Tag: joe biden

Biden wants to put the US on permanent war footing

The White House is steering the United States into a budgetary ditch it may not be able to get out of.

The Biden administration is supersizing the defense industry to meet foreign arms obligations instead of making tradeoffs essential to any effective budget. Its new National Defense Industrial Strategy lays out a plan to “catalyze generational change” of the defense industrial base and to “meet the strategic moment” — one rhetorically dominated by competition with China, but punctuated by U.S. support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Instead of reevaluating its maximalist national security strategy, the Biden administration is doubling down. It is proposing a generation of investment to expand an arms industry that, overall, fails to meet cost, schedule, and performance standards. And if its strategy is any indication, the administration has no vision for how to eventually reduce U.S. military industrial capacity.

When the Cold War ended, the national security budget shrank. Then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and deputy William Perry convened industry leaders to encourage their consolidation in a meeting that later became known as the “Last Supper.” Arms makers were to join forces or go out of business. So they ended up downsizing from over 50 prime contractors to just five. And while contractors needed to pare down their industrial capacity, unchecked consolidation created the monopolistic defense sector we have now — one that depends heavily on government contracts and enjoys significant freedom to set prices.

In the decades since, contractors have leveraged their growing economic power to pave inroads on Capitol Hill. They have solidified their economic influence to stave off the political potential for future national security cuts, regardless of their performance or the geopolitical environment.

Growing the military industrial base over the course of a generation would only further empower arms makers in our economy, deepening the ditch the United States has dug itself into for decades by continually increasing national security spending — and by doling about half of it out to contractors. The U.S. spends more on national security than the next 10 countries combined, outpacing China alone by over 30%.

Ironically, the administration acknowledges in the strategy that “America’s economic security and national security are mutually reinforcing,” stating that “the nation’s military strength depends in part on our overall economic strength.” The strategy further states that optimizing the nation’s defense needs typically requires tradeoffs between “cost, speed, and scale.” It doesn’t mention quality of industrial output — arguably the biggest tradeoff the U.S. government has made in military procurement.

Keep reading

Ukraine’s Top Spy Chief Says Navalny Died From Blood Clot, Rejects ‘Murder’ Narrative

In a very unexpected plot twist, Ukraine appears to be in agreement with the Kremlin on Alexei Navalny’s death inside a far northern Russian prison which occurred on Feb. 16 and was listed by Russian authorities as officially due to “natural causes”. The dominant Western narrative has thus far been that Putin had him “murdered”. 

Yet now Kiev sources are saying that the anti-Putin activist supported by the West died of a blood clot. Surprisingly, this explanation is being advanced among Ukraine media sources after none other than Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), bluntly stated it to a group of journalists on Sunday. “I may disappoint you, but as far as we know, he indeed died as a result of a blood clot. And this has been more or less confirmed,” Budanov stated.

“This wasn’t sourced from the internet, but, unfortunately, natural [causes],” he added in the remarks which were also caught on video. The spy chief’s words were also picked up in The Daily Mail, though predictably US mainstream outlets have been slow to acknowledge the assessment.

Further, the NATO-friendly pundit Anton Gerashchenko, who also served as former Ukrainian Advisor to Internal Affairs Minister, has said the following:

Vladimir Osechkin, founder of Gulagu. Net, says that, according to his sources, Navalny was killed (finished off with a blow to the chest) after being tortured with frost.

Head of Ukrainian military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov said that according to his sources, “it was a blood clot.”

Over the weekend Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, said her son’s body was finally released to the family. She has said Russian officials are seeking to pressure the family into doing a ‘secret funeral’ so as not to attract public demonstrations. “We do not know if the authorities will interfere to carry it out as the family wants and as Alexey deserves,” she said previously.

Navalny’s wife has laid ultimate blame on Putin for his death, while President Biden too and other Western leaders have said “Putin is responsible.”

“What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality,” Biden had said immediately after Navalny’s death was announced by Russian prison services. Some European leaders quickly branded Putin’s government a “rogue regime” as a result, urging that Moscow “must be held accountable”. The whole situation seems akin to the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, where there was a rush to blame Moscow, but allegation which were later quieted and walked back.

Meanwhile, Russia hawks in the US are urging the administration to go beyond last Friday’s large round of new anti-Moscow sanctions…

Keep reading

Biden DOJ Indicts Journalist for Tucker Carlson Leaks

A Florida journalist who accessed and made public unaired video footage of an interview that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson conducted with the rapper Ye was arrested this week and hit with more than a dozen federal charges stemming in part from the disclosure, raising immediate concerns from press freedom advocates.

Timothy Burke, a Tampa-based media consultant and former Daily Beast staffer, obtained and disseminated clips of the 2022 Ye interview — during which the rapper formerly known as Kanye West made antisemitic remarks that were edited out of the final version — as well as behind-the-scenes footage of Carlson, who left Fox last year.

The 26-page indictment against Burke, revealed on Thursday, accuses him of “utilizing compromised credentials to gain unauthorized access to protected computers” and “scouring those protected computers for electronic items and information,” among other alleged crimes.

