Tag: corruption

Another day, another illegal billion-dollar bribe to raise your electricity prices

The Interior Department has made another illegal agreement with a gas company to drop development of cheap and clean offshore wind and instead focus on dirty, expensive gas, giving that company the better part of a billion dollars worth of taxpayer money while starving Americans of much-needed electricity.

Wind is one of the cheaper forms of energy we have available to us, and also has the benefit of not causing pollution. Pollution from fossil fuels harms human health, causing millions of deaths and childhood asthma cases and costing trillions of dollars per year globally.

It’s also an important resource at a time when American electricity demand is increasing, leading to higher energy bills as the proliferation of data centers squeezes energy availability.

However, the Department of the Interior, the government agency responsible for usage of public lands including oceans, is currently occupied by Doug Burgum, a fossil fuel advocate who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the fossil fuel industry.

As such, Burgum has done all he can to stop cheap and clean energy projects and to try to benefit dirty and expensive fossil fuels, to the detriment of Americans’ lungs and electricity bills.

Interior has cut off 400k homes worth of power just before Christmas, tried to pause new power generation projects and halt existing constructions, and tried to make permitting harder (while fast-tracking expensive, dirty projects with “concierge” service). His party suggested drastic new fees on wind farms, far in excess of the inspection fees on dirty oil projects.

But many of those efforts have been swiftly reversed by courts due to their illegality.

This hasn’t stopped Burgum from coming up with other illegal ideas to starve Americans of the energy they need.

The latest trend has involved a pattern of bribes given to oil companies from public coffers to convince them to stop development of offshore wind and instead refocus on gas projects.

It started with a nearly-$1B bribe from taxpayer coffers to French oil giant TotalEnergies in March, basically buying out its offshore wind lease in exchange for a commitment to put that money into fossil fuel projects.

Interior made up a fake national security reason for this agreement, even though it is clear that domestic sources of power are far more secure than the kind that start intractable global conflicts. Courts have previously ruled that there are no national security concerns around wind power and Dept. of Defense had signed off on these projects.

But it didn’t stop there. Interior has continued with similar near-billion-dollar bribes, with an $885 million deal in April, and another near-billion-dollar deal today.

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Independent Grooming Gang Report Calls For Life Sentences and Deportations, But State Complicity in Rapes Remains Uninvestigated

A crowdfunded independent inquiry into predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs in the United Kingdom concluded this week, calling for major legal changes to put abusers in prison for life. But major gaps still remain from this latest unofficial investigation into the decades-long scandal of systematic child rape, countless cover-ups, and internal evidence of the inaction of public servants in the face of horrific abuse of mostly young white working-class girls.

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report has called for the establishment of a specialist national prosecutor to focus on the systematic grooming and gang rape of young girls in the United Kingdom by predominantly Pakistani men, and for considerably harsher punishments for those found guilty.

The report was particularly critical of the British state, given testimony from survivors stating the authorities were often aware of the rapes, but either turned a blind eye or even sided with abusers. It stated: “The perpetrators operated with impunity because the state enabled them… The rape gangs did not operate in the shadows, but with the active or passive consent of the British state.”

In damning accusations, the Inquiry Report this week stated:

The demographic and cultural drivers are clear. Perpetrators from Pakistani Muslim and other Muslim backgrounds operated under an honour- and shame-based clan code that treated non-Muslim girls, especially white working class girls, as property available for sexual use…

…every one of our institutions failed them catastrophically. Police forces ignored repeated reports, criminalised victims instead of perpetrators, destroyed evidence, and allowed known rapists to walk free on bail. Social care services undermined protective parents, placed children in trafficking hubs inside children’s homes, closed cases despite clear indicators of exploitation, and retaliated against whistleblowers.

The NHS recorded genital injuries, multiple sexually transmitted infections in children as young as 13, pregnancies caused by rape, and suicide attempts, yet discharged victims back to their abusers without safeguarding referrals or trauma care. Schools observed older men collecting girls at the gates, heard disclosures of rape on school premises, and responded by excluding victims rather than protecting them. Taxi licensing authorities renewed permits for drivers who formed the logistical backbone of the networks and collapsed in the face of organised protests when basic safety measures were proposed.

