Tag: joe biden

Biden’s War Machine Is Sending Another $1.7 Billion To Ukraine

The Biden administration is announcing another $1.7 billion in aid to Ukraine, bringing the total taxpayer money spent on the proxy war more than $65 billion since the Russia invaded the European nation.

The additional aid was announced on Tuesday and is partially sponsored by the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID). 

A statement from USAID says, “This additional funding will provide emergency food and cash assistance, safe drinking water, accessible shelter, logistical support, humanitarian coordination and protection, emergency health care, including mental health care and support for survivors of gender-based violence. This funding is in addition to USAID’s support for activities aimed specifically at alleviating shelter concerns during the coming winter months.”

It goes on to state, “The provision of cash will offset increased heating costs through the purchase of fuel for electricity, materials for light renovations (insulation), and the distribution of thermal blankets and winter clothes and shoes, especially for children and the elderly.”

To date, USAID has given the Ukrainian government $4 billion in budgetary support. The organization said these funds have been used to keep gas and electricity flowing to hospitals and schools, get humanitarian supplies to citizens, and pay the salaries of civil servants and teachers.

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Biden Administration is sued over DHS social media surveillance allegations

The Oversight Project, run by conservative think tank Heritage, has sued the Biden administration over surveillance of people through social media.

The lawsuit demands the release of documents related to the DHS’ contract with Babel Street, a Virginia-based company that provides surveillance and data mining technologies.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

The DHS has a contract with Babel Street to provide Babel X, a tool that scrapes data from smartphone apps and online sources. According to a report on Heritage’s website, government agencies “can aggregate and search that data by any number of keywords and in many languages.”

Speaking to The Washington Post in 2017, the company’s founder Jeff Chapman said: “There are billions of smartphones on the planet. All you have to do is listen to them.”

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Biden Admin Spends $1.5 Million on ‘Transgender Programming’ for Inmates

The left is becoming more aggressive at pushing their transgender agenda on society, and it doesn’t seem like they’re going to stop forcing their woke narrative  any time soon. 

In fact, prisoners will now have luxurious options when it comes to “transitioning,” and all paid for by the American people, of course. 

The Department of Justice (DOJ) entered a $1.5 million contract with a private company to develop a “transgender programming curriculum” to be used in prisons across the U.S. 

According to a statement to the Epoch Times from the office of public affairs for the department’s Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the curriculum will teach “techniques to seek support for mental health concerns and skills to advocate for physical, emotional, and sexual health and safety.” 

The program will help incarcerated inmates how to “manage identity concerns during incarceration” and advocate for their “sexual health and safety.” 

The contract also asks the firm to develop a program to help transgender inmates access hormone treatment after they are released.

Less than one percent, or 1,114 inmates of the 158,033 federal inmates under the BOP’s charge, identify as transgender, meaning the Biden administration spent roughly $1,250 on each transgender inmate. 

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Biden Commits Another $400 Million Of Your Taxpayer Dollars To Ukraine

The Biden administration has announced another $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, making the total financial assistance more than $63 billion.

This aid package is the 15th presidential drawdown since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. 

The latest package includes four more Lockheed Martin-created High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, ammunition for them, three tactical vehicles, a thousand rounds of 155 mm artillery ammunition, demolition munitions, counter-battery systems, and spare parts.

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Fueling the Warfare State. America’s $1.4 Trillion “National Security” Budget Makes Us Ever Less Safe

This March, when the Biden administration presented a staggering $813 billion proposal for “national defense,” it was hard to imagine a budget that could go significantly higher or be more generous to the denizens of the military-industrial complex. After all, that request represented far more than peak spending in the Korean or Vietnam War years, and well over $100 billion more than at the height of the Cold War. 

It was, in fact, an astonishing figure by any measure — more than two-and-a-half times what China spends; more, in fact, than (and hold your hats for this one!) the national security budgets of the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. And yet the weapons industry and hawks in Congress are now demanding that even more be spent.

