Tag: corruption

The U.S. government defended the overseas business interests of baby formula makers at kids’ expense

When Gustun Aunlamai arrived at school at age 4, he was so overweight that his teacher worried he’d have trouble breathing during naptime. His arms and legs were thick. His mouth peeked out from two ballooning cheeks. He moved slowly.

Throughout his toddler years, Gustun had regularly asked his parents to refill his bottle with his favorite “milk” — a type of formula made especially for kids his age. And they were happy to oblige. Sumet Aunlamai and Jintana Suksiri, who lived in a rural province north of Bangkok, had carefully chosen the brand.

Like other Thai parents, they’d been bombarded by formula advertising on television, online and in grocery stores, where a rainbow of boxes and canisters of powdered toddler milk featured teddy bears in graduation caps and giveaways like toys or diapers. It cost far more than cow’s milk but promised to make Gustun stronger and smarter.

What Jintana didn’t know, as Gustun chugged the formula and his weight neared 70 pounds, was that her son’s choice drink had sparked an international feud.

In 2017, Thai health experts tried to stop aggressive advertising for all formula — including that made for toddlers. Officials feared company promotions could mislead parents and even persuade mothers to forgo breastfeeding, depriving their children of the vital health benefits that come with it. At the time, Thailand’s breastfeeding rate was already among the lowest in the world.

But the $47 billion formula industry fought back, enlisting the help of a rich and powerful ally: the United States government.

Over 15 months, U.S. trade officials worked closely with formula makers to wage a diplomatic and political pressure campaign to weaken Thailand’s proposed ban on formula marketing, a ProPublica investigation found.

U.S. officials delivered a letter to Bangkok asking pointed questions, including whether the legislation was “more trade restrictive than necessary.” They also lodged criticisms in a bilateral trade meeting with Thai authorities and on the floor of the World Trade Organization, where such complaints can lead to costly legal battles.

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SQUEEZED BY AFRICAN COUPS, BIDEN COZIES UP TO THE WORLD’S WORST DICTATOR

U.S. COMMANDOS HAVE shown a special interest in strengthening ties with one of the most corrupt, abusive, and repressive regimes on the planet. The delivery of aid by Special Operations forces to the coastal African nation of Equatorial Guinea last month followed pilgrimages to the country’s pariah president by top U.S. officials.

The move came amid shifting West African geopolitics. A Pentagon report last year mentioned Equatorial Guinea as the potential site of a future Chinese military base. At the same time, U.S. relations with longtime allies in Central and West Africa have frayed, often in the aftermath of coups d’état by American-trained military officers.

The aid to Equatorial Guinea appears to be the latest facet of a U.S. charm offensive to woo the country’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, a tyrant now in his sixth decade in power, as the U.S. has lost influence in the African Sahel.

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Joe Biden’s Political Origin Story Is Almost Certainly Bogus. It May Land Him In Legal Trouble.

For nearly two decades, President Joe Biden has told a story about why he devoted his life to politics. He repeated the tale, at the risk of facing criminal charges for lying to a federal agent, while speaking to Special Counsel Robert Hur in October 2023.

Fresh out of law school and working as a clerk at a high-powered Wilmington, Delaware, law firm, Biden, in his telling, was tapped to defend a construction company sued by a 23-year-old welder who “lost part of his penis and one of his testicles” to a fire that broke out when he was working inside a chimney at a Delaware City plant. Thanks to Biden’s shrewd legal defense on the construction company’s behalf, the injured man lost the case.

“I wrote this memo. And son of a b—, it prevailed,” Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. “And I looked over at that kid…and I thought, ‘son of a b—, I’m in the wrong business, I’m not made for this.’”

Biden said he was so wracked with guilt that he concocted an excuse to avoid a celebratory lunch with one of the firm’s named partners and walked into the public defender’s office to ask for a job that very day. It’s “the only time I ever lied,” Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. Thus began, according to a New York Times report on the special counsel interview, “a career that would one day take him to the White House.”

But this story is almost certainly a complete work of fiction.

Although Biden did work at a law firm tapped to defend a construction company in a negligence suit like the one he described to Hur, the case concluded in 1968, while Biden was still in law school. And the welder won, walking away with $315,000, more than $2.8 million in 2024 dollars.

