally fails to sell. The simple explanation, from a lowly employee: "The dogs don’t like it!"
In 2009, Domino’s admitted that the pizza it had been delivering was so bad that the dogs didn’t like it. The National Journal’s Shane Goldmacher described the turnaround.
“The company launched a scathing ad campaign attacking its own pizza as “cardboard,” “boring,” and “bland.” The spots were linked to the debut of a new recipe and an admission that its old pizza stunk.”
It’s Domino’s success in rebooting the brand to align with what the customers wanted that made Mrs. Cantor’s stock options so lucrative.
If Cantor could learn that lesson, and drop the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge plans that few or no Republican voters like, he might remake the party.
But is Cantor going to do that? No, he’s not. An MSM story published as I was writing this reports he’s doing exactly the opposite:
He has begun talking about urban poverty, visiting charter schools to explore education reforms, and has sought alliances with African American lawmakers, traveling to Mississippi to appear at a civil rights event and honor Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.
And he has maneuvered behind the scenes to push House Republicans toward an eventual floor vote on a plan to legalize certain illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.
Cantor attempts to remake the House Republican brand, and his own, By Robert Costa, The Washington Post, March 25, 2014
That’s the same “cardboard,” “boring,” and “bland” pizza that Conservatism, Inc. has been serving for years.
Americans aren’t going to show up to the polls to eat it. But when that happens, no doubt the Cantors will go into the pizza business fulltime.
James Fulford is a writer and editor for VDARE.com.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.