In recent National Defense Authorization Act proposals, which always set a marker for what Congress is willing to fork over to the Pentagon, the Senate and House Armed Services Committees both voted to increase the 2023 budget yet again — by $45 billion in the case of the Senate and $37 billion for the House. The final figure won’t be determined until later this year, but Congress is likely to add tens of billions of dollars more than even the Biden administration wanted to what will most likely be a record for the Pentagon’s already bloated budget.

This lust for yet more weapons spending is especially misguided at a time when a never-ending pandemic, growing heat waves and other depredations of climate change, and racial and economic injustice are devastating the lives of millions of Americans.  Make no mistake about it: the greatest risks to our safety and our future are non-military in nature, with the exception, of course, of the threat of nuclear war, which could increase if the current budget goes through as planned.

But as TomDispatch readers know, the Pentagon is just one element in an ever more costly American national security state.  Adding other military, intelligence, and internal-security expenditures to the Pentagon’s budget brings the total upcoming “national security” budget to a mind-boggling $1.4 trillion. And note that, in June 2021, the last time my colleague Mandy Smithberger and I added up such costs to the taxpayer, that figure was almost $1.3 trillion, so the trend is obvious.

To understand how these vast sums are spent year after year, let’s take a quick tour of America’s national security budget, top to bottom.

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A Biden Tax Hike Kicked In That Affects Everything From Soap To Lightbulbs

An excise tax hike on household items that was buried in President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure package last year went into effect on July 1, according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

A roughly $13 billion tax increase on 42 chemicals, metallic elements and critical minerals was included in Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Common household items like rubber, soap, concrete, plastics, lightbulbs and electronics will be impacted. 

Superfund chemical excise taxes were previously in place between 1987 and 1995, according to the IRS. The infrastructure package, which the White House called “a once-in-a-generation investment,” triggered the re-implementation of the taxes.

Funds from the reinstated excise tax will be partially directed to the Superfund Trust Fund, which is administered through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and responsible for “cleaning up some of the nation’s most contaminated land and responding to environmental emergencies, oil spills and natural disasters.”

The tax impacts Americans who import, produce or manufacture qualified chemicals, Bloomberg Law reported. Importers, producers and manufacturers will pay between $0.48 and $9.47 per ton in tax on chemicals, the outlet reported.

Republicans have been critical of the Biden administration for imposing the taxes amid soaring inflation and supply chain crises. Inflation reached 8.6% in May from a year prior, which is the fastest increase in 40 years.

Former NIH Chief Is Now Highest Paid Member Of Most Expensive White House Staff Ever

When Francis Collins departed as Director of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) in December 2021, his legacy included multiple-millions of dollars in secret royalty payments to himself, prominent colleagues like Dr. Anthony Fauci, and hundreds of other scientists, officials, and researchers working under him.

Today, Collins is the highest paid adviser to the president with the most expensive White House staff ever, according to data compiled by the Chicago-based non-profit government watchdog, Open The Books (OTB).

Collins is paid $300,000 annually as the Acting Science Adviser to President Joe Biden. The new salary represents a 47 percent increase over the $203,500 annual compensation Collins made as NIH Director for 12 years. All salary figures were obtained by OTB under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Earlier this year, The Epoch Times first reported that OTB uncovered more than 1,600 NIH officials, scientists, and researchers who received an estimated $350 million in secret royalty payments from sources outside the government that the agency refuses to identify.

The payments were made between 2010 and 2020, including all but a couple of years of Collins’ tenure.

“We also find that during this period, leadership at NIH was involved in receiving third-party payments. For instance, Francis Collins, the immediate past director of NIH, received 14 payments. Dr. Anthony Fauci received 23 payments, and his deputy, Clifford Lane, received eight payments,” OTB President Adam Andrzejewski told The Epoch Times.

Collins’ successor as NIH Director, Dr. Lawrence Tabak, admitted to Congress in May that the secret royalty payments have “the appearance of a conflict of interest,” but he claimed the agency has sufficient internal safeguards to prevent abuse.

