Tag: taxes

Ukraine Gets Their Billions Despite CIA Director Reportedly Warning Zelenksy To Stop Stealing So Much Money

Democrats cheered and waved Ukrainian flags, chanting “Ukraine, Ukraine!” in some pavlovian response to Congress passing a bill that will send (another) $61 billion to Ukraine with no questions asked

Ukrainian president Zelenskyy was very pleased, personally thinking Speaker Johnson

I am grateful to the United States House of Representatives, both parties, and personally Speaker Mike Johnson for the decision that keeps history on the right track.

Democracy and freedom will always have global significance and will never fail as long as America helps to protect it.

The vital U.S. aid bill passed today by the House will keep the war from expanding, save thousands and thousands of lives, and help both of our nations to become stronger. Just peace and security can only be attained through strength.

We hope that bills will be supported in the Senate and sent to President Biden’s desk. Thank you, America!

‘War is Peace’, America!

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We’ve Blown $1B In Ammo and Navy Secretary says, “Oh well”

We have an industrial base problem and an Administration that has this childish inclination to grab everything off the shelves, rip the boxes open, use some of the contents, throw the partially empty box away, and then lunge for another box on the shelf.

And like a child, they never pause to think where the boxes of stuff come from or ensure new boxes are placed on the vacant shelves.

It’s the mindset of the globalist utopian, just take, never give. They know how to consume, not create or produce. Classic projection – that’s what they accuse of everyone else.

We’re approaching 2 and ½ years of grabbing ordnance off the shelves and not really placing orders with signed contracts. The Biden officials will lecture industry endlessly about the woeful state of the industrial base and then not do two key things. Create more Government owned, Contractor operated plants and place signed orders.

Air Force Plant 44, the singular most important American missile factory, on the southern perimeter of Tucson International Airport, Arizona, where flights are landing daily with illegals and 9,000 illegals a day are streaming up from Nogales has plenty of room for expansion – but no signs of it. Contractors should not be expected to invest in capitalization and expansion when the buying patterns are psychotic which is why many leave the industry.

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NIH Refuses To Release Details Of COVID-19 Vaccine Royalty Agreement

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is refusing to release additional information about an agreement it reached over a COVID-19 vaccine that has earned it at least $400 million.

The NIH declined to provide any materials in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Epoch Times.

“The NIH withholds the entirety of the records as they are protected from release,” Gorka Garcia-Malene, an NIH officer, told The Epoch Times in a letter.

She cited an exemption outlined in the act that allows government agencies to partially or fully withhold information.

“In this case, exemption 3 incorporates 35 U.S.C. 209 (f), which reads in relevant part, ‘No Federal agency shall grant any license under a patent or patent application on a federally owned invention unless the person requesting the license has supplied the agency with a plan for development or marketing of the invention, except that any such plan shall be treated by the Federal agency as commercial and financial information obtained from a person and privileged and confidential and not subject to disclosure under section 552 of title 5,’” Ms. Garcia-Malene wrote.

“Exemption 4 protects from disclosure trade secrets and commercial or financial information that is privileged and confidential,” she added.

In February 2023, Moderna announced that it had paid $400 million to the NIH and would make additional payments in the future as part of a licensing agreement for spike proteins used in the company’s COVID-19 vaccine. The Epoch Times obtained a copy of the contract, which confirmed the payment but redacted details of the future payments.

The Epoch Times then lodged a new request, seeking more details about the future payments, which are said to be based on how many COVID-19 vaccines are sold.

Ms. Garcia-Malene was responding to the new request.

James Love, director of the nonprofit Knowledge Ecology International, said the information should be made public.

“The NIH put out several press statements about the royalty dispute with Moderna, and they should not now claim it is some secret confidential information. And when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, the public interest in transparency is large too,” Mr. Love told The Epoch Times in an email.

“There are a lot of NIH officials who resent transparency,” he added.

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“The Food is No Good at All” – African Illegals at NYC City Council Complain About Free Food and Housing

African illegals at a New York City Council meeting complained about the free (taxpayer-funded) food and housing provided to them.

More than 1,300 illegal aliens from Africa swarmed New York City Hall on Tuesday after they were falsely promised work visas and green cards.

