Tag: taxes

California activist group teaches teens to push for ‘racial justice’ with taxpayer funds: Report

A California activist group, Californians for Justice (CFJ), was paid “nearly $2 million to facilitate equity and leadership development training for students and teachers” between 2019 to 2023, per a Free Press report. 

The Long Beach Unified School District used taxpayer funds to pay CFJ, The Free Press revealed. 

CFJ pushes to teach youth about “racial justice” and is active in San Jose, Oakland, Fresno and Long Beach, according to the organization’s website. 

Long Beach Unified School District spokesperson told Fox News Digital that it believed in educating students to value “justice, equity, and inclusion.” 

“Californians for Justice (CFJ) assists Long Beach Unified in developing programs at five comprehensive high schools, focusing on creating opportunities for students of color to have a voice in decision-making and experiences at the schools,” the spokesperson said in a statement. 

The spokesperson continued, “As a district, we collaborate with all communities, striving to educate students as stewards of justice, equity, and inclusion, celebrating our collective differences. Long Beach Unified values CFJ’s expertise in equity training and professional development for students, fostering an inclusive learning environment. Our practice of providing stipends, referred to as internships, up to $1,400 per student and family ensures equitable participation in CFJ programs, embracing diverse perspectives in education. We address concerns promptly, ensuring educational materials are unbiased.” 

The statement also claimed that the school district “prioritizes a safe, inclusive environment for staff, actively addressing instances of discrimination or exclusion.” 

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There Is A War On Free Speech, And They Won’t Ever Be Satisfied Until It Is Completely Eradicated

The freedom to say whatever we want is one of the most fundamental rights in a free society.  If we are not free to speak up, it is is just a matter of time before all of our other rights are taken away as well.  So it should deeply alarm all of us that free speech is under attack like never before.  Much of the population has become convinced that “hate speech” is a special class of speech that does not deserve protection.  Of course in practice “hate speech” ends up being whatever forms of expression that the leftist elite hate.  That is why “hate speech” laws are always written so vaguely.  That way they can be used to go after whoever the leftist elite feel like going after at the time.

It is not always easy to have a society where people are allowed to say whatever they want.  People say things all the time that deeply, deeply offend me.  And there are some that have said things about me that are tremendously hateful and untrue.

But if we are going to have a free society, people have got to be free to say whatever they want.  So we should never support freedom of speech being taken away from anyone, because once we start going down that slippery slope it is just a matter of time before they come after our freedom to say what we want.

That is why what is happening in the state of Washington is so alarming.  A new law would allow private individuals to collect up to $2,000 every time they report someone to the new “hate crimes and bias incidents hotline”…

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Dept. of Justice pays out nearly $1 million to public university to track spread of ‘Mis-, Dis- and Mal-Information’

As the presidential election approaches, the Biden administration is expanding its controversial initiative to control information and censor Americans by funding a new project that tracks the spread of “mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM)” by internet users.

A public university in South Carolina is getting nearly $1 million from the government to map the spread of MDM in real time and create an online dashboard with an MDM tracker.

The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is doling out the funds to researchers at Clemson University to meet its reported mission of “improving knowledge and understanding of crime and justice issues through science.” The NIJ claims it provides objective and independent knowledge and tools to inform the decision-making of the criminal and juvenile justice communities to reduce crime and advance justice.

The government is giving Clemson researchers a bunch of taxpayer dollars to identify information and opinions it does not like by conducting the “first real-time mapping of the spread of MDM campaigns around contentious public events,” according to the grant announcement.

The venture has been named “Networks and Pathways of Violent Extremism: Effectiveness of Mis/Disinformation Campaigns” and researchers assure their work will not be biased even though a leftist administration is funding the work, and most academics are themselves on the left politically.

The research is essential, the Biden administration asserts, to avert “violent extremism.” This is the explanation offered in the DOJ’s grant document: “Nationally publicized political events often become focal points of MDM, which are exploited by various individuals and groups to launch disinformation campaigns and trigger spontaneous or crowd-sourced diffusion of disinformation and violent extremism.”

Clemson researchers will use the public funds to develop specialized algorithms to identify the creation of MDM campaigns and capture event-level characteristics of real-life events that trigger MDM, the grant announcement explains.

The academics will also help determine what characteristics of high-profile events are more likely to trigger online MDM campaigns and what are the common characteristics of organizations and other actors engaged in MDM campaigns.

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House Republicans defend use of earmarks as Congress passes spending bills with $13 billion of pork

House Republican lawmakers who advocate for reducing federal spending to bring down the budget deficit are defending the use of earmarks as Congress passes a spending package that include $13 billion of them.

“When Democrats are in control, if we don’t have the opportunity for our elected representatives to weigh in on these types of issues, then we’re sending our tax dollars to Washington, D.C. and bureaucrats are deciding where it goes,” said Rep. Erin Houchin, R-Ind., during an interview with Just the News.

Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah, said he’s thankful for the earmarks process, which is now formally titled, “Community Project Funding,” noting that his “district was not being serviced at all” when earmarks were banned prior to 2021.

There were about 6,000 earmarks taking up 605 pages in the minibus spending package that passed. The package contains 6 appropriations bills.

“Keep in mind as representatives we are the closest to the people,” Owens said on Thursday on Capitol Hill. “If there’s a body that knows what the people really care for and need it is the House and what we did, we took ourselves off the plate.”

Not all Republicans in Congress are on board with earmarks, known derogatorily as “pork.” 

Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., told Just the News that the previous ban on earmarks should be resurrected. “It’s another step in the wrong direction. It does nothing to cut our spending, it does nothing to secure our border, and worse than that, you mentioned, you’ve got nearly 7,000 earmarks for about $13 billion.”

“And earmarks represent the worst in Washington because they are pet projects back in somebody’s district used to buy votes,” Good continued. “It’s something that was eliminated about 15 years ago, it got brought back by the Dems when they got control. But Republicans have kept it much to my dismay, I oppose earmarks and we ought not to be doing that.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., described the earmarks in the minibus spending package as wasteful. A second spending package is under consideration and has to be passed before a March 22 shutdown deadline.

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Smedley Butler Explains The Latest Excuse For American Intervention In Ukraine

Senior Fellow Alex Pollock drew my attention to an important quotation by Smedley Butler: 

1935 speech and later a book by Major General Smedley D. Butler (USMC), includes  “… A racket is best described, I believe, something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make large fortunes…

If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destructions, they will have no time for the constructive job of building a greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war – even the munition makers.

So … I say, TO HELL WITH WAR.”

It is notable that very little has changed over the past century in terms of how regimes rationalize war. It was during the First World War that the term “merchants of death” first gained widespread use, and it was also during that war that the American regime also spoke often in terms of munitions spending as a benefit of war. It was all part of a war-propaganda machine dreamed up with Woodrow Wilson’s cadre. 

Unfortunately, the propaganda still works with many. It was just two weeks ago, in fact, that the Biden Administration began explicitly trying to sell US military aid to Ukraine as a scheme to “create jobs” in the United States. The administration’s statement on the war spending is virtually identical to something out of a US propaganda mill in 1950 or 1918. We would only need to change a few of the names and places. According to Biden’s handlers: 

“While this bill dispatches military hardware to Ukraine,” Biden mentioned on Tuesday, “it actually finances manufacturing within the United States in states like Arizona, where Patriot missiles are manufactured; Alabama, the home of Javelin missiles; and also Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas, which are hubs for the production of artillery shells.”

There are a multitude of problems with this statement.

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Federal Judge Rules Biden Can’t Divert Funds That Were Allocated for Construction of Border Wall

A federal judge has just ruled that the Biden administration cannot divert funds that were specifically allocated for the construction of a border wall under Trump.

Biden wanted to use this money for other things, naturally.

This doesn’t mean that Biden has to finish the wall and of course, he won’t. But it also means that he can’t touch the funds.

The Washington Times reports:

Judge orders Biden to stop diverting border wall money

A federal judge on Friday shot down the Biden administration’s plans to divert money from border wall construction to other projects like environmental remediation, ruling that it appears to violate the law.

Judge Drew B. Tipton said Congress gets to decide how money is spent and when it wrote its spending bills for fiscal years 2020 and 2021 it allocated nearly $1.4 billion each year for wall-building. The president trampled on that when he decided to spend wall-building money on “remediation projects.”

The government said it should have leeway to spend the money, and argued the remediation projects were ancillary to the wall and should be allowed.

Judge Tipton, though, said the way Congress wrote the law it was quite specific in saying the money should go to barriers along the border.

“The central question in this case, then, is this: Has the Government obligated FY 2020 and FY 2021 funds for the ‘construction of [a] barrier system’? The answer is largely no,” the judge concluded.

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BIDEN IS BANKROLLING ISRAEL’S WAR AMID GROWING FINANCIAL HARDSHIP AT HOME

IN LATE OCTOBER, President Joe Biden issued two supplemental funding requests. The first, primarily to support Israel’s war on Gaza and Ukraine’s war against Russia, became the $95 billion National Security Act, which the Senate passed in February. This week, Biden urged House leadership to pass the bill as soon as possible.

Never has the president appeared more committed to advancing one of his priorities. Biden delivered a rare Oval Office address specifically to market the plan — something he hasn’t done for any other proposal — and designated the funding as “emergency requirements.” In the weeks and months that followed, he ensured that it remained at the top of Congress’s agenda, even if that meant delays to other legislative business. His hard work paid off: The current bill gives Biden pretty much exactly what he asked for.

The second proposal is half the size of the first and funds domestic programs such as grants to child care providers and disaster relief. This request wasn’t designated as emergency spending.