The crowdfunded inquiry, which is not an official government investigation but rather an independent process headed up by MP Rupert Lowe, the leader of a small sovereigntist-right party, Restore Britain, commenced in 2025 and held public hearings of evidence in February 2026. The remarkable testimonies of survivors, in which extreme acts of sexual brutality against young children were alleged, have doubtless played an important role in keeping public attention on the grooming scandal, which the British government has been reluctant to fully address.

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Pennsylvania Supreme Court Accuses Far Left Philly DA Larry Krasner of Misrepresenting Cases – Imposes Embarrassing New Rule on Him

Larry Krasner is the Soros-backed district attorney of Philadelphia who loves to threaten ICE agents with arrest while letting dangerous criminals out of jail.

In a stunning turn of events this week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court accused Krasner of misrepresenting the facts of cases in his quest to dismiss charges against criminals.

They also imposed an embarrassing new rule on him. Going forward, when Krasner wants to dismiss charges and let someone out of jail, the case is required to be reviewed by the state attorney general’s office.

This is way overdue, but it’s great to see Krasner get his comeuppance.

KYW News Radio reports:

Pa. attorney general must review cases Philly DA wants to overturn, state Supreme Court rules

In an extraordinary ruling from Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, if the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office wants to overturn a conviction in state court, the state Attorney General’s Office must be given the chance to review the case and make sure a proper investigation was done.

The order comes as a King’s Bench petition, which is basically a mechanism for the high court to take over a case and review it. The case at hand involved Lavar Brown, a man convicted of killing two men in the early 2000s and sentenced to death row.

In their opinion, the five Democratic and two Republican justices said District Attorney Larry Krasner has “numerous instances of untrustworthy concessions, lack of candor, misrepresentations of fact, lack of adequate investigation, and avoidance of hearings” and is “unreliable.”

They said when a district attorney fails to follow through on their duties it “does not minister justice, it facilitates injustice.”

The high court said because “the problems are poised to continue,” it’s now requiring the Attorney General to intervene on behalf of the commonwealth.

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Failing Hollywood Wants a Bailout From Taxpayers and Adam Schiff is Trying to Give it to Them

Just yesterday, it was reported that Hollywood insiders fear the city is turning into the next Detroit. Movie and TV productions are talking their business to other, more attractive locations with fewer rules and better tax rates.

In response to this, Adam Schiff and other lawmakers want to give Hollywood a federal tax subsidy. In other words, they want taxpayers to bail out Hollywood.

Why should average Americans who have nothing to do with the entertainment industry have to help Hollywood fix a problem that they are causing for themselves?

Reason reports:

Adam Schiff Wants Federal Tax Credits for Movie and TV Production

Eager to cut costs, studios increasingly shoot films and TV shows overseas. Unsurprisingly, one lawmaker thinks the government should help.

“Los Angeles has been the world’s entertainment capital for 100 years and still has an unmatched concentration of talent and infrastructure,” Gene Maddaus writes at Variety. “But in an age of globalization, with easy international travel and communication, the city is losing its edge.”

While still synonymous with the entertainment industry, fewer and fewer projects are actually filmed in Hollywood.

The problem primarily comes down to cost. “Everything costs more in L.A., starting with labor, due to the high cost of living and elaborate union agreements,” Maddaus writes. “Other states and countries have developed crew bases of their own, are more solicitous of producers’ needs and offer more generous incentives.”…

“In order to save this industry in America, we need to be competitive with tax credits,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) told Variety. Schiff wants a federal film production tax credit; he said in March he had “largely drafted” a bill but that he needed bipartisan support.

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The US-Israel Wars on Iran: Follow the Money

Like most of America’s wars in West Asia, the current joint U.S.-Israel attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran is about securing control over the region’s energy resources and preserving oil currency policies; practices that have fueled its expansive economy since the end of the Second World War.

Ultimately, this conflict, which has sent shockwaves through the global economy, boils down to who will reign in West Asia, control the world’s energy lifeline, and dictate the rules of global finance.

Beneath the veneer of geopolitical diplomacy and rhetoric about global order, the true catalyst for U.S. wars in the Persian Gulf – from the 1990 invasion of Kuwait to the current Iran war – has always been monetary supremacy, “money.” They have been rooted in oil revenue, debt leverage, and the staggering economic stakes of global energy and currency dominance.

