Tag: taxes

Russian ‘Independent’ Media Surprised Their Funding Came From USAID, Express Anger

Russian independent media has had a rough decade in Moscow, with many forced to leave for Baltic nations or other jurisdictions to be able to report freely.

The Kremlin long has put out a narrative that most of this ‘independent media’ was on the payroll of the American intelligence services.

Now that the Kremlin narrative has turned out to be true, there is shock, surprise, and even anger being expressed by Russian independent media personalities.

Yulia Latynina was one of the main stars of liberal journalism, a permanent host of Ekho Moskvy and one of the most caustic critics of the Russian government. Much has changed in the last three years, writes a journalist interviewing her recently on this subject.

What prompted Yulia, who is still listed as a foreign agent in Russia, to reconsider her attitude to the war, Ukrainian activists and liberal journalists? What does she now think about the empire and the new world order that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are writing? What conclusions did she draw from the USAID story and what is her response to dissatisfied subscribers?

“My ideas about what was happening began to change when I read a very laudatory book by Franklin Foer about Biden. And then I read a recently published book by Bob Woodward. “

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Incoming… President Trump to Sign Executive Order to Abolish Department of Education

President Trump will sign an executive order to abolish the Department of Education as early as Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Earlier this week the Senate voted 51-45 to confirm Linda McMahon as the 13th Secretary of Education.

President Trump vowed to wage war with Education Department and give power back to the states.

“On Day 1, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children,” Trump has said. “And I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.”

Trump said he wants to strip the entire department.

“We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing and arithmetic, and are you not teaching woke?’ Not teaching woke is a very big factor, but we’ll have a very small staff,” Trump said on the campaign trail in October.

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Chancellor set to cut welfare spending by billions

The chancellor has earmarked several billion pounds in draft spending cuts to welfare and other government departments ahead of the Spring Statement.

The Treasury will put the proposed cuts to the government’s official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), on Wednesday amid expectations the chancellor’s financial buffer has been wiped out.

Sources said “the world has changed” since Rachel Reeves’s Budget last October, when the OBR indicated she had £9.9bn available to spend against her self-imposed borrowing rules.

The OBR’s forecast is likely to see that disappear because of global factors such as trade tariffs, as well as higher inflation and borrowing costs in the UK.

The Treasury will on Wednesday inform the OBR of its “major measures” -essentially changes to tax and spending in order to meet the chancellor’s self-imposed rules on borrowing money.

The government has committed to get debt falling as a share of the economy during the course of this Parliament, and to only borrow to fund investment, not to cover day-to-day spending.

Such rules, put in place by most governments in wealthy nations, are designed to maintain credibility with financial markets. Reeves has repeatedly said her rules are “non-negotiable”.

The spending cuts drafted by the Treasury will help plug the gap that has emerged in recent months, ahead of the OBR publishing its forecast and Reeves giving a statement on 26 March.

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Europe Spent More on Russian Fuel in 2024 than Ukraine Aid

The European Union (EU) has been talking very tough about its unwavering and unlimited support for Ukraine since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous visit to the White House, but data published by an independent research organization shows the EU spent more on Russian oil and gas in 2024 than it spent on Ukraine.

The Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), a group opposed to burning fossil fuels, calculated that European nations spent $23 billion buying Russian fuel in 2024, compared to $19.6 billion in foreign aid provided to Ukraine.

EU spending on Russian fuel was down six percent from the previous year, but this was largely due to falling prices, since the volume of Russian product imported by the EU was only down by one percent.

CREA also found Russian oil sales to China, India, and Turkey booming, although its total fossil fuel revenue of $254 billion was down three percent from 2023. Russia’s “shadow fleet” of some 558 tankers moved 167 million metric tons of oil in defiance of price caps.

“Despite a host of sanctions, Russian revenues in the third year have dropped by a mere 8% compared to the year prior to the invasion of Ukraine,” the report noted. Furthermore, the effect of sanctions appears to be diminishing, largely due to Russia’s skill at using its shadow fleet to evade price restrictions.

CREA recommended “tighter sanctions” against Russia that could “slash Kremlin revenues” by up to 20 percent – but those sanctions would require the EU to break its addiction to Russian fuel. European purchases have declined greatly since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, but Europe still provides roughly a quarter of Russia’s fossil fuel export revenue.

