US advocacy group America First Legal (AFL) has released a new package of emails that challenge US President Joe Biden’s prior statements that he knew nothing about his son Hunter’s ties with foreign business people.
The emails are dated from December 2009 to June 2010, the group said, adding that they had been provided by the National Archives at its request. They include emails sent by Hunter’s ex-business partner Eric Schwerin to top assistants of Joe Biden, then vice president in Barack Obama’s administration.
“Hunter’s business partner, Eric Schwerin, emailed the Office of the Vice President about a ‘China Lunch’ a couple of months before [former Chinese President Hu Jintao’s] official visit to the United States. Despite Joe Biden’s denial that he was aware of Hunter’s business dealings with China, the National Archives redacted this email because its ‘Release would disclose confidential advice between the President and his advisors, or between such advisors,'” AFL said.
Schwerin purportedly intended to secure an invitation for his colleague to a 2010 State Department dinner with high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials.
Joe Biden has adamantly denied any knowledge of or involvement in any of his son’s business dealings as the Republicans in Congress are probing him over possible abuse of power.
Other emails indicate that Hunter Biden received confidential information from the vice-president’s office about a state visit to Africa in 2010.
“These records – which are only a small portion of the actual records that the National Archives possess – demonstrate for the American people, yet again, continued evidence of influence peddling and personal enrichment by the Biden family. The full extent has yet to be seen, but with each release, we are painting a fuller picture for the American people of the extent to which the Biden family business was intertwined with the official business of the United States,” America First Legal Vice President and General Counsel Gene Hamilton said.
In September 2020, a report by two US Republican senators revealed Hunter Biden and his associates were involved with foreign individuals in millions of dollars worth of questionable financial transactions. The transactions involved individuals with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the wife of the former mayor of Moscow.
The FBI has refused to provide records of its communication with Twitter, related to policing misinformation.
In December, as part of the Twitter Files, journalist Matt Taibbi published several emails between FBI officials and Twitter that showed that the FBI repeatedly contacted Twitter to flag alleged misinformation. The FBI’s National Election Command Post (NECP) and the Foreign Influence Task Force were in close contact with Twitter over election misinformation, according to the emails obtained by Taibbi.
In light of the Twitter Files revelations, watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all records of communication between the FBI and Twitter from January 2020 to November 2022.
The FBI refused to respond to the request, claiming it “will neither confirm nor deny the existence” of the records.
“The mere acknowledgment of the existence of FBI records on third-party individuals could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” the FBI told Protect the Public’s Trust.
“The FBI’s response to these requests is nothing short of bizarre,” Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told the Washington Examiner. “They twisted the substance of the requests and then asserted the right to deny acknowledging if records even exist based upon their mangled interpretation, and even though they have already admitted that the records exist.”
Chamberlain added that the lack of transparency from the FBI increases “suspicion about what the agency’s officials may have been involved in.”
The watchdog plans to appeal the FBI’s decision, arguing there is “tremendous public interest in knowing how the FBI interacted with Twitter, particularly with respect to suppressing speech by American citizens.”
“There is no substantial privacy interest in the entirety of the requested records,” the watchdog wrote in the appeal.
In 2023, despite skyrocketing inflation, debt, as well as rising sociopolitical divisions, leadership among both the Republicans and Democrats will always agree that substantially more US taxpayer money, never less, should be poured into the military industrial complex, according to an analysis by Judd Legum.
Case in point, the debt ceiling agreement established between the Joe Biden administration and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy caps military spending at a record $886 billion, exactly matching Biden’s mammoth budget request.
The GOP was seeking large increases in military spending and would only entertain cuts in non-military expenditures. The agreed upon war budget represents a 3.3% increase over the current year. The tentative deal still needs to make its way through Congress, where hawks will fiercely oppose any and all military spending caps.
Half of this money will go to defense contractors with Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics receiving the lion’s share. Some of these arms industry giants are currently ensnared in a massive “price gouging” scandal, with a bipartisan group of Senators demanding an investigation be opened at the Pentagon’s highest levels.
Legum highlights the lack of any “peace dividend.” after the disastrous 20 year war and occupation in Afghanistan. “This military spending increase has occurred even as Biden ended the war in Afghanistan, the military’s longest-running and most costly foreign intervention… Each year, the costs go up dramatically,” Legum writes.