Biden, whose 1988 presidential campaign collapsed amid allegations that he had plagiarized speeches and a law school paper, has a long record of embellishments and yarn spinning. Over the years, he has told several stories about himself that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Those fibs range from the small and peculiar—he claimed in November 2023 that he was offered a spot on the Naval Academy’s football team—to the mendacious, such as his insistence that he never spoke with his son, Hunter Biden, about the latter’s foreign business dealings.

This report is based on a review of court records obtained from the National Archives as well as contemporaneous news reports and interviews with Biden’s former law firm colleagues and federal court clerks.

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Michigan Offering Citizens $500 Per Month To House Illegal Immigrants

The state of Michigan is offering $500 per month to residents who agree to house illegal immigrants in their homes.

The so called ‘Newcomer Rental Subsidy‘ would provide the payment for up to a year for any homeowner willing to take part, equating to a total of $6000.

The state those says those eligible for the program include refugees, asylees, special immigration visa holders, victims of human trafficking, Cuban and Haitian entrants, Afghan nationals, and Ukrainian humanitarian parolees.

The program also states that illegals who have been processed as part of the ‘Family Reunification Parole Process’ from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia, individuals with a pending asylum application, and other immigrant individuals on a case-by-case basis are also eligible.

Basically anyone who crosses the border then.

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If You’re a US Reporter, Anything but Rabidly Pro-Israel Coverage Is Dangerous to Your Career

Early in 2003, Ashleigh Banfield was a star in the making. A rising journalist at MSNBC, she covered the opening stages of the Iraq War. Before that, she’d made a name for herself covering the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. Smart, pretty, highly skilled, she was heading nowhere but up. Until she gave an honest lecture on her experiences in Iraq and the Middle East on April 24, 2003.

I’ve written before about Banfield’s honest and heartfelt critique of Iraq war coverage in the U.S. mainstream media, which won her no friends at NBC News. In fact, the NBC brass sidelined and essentially exiled her. I recently reread her Landon Lecture at Kansas State University and realized NBC wasn’t just angry about her critique of mainstream media war coverage: they were likely even more incensed at how she humanized and empathized with Palestinians and other Middle Eastern peoples and groups, including organizations like Hezbollah.

Here’s some of what she had to say back then in 2003:

But it’s interesting to be able to cover this [Israel and Palestine]. There’s nothing in the world like being able to cross a green line whenever you want and speak to both sides of a conflict. I can’t tell you how horrible and wonderful it is at the same time in the West Bank and Gaza and Israel. There are very few people in this world who can march right across guarded check points, closed military zones, and talk to Palestinians in the same day that they almost embedded with Israeli troops, and that’s something that we get to do on a regular basis.

And I just wish that the leadership of all these different entities, ours included, could do the same thing, because they would have an eye opening experience, horrible and wonderful, all at the same time, and it would give a lot of insight as to how messages are heard and how you can negotiate. Because you cannot negotiate when someone can’t hear you or refuses to hear you or can’t even understand your language, and that’s clearly what’s happening in a lot of places in the world right now, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, not the least of which there’s very little listening and understanding going on. Our language is entirely different than theirs, and I don’t just mean the words. When you hear the word Hezbollah you probably think evil, danger, terror right away. If I could just see a show of hands. Who thinks that Hezbollah is a bad word? Show of hands. Usually connotes fear, terror, some kind of suicide bombing. If you live in the Arab world, Hezbollah means Shriner. Hezbollah means charity, Hezbollah means hospitals, Hezbollah means welfare and jobs.

These are not the same organizations we’re dealing with. How can you negotiate when you’ re talking about two entirely different meanings? And until we understand – we don’t have to like Hizbullah, we don’t have to like their militancy, we don’t have to like what they do on the side, but we have to understand that they like it, that they like the good things about Hizbullah, and that you can’t just paint it with a blanket statement that it’s a terrorist organization, because even when it comes to the militancy these people believe that militancy is simply freedom fighting and resistance. You can’t argue with that. You can try to negotiate, but you can’t say it’s wrong flat out.