The illegals were lined up outside of New York City Hall as far as the eye could see.

Africans in Islamic garb swarmed the sidewalk.

Many of them are from Guinea and entered the US through the Mexican border.

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House Speaker Unveils $95 Billion Foreign Aid Bills

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has revealed a series of foreign aid bills totaling $95 billion that come as he faces renewed challenges and frustrations from his conference.

The packages unveiled on April 17 include funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific partners.

The $95 billion price tag puts it nearly evenly in line with an earlier Senate-passed foreign aid and national security package that Mr. Johnson declined to take up in the House.

Of that $95 billion top-line figure, roughly two-thirds—$61 billion—will go to Ukraine.

A little more than $26 billion of the package will go to Israel, and $16.5 billion of that funding is dedicated to military funding, including replenishing the depleted reserves of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

Nearly $10 billion in additional funding is slated for humanitarian relief for “vulnerable populations and communities” in the Gaza Strip.

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NPR CEO calls First Amendment the ‘number one challenge’ in American journalism which makes it hard to crack down on ‘bad information’ and ‘influence peddlers

NPR’s new chief executive Katherine Maher called the First Amendment the ‘number one challenge’ in American journalism during a panel discussion.

Maher, 40, noted the First Amendment provides a ‘fairly robust protection of rights,’ making it ‘a little tricky to address some of the real challenges of where bad information comes from.’

These comments were made during an online panel discussion at the 360/Open Summit held by the Atlantic Council in 2021. 

The clip went viral after whistleblower editor Uri Berliner was suspended for speaking out about the outlet’s progressive bias the last week.

Berliner announced his resignation on Wednesday, stating, ‘I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems I cite in my Free Press essay.’

‘The number one challenge that we see here is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States,’ Maher said at the panel hosted by the Atlantic Council’s research lab, where she served as a nonresident senior fellow. 

According to the organization’s release, she discussed fighting censorship, addressing diversity and building trust based on her experience as the former CEO of Wikimedia, which owns Wikipedia. 

The clip has now gone viral on X, with Elon Musk reposting and saying, ‘This keeps getting crazier! The head of NPR hates the Constitution of the USA.’

Maher recently made national headlines after former NPR editor Berliner penned an open essay for The Free Press, where he slammed the outlet for being made up almost entirely of Democrats which he argued ‘lost America’s trust.’ 

Berliner claimed the publicly funded broadcaster became an activist organization obsessed with pushing progressive ideals.   

In response to the 25-year NPR veteran’s article, the network suspended him for five days for violating its policy of working or reporting for another outlet without permission, starting Friday. 

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California lawmaker unveils ‘Genealogy Office’ to decide who’s REALLY descended from slaves and wins reparations payouts

A California lawmaker has unveiled plans for a ‘Genealogy Office’ to decide which residents are genuine descendants of slaves and could get life-changing benefits payouts.

Steven Bradford, a Democratic state Senator for LA County, proposed bill SB 1403 to create a controversial genealogy unit to ‘confirm reparations eligibility’ of applicants.

The state’s first-in-the-nation reparations task force last year decided that some residents should win $1.2 million payouts as compensation for injustices from the slavery era onwards.

But lawmakers have struggled to turn those plans into reality, and have advanced several bills to devise a working reparations scheme amid fears of spiralling costs in a cash-strapped state. 

Bradford’s bill, which was amended this month, aims to solve the problem of working out who is in line for a payout.

Its planned genealogy team would ‘support potential reparations claimants by providing access to expert genealogical research to confirm reparations eligibility,’ says the bill.

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One Hundred Years of IRS Political Targeting

One hundred years ago, Senator James Couzens, a Michigan Republican, took to the Senate floor to denounce the Bureau of Internal Revenue for abusing its power and trampling innocent taxpayers. Couzens launched a sweeping Senate investigation of federal tax collectors. One year later, Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair personally delivered a demand for $10 million in back taxes as Couzens stepped out of the Senate chamber. Couzens fought the case, and eventually proved that he had actually overpaid his taxes by roughly one million dollars, as David Burnham noted in his 1989 classic, A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power. But the precedent of the IRS exploiting its power to attack its critics was firmly established.

