Tag: joe biden

Emergency rule emergency? How authorities are invoking crises to exercise unprecedented power

Days after the 2008 election, Rahm Emanuel famously issued what’s known today as Rahm’s rule.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Emanuel, then chief of staff to President-elect Barack Obama. “And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

Emanuel argued the 2008 financial crisis afforded the Obama administration a window to promptly address problems that had previously been deferred indefinitely pending the long-term ripening of political consensus.

Fourteen years later, Emanuel’s now-famous phrase on crises has become standard practice in Washington, D.C., as officials in power regularly use what they deem “emergencies”— from viral pandemics to purported threats to democracy — to push controversial measures and restrictions on civil liberties that otherwise might fail due to pushback.

This trend was recently highlighted by President Biden declaring the COVID-19 pandemic over while still maintaining the national emergency declaration on the pandemic as his administration used COVID-19 to justify major executive action.

“The pandemic is over,” Biden recently told CBS’ “60 Minutes” in an interview. “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.”

However, the Biden administration has yet to lift the public health emergency that was first declared in 2020 for COVID-19. That declaration has allowed the White House to use the National Emergencies Act to activate special executive powers, such as restricting hours of operations at U.S. ports of entry.

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Biden Admin Spends Tens Of Millions To Deliver Fiber Internet To Only About 90 Rural Alaska Households

President Joe Biden’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) is spending tens of millions in tax dollars to bring fiber optic internet to rural southeast Alaska.

As part of USDA’s “Reconnect Program,” it awarded a roughly $33 million grant to the Alaska Telephone Company (ATC), the agency announced last Thursday. Fiber will be delivered to 92 households and a total of 211 people and five businesses in two Alaska native villages called Skagway and Chilkat, according to a federal grant award listing.

ATC’s fiber plan will cost around $204,000 per passing of each residence and business, according to an analysis by Fierce Telecom, a tech publication. ATC also said in a Sept. 22 statement it will invest roughly $11 million into the fiber project.

“The Klukwan-Skagway Fiber project will spur economic growth and significantly enhance quality of life in very remote, hard-to-serve locations, empowering rural Alaskans with options for remote work, distance learning, telemedicine, and more,” Mike Garrett, CEO of Alaska Power & Telephone Company, which oversees ATC, said in the statement.

Fiber is a type of broadband connection that involves plastic or glass cords and is used for cable television and telephone signals as well as internet. It is roughly 20 times faster than standard cable internet and 80 times faster than digital subscriber line (DSL), another internet technology, according to HP.

USDA’s reconnect program allocates up to $1.1 billion in grants and loans to areas in rural America that lack “sufficient access” to broadband internet, a type of internet through service providers. The program was authorized under Biden’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed in November 2021.

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14 Things We Know About The Mysterious “Explosions” That Severely Damaged The Nord Stream 1 And Nord Stream 2 Pipelines

Something really strange just happened.  On Monday, large underwater “explosions” were detected in the precise areas of the sea where the Nord Stream pipeline system is now leaking.  In fact, the explosions were so large that they actually registered on the Richter scale.  If someone wanted to purposely damage the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, very large explosions would be needed because those pipelines are extremely thick.  So it appears that this was a deliberate act of sabotage, and that is what many European officials are now alleging.  But if that is the case, who was behind it?

At this point we just don’t know.

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Biden Asks If Recently Deceased Congresswoman Is At White House Speech

President Biden’s latest gaffe – no not the pedophile one –  was quite the doozy.

While reading remarks during a White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, Biden asked if the late Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN) was in attendance.

Walorski was tragically killed in a car crash last month.

“I want to thank all of you here, including bipartisan elected officials like Rep. McGovern, Sen. Braun, Sen. Booker, Rep. — Jackie, are you here?” Biden said. “Where’s Jackie? I thought she was going to be here — to help make this a reality.”

What’s more, Biden issued a statement saying that Walorski’s death left he and first lady Jill Biden “shocked and saddened.”

“We may have represented different parties and disagreed on many issues, but she was respected by members of both parties for her work on the House Ways and Means Committee on which she served,” reads the statement (which Biden totally wrote). “She also served as co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus, and my team and I appreciated her partnership as we plan for a historic White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health this fall that will be marked by her deep care for the needs of rural America.”

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Ex-CIA Ray McGovern: Conditioned For War With Russia

Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden — I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jacob Sullivan and China specialist Kurt Campbell – will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.

Most Americans are oblivious to the reality that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary weapons. Corporate leaders and Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. “exceptionalism,” find the lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive themselves into thinking that (a) the U.S. cannot lose a war; (b) escalation can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or unconsciously, “Not to worry. And, in any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk.”