Though the indictment doesn’t explicitly mention Fox or Carlson, the Tampa Bay Times reported that it says Burke “accessed a video stream of an interview featuring a show host for a ‘multinational media company based in New York City’ on Oct. 6, 2022 — the same day Carlson’s interview with West aired.”

Burke and his legal team have denied any wrongdoing and rejected claims that Fox was “hacked,” maintaining that he accessed the video footage using information “publicly posted to the internet.”

Keep reading

Biden Admin. pressured Amazon to censor books about vaccine safety risks during Covid

White House officials pressured Amazon in 2021 to censor and minimize access to books on its online site that questioned the safety or efficacy of vaccines, according to e-mails released earlier this month by House Judiciary Committee Chairman, U.S. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio.

The campaign to curtail any vaccine-related book sales during the height of the pandemic was led by President Biden’s Senior Advisor for Covid-19 Response, Andrew Slavitt, and sought to avoid the spread of “propaganda and misinformation.”

“Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?” Slavitt wrote to Amazon in a Mar. 2, 2021, e-mail.

In initial discussions, Amazon officials discouraged “a manual intervention” to censor or remove certain book titles from populating in search results, concerned that it would be too obvious and lead to further criticism. “We will not be doing a manual intervention today,” one e-mail between Amazon executives read. “The team/PR feels very strongly that it is too visible, and will further compound the Harry/Sally narrative (which is getting the Fox News treatment today apparently), and won’t fix the problem long-term … because of customer behavior associates.”

The Amazon officials, whose names were redacted from the e-mails, reveal that another individual at the company “gave very direct guidance to the teams to be boring and not do anything that is visible and will draw more attention.”

Keep reading

The Average U.S. Household Is Spending $1,019 More A Month Just To Buy The Same Goods And Services It Did 3 Years Ago

It seems odd to talk about 2021 as “the good old days”, but the truth is that the cost of living was far lower just three short years ago.  Earlier today, I did an interview with Sam Rohrer of Stand In The Gap Today in which we discussed how food prices have gotten wildly out of control.  One example that I brought up was the fact that a Big Mac “value meal” can cost up to 18 dollars in some parts of the country.  There is no way that I would shell out 18 bucks for a burger, some fries and a drink at McDonald’s.  But this is the economic environment that we live in today.

Has your income gone up by more than a thousand dollars a month over the past three years?

If not, you are falling behind.

According to economist Mark Zandi, the average U.S. household is now shelling out an additional $1,019 a month just to purchase the exact same goods and services that it did three years ago…

The typical U.S. household needed to pay $213 more a month in January to purchase the same goods and services it did one year ago because of still-high inflation, according to new calculations from Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.

Americans are paying on average $605 more each month compared with the same time two years ago and $1,019 more compared with three years ago, before the inflation crisis began.

In the old days, I actually enjoyed going to the grocery store.

But now it has become such a painful experience.

Keep reading

Refusing To Admit US Foreign Policy Blunders

A recurring defect in US foreign policy is a refusal by elites to concede when they made a serious policy mistake.  This is not a new problem, but it has grown decidedly worse in the past few decades.  It characterized the intervention in Vietnam years after it should have become evident that Washington’s approach was failing.

Even one of the few worthwhile lessons from the bruising Vietnam experience proved only to be temporary; The U.S. should not get involved in murky civil wars.  A generation later, the United States had embarked on forceable nation building missions in both the Balkans and the Middle East.  The subsequent interventions in Libya and Syria were even less defensible because Washington already had the Iraq fiasco as fresh evidence that the Vietnam failure was not unique.

One might have thought that the Vietnam experience would have inoculated US policymakers against a repetition in other parts of the world, however, even that benefit appeared to be temporary.  Not even the sacrifice of 58,000 American lives and approximately 1,000,000 Vietnamese lives caused US leaders to reconsider a policy of global interventionism.  Indeed, two decades later the United States was mired in another full-fledged civil war, this time in the Balkans.  Another decade later, US leaders once again attempted to forcibly execute a strategy that created a client both democratic and compliant in Iraq.  Such conduct strongly indicated that US officials might be incapable of learning appropriate foreign policy lessons.  The latest adventure of the U.S. and its NATO allies in Ukraine appears to be less rewarding and even more dangerous than the previous examples.

A new generation of policy makers replicated many of the same mistakes a generation later in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world.  Civilian and military officials in George W. Bush’s administration clung to failing policies even when it became obvious that the strategy being pursued was based on the illusion that Washington’s Iraq clients were winning the struggle.

And once again, the United States and its allies ignored multiple signs early on that the latest interventions would turn out badly.  The portrayal of conditions in Afghanistan, for example, had almost no resemblance of actual battlefield conditions.  Media accounts and congressional testimony bore little resemblance to the actual situation on the ground in that country.  In the real world, Taliban forces made steady advances.  Such spewing of fiction about an ultimate democratic victory continued during the Obama and Trump administrations.  And when Joe Biden’s administration finally withdrew U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the withdrawal turned into a fiasco.

Keep reading

Biden Admin Wants To Spend Around $1 Million on University “Disinformation” Monitoring Program

The White House’s latest initiative to carry out its brand of combating misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (which is now referred to by the handy “MDM” initial) continues to co-opt the education sector.