President Franklin Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers including William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer. FDR also dropped the IRS hammer on political critics such as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin and prominent Republicans like former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Perhaps Roosevelt’s most pernicious tax skulduggery occurred in 1944 when he spiked an IRS audit of massive illegal campaign contributions from a government contractor to Congressman Lyndon Johnson. LBJ’s career would likely have been destroyed if Texans had learned of his dirty-dealing. Instead, LBJ survived and scores of thousands of Americans and more than a million Vietnamese died as a result.

President John F. Kennedy raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form. Shortly after capturing the presidency, JFK denounced “the discordant voices of extremism” and derided people “who would sow the seeds of doubt and hate” and make Americans distrust their leaders.

At a news conference a few days later, a reporter sought his views on the legality of campaign contributions supporting ”right-wing extremist groups.” Kennedy replied “As long as they meet the requirements of the tax law, I don’t think that the Federal Government can interfere or should interfere with the right of any individual to take any position he wants. The only thing we should be concerned about is that it does not represent a diversion of funds which might be taxable to—for nontaxable purposes. But that is another question, and I am sure the Internal Revenue system examines that.”

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Biden Spending $300 Million On Sanctuary Cities

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is distributing $300 million to sanctuary cities that provide services like shelter and food to illegal immigrants amid a massive increase in incursions across the southern border.

The $300 million in grants will be provided through the Shelter and Services Program (SSP), according to an April 12 press release. SSP offers funding to non-federal entities like NGOs and local governments that provide support to illegal immigrants released into the United States by the DHS. Out of the $300 million, $275 million will be distributed in the first allocation, with the remaining $25 million to be allocated later this year to meet operational requirements.

“The initial funding will be available to 55 grant recipients for temporary shelter and other eligible costs associated with migrants awaiting the outcome of their immigration proceedings.”

Costs covered under the program include expenses related to providing shelter, food, transportation, medical care, and personal hygiene for illegal immigrants. Other costs like modification of existing facilities, clothing, translation services, outreach information, and management and administration expenses are also covered.

In addition to the $300 million funding, the DHS also announced $340.9 million for the SSP competitive grant program.

Last year, over $780 million was distributed through SSP and another program that went to organizations and sanctuary cities across the country that provided services to illegal immigrants. Well-known sanctuary cities include Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, New York City, and San Francisco.

The Biden administration’s latest funding splurge comes as the influx of illegal immigrants into the United States has ballooned in recent years.

According to data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), border patrol agents encountered 1.73 million illegals at the southwest land border in fiscal year 2021. This number rose to 2.37 million in fiscal year 2022 and then to 2.47 million in 2023. For the first five months of this fiscal year, 1.34 million encounters have already been registered.

Between October 2021 and March 2024, the total number of encounters stands at over 7.9 million illegal immigrants.

During an April 10 press conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said he estimates that nearly 16 million illegal immigrants entered the United States under the Biden administration.

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‘Transgender Archeology’ PhDs And Degrees In ‘Magic’ Being Funded With Taxpayer Money

A Conservative MP in the UK has called for a thorough review of government higher education funding after it was revealed that taxpayer money is being spent on ridiculous university courses, including a PhD researcher who has chose to explore “Transphobic Invocations of Archaeology.”

The Telegraph reports that the student at the University of York is being given more than £18,000 a year by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to do detailed research and present papers, including one titled Bones Don’t Care About Your Feelings: Challenging Transphobic Invocations of Archaeology in (Social) Media.

The student in question also gave a presentation that noted “What if I told you that when an archaeologist finds human remains, it is a fact that there [sic] only two choices for gender identification.”

The ‘research’ was also partially funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a non-departmental government body that distributes funds for research, which claims that “research projects we support are made via a rigorous peer review process.”

Maybe make it a bit more rigorous then?

Commenting on the finding, biologist Dr Emma Hilton, co-founder of Sex Matters, noted “Human remains cannot tell us anything about the unembodied ‘gender identity’ of a person.”

Providing an example, Hilton urged that “A female Viking warrior buried with male-typical war possessions tells us only that some women successfully broke through early glass ceilings.”

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