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Ontario’s Premier Threatens to Cut Off Electricity to U.S. — Says Republicans Will ‘Feel Pain Like They’ve Never Felt Before’ 

The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, has threatened the U.S. over Donald Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on Canadian exports.

After initially putting a hold on his planned tariffs against Canada and Mexico, Trump confirmed this week that he would move forward with plans to 25 percent tariffs on both countries until both countries agreed to his demands surrounding border security.

In an interview on NBC News, Ford said he had never met a single American who supported the idea of tariffs, despite the fact that the majority of Americans voted for Donald Trump.

Ford ranted:

We are the largest purchaser of alcohol in the world. We buy over 3,600 products from 35 states. I talked to the Governor of Kentucky and Mitch McConnell. Don’t touch our bourbon. I’m going after absolutely everything.

And I don’t want to. We keep the lights on for 1.5 million homes in manufacturing in New York, in Michigan, and in Minnesota.

If he wants to destroy our economy and our families, I will shut down the electricity going down to the U.S. And I’m telling you, we will do it.

Ford then went on to say that Americans, particularly those in red states, would feel immense pain as his retaliatory measures.

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JUST IN: President Trump Resumes Tariffs Against Canada, Mexico, and China

President Trump has reinstated his tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act after temporarily suspending the tariffs last month during negotiations to secure the border and stop the flow of fentanyl. 

However, the President told reporters on Monday that there is “no room left for Mexico or for Canada,” citing the “vast amounts of fentanyl” that has come into the U.S.

Trump: No room left for Mexico or for Canada. No, the tariffs, you know, they’re all set. They go into effect tomorrow… And just so you understand, vast amounts of fentanyl have poured into our country from from Mexico, and as you know, also from China, where it goes to Mexico and goes to Canada. And China also had an additional 10%, so it’s 10% plus 10%. And it comes in from Canada, and it comes in from Mexico. And that’s a very important thing to say.

Trump slapped the tariffs on the three countries under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in February.

  • 25% tariffs on all Mexico imports
  • 25% tariffs on nearly all Canadian imports — 10% on Canadian energy resources
  • 10% tariffs on all China imports

An additional ten percent tariff on China was imposed on Tuesday, bringing the total to 20%.

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Federal Employees Hate DOGE Because They Fear Meritocracy

Not all people who are attracted to government employment are searching for a cushy job with limited work load and even less oversight, but most aren’t working for agencies like the IRS, ATF or USAID because of patriotic duty.  In reality, federal bureaucrats act as if they’ve found a cheat code to life.  And until the arrival of Elon Musk’s DOGE audits, that assumption was generally true.   

As Dan Aykroyd’s character Ray Stantz notes in the movie Ghostbusters: 

“Personally, I liked working for the university. They gave us money and facilities. We didn’t have to produce anything. You’ve never been out of college. You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector … they expect results!”

For decades it’s been a running joke that government employees do very little while collecting a generous paycheck.  For American taxpayers, however, the joke’s not so funny.  DOGE audits have exposed considerable waste and fraud within the system.  Apologists in the media argue that most of this information was available to anyone willing to look, but this is a misrepresentation of the bigger problem. 

Until recently no one had collated spending data in way that is easy for the average American to reference and track.  In fact, digging up this information is made as frustrating as possible, likely to dissuade people from investigating for themselves.  The Government Accountability Office doesn’t do it; if anything they pretend to scrutinize various agencies while covering for their mismanagement.  When it comes to government waste the phrase that leaps to mind is “hidden in plain sight”.  

“Waste” and “fraud” are the only words to describe the situation with federal employment – In 2024 there were over 3 million workers, the most since 1994, collecting around $270 billion annually (including benefits).  Federal supervisors are incentivized to give average to outstanding employee performance reviews in order to avoid employee and union backlash, as well as negative attention for their department.  It is often noted that government work has bred a culture of “conflict avoidance”.  In other words, merit is not their top priority.

In the past various establishment media outlets have admitted to this trend.  The Washington Post in 2016 noted that only 0.1% of federal employees ever get a negative performance review.