Washington’s hardline stance, economic strangulation and military interventions  have been designed to enforce compliance. Countries, like Iran, that resist U.S. hegemony face severe financial and military pressures, because their defiance challenges America’s regional security architecture and unipolar dominance over the global financial system.

Since the 1970s, the “petrodollar system” has been the invisible engine of American prosperity and power.  However, the economic scaffolding that has buoyed its global hegemony is fraying, as geopolitical shifts and de-dollarization trends gradually erode the U.S. dollar’s absolute grip on global energy markets.

To make sense of how we reached this point, it is important to consider how the U.S. dollar achieved its global dominance and shaped our current economic reality.

In June 1974, the United States and Saudi Arabia signed a landmark economic and military cooperation agreement, establishing what has come to be known as the “petrodollar system.”

This consequential bargain was born in an era of political and economic uncertainty – inflation, Vietnam War and the 1973 Arab oil embargo. With the U.S. economy in a nosedive, then-President Richard Nixon, anxious to maintain the global demand for dollars, persuaded the Saudi government to finance America’s debt with its petroleum wealth.  He convinced them to price their oil exclusively in U.S. dollars and to invest their surplus oil profits in U.S. Treasury bonds.  In exchange, Washington agreed to provide the Saudis with weapons and protection.  By 1975, all Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries were pricing their oil in dollars.

The Saudi policy of pricing crude exclusively in U.S. dollars compelled all purchasing nations to convert their native currencies before making purchases.  Increased international demand for the dollar made it the world’s singular reserve currency and preferred medium of exchange.  To meet the increased need, Washington simply fired up the printing presses.

Over the years, Washington’s staunch support of the repressive Saudi regime has been driven by a strategic imperative: to ensure that its client state remains committed to the 1974 bargain.

This favorable pricing and trading arrangement has allowed Washington to entail massive deficits, to borrow and spend with abandon without triggering financial collapse. It has financed America’s numerous military adventures and provided the tools to wield economic sanctions and enforce its foreign policy.

Although a web of motives have fueled Washington’s interventions in West Asia, punishing currency dissenters was prominent in its past wars in Iraq and Libya.

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New Inquiry Reveals the Terrifying Truth About Muslim Atrocities Against UK Girls and Women

A report from the UK proves that the tinfoil hat crowd was right once again: Muslims have been committing barbaric sex crimes against white British girls and women at terrifying rates, and the police, courts, schools, and elected leaders made it all possible.

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report is hard to read but foolish to ignore. Here are a few fact-grabs that should turn the UK upside down:

Introduction

The scale of the crimes committed is staggering. It has been previously established that, at the very least, 250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma. The true number is probably higher. Pg. 7

The perpetrators bear primary responsibility, yet the institutional failures that enabled them for decades must also be confronted. Pg. 7

Organised networks of perpetrators built coordinated operations that transported victims between locations, supplied them with drugs and alcohol, recorded abuse for distribution and blackmail, and passed girls between multiple adult men. These crimes have been committed for decades, since the 1950s by Pakistanis in particular, and have affected every region of our nation. Pg. 7

Institution failures are an understatement. After reading the report, it’s hard to believe that these systematic crimes were not intentional.

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Gavin Newsom solicited $340M in ‘behested payments’ from special interests, filings reveal

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s bid to seize control of the narrative around multiple federal investigations is backfiring, with critics using the governor’s accusations of Trump-led ‘lawfare’ to revive long-running questions about pay-to-play politics in California.

State records show Newsom has solicited more than $340 million in donations from wealthy donors and special interests — some of which have received preferential treatment and millions of dollars in state contracts — while also taking pains to prop up the political activities of his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

A review of state disclosure records shows Newsom has reported 1,325 behested payments totaling $347,240,506 since 2011, when he was serving as lieutenant governor.

The payments — legal under California law, but a controversial if not illegal practice in some other states — are reported once they hit $5,000 from a single source in a calendar year, and they must be for a charitable, governmental or legislative purpose.

Criticism and memes of Newsom’s habit of soliciting donations have been gaining steam since the governor announced on Monday he and wife are the focus of multiple federal probes.

