Tag: joe biden

Biden’s Pentagon Transition Team Members Funded by the Arms Industry

On Tuesday, Joe Biden released a list of transition teams for the various departments in his future White House. The Pentagon transition team for Biden consists of 23 people, many of whom hail from hawkish think tanks.

The team is led by Kathleen Hicks, who worked in the Pentagon under the Obama administration. Hicks most recent employer is the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS), a think tank that receives contributions from arms makers like Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, to name a few.

CSIS also receives contributions from governments. The think tank’s top government donors are the US, the UAE, Taiwan, and Japan. Two other CSIS employees are on the transition team; Andrew Hunter and Melissa Dalton, who both worked in the Pentagon under the Obama administration.

CSIS employees author policy papers and Op-Eds that generally call for more US involvement around the world. In August, Hicks co-authored an Op-Ed in The Hill titled, “Pentagon Action to Withdraw from Germany Benefits Our Adversaries,” a piece that slammed Trump’s plan to draw down troops from Germany, which Biden could to call off.

Two members of the transition team come from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), Susanna Blume, a former Pentagon employee, and Ely Ratner, who served as deputy national security advisor to then-vice president Joe Biden from 2015 to 2017.

CNAS is another think tank that enjoys hefty donations from weapons makers, major corporations, and governments. From 2019 to 2020, CNAS received at least $500,000 from the US State Department and at least $500,000 from Northrop Grumman. Other donors include Google, Facebook, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin.

Three more team members list their latest employer as the RAND Corporation, Stacie Pettyjohn, a wargaming expert, Christine Wormuth, who held a few roles in the Obama administration, and Terri Tanielian, a behavioral scientist.

RAND is another hawkish think tank that receives the bulk of its funding from the US government, including the US Army, Air Force, and Department of Homeland Security. RAND is also funded by the UAE, Qatar, and NATO.

A report from In These Times found at least eight out of the 23 team members come from organizations that receive funding from US weapons makers (not including RAND). Besides the CSIS and CNAS employees listed above, In These Times includes Sharon Burke, who works for New America, Shawn Skel­ly, from CACI International, and Vic­tor Gar­cia, from Rebellion Defense.

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Biden Informed Of Pfizer’s Vaccine News Before Government Health Officials

Former Vice President Joe Biden was informed of Pfizer’s successful coronavirus vaccine news before the nation’s incumbent chief health care administrator, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar.

“I, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, learned about this from media reports on Monday morning,” Azar said Wednesday during an interview with Washington D.C. radio station WMAL.

On Monday, the pharmaceutical giant announced that its coronavirus vaccine candidate showed to be 90 percent effective in large-scale clinical trials, putting the end of the pandemic that has claimed the lives of almost 250,000 Americans since March on the horizon.

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Marijuana Reform Omitted From Biden Transition Plan On Racial Equity Despite Campaign Pledges

Marijuana reform advocates have been looking for signs that an incoming president-elect Joe Biden will make good on his campaign pledge to pursue cannabis policy changes since the former vice president has been projected to win the election. But they didn’t get any such sign in a new racial equity plan his transition team has put forward.

While Biden emphasized on the campaign trail that cannabis decriminalization and expungements would be part of his racial justice agenda, the plan released over the weekend omits any specific mention of marijuana reform.

Many of the proposals are broadly described, however, and it’s possible that a policy like decriminalization could be folded into broader commitments to eliminate “racial disparities and ensuring fair sentences,” for example.

In any case, there’s been some skepticism on the part of advocates that Biden’s stated support for cannabis reform will be matched with administrative action. And although he and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have repeatedly promised to follow through with decriminalization and expungements if elected, that issue did not make the cut in the new “commitment to uplifting Black and Brown communities.”

The page says Biden is working to “strengthen America’s commitment to justice, and reform our criminal justice system” and lays out other specific promises that were often mentioned on the campaign trail alongside marijuana reform, such as a ban on police chokeholds and creating a national oversight commission to track law enforcement abuses. But cannabis reform is nowhere to be found in the transition team document.

In contrast, a still-live page on Biden’s separate campaign site for his “Plan for Black America” that he rolled out while running for president, includes the pledge to “decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions.”

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Introducing The Biden-Harris Paid-For Online Troll Farm

After a bit of research into the Biden-Harris digital operation, I found a likely answer to my question. It’s no secret to anyone in the digital subcontracting business that India’s troll farm industry is the largest in the world. It boasts a global clientele, and it is also the cheapest, and most decentralized and robust in the world. This service is available for anyone who is willing to pay – western PR agencies, fashion brands, entertainment companies, and political campaigns. The more money you have, the more online muscle you can flex. As it turns out, in 2020 one of this shady industry’s biggest and best paying clients has been the Biden-Harris campaign.

As one troll farm operator in India told Newsweek recently, “We don’t pick and choose. Joe Biden the person is irrelevant to us. We got a target in August to follow him and engage with his tweets, and we did. The agencies in Delhi who we work with don’t tell us any details, and we don’t ask.”

With very little popularity online and with the election drawing near, in August the Biden campaign reached out to troll farms in India in order to artificially boost Joe’s lack luster Twitter presence, and received an immediate injection of tens of thousands of fake followers which were literally purchased from troll farms located throughout rural India. On this point, Newsweek added:

“Within two weeks of Biden selecting Kamala Harris as his running mate on August 12, his Twitter following jumped by 738,595 new followers—a 9.1 percent leap. The number hit 11 million by the third week of October.”

If memory serves me correctly, aren’t these the very same practices that federal law enforcement agencies spent the last four years condemning as systemic during the 2016 presidential election?

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Biden’s first move as president-elect? Mask mandate for all. Here’s how he plans on doing it.

One of Joe Biden’s first priorities as president-elect will be implementing mask mandates nationwide by working with governors. The future 46th president, however, says if they refuse then he will go to mayors and county executives and get local masking requirements in place.

Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel believes that while masks are “the icing on the physical distancing cake” and should be worn properly both indoors and outdoors, especially when people are too close together, a more punitive approach to mask wearing may have the opposite impact of what the administration intends. 

“I think masks are quite useful, but they have a place and they’re not the be all and end all,” Siegel said. “I’m worried that mandating this with fines and such may actually lead to more of a rebellion against it.”

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Biden’s Pick for Coronavirus Task Force: ‘Living Too Long Is Also a Loss’

This morning, President-elect Biden announced that his coronavirus task force would include Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

In a 2014 essay in The Atlantic, Emanuel, explained why he hoped to die at age 75, and why he finds the idea of living past that date to be morally problematic:

Here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.

By the time I reach 75, I will have lived a complete life. I will have loved and been loved. My children will be grown and in the midst of their own rich lives. I will have seen my grandchildren born and beginning their lives. I will have pursued my life’s projects and made whatever contributions, important or not, I am going to make. And hopefully, I will not have too many mental and physical limitations. Dying at 75 will not be a tragedy.

Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won’t actively end my life. But I won’t try to prolong it, either. Today, when the doctor recommends a test or treatment, especially one that will extend our lives, it becomes incumbent upon us to give a good reason why we don’t want it. The momentum of medicine and family means we will almost invariably get it…

But 75 defines a clear point in time: for me, 2032. It removes the fuzziness of trying to live as long as possible. Its specificity forces us to think about the end of our lives and engage with the deepest existential questions and ponder what we want to leave our children and grandchildren, our community, our fellow Americans, the world. The deadline also forces each of us to ask whether our consumption is worth our contribution.

This is the man who Joe Biden has selected to help save the country from a virus that is particularly dangerous to the elderly.

In other news, Joe Biden turns 78 on November 20.

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