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“Needs To Be Torn Down”: LA Fire Stations Are In Total Disrepair

LAFD fire stations are in disrepair, with firefighters often funding and handling repairs themselves, according to The Free Press.  

At a Pico-Robertson station, two firefighters were seen filling a three-foot pothole with sand. At another, a sewage leak had persisted for six months—“now the ceiling is falling in.”

A source reported that at least 12 of the city’s 106 stations were infested with mold. At Fire Station 112, an April 2022 report found 2.3 million spores in the dining hall, where a safe level is under 700. A firefighter who paid for the test claimed his chief became so ill he was hospitalized, resulting in a thumb amputation. Another firefighter refused to enter the kitchen because his “face would break into hives.”

At a station east of downtown, a broken window had been boarded up, and roof tiles showed water damage. Another firefighter stated that the LAFD ignored a broken garage door for a year—only repairing it after the community raised funds.

A firefighter, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, said “anyone legitimate would say the station needs to be torn down.”

The Free Press article notes that the LAFD’s budget was cut by $17.6 million last year, a reduction Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said had “adversely affected” the department’s “ability to maintain core operations,” including fire prevention. Mayor Karen Bass has denied that the cuts have impacted firefighting efforts, despite blazes that have killed 27 people and destroyed 12,000 buildings.

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Rubio Expedites Shipment of $4 Billion in Military Aid for Israel

On Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he had expedited the shipment of $4 billion in military aid for Israel, a strong show of support for Israel as it is threatening to restart its genocidal war on Gaza.

“I have signed a declaration to use emergency authorities to expedite the delivery of approximately $4 billion in military assistance to Israel,” Rubio said in a statement.

He claimed that President Biden had imposed a “partial arms embargo” on Israel, although Biden provided more military aid to Israel in a single year than any US president in history.

“The decision to reverse the Biden Administration’s partial arms embargo, which wrongly withheld a number of weapons and ammunition from Israel, is yet another sign that Israel has no greater ally in the White House than President Trump,” Rubio said.

Rubio said that since President Trump came into office on January 20, his administration has approved $12 billion in arms deals for Israel. “The Trump Administration will continue to use all available tools to fulfill America’s long-standing commitment to Israel’s security, including means to counter security threats,” he said.

The statement came a day after the statement department approved three separate arms deals for Israel worth nearly $3 billion, which includes a huge number of 2,000-pound bombs. The biggest sale, which will likely be funded by US military aid, includes 35,529 MK-84 or BLU-117 2,000-pound bombs and 4,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads.

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Oklahoma School District Mismanaged Millions Of Dollars, Audit Finds

A recent audit of Oklahoma’s Tulsa Public Schools reported financial mismanagement, noncompliance with state law and district policy, and a lack of transparency by administrators.

State Auditor and Inspector Cindy Byrd said auditors reviewed $37.7 million in Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) expenditures between 2015 and 2023 and found that $29 million was paid to consultants. Byrd said auditors found 1,450 discrepancies in 900 invoices and 90 vendor records.

The report also alleged that TPS may have violated a state law prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in Oklahoma’s public schools.

Byrd released the audit report during a press conference on Feb. 26 in Oklahoma City. She said Gov. Kevin Stitt requested the audit in 2022 after Devin Fletcher, the system’s former chief talent manager and equity officer, resigned amid allegations of mismanagement.

In October 2023, Fletcher pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He admitted to stealing $603,000 from TPS and the Foundation for Tulsa Schools, a nonprofit created to support TPS programs. Byrd said he was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Byrd alleged Fletcher only perpetuated mismanagement that TPS administrators had engaged in since at least 2018.

“Fletcher’s misconduct was the result of a much larger problem,” Byrd said.

She said that the TPS board shared some responsibility.

“Had board members acted with more diligence … they would have been in a much better position to prevent Fletcher’s malfeasance and to provide the oversight that state law requires,” Byrd said.

According to the report, TPS administrators routinely covered expenditures with foundation money. In this way, the report alleged, they avoided TPS policy 5202, which required requests for proposals, competitive bidding, and itemized invoices for any expenditure greater than $50,000.

Using foundation money also allegedly enabled them to hide much of the mismanagement from TPS board members since the board did not routinely review foundation expenditures, according to the report.

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