While Biden personally and repeatedly urged Congress to approve his foreign policy plan, there is not a single instance of him even mentioning his domestic proposal in a statement since offering it on October 25. It hasn’t made an appearance on his personal or presidential X accounts either. Indeed, the way the proposal is written suggests that Biden never intended it to be taken seriously. The foreign policy request is a 69-page, fully drafted legislative proposal that’s formally addressed to the House speaker; the domestic request is a two-page summary table.

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78-Year-Old Grandmother Awarded $3.8 Million After Illegal SWAT Raid

A 78-year-old woman whose home was mistakenly raided by a Denver SWAT team will now receive a nearly $3.8 million payout. The large sum comes as a result of a 2020 Colorado law that banned qualified immunity protections for police officers in the state, making civil rights lawsuits against police significantly more likely to succeed. 

On January 4th, 2022, Ruby Johnson, a retired postal worker, was sitting in her Denver home when she heard a police airhorn loudly commanding that she leave her home with her hands up. Johnson, who had recently showered and was only wearing a bathrobe, left her house to find a Denver SWAT team gathered outside her door.

The SWAT team had been sent to Johnson’s home as part of an effort to recover a vehicle that had been stolen the previous day. According to Johnson’s lawsuit, the stolen car had an iPhone inside, and the Find My app feature indicated that the phone was near Johnson’s house. 

While the police officers had obtained a warrant to search Johnson’s home, they did so using an affidavit that allegedly provided “false characterization” of how reliable the Find My app is, overstating how sure the police could be that the iPhone—and the truck—would be at Johnson’s house.

According to Johnson’s lawsuit, after receiving this warrant, the SWAT team aggressively searched her home, causing considerable damage to her belongings. Making matters worse, even though Johnson gave police her garage door opener and told them how to enter the garage’s front door, police used a battering ram to enter the garage, destroying the door and door frame. Ultimately, the SWAT team found no sign of the truck or any other criminal activity. The officers left and later told Johnson’s children that the department wouldn’t pay Johnson for the considerable damage caused to her home.

Johnson filed a lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado in December 2022, alleging that the search was unlawful under the Colorado Constitution.

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Congress Wastes Billions With Bogus Emergency Declaration

What constitutes an emergency? According to Congress’ new spending package, research equipment and facilities for the National Science Foundation is an emergency. So are the 2024 Democratic National Committee convention and the Republican National Committee convention. So is NASA space exploration. 

By classifying all these line items as emergencies, Congress can get hundreds of millions of taxpayer funding for them with reduced oversight.

Congress’ latest spending package, released this week, is hardly the first time obviously nonemergency projects have been given this special funding designation. According to a January report from the Cato Institute, Congress has approved over $12 trillion in spending for emergencies over the past three decades, making up around 1 in 10 federal budget dollars spent—more than both Medicaid and veterans programs combined.

How is this possible? Much of it comes down to lax rules that let lawmakers classify regular spending projects as “emergencies.” 

“Congress has complete discretion in designating spending for emergencies because what qualifies as an emergency is subject to interpretation,” Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett wrote in Cato’s report. While the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has laid out several criteria that emergency spending is supposed to meet, Boccia and Lett note that “the current process lacks a mechanism to evaluate whether an emergency provision meets the OMB’s test, which means that anything can count as emergency spending.”

Once spending gets earmarked as an emergency, it isn’t subjected to typical caps on discretionary spending, allowing Congress to rack up costs with little accountability. “Unfortunately, over the course of the last 30-some years, Congress took what was designed to be a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ escape valve, and they’ve turned it into a major source of funding for federal activity,” David Ditch, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, tells Reason.”It’s just a way for [Congress] to avoid fiscal consequences. And that’s part of how we got where we are.”

“Emergencies are, by definition, unexpected and urgent situations requiring immediate action—except in Congress, where the term is increasingly used to justify spending decisions that should be part of the normal budget process,” Eric Boehm pointed out in the April 2024 issue of Reason magazine, “Because emergency spending bypasses some of the scrutiny applied to the normal budgetary process, it has become a convenient way for lawmakers and presidents to hike spending—and add to the national debt.”

Cato’s report highlights some particularly egregious examples of this exact phenomenon, including $600 million earmarked for replacing aircraft used in weather forecasting, $347 million for prison construction and detention costs, and $278 million to speed up the building process for a single research center.

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Federal program sends $100 million plus to deceased Americans

Two House lawmakers blasted a federal program this week for sending over $100 million to deceased Americans.

The lawmakers sent the letter to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation Director Gordon Hartogensis after money given to his federal group under the American Rescue Plan Act was misspent.

Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., and Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee Chairman Bob Good, R-VA., led the letter.

According to the lawmakers, $127 million went to the Central States Pension Fund, taxpayer dollars that were paid out for people who are no longer alive.

Now the issue is under investigation, but the lawmakers said that the agency has not explained how the overpayments happened or done enough to recover them.

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