He explains that the US has added more than $300 billion to the military budget during the last eight years. In 2015, the Pentagon budget was $585 billion. Half of this obscene increase in war spending and profiteering has been bylined by the Biden administration. Legum continues,
(Had military spending kept pace with inflation, [it] would still be less than $700 billion annually.) Biden has added nearly $150 billion to the military budget since 2021, the last budget approved by President Trump. The budget of the Pentagon now exceeds “the budgets for the next ten largest cabinet agencies combined.” In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in government contracts, more than 1.5 times the budget of the entire State Department.
Last year, the United States spent more on its military than the next 10 highest-spending countries combined.
A recent report on 60 Minutes, the CBS news program, saw former Pentagon officials, contract negotiators, and insiders accuse these defense firms of “astronomical price increases” and “unconscionable” fraud.
In particular, the CBS report cites Shay Assad, a 40-year veteran contract negotiator, who says military industrial complex behemoths, such as Lockheed and Raytheon, overcharge for “[everything from] radar and missiles … helicopters … planes … submarines… down to the nuts and bolts.”
The cited experts described these practices, as well as the accompanying rampant unaccountability, as largely the culmination of bureaucratic decisions made during the immediate post-Cold War era.
In the early 1990s, ostensibly to reduce costs, the DOD “urged defense companies to merge and 51 major contractors consolidated to five giants.” This drastically reduced competition and put the big five industry “giants” in an extremely advantageous situation. The War Department “has few options today, and the defense contractors know it,” Legum writes.
Assad clarifies the effects of this centralization of power, “In the [1980s], there was intense competition amongst a number of companies. And so the government had choices. They had leverage. We have limited leverage now,” Assad said. “The problem was compounded in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts.”
Retired Pentagon auditor Mark Owen bluntly told CBS, this is “not really a true capitalistic market because one company is telling you what’s going to happen. [It’s a] monopoly.”
The report highlighted the fact that, before the clamp down on competition, a shoulder-fired Stinger missile, produced by Raytheon, cost $25,000 in 1991. Now that Washington is subsidizing the provision of so many Stingers to Ukraine, as well as Taiwan, the weapon is now priced at more than $400,000. This is an “eye-watering” seven-fold increase, even when taking inflation into account as well as interim technological advancements.
Lockheed and Boeing were found to have yielded an over 40 percent profit on sales of PAC-3 surface to air missiles to Washington and its allies. Assad explained the companies saw a windfall of hundreds of millions on the deals over seven years, and “based on what they actually made, we would’ve received an entire year’s worth of missiles for free.”
The DOD also “caught Raytheon making what they called ‘unacceptable profits’ from the Patriot missile defense system by dramatically exaggerating the cost and hours it took to build the radar and ground equipment.”
Assad demonstrated to the 60 Minutes host that an oil pressure switch was selling for over $10,000, when he claimed the switch should cost $328. The host asked Assad a question regarding the huge discrepancy, to which the former official responded “Gouging. What else can account for it?”
A major aspect of this problem is the Congress and defense contractors’ bribes. As Legum details, the military-industrial complex spent $2.5 billion on lobbying in the last two decades. “During that period, defense contractors employed an average of 700 lobbyists — more than one lobbyist for every member of Congress.”
Though, some Senators just denounced the contractors, in a letter to the Pentagon chief, saying these firms are “dramatically overcharging the Department and U.S. taxpayers while reaping enormous profits, seeing their stock prices soar, and handing out massive executive compensation packages.”
The lawmakers charged that these “companies have abused the trust government has placed in them… exploiting their position as sole suppliers for certain items to increase prices far above inflation or any reasonable profit margin.”
The legacy of Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky will be turning Ukraine into “a new Afghanistan,” according to former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov. Azarov was head of government three times and presided over Ukraine’s largest economic growth in its post-Soviet history, thus making his opinion about Zelensky’s legacy, especially scathing.
“Over the years, presidents of Ukraine made promises to turn the country into either a new France or a new Switzerland. However, Zelensky went further than anyone and turned the country into a new Afghanistan, to the delight of the Anglo-Saxons and defence companies,” Azarov wrote in a social media post.
