Tag: joe biden

Biden Expected To Sign Executive Order To Fight Republican ‘Bullying’ of LGBTQ Minors

On Wednesday, President Biden is expected to sign an executive order at a White House event aimed at “advancing LGBTQI+ equality.” He is also expected to blast Republicans for allegedly “bullying” LGBT minors.

Per a senior administration official to Fox News: “[Biden will] forcefully condemn the discriminatory attacks on LGBTQI+ children and families that are seeing all across the country.”

“He will talk about how these bills are worsening the mental health crisis that LGBTQ youth are facing, putting them at greater risk of suicide,” he added. “President Biden always stands up to bullies, and that’s what these extreme MAGA laws and policies do. They bully kids.”

Of course, it’s not clear what “discriminatory attacks” the President is referring to. Nor is it understood what “extreme MAGA laws and policies” are responsible for this alleged attack on LGBT children and the high suicide rate amongst the community.

The expected executive order will also call on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to ensure minors can receive gender transition surgeries. It will also “crackdown on conversion therapy”, calling on HHS to clarify that federally funded programs cannot endorse the practice.

Keep reading

MBS Sullies Saudi Arabia’s Good Name With Plans To Meet US President

The White House has officially confirmed reports that President Biden will indeed be visiting Saudi Arabia in contradiction of his campaign vows to make the nation a “pariah” for its human rights violations, and everyone’s acting like visiting a murderous tyrant is somehow beneath the dignity of a US president.

“The President will then travel to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which is the current chair of the GCC and the venue for this gathering of nine leaders from across the region, at the invitation of King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud,” the White House statement reads. “The President appreciates King Salman’s leadership and his invitation.  He looks forward to this important visit to Saudi Arabia, which has been a strategic partner of the United States for nearly eight decades.”

The president will meet with the nation’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, to discuss what the White House calls “means for expanding regional economic and security cooperation, including new and promising infrastructure and climate initiatives, as well as deterring threats from Iran, advancing human rights, and ensuring global energy and food security.”

But what they will primarily be discussing is oil, as the US flounders in its economic war against Russia.

Keep reading

Biden to send another $1 billion weapons package to Ukraine

President Biden on Wednesday announced plans to send another $1 billion security assistance package to Ukraine that will include artillery, coastal defense weapons and ammunition to help the country fight off Russian forces.

Biden also said he would send an additional $225 million in humanitarian aid to Ukraine to provide drinking water, medical supplies, food and shelter for families inside Ukraine grappling with the impact of the months-long Russian invasion.  

The president said in a written statement that he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday to inform him of the additional assistance, which is a sliver of a massive $40 billion aid package passed by Congress last month. The call Wednesday morning between the two leaders lasted about 40 minutes, according to the White House. 

“I reaffirmed my commitment that the United States will stand by Ukraine as it defends its democracy and support its sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of unprovoked Russian aggression,” Biden said.  

The U.S. has sent billions in weaponry, humanitarian and economic assistance to Ukraine to help forces blunt the Russian attack since the start of the war at the end of February. The administration quickly depleted the first $13.6 billion emergency aid package Congress approved for Ukraine in March. 

According to the White House statement, the latest assistance package will include ammunition for artillery and the advanced rocket systems that the U.S. already sent to Ukraine. 

Keep reading

Biden Claims Inflation Is ‘Worse Everywhere But Here.’ That’s Not Even Close To True.

President Joe Biden falsely claimed in a Tuesday speech for the AFL-CIO that inflation is hitting the rest of the world worse than in the United States.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 8.6% year-over-year as of May, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed last week. Over the same period, the Producer Price Index (PPI) — which tracks inflation for wholesalers — increased 10.8%.

“Under my plan for the economy, we’ve made extraordinary progress,” Biden nevertheless argued at the labor union’s conference. “And we put America in a position to tackle the… worldwide problem that’s worse everywhere but here: inflation.”

However, data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that the United States boasts higher inflation rates than many other developed countries. The 8.3% inflation rate seen in the United States as of April was higher than the 7.8% rate in the United Kingdom, the 7.4% rate in Germany, the 6.8% rate in Canada, the 6% rate in Italy, the 4.8% rate in South Korea, and the 2.5% rate in Japan.

“Energy prices remained the main contributor to inflation in France, Germany and Italy in April,” the OECD said, “while inflation excluding food and energy continued to drive inflation in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.”

The international organization recently increased its 2022 inflation forecasts for the world’s leading economies, including an upward revision from 4.4% to 5.9% in the United States — a level exceeding expected rates for Australia, France, South Korea, Norway, Switzerland, and Japan.

In response to the most recent inflation report for the United States, Biden again pinned the blame on “Putin’s Price Hike” — a reference to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its role in hiking global energy costs.

Keep reading

Biden Advisor Says Social Media Should Silence Anyone Who Criticises Green Energy “Transition”

One of Joe Biden’s senior advisors told a reporter this week that social media companies should be cracking down on and censoring anyone who speeds information critical of the administration’s so called ‘green energy transition’.

National climate advisor Gina McCarthy made the comments in an interview with a reporter for Axios, stating “Now it’s not so much denying the problem. What the [fossil fuel] industry is now doing is seeding doubt about the costs associated with [green energy] and whether they work or not.”

She continued, “We need the tech companies to really jump in,” on “disinformation,” noting that criticising a green energy transition upheaval is “equally dangerous to denial,” and adding “we have to move fast.”

The Axios interviewer just nodded in agreement without any pushback.

Keep reading

Biden’s New Press Secretary Almost Calls Saudis A ‘Regime’

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre came very close to committing the cardinal sin of referring to a US-aligned nation as a “regime” on Monday.