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How Deep Are the Newsoms in It? THIS Deep.

It seems impossible — or just too revolting — to keep up with the financial hanky-panky of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and First Partner (gag) Jennifer Siebel Newsom. But thanks to a couple of investigative reporters with stronger stomachs than I have, let’s see if I can’t put everything you need to know into one easily digestible column.

I love it when other people do my dirty work for me, so let’s get started.

“Today, my wife & I joined Donald Trump’s hit list,” Newsom practically boasted on Monday. “He has directed his Department of Justice to investigate us. They have not found a crime — they are simply trying to find one.”

Well, let’s see what Fox Business anchor Liz MacDonald and my old friend and Red State colleague Jen Van Laar have to say about that.

MacDonald said Tuesday that the DOJ probe “is about California Democrats’ modern-day machine politics,” which she described as a “feedback loop of Sacramento-corporate lobbyists-governor/wife nonprofit-behested nonprofit donations-lucrative state contracts-Sacramento.”

Don’t bother writing all this down — there won’t be a quiz at the end of today’s column. You’re welcome.

“The modern Sacramento machine trades corporate compliance and nonprofit funding/donations for policy access and state business,” MacDonald added, and then explained how that grift (allegedly!) worked for the Newsoms:

According to IRS Form 990 disclosures, her nonprofit frequently buys from Siebel Newsom’s for-profit film company—Girls Club Entertainment LLC—writer, producer and director services and the licensing and production rights for her documentaries. Then it sells the docs to the state and public schools. 

 IRS records show that her nonprofit has paid her Girls Club Entertainment LLC roughly $1.64 million for these production and licensing rights since 2012, which includes a steady annual contracting fee of $150,000 since 2018.

TL;DR: Siebel Newsom produced unwatchable propaganda videos for children, for which Democrat-dominated schools then paid her handsomely. Or as MacDonald summed it up, “Over the past decade, Siebel Newsom has collected over $3.7 million in combined personal salary and LLC payouts funded by the nonprofit.”

Then there are behested payments, which MacDonald explained are “a unique mechanism in California politics where an elected official asks a corporation, labor union, or wealthy individual to donate money to a specific charity, nonprofit, or government program.” Unlike campaign donations, there are no caps.

As governor, Newsom requested a record $226 million in behested payments in one year. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars went to the California Partners Project,” MacDonald wrote, “a nonprofit founded by his wife.”

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DOJ Probes JPMorgan, Bank of America, Over Political Account Closures

Federal subpoenas hit JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo this week, ordering the banks to name every customer they cut off and to say why.

The legal fight is about fraud statutes and prosecutorial reach. A blunter question sits underneath it. When a bank shuts your account over your politics, where are you supposed to go?

The demands came from the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., run by Jeanine Pirro.

Her prosecutors asked the banks for lists of people who were “debanked” and for the reasons behind shutting them out. Some of the subpoenas reach back more than a year.

The investigation tests whether the account closures violated the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989, a law built to chase bank fraud.

Debanking amounts to financial exile. A private institution decides your views, or your line of work, make you a liability, and your access to checking accounts, payroll, and credit can vanish.

There’s no hearing, no judge, and often no warning beyond a card that stops working. The power to do this sits with the bank, and the person on the other end rarely gets to argue back.

Last August, President Trump signed an executive order telling banking regulators to root out “politicized or unlawful debanking” and to penalize it. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency later reviewed the nine largest banks and reported it had found early signs of the practice. Pirro’s office went further on its own, opening the criminal probe without waiting for a referral from those regulators.

The banks’ defense is the one you’d expect. They say they shut accounts only over legal, regulatory, or financial risk, never over belief. That explanation is convenient and hard to check because the standards live inside the banks and the people affected almost never see them. When the threshold for losing your account is “risk” defined by the institution that benefits from defining it loosely, almost any disfavored customer can be folded in.

For the crypto industry, the probe puts a name to a years-old grievance. Digital-asset firms watched their accounts close across 2022 and 2023 and called it “Operation Chokepoint 2.0,” a nod to a 2013 Obama-era program that pushed banks to drop industries the government disliked. The pattern repeats because the method works. You don’t have to outlaw an activity if you can cut off the money that keeps it alive.