Federal personnel law and regulations bar government employees from having either actual conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflicts in their decision-making as public servants.

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Fed report finds 75% of $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program didn’t reach employees

Taxpayers paid $4 for every $1 in wages and benefits received by workers in jobs saved by the federal government’s pandemic Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), according to a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The Fed study also found PPP didn’t support jobs at risk of disappearing, and money flowed disproportionately to wealthier households.

“The PPP was a very large and very timely fiscal-policy intervention, saving about 3 million jobs at its peak in the second quarter of 2020 and distributing $800 billion well within two years of the onset of the COVID-19 crisis,” authors William Emmons and Drew Dahl concluded in their study, “Was the Paycheck Protection Program Effective?”

“But it was poorly targeted, as almost three-quarters of its benefits went to unintended recipients, including business owners, creditors and suppliers, rather than to workers. Due to differences in the typical incomes of those varied constituencies, it also ended up being quite regressive compared with other major COVID-19 relief programs, as it benefited high-income households much more.”

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MILLIONS OF BARRELS FROM U.S. EMERGENCY OIL RESERVE SENT ABROAD, INCLUDING TO CHINA

Courtesy of Reuters we know: more than 5 million barrels of oil that were part of the historic U.S. SPR release were exported to Europe and Asia last month, including top US geopolitical nemesis in the global arena, China, even as U.S. gasoline and diesel prices hit record highs.

The export of crude and fuel is blunting the impact of the moves by U.S. President Joe Biden to lower record pump prices. In a widely mocked call, Biden on Saturday renewed a call for gasoline suppliers to cut their prices, drawing rightful criticism from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, because going after mom and pop gas stores merely demonstrates just how clueless the handlers of the senile presidential puppet truly are.

About 1 million barrels per day have been drained from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve through October, an unprecedented pace. The drain means SPR inventories fell to the lowest since 1986. US crude futures are above $100 per barrel and gasoline and diesel prices above $5 a gallon in one-fifth of the nation. US officials have said oil prices could be higher if the SPR had not been tapped, and for once they are right. Still, the question looms of what happens to oil prices when the US can no longer sell the SPR amid concerns of a real emergency: we know the answer and the Biden admin won’t like it.

“The SPR remains a critical energy security tool to address global crude oil supply disruptions,” a Department of Energy spokesperson said, adding that the emergency releases helped ensure stable supply of crude oil.

Citing customs data, Reuters traced that the fourth-largest U.S. oil refiner, Phillips 66 shipped about 470,000 barrels of sour crude from the Big Hill SPR storage site in Texas to Trieste, Italy. Trieste is home to a pipeline that sends oil to refineries in central Europe. Meanwhile, Atlantic Trading & Marketing (ATMI), an arm of French oil major TotalEnergies, exported 2 cargoes of 560,000 barrels each. Cargoes of SPR crude were also headed to the Netherlands and to a Reliance refinery in India, an industry source said.

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FAA to give airports $1 billion for terminals and upgrades

The Biden administration is giving nearly $1 billion to 85 airports to expand and upgrade terminals and other facilities, using money approved in last year’s huge infrastructure bill.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the projects will help meet future demand for travel and make flying safer and more efficient.

“I don’t think anybody could look at airports across America today and say that the existing system and existing levels of funding have been adequate,” Buttigieg told reporters.

The grants announced Thursday are the first installment of $5 billion for airport projects that were included in an infrastructure bill that Congress approved and President Joe Biden signed last November.

The largest of the Federal Aviation Administration grants include $60 million to improve the terminal and replace the bag-handling system at Denver International Airport, $50 million apiece for Boston’s Logan Airport and Orlando International Airport in Florida, $49.6 million for Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., to build a new concourse and $20 million for Pittsburgh International Airport to build a new terminal next to the old one.

The main airports in Detroit and Philadelphia will get more than $20 million each to renovate their restrooms.

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