“What do you think? Is there a chance that Washington will get tired of its ‘toy’ in the foreseeable future? Or is the pleasure of playing dirty tricks on Russia more important than the lives of the hostages of the Kiev regime?” the politician asked on Facebook.
It is recalled that Azarov explained in an interview in early May the role played by the US and the UK in transforming Ukraine into a failed state, outlining how since the Euromaidan coup in 2014, the country’s population halved. He also characterised the current Ukrainian president as “an empty vessel” who cares more about profits and popularity abroad than the Ukrainian people, which makes him a tool of Western powers and oligarchic interests.
Azarov is certainly not the first to compare the war in Ukraine to that of the 20-year US war in Afghanistan, with experts believing that both conflicts were prospects for the US military-industrial complex to profit from massive new defence contracts. However, experts also warn that Ukraine could become Washington’s next Afghanistan-style forever war.
It is recalled that analyst Scott Ritter, a former United Nations inspector and US Marine in Iraq, said that President Joe Biden should tell his Ukrainian counterpart that his country realistically has no chance of emerging victorious from its confrontation with Russia and that the US runs from fights as it does not have to deal with the terrible consequences of leaving, just like in Afghanistan and Vietnam.
In this same light, The American Conservative published in August 2022 that “defense contractors shed a tear when America’s war in Afghanistan came to a close […] But just after one protracted conflict came to a close, another came to the complex’s rescue. Though there is little national interest for the U.S. in Ukraine, and everything to lose given Russia is a nuclear-armed power, Biden has vowed that the U.S. will be alongside Ukraine for the long haul.”
It is suggested that the US continues its useless but destructive wars, such as in Vietnam, Afghanistan and now Ukraine, to prop up the American military-industrial complex. The same publication, but in a later article, highlighted that the war in Ukraine was a “new 1980s-style Afghanistan, with the U.S. playing both the American and the Soviet roles at times,” adding that “while NATO countries and others sent small numbers of troops and material to Afghanistan, the U.S. has gone out of its way to make Ukraine look like a NATO show when it is not.”
The comments by Azarov came days before Zelensky said that the start time for the activation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had been approved. According to Zelensky, at the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief meeting, there was also a discussion on the issue of supplying ammunition to soldiers.
However, Zelensky is merely speaking for the sake of speaking when we consider that we are in the last day of spring and the first days of summer, and the long-awaited offensive never began, which is especially humiliating considering the boastful claims made of soon capturing Crimea and Mariupol from Russia.
It is likely that, just like in the Afghanistan case, military offensive methods will not be used by Ukraine but rather terrorist methods instead, such as reconnaissance, drone weapons, airspace intrusion, and infrastructure destruction. As The Telegraph concedes, Ukrainian troops are exhausted, and Kiev is in a “desperate push to replenish its battle-stricken military ahead of a looming counter-offensive.”
Even though Ukraine has received a lot of NATO equipment and weapons, there is nonetheless a shortage of troops that officials consider key players in the counter-offensive. Recruiters are facing a huge challenge trying to attract the right number of men into the army, and now they are adopting harsher recruitment tactics to find people for the Army. All this points to a similar scenario experienced in Afghanistan, something Zelensky has made Ukraine akin to.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Four months after The Guardian and other European media outlets revealed the world’s leading carbon credit certifier sold worthless offsets to major corporations, the head of Washington-based Verra has stepped down.
“I am writing to let you know that after nearly 15 fantastic years as the CEO of Verra, I have decided to step down,” Verra’s CEO, David Antonioli, wrote in a LinkedIn post last week. He’s leaving the role after dominating the multi-billion dollar carbon offset market for years and certifying over a billion dollars in credits through its verified carbon standard (VCS).
Antonioli expressed gratitude towards the current and past employees and was proud of Verra’s accomplishments as the world’s leading standard-setter for climate action and sustainable development. He did not give a reason for his abrupt departure.
Antonioli’s exit comes four months after The Guardian, German weekly Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial, a non-profit investigative journalism organization, revealed a damning report on how Verra approved tens of millions of dollars of worthless offsets to Disney, Shell, Gucci, and other big corporations.
The report found Verrra issued “phantom credits” to major corporations that don’t represent genuine carbon reductions. Some corporations purchased these fraudulent credits and labeled their products as “carbon neutral.”