In the official White House transcript of Jean-Pierre’s interaction with a reporter inquiring about Biden’s upcoming meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the press secretary’s comment reads as follows:

“Of course, he will be — they will discuss energy with the Saudi government.”

However, if you watch a video clip highlighted on Twitter by Kawsachun News’ Camila Escalante, you’ll notice Jean-Pierre gets tripped up before the word “government”, with a more accurate transcribing reading something like, “Of course, he will be — they will discuss energy with the Saudi re— uhh, err, government.”

Which is hilarious, because for imperial spinmeisters the word “regime” is traditionally reserved for governments which are not aligned with the US empire, because it suggests that they are undemocratic and authoritarian. The theocratic monarchy of Saudi Arabia is most certainly authoritarian and is the exact opposite of democratic, but because it is aligned with the interests of Washington that pejorative label is typically avoided at the upper echelons of imperial narrative management.

Whether or not a government will be affixed with this label has far less to do with its level of oppressiveness than with whether or not it cooperates with imperial agendas. In a 2018 article titled “A ‘Regime’ Is a Government at Odds With the US Empire,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s Gregory Shupak explained:

The function of “regime” is to construct the ideological scaffolding for the United States and its partners to attack whatever country has a government described in this manner. According to the mainstream media, the democratically elected government of Nicaragua is a “regime” (Washington Post, 7/11/18). Cuba also has a “regime” (Washington Post, 7/25/18). Iraq and Libya used to have “regimes”—before the United States implemented “regime change.” North Korea most definitely has one (New York Times, 7/26/18), as do China (Washington Post, 8/3/18) and Russia (Wall Street Journal, 7/15/18).

 

When, for the media, does a government become a “regime”? The answer, broadly speaking: A country’s political leaders are likely to be called a “regime” when they do not follow US dictates, and are less likely to be categorized as such if they cooperate with the empire.

…

Washington’s economic and military partner Saudi Arabia is described as having a “regime” far less often than is Syria, despite its rather “regime”-like qualities: Its unelected government represses dissidents, including advocates for women and its Shia minority, and carries out executions at an extraordinary clip, including of people accused of adultery, apostasy and witchcraft. Saudi Arabia crushed an uprising in neighboring Bahrain in 2011, and with its US and UK partners, is carrying out an almost apocalyptic war in Yemen.

Keep reading

Rents across U.S. rise above $2,000 a month for the first time ever

Kim Drotar is a public school teacher who rents an apartment in St Louis. But she doesn’t have the best neighbors.

“They’re 19, 20 and have parties and bang on my door in the middle of the night and, you know, just to be jerks,” she says.

Drotar’s a single mom with a daughter in 5th grade. She’s been trying to find a house she can afford to buy.

“I just want some place where she can ride her bike and make friends with the neighbors and play with the kids and they can come over.”

But she keeps getting outbid when she makes offers. And now with mortgage rates up sharply she says she’s just been priced out completely. Meanwhile, continuing to rent is getting harder to afford, too.

Kim Drotar says her rent rising by 22% this year is making it harder for her to save for a down payment on a house.

“My rent is increasing 22% this year,” she says. “It’s harder and harder to save more for a down payment.”

A new report from Redfin shows that nationally listed rents for available apartments rose 15% from a year ago. And the median listed rent for an available apartment rose above $2,000 a month for the first time.

Keep reading

Joe Biden’s Submissive — and Highly Revealing — Embrace of Saudi Despots

In 2018, President Trump issued a statement reaffirming the U.S.’s long-standing relationship with the Saudi royal family on the ground that this partnership serves America’s “national interests.” Trump specifically cited the fact that “Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world” and has purchased hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons from U.S. arms manufacturers. Trump’s statement was issued in the wake of widespread demands in Washington that Trump reduce or even sever ties with the Saudi regime due to the likely role played by its Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

What made these Trump-era demands somewhat odd was that the Khashoggi murder was not exactly the first time the Saudi regime violated human rights and committed atrocities of virtually every type. For decades, the arbitrary imprisonment and murder of Saudi dissidents, journalists, and activists have been commonplace, to say nothing of the U.S./UK-supported devastation of Yemen which began during the Obama years. All of that took place as American presidents in the post-World War II order made the deep and close partnership between Washington and the tyrants of Riyadh a staple of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Yet, as was typical for the Trump years, political and media commentators treated Trump’s decision to maintain relations with the Saudis as if it were some unprecedented aberration of evil which he alone pioneered — some radical departure of long-standing, bipartisan American values — rather than what it was: namely, the continuation of standard bipartisan U.S. policy for decades. In an indignant editorial following Trump’s statement, The New York Times exclaimed that Trump was making the world “more [dangerous] by emboldening despots in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere,” specifically blaming “Mr. Trump’s view that all relationships are transactional, and that moral or human rights considerations must be sacrificed to a primitive understanding of American national interests.”

The life-long Eurocrat, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, lamented what he described as Trump’s worldview: “if you buy US weapons and if you are against Iran – then you can kill and repress as much as you want.” CNN published an analysis by the network’s White House reporter Stephen Collinson— under the headline: “Trump’s Saudi support highlights brutality of ‘America First’ doctrine” — which thundered: “Refusing to break with Saudi strongman Mohammed bin Salman over the killing in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Trump effectively told global despots that if they side with him, Washington will turn a blind eye to actions that infringe traditional US values.” Trump’s willingness to do business with the Saudis, argued Collinson, “represented another blow to the international rule of law and global accountability, concepts Trump has shown little desire to enforce in nearly two years in office.”

Keep reading