The Department of Justice agency the National Institute for Justice (NIJ) is behind the funding effort that is said to be designed to study and research “effective technologies and tools for identification, moderation, and/or removal of extremist content.”

A grant worth $1 million will be spent to come up with a dashboard featuring an MDM tracker, which is supposed to surveil the internet for both speech, and narratives, and do so in real time. The project’s official name is, “Networks and Pathways of Violent Extremism: Effectiveness of Mis/Disinformation Campaigns.”

And reports say that the targeted speech coincides with “contentious political events.” Critics say that the taxpayer dollars here are in reality going towards suppression of conservative and religious groups, rather than as declared, violent extremists.

The recipient of the grant is South Carolina-based Clemson University. Researchers there are expected to come up with computer models that will keep an eye on accounts singled out as MDM peddlers and identify people associated with allegedly spreading MDM.

Eventually, the effort should produce the real-time tracking dashboard.

Regular citizens may not benefit from this project – considering the “fluid” nature of the very definitions of misinformation and its companions (some reports mention the initial, and subsequent treatment of the Covid origin and Hunter Biden laptop stories as examples of this.)

But the grant does specify who will benefit: law enforcement and policymakers.

Keep reading

Biden and US media lies about Ukraine are reminiscent of Vietnam War

The American Conservative published an article that parallels the Vietnam War, considered the greatest military humiliation in US history, with what they point out is a campaign of deception carried out by the current US Government, which will lead to a defeat for Kiev and NATO.

According to the author James W. Carden, who served as an advisor on US-Russian affairs at the State Department during the Obama administration, the media campaign regarding Ukraine carried out by the White House was a copy of the actions of successive US governments in Vietnam until the Nixon administration withdrew troops and concluded the intervention in 1973. He relates the Vietnam War with the lies with which President Joe Biden and his collaborators have tried to deceive citizens about the progress of the Ukraine conflict and its origin, among other issues.

These false narratives, the article notes, have been put in place and presented to Americans with the help of the “most dutiful accomplices,” such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, media outlets that, until recent times, published the triumphalist comments of Biden and his administration without any type of questioning, in addition to analysis columns where Russian President Vladimir Putin was demonised and falsely stated that Ukraine was on its way to victory.

Keep reading

Biden’s New Regulation Could Make Up to 1 Million Jobs Vanish, According to Manufacturing Leader

The Biden administration is in the process of putting in place a rule one manufacturing leader says could kill off a million manufacturing jobs.

Jay Timmons, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, made his prediction in an advance copy of his annual state of manufacturing address, according to Fox Business.

The remarks said that while Biden claims to support manufacturers, “what he won’t tell you is that his federal agencies are, at this very moment, working to undermine his manufacturing legacy — those agencies are undermining your success.

“In fact, just two weeks ago, they announced one big regulation that could wipe out up to 1 million jobs. It’s referred to as National Ambient Air Quality Standards or PM2.5,” he said.

“It’s not the name that matters. It’s the consequences. It’s stricter than rules they have even in Europe,” he wrote.

“And in vast portions of the country, we will barely be able to build new manufacturing facilities as a result,” Timmons said.

The rule imposes a stricter air quality standard on what’s known as fine particle pollution.

“Michigan would be one of the states hit hardest. And if new manufacturing investments dry up, that spills over to the rest of the state economy,” Timmons said.

“It affects the family trying to sell their home, the teacher hoping for new investments in schools, the students looking for job opportunities here in the state,” Timmons said

Timmons said that forcing manufacturers to move to other nations defeats the goal of clean air rules.

“And to what end? You cannot solve the world’s environmental challenges by driving manufacturing investment away from the United States to countries with lower standards,” he said.

Keep reading

Republicans ask why 9 boxes of Biden records were omitted in Special Counsel report

Department of Justice (DOJ) Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents omitted nine boxes of potentially classified records, according to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin).

The senators made the existence of the records public after the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) responded to their oversight queries. NARA reportedly confirming that, at DOJ’s urging, it retrieved the 9 boxes out of concern for the sensitivity of their contents.

NARA further acknowledged to the senators that the FBI had reviewed the contents of the boxes. But it is unclear if NARA or the FBI shared their findings with Hur.   

Grassley and Johnson are pressing Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Hur on this “significant factual omission.”

Specifically, the senators are asking for a description of the boxes’ contents and an explanation of what the agencies did with them.  “…[W]e publicly revealed last year that NARA had retrieved nine boxes of Biden records from the Boston office of Patrick Moore, one of Biden’s personal counsels,” the senators wrote.

“Oddly, Special Counsel Hur’s report did not mention NARA’s retrieval of the nine boxes from Mr. Moore’s office… [I]t is unclear if Special Counsel Hur had any awareness of or reviewed the information contained in these nine boxes.” “DOJ, FBI, and the Special Counsel’s office owe Congress and the American people a complete explanation regarding this apparent omission in Special Counsel Hur’s report, a detailed description of the contents of the nine boxes, and what was done with them,” the senators concluded. 

Keep reading