The media also know they can always trot out died-in-the-wool Russophobes to “explain,” for example, why the Russians are “almost genetically driven” to do evil (James Clapper, former national intelligence director and now hired savant on CNN); or Fiona Hill (former national intelligence officer for Russia), who insists “Putin wants to evict the United States from Europe … As he might put it: “Goodbye, America. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” 

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The US Empire Is Accelerating Toward Global Conflict On Two Fronts

Vladimir Putin has announced that referenda will be held in four regions of the eastern part of Ukraine whose populations will now vote on whether to join the Russian Federation, much like the Crimea referendum of 2014 which resulted in Russia’s annexation of that territory. Putin announced that 300,000 additional troops will be mobilized for the war to help facilitate this action, which is a major escalation in the conflict by any measure.

Putin also issued a stern nuclear warning that’s being hysterically spun by empire managers as a shocking and unprecedentedly bellicose threat, but if you read what he actually said it’s clear that he’s really reminding the west of the same principles of Mutually Assured Destruction that have been in place for generations, and isn’t expressing any position that western nuclear powers don’t also hold:

Nuclear blackmail was also launched. We are talking not only about the shelling of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which is encouraged by the West, which threatens a nuclear catastrophe, but also about the statements of some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction against Russia – nuclear weapons.

To those who allow themselves to make such statements about Russia, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the NATO countries. And if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.

The citizens of Russia can be sure that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be ensured, I emphasize this again, with all the means at our disposal. And those who are trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the wind can also turn in their direction.

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This Biden Proposal Could Turn US into A “Digital Dictatorship”

Last Wednesday, President Biden was widely praised in mainstream and health-care–focused media for his call to create a “new biomedical research agency” modeled after the US military’s “high-risk, high-reward” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. As touted by the president, the agency would seek to develop “innovative” and “breakthrough” treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, with a call to “end cancer as we know it.”  

Far from “ending cancer” in the way most Americans might envision it, the proposed agency would merge “national security” with “health security” in such as way as to use both physical and mental health “warning signs” to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur. Such a system is a recipe for a technocratic “pre-crime” organization with the potential to criminalize both mental and physical illness as well as “wrongthink.”

The Biden administration has asked Congress for $6.5 billion to fund the agency, which would be largely guided by Biden’s recently confirmed top science adviser, Eric Lander. Lander, formerly the head of the Silicon Valley–dominated Broad Institute, has been controversial for his ties to eugenicist and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his relatively recent praise for James Watson, an overtly racist eugenicist. Despite that, Lander is set to be confirmed by the Senate and Congress and is reportedly significantly enthusiastic about the proposed new “health DARPA.”

This new agency, set to be called ARPA-H or HARPA, would be housed within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and would raise the NIH budget to over $51 billion. Unlike other agencies at NIH, ARPA-H would differ in that the projects it funds would not be peer reviewed prior to approval; instead hand-picked program managers would make all funding decisions. Funding would also take the form of milestone-driven payments instead of the more traditional multiyear grants.

ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the “breakthroughs” that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, stated just last month that “cancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech” post-COVID. BioNTech has been developing mRNA gene therapies for cancer for years and is collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create mRNA-based treatments for tuberculosis and HIV.

Other “innovative” technologies that will be a focus of this agency are less well known to the public and arguably more concerning.

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Biden’s ‘60 Minutes’ Interview Proved Once Again He Isn’t Running The Country, So Who Is?

President Joe Biden sat down for a rare, one-on-one interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” this past weekend, and it went about as well as you’d expect.

In addition to dismissing public concerns about skyrocketing inflation and his family’s foreign business dealings, America’s commander in chief decided to lay out his administration’s supposed policy with respect to the ongoing China-Taiwan issue.

“We agree with what we signed onto a long time ago,” Biden said in an apparent reference to the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act. “There’s a ‘One China Policy,’ and Taiwan makes their own judgments about their independence. We are … not encouraging [them to be] independent. … That’s their decision.”

Under the “One China Policy,” the United States acknowledges that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the sole government of China and that Taiwan belongs to China. The U.S. does not, however, recognize the PRC’s claims to territorial sovereignty over Taiwan.

While Biden’s remarks about Taiwanese independence fall in line with the United States’ long-standing policy toward the island nation, his next comments almost assuredly left White House staff hopping mad. When asked by CBS News’s Scott Pelley if the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese invasion, Biden answered with an unequivocal “yes.”

“So, unlike Ukraine, to be clear, sir, U.S. forces, U.S. men and women would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion?” Pelley asked in a follow-up, to which Biden replied, “yes.”

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