That is the chilling effect in its purest form. People and businesses learn that the wrong affiliation can cost them a bank account, so they grow careful about what they say, fund, or build. The punishment never needs a courtroom to land, and it teaches everyone watching to keep their heads down.

JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo have mostly declined to comment on the subpoenas. JPMorgan has disclosed that it faces “reviews, investigations and legal proceedings” tied to the executive order.

The records Pirro wants would show, customer by customer, who the banks decided to drop and why. People shut out of the financial system for their views have spent years being told it never happened.

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Google Removes the Final Workaround for Full Ad Blocking in Chrome

Google is removing the last technical workaround that kept effective ad blockers alive in Chrome.

When Chrome 150 ships on June 30, the browser will delete a hidden setting called the ExtensionManifestV2Disabled flag, a switch that power users had been toggling to keep old-style extensions running after Google officially discontinued them.

Without it, uBlock Origin and every other extension built on the old Manifest V2 framework, the set of rules that governed how browser extensions worked for years, will stop functioning permanently. Chrome 151, expected in July, will strip the remaining MV2 flags entirely. No policy override and no hidden setting will bring them back.

The company that sells more advertising than any other on Earth now controls whether you can block those ads. And it just decided you can’t, at least not effectively.

What Google took away and why it took it

The technical change is the replacement of Chrome’s webRequest API with the declarativeNetRequest API.

Under the old system, extensions like uBlock Origin could watch your browser’s traffic as it happened, see an ad or tracker trying to load, and block it on the spot before it ever reached your screen.

Under the new system, extensions have to hand Google a pre-written list of things to block and Chrome decides whether to follow those instructions. The lists are capped at a fixed number of rules, and the extension can’t react to anything that isn’t already on the list.

uBlock Origin’s developer, Raymond Hill, has been clear that a Manifest V3 version cannot replicate the original’s full capabilities. A stripped-down version called uBlock Origin Lite exists for MV3, but it handles only a fraction of the filter lists, the community-maintained databases of known ads and trackers, that the original supported.

It also can’t perform cosmetic filtering, the process of hiding ad containers and promotional elements that remain on a page even after the ad itself is blocked. Without it, you get blank boxes where ads used to be, or sponsored content that looks native to the page. For more than 40 million Chrome users who relied on the original, the replacement is a downgrade by design.

Google engineer Devlin Cronin confirmed the timeline in a Chromium code review commit, a logged change to Chrome’s underlying source code that other developers can inspect, writing that “MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won’t be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we’ve actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire.”

Cronin’s sign-off, that “other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire,” suggests the removal as a Chrome-specific choice. It isn’t. Google controls 65% of the desktop browser market and the MV2 code being stripped from Chromium, the open-source project that Chrome and many other browsers are built on top of, affects every browser that shares that foundation.

Google justifies the migration on security grounds and there’s some substance to the argument. The old webRequest API gives extensions deep access to every network request a browser makes, from images and page loads to login credentials, and the extension sees the data before Chrome acts on it.

A compromised or malicious extension with that access can read your passwords as you type them, redirect you to fake websites, or slip harmful code into pages you trust.

The declarativeNetRequest API is designed to prevent exactly this kind of attack by restricting extensions to predefined rule sets. Instead of giving an extension free rein over your browser traffic, Chrome only lets it submit a list of instructions in advance and handles the blocking itself. That narrows the ways a bad actor can exploit an extension because the extension never gets to touch your data directly.

But Google generated roughly $239.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2025, and content blockers directly reduce the number of ads users see. The MV3 restrictions don’t ban ad blocking entirely. They cap how many rules an extension can use and eliminate dynamic blocking, the ability to recognize and stop new ad formats and trackers as they appear in real time.

Ad companies constantly change how they deliver ads, rotating domains and disguising tracking scripts, and the old extensions could keep up with that. The new ones can only block what’s already on a list that was written before the ad loaded. The result is ad blockers that work against yesterday’s ads but struggle against the ones that adapt daily.

The same company that built Chrome and sells the ads it displays also wrote the rules governing what ad blockers can do inside it. Whether those incentives shaped MV3’s design is the most obvious question in the room, and Google has never given a convincing answer.

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