And that’s some of the problems we have in dealing in this war in terror. As a journalist I’m often ostracized just for saying these messages, just for going on television and saying, “Here’s what the leaders of Hezbullah are telling me and here’s what the Lebanese are telling me and here’s what the Syrians have said about Hezbullah. Here’s what they have to say about the Golan Heights.” Like it or lump it, don’t shoot the messenger, but invariably the messenger gets shot.

We hired somebody on MSNBC recently named Michael Savage. Some of you may know his name already from his radio program. He was so taken aback by my dare to speak with Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade about why they do what they do, why they’re prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they call a freedom fight and we call terrorism. He was so taken aback that he chose to label me as a slut on the air. And that’s not all, as a porn star. And that’s not all, as an accomplice to the murder of Jewish children. So these are the ramifications for simply being the messenger in the Arab world.

Emphasis added. Original spelling retained. You can watch her speech here.

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A Company Family: The untold history of Obama and the CIA

In the summer of 2012, President Barack Obama signed a secret order authorizing the CIA and other U.S. agencies to support rebels in Syria seeking to oust Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad—a nationalist who had allied with Iran and stood up to U.S. proxy Israel.1

Costing more than $1 billion, Operation Timber Sycamore evolved into the largest covert operation since the arming of mujahadin fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

U.S. Special Forces under Timber Sycamore again trained Islamic fundamentalists, this time in Jordan, who again carried out a reign of terror.2

A voracious consumer of intelligence, Obama’s trademark throughout his presidency was to move war into the shadows, a light-footprint approach designed to expand U.S. power covertly.

General Joseph Votel, head of the special operations command (SOCOM) characterized the Obama era as a “golden age for special operations.” Green Berets were deployed to 133 countries—70 percent of the world—in 2014 alone.3

In a meeting about Afghanistan, Obama told CIA Director Leon Panetta that the CIA would “get everything it wanted.”4

The New York Times reported that, “in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama forged with Mr. [John] Brennan,”5 an architect of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.

Obama’s worldview meshed so closely with this “unsentimental intel warrior” and “terrorist hunter” that Obama “found himself finishing Brennan’s sentences.”

An anonymous Cabinet member explained that “presidents tend to be smitten with the instruments of the intelligence community [but] Obama was more smitten than most—this has been an intelligence presidency in a way we haven’t seen maybe since Eisenhower.”6

The consequences could be seen in Obama’s boosting funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which promotes regime change in countries defiant of the New World Order, and his drastic expansion of the use of drones—for both surveillance and targeted killings.

The Obama administration further; a) backed coups in Ukraine and Honduras; b) pivoted the U.S. military to Asia, ramped up arms sales to Saudi Arabia and expanded military bases in Africa; c) helped suppress evidence about CIA torture, d) refused to pursue a criminal case against the CIA’s money laundering bank, HSBC, e) eavesdropped on U.S. allies and a U.S. congressman (Dennis Kucinich) who opposed his administration’s illegal invasion of Libya that devastated that country, f) stepped up surveillance and efforts to destroy Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange, and g) presided over the prosecution of a record number of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Additionally, the Obama administration a) protected longtime CIA assets from prosecution, like Rwandan mass murderer Paul Kagame; b) waged war by proxy in Yemen through the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to which it sold nearly $27 billion worth of arms; c) provided weapons to drug cartels in Mexico under the Operation Fast and the Furious while ramping up the War on Drugs through the Plan Mérida; and d) oversaw establishment of a clandestine arms pipeline from Libya to Syria by Ambassador Chris Stevens as part of Operation Timber Sycamore.7

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ACLU, Once a Defender of Free Speech, Goes After a Whistleblower

Among the unfortunate changes of recent years has been the transformation of the American Civil Liberties Union from an advocate for free speech and other individual rights into just another progressive political organization. Historically, despite much pushback, the group defended the right of people from across the political spectrum to advocate and protest. But the organization has become unreliable on the issue; most recently in the very 21st century debate over gender identity, which sees the ACLU of Missouri targeting a whistleblower who is critical of medical transitions for minors.

“Strange evening,” journalist Jesse Singal wrote March 7 on X (formerly Twitter). “The ACLU of Missouri subpoenaed Jamie Reed, demanding (among other stuff) all her communications w/me. I emailed them saying (politely) wtf, you’re the ACLU. Got a call from a lawyer there saying it was a mistake – ‘It’s a big team.’ Okay.”