Days after The Guardian’s report in January, Antonioli rejected the findings, calling them “outlandish claims” and heavily defended Verra’s certification of carbon credits. But after all that, Antonioli is still stepping down.
Meanwhile, “Some firms are moving away from offsetting-based environmental claims, such as Gucci, which has removed a carbon neutrality claim from its website that heavily relied on Verra’s carbon credits,” The Guardian said.
Diego Saez Gil, the CEO of Pachama, a carbon offsetting firm, said Verra should update its programs to improve the company’s integrity. He told The Guardian :
“This is a pivotal moment for carbon markets. In order to scale the critical funding required for carbon sequestration at a planetary scale, we must ensure integrity, transparency, and real benefits for local communities and biodiversity. A new generation of innovative players is collaborating with standard bodies, academics, corporates, and communities, creating a new era of carbon markets that gives me hope.”
Despite having previously purchased “worthless” carbon offsets, companies such as JPMorgan, Disney, and BlackRock continue their ESG commitments. In particular, JPMorgan pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase credits for carbon removal.
Insiders have spoken up about the murky ESG industry. Take, for example, an insider who told Bloomberg in 2021 that TotalEnergies SE orchestrated a “carbon-neutral” liquified natural gas shipment with China National Offshore Oil Corp on math that was “guesswork” and involved lots of “googling.”
Recall Elon Musk tweeted one year ago, “ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr recently said that if he becomes president, he will ban pharmaceutical advertising on US television.
“It’s not good to have pharmaceutical advertising on TV,” said Kennedy. “It’s good for the television stations, it’s good for the pharmaceutical companies, but it’s not good for public health.”
The US and New Zealand are the only two nations globally that allow drug companies to promote their products directly to the consumer – known as direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA).
Kennedy said that because of pharmaceutical advertising in the US, Americans use more prescription drugs than anywhere else in the world, and yet, they have the worst outcomes.
Americans have the lowest life expectancy compared to other wealthy nations and the highest rate of avoidable deaths, despite spending nearly 18% of GDP on healthcare in 2021.
Kennedy told me he blames “the influence of the pharmaceutical lobby in Washington, and indirectly, the influence of media companies that earn some $18 billion in revenue annually from direct-to-consumer drug advertising.”
Drug advertising in the US
In the 80s, there were few prescription drug ads broadcast on US TV because the regulatory standard made it difficult to provide adequate information about drug labelling to consumers. David Kessler, FDA Commissioner between 1990 and 1997, also vigorously opposed DTCA.
But when Kessler left the agency, the new administration eased regulatory restrictions and the floodgates opened. Within a decade, DTCA went from US$2.1 billion in 1997 to US$9.6 billion in 2016.
“They do it because it works,” said Barbara Mintzes, professor of evidence-based pharmaceutical policy at the University of Sydney. “Drug companies would not be spending the money if it did not lead to expanded sales.”
Proponents argue that DTCA empowers the consumer with information about diseases and drug treatments by encouraging informed discussions between patients and their medical providers. But Mintzes is not convinced.
“I totally agree that people need information on medicines but getting that information from advertising is not the same as getting it from an unbiased source,” said Mintzes.
Mintzes has long argued against DTCA saying, “There is no public health rationale and no reliable evidence that it leads to better care, public or patient empowerment, or to the type of information needed for shared informed treatment choices.”
Many Americans are unaware of the persuasiveness of DTCA. A national FDA survey found that 29% of consumers believed that only completely safe medicines could be advertised on TV. In California, it was 42% of consumers.
Advertised drugs offer little benefit
The decision about which drugs are advertised is not made on public health grounds, but on what will maximise profits.
“It’s a marketing decision,” says Mintzes. “Often, it’s a small, select group of drugs that are very expensive, on patent, and are not necessarily the best available treatments in terms of effectiveness or safety.”
According to a recent study published in JAMA, most of Big Pharma’s spending (68%) on the top-selling prescription drugs in 2020, were of ‘low added benefit’ for patients.
The study’s lead author Michael DiStefano, a researcher at Johns Hopkins said it’s probably a strategy of the pharmaceutical industry to “drive patient demand for drugs that clinicians would be less likely to prescribe.”
