Hot damn!
Not only has Elon Musk brought the hammer down on the entirety of the Deep State’s foreign aid boondoggles, but his sleuths have apparently also uncovered one of the Swamp’s most pernicious artifices. To wit, numerous Federal agencies, including USAID, purchase a shit-ton of expensive subscriptions from beltway megaphones like Politico, which by pure happenstance, of course, favor their agency subscribers with a steady patter of “news” that tracks right down the UniParty fairway.
And we aren’t talking chump change. These “subscriptions” for the “pro” version of various Politico newsletters, for instance, come at $3,000 to $24,000 a pop. Since two of the latter were purchased by the climate crisis bureau over at USAID you have to wonder what that had to do with feeding the world’s starving masses or why USAID bureaucrats needed high-priced climate policy gossip when their inboxes were already flooded with free climate change propaganda from dozens of other Federal agencies, Federally-funded think tanks, NGOs and anti-fossil fuel activists.
As it happened, the tab across all Federal agencies just for the various Politico publications accumulated to $8.2 million over the past nine years according to USASpending.gov. Since most of that cash flow was due to purchase of the high-price “pro” versions, we can only imagine the “deep” insights that must be contained in the “Politico Pro Analysis” at $5,000 per year. Well, at least compared to the regular political gossip/news contained in the standard “Politico” subscription at $200 per year that a smattering of political junkies out in Flyover America apparently purchase.
Hellbound and Down 