The subpoena Singal attached (supposedly since modified, though a redacted version of the original remains publicly available through the Missouri courts website) demanded of Reed “all communications, including any documents exchanged, between you and Jessie Singal concerning Gender-Affirming Care provided at or through the Center.” It also sought “all communications, including any documents exchanged, concerning Gender-Affirming Care involving media or between you and any media outlet or any member of the media” (journalist Benjamin Ryan says that would include him). The subpoena also demanded Reed’s communications with state officials, legislators, and advocacy organizations.

Jamie Reed, it should be noted, isn’t a party to the case behind the subpoena, which is a challenge to Missouri’s 2023 ban on “gender transition surgery” and “cross-sex hormones or puberty-blocking drugs” for minors. But she was a motivator for that legislation as a former staffer at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital who developed significant doubts about what she believed to be a lack of safeguards in place regarding permanent changes to children’s bodies and lives. In a widely read piece for The Free Press, she described such interventions as “medically appalling.”

Whether you agree with Reed or not, she’s a sincere advocate for a position on an issue that commands attention and has serious policy implications. Just this month, New York magazine published a piece arguing that minors have an absolute right to change their bodies, while Britain’s National Health Service stopped prescribing puberty blockers for children in gender identity cases because of doubts about their safety or effectiveness. Reed is engaged in public debate of the sort that civil libertarians defend, so it’s bizarre to see the ACLU of Missouri putting the screws to her over her advocacy. Or it would be if the ACLU wasn’t undergoing a painful and very public transformation.

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Report: CIA Blocked Federal Investigators from Interviewing Hunter Biden’s ‘Sugar Brother’ Kevin Morris

A whistleblower said that the CIA reportedly blocked federal investigators from interviewing Kevin Morris, a high-powered entertainment lawyer representing Hunter Biden, about his connections to the president’s son during probes into his alleged tax crimes.

The unnamed whistleblower told the House Oversight and Judiciary Committee chairmen that the “intelligence agency stopped IRS and Justice Department investigators from interviewing Morris in August 2021, a Hollywood lawyer and patron of the first son, according to a Thursday letter addressed to CIA Director William Burns,” per the New York Post.

“The whistleblower informed Oversight chairman James Comer (R-KY) and Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) that two DOJ officials were summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. — and told Morris ‘could not be a witness for their investigation into Hunter Biden,’” the NY Post reported.

Comer and Jordan wrote in the letter later obtained by the outlet that “it is unknown why or on what basis the CIA allegedly intervened to prevent investigators from interviewing Mr. Morris.”

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Newly Released Emails Show Biden White House Officials Met With and Communicated With Pro-Censorship Group

America First Legal (AFL) has published emails revealing more ties between the Biden White House and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) – a controversial group originally based in the UK that’s believed to be involved in censorship pressure around the world.

The emails originate in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of State and refer to using US assets designed to counter domestic terrorism to work with CCDH, the non-profit has announced.

AFL – which positions itself as a counterpoint to ACLU – has filed several lawsuits concerning various government bodies’ involvement in collusion with private tech companies, aimed at promoting censorship.

AFL now notes that the Biden administration from the very beginning of the current president’s mandate “embraced” various initiatives leading to curtailing speech, and to censorship, and was not shy to enlist the national security apparatus, either.

The administration at one point said that in order to “maximize” understanding of domestic terrorism, it should back “and making appropriate use of the analysis performed by entities outside the government.”

CCDH is one of those entities, AFL says, and the documents now released concerned how the group worked with the White House to suppress speech in the US on topics like vaccine mandates and the questioning of the integrity of the 2020 presidential election – all the while trying to fit that within the concept of domestic terrorism.

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Media Blocked From Border Area Where Ilegals Overran National Guard

The Customs and Border Protection Agency has blocked the media from accessing the area where hordes of illegal immigrants overran the National Guard in El Paso earlier this week, leaving reporters asking how they are supposed to do their jobs.

Footage emerged Thursday of illegal immigrants literally tearing down barriers near El Paso, Texas and storming the border, braying to be let into the US.

Now, two days later, this sign has been put up instructing the media to basically stay away.

Can’t have anybody documenting the border crisis any further right?

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