“When a consumer sees these advertisements on TV or social media, they should really question if it’s the best drug for them and have a conversation with their provider,” said DiStefano.
Poor FDA oversight of DCTA
The FDA regulates the promotion of medicines and the content of DTCA, under the authority of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA). It requires that advertising is accurate, and only promotes the drug for approved conditions, clearly stating harms and ways to get more information.
However, the agency lacks the resources to police it properly.
A 2002 Government Accountability Office report found the FDA’s oversight of DTCA was lacking. The agency had allowed some drug companies to repeatedly disseminate new misleading advertisements for the same drug.
Further, a change in the FDA’s procedures for reviewing draft regulatory letters led to a significant lag in issuing letters to demand the removal of misleading advertising – some regulatory letters were not even issued until after the advertising campaign had run its course.
Vioxx ads led to unnecessary deaths
From 1999 to 2004, Vioxx was among the most aggressively advertised medicines in the US. Merck spent more than US$100 million per year in advertising to consumers and generated annual sales of more than US$1 billion.
But Merck ran a deceptive advertising campaign, which misrepresented the safety of Vioxx and improperly concealed the drug’s increased risk of stroke. Vioxx was estimated to have caused 88,000–140,000 heart attacks in the USA alone – 44% of which were fatal.
A significant proportion of those people who died, took Vioxx after seeing it advertised on TV.
FDA promoted covid products
During the pandemic, the FDA began promoting covid-19 products – antivirals and vaccines – something that is not in the agency’s remit.
FDA commissioner Robert Califf, for example, repeatedly advertised the benefits of Pfizer’s antiviral drug paxlovid and covid-19 vaccines for reducing the risk of long covid.
“The FDA commissioner can’t tweet like this,” wrote Vinay Prasad, a practicing haematologist-oncologist at the University of California San Francisco. “How does the FDA preserve the authority to regulate truthful marketing, when the FDA commissioner is a billboard for Pfizer? These claims are not validated by the highest methods. This is unbelievable.”
In addition, director of the FDA’s vaccine division Peter Marks, featured in multiple videos on the FDA’s website, encouraging people to take the newly authorised bivalent boosters.
“It always feels odd to see the FDA promote products,” said Jessica Adams, a regulatory affairs expert. “The agency used to go out of its way to respect patient-provider decision-making and not interfere with the practice of medicine.”
In fact, the FDA’s own homepage was promoting the covid-19 vaccines.
“The FDA acts like a cheerleading or marketing arm of pharma companies, not a regulatory agency” said Aaron Siri, attorney at Siri & Glimstad law firm. “By promoting these shots, the FDA has hopelessly conflicted itself from later admitting these products have serious issues.”
“It is not the role of the FDA to promote vaccines or advise people to get them. Its role is to objectively assess whether they are safe and effective to its standard,” added Siri.
FDA’s revolving door
Kennedy has renewed calls to put an end to the FDA→Big Pharma “revolving door” which leads to undue influence over the agency.
Ten of the last 11 commissioners have gone on to secure roles with the pharmaceutical or biotech industries they once regulated – most within a year or two of leaving the FDA (see table).
Califf was announced as FDA commissioner on 17 Feb 2022 (his second time). SEC filings indicate that he resigned from the board of directors of Centessa Pharmaceuticals, the day before the announcement.
“That is an indication of just how completely industry has captured this agency,” said Kennedy vowing to shake up the system if he becomes president.
“We will institute new rules extending the waiting period before former officials can enter industry, consulting, and lobbying. We want real public servants in positions of public trust,” he added.
Kennedy believes the key to reforming the FDA will be to put qualified people in positions from outside the pharmaceutical industry, and to call on whistle-blowers, dissidents, and other people of integrity from within the FDA.
The FDA did not comment on the agency’s ‘revolving door’, nor did it answer whether the agency had considered instituting an extended waiting period between the time officials leave the FDA and enter industry.
A militant wearing the insignia of Mexico’s notorious Gulf Cartel (Cartel Del Golfo, CDG) was filmed in the state of Tamaulipas carrying a US-made anti-tank missile launcher. Milenio TV identified the weapon as a Javelin, thousands of which were sent to Ukraine by the Pentagon.
Footage filmed in Matamoros on Monday and aired on Tuesday evening by the news channel Milenio TV showed a man with CDG patches armed with a Kalashnikov rifle and a missile they said was the Raytheon-made FGM-148.
Over 10,000 Javelins from Pentagon stockpiles have been sent to Ukraine since last February, to the point where the US military has begun to run out of the missiles itself.
Milenio presenter Azucena Uresti noted on Twitter that the estimated value of a Javelin launcher on the black market was anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000, while the average cost of a missile was about $30,000.
#AzucenaALas10 | En #Tamaulipas, un presunto miembro del Cártel del Golfo fue grabado portando una de las armas más exclusivas y poderosas, un "javelín", que ha sido utilizado durante la invasión a Ucrania con un valor de entre 20 mil y 60 mil dólares pic.twitter.com/2BGtJMc2Xl
Keen-eyed military experts believe the weapon in the Milenio footage may actually be the AT-4, a Swedish-made disposable anti-tank launcher, which is also in use by the US military and likewise supplied to Ukraine by the thousands.
Russia has repeatedly warned the US and its allies not to “stuff” Ukraine with weapons and ammunition, both because this risked a direct confrontation and since nonexistent controls would result in the weapons ending up in the criminal underworld.
A RT investigation in July 2022 found a variety of Western-supplied weapons, including anti-tank rockets, for sale on the “dark web.” Several months later, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that $1 billion a month worth of Western weapons was ending up in the hands of “terrorists, extremists and criminal groups in the Middle East, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia.”
Kiev has denounced this as “propaganda” and insisted all were accounted for.
The US outlet CBS censored their documentary on weapons supplies to Ukraine after the government in Kiev objected. Last month, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said the West was aware its weapons were ending up on the black market, but that most governments did not care because arming Ukraine mattered more to them.
The Gulf Cartel is based in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, specifically in the border city of Matamoros, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. It dates back to the 1930s, but gained in notoriety in the late 1990s, when it spun off a notorious militia called Los Zetas. The group has since broken off on its own. Though primarily known as a drug smuggling cartel, CDG has also been accused of racketeering, abductions, money laundering, and trafficking of people, sex slaves and weapons.
In March, the cartel apologized for one of its factions kidnapping four Americans and killing two of them, in what they said was a case of mistaken identity. Five members of that faction were handed over to the Mexican police.
A bipartisan group of Senators sent a letter to the Defense Department chief calling for an investigation into major American arms dealers accused of systemic “price gouging,” on Wednesday, according to The Hill.
The letter, signed by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Mike Braun (R-IN) Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), cites former Pentagon officials, auditors, and other insiders who spoke to CBS and accused military-industrial complex giants, such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing, of ripping off the US taxpayer.
During a recent 60 Minutes report, Shay Assad, who worked as a Pentagon contract negotiator for 40 years, cites numerous examples while explaining to the outlet that these firms overcharge the DOD for “[everything from] radar and missiles … helicopters … planes … submarines… down to the nuts and bolts.”
The report said these “astronomical price increases” have worsened sharply amidst Washington’s exponentially rising demand for weapons systems to both bolster Taiwan – in a thinly-veiled effort to destabilize China – and support NATO’s proxy Kiev during its war with Russia.
“Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and TransDigm are among the offenders,” the senators asserted. Their letter continues, “[these contractors are] dramatically overcharging the Department and U.S. taxpayers while reaping enormous profits, seeing their stock prices soar, and handing out massive executive compensation packages.”
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, the letter’s recipient, sat on Raytheon’s board of directors before accepting his current post. The lawmakers charge that these companies are securing profits ranging from 40% to even as high as 4,000%.
The military budget will soon surpass the once unthinkable $1 trillion mark. The DOD has requested a record $842 billion for the next fiscal year, roughly half of which will go to “the offenders,” just such private defense contractors.
While the Joe Biden administration has asked Congress to approve a nearly $900 billion military budget. The hawkish legislature will almost certainly add tens of billions more to Biden’s proposed budget. For 2023, Congress added another $45 billion to Biden’s already mammoth request for $813 billion, resulting in a finalized $858 billion annual military spending bill.
Even these eye-opening numbers do not tell the whole story, because the real national security state budget is already fast approaching $1.5 trillion.
The lawmakers’ letter also expresses concerns about the Pentagon’s ability to audit, track and mitigate fraud risk. The DOD’s accountability system is completely “broken.” Assad said, “No matter who they are, no matter what company it is, they need to be held accountable. And right now that accountability system is broken in the Department of Defense.”
The Senators complained that, for decades, this obscene, unaccountable spending has been ongoing. The letter cites a 2021 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report which found the Pentagon failed to implement any comprehensive solution to combating this “unconscionable” fraud, as Assad has described it.
“The DOD can no longer expect Congress or the American taxpayer to underwrite record military spending while simultaneously failing to account for the hundreds of billions it hands out every year to spectacularly profitable private corporations,” the Senators declared. These firms “have abused the trust government has placed in them…exploiting their position as sole suppliers for certain items to increase prices far above inflation or any reasonable profit margin,” the letter continued.
“It’s not really a true capitalistic market because one company is telling you what’s going to happen. [It’s a] monopoly,” retired DoD auditor Mark Owen told CBS.
Connor Freeman is the assistant editor and a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest.
The FBI has again refused to turn over documents subpoenaed by the US Congress regarding bribery accusations against President Joe Biden, prompting House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer to warn that he will seek to hold the agency’s director in contempt for “obstructionist” tactics.
“The FBI’s decision to stiff-arm Congress and hide this information from the American people is obstructionist and unacceptable,” Comer said on Tuesday in a statement.
The Kentucky Republican added that the committee will take steps to hold FBI director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a lawful subpoena.
“Americans deserve the truth, and the Oversight Committee will continue to demand transparency from this nation’s chief law enforcement agency,” Comer added.
At issue is an FBI informant file detailing allegations that Biden accepted $5 million in foreign bribes in exchange for policy favors when he worked as vice president under then-President Barack Obama. The FBI received the tip in June 2020. The allegations came to light earlier this year, when a whistleblower informed Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of their existence.
FBI officials have missed multiple deadlines to comply with the subpoena, including Comer’s latest demand that the documents be handed over by Tuesday. Wray has claimed that the allegations against Biden were unverified and that the so-called FD-1023 file in the case must be kept private to protect FBI informants.
House Republicans have sought the documents to weigh the substance of the allegations against Biden and examine whether the FBI has handled the case properly. Comer argued earlier this month that the agency has had the evidence for years and has apparently “done nothing” with it.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, said on Tuesday that he will lead members of his party in voting to hold Wray in contempt if the FBI director refuses to turn over the FD-1023. He added that any sensitive information on the informant could be redacted.
The FBI issued a statement saying any discussion of pursuing contempt proceedings against Wray is “unnecessary.” The agency said it had offered in a letter to Comer to provide information to the committee “in a format and setting that maintains confidentiality and protects important security interests and the integrity of FBI investigations.” Wray is scheduled to discuss the issue with Comer on Wednesday in a phone call.
Comer has said the allegations “fit a pattern” of then-Vice President Biden flying to various countries, taking an unusually active role in US foreign policy decisions, then receiving wire transfers from those nations into bank accounts linked to his family members.
The House Oversight Committee released documents earlier this month showing evidence of the bank transfers. Biden, meanwhile, argued that the committee’s findings were “not true.”
A team of pro-fluoride researchers led by California’s dental director intentionally omitted data from a study seeking to undermine the forthcoming National Toxicology Program (NTP) report linking fluoride exposure to neurodevelopmental damage in children, according to documents released last week.
The documents — obtained through a California public records search and posted in a press release by the Fluoride Action Network — show that the team, led by Dr. Jayanth V. Kumar, a dental surgeon, conducted a meta-analysis of the scientific literature on fluoride’s neurotoxicity and found a link between fluoride exposure and lowered IQ in children at low levels of exposure.
However, they omitted the data and wrote a paper concluding there was no evidence of a link.
Four rounds of peer review rejected Kumar’s manuscript as “poorly researched,” “internally inconsistent” and committing “unashamed exaggeration” before the journal Public Health finally published the study last month.
NTP report: ‘no obvious threshold’ at which fluoridating water is safe
Kumar et al.’s study was published online less than a week before the NTP’s May 4 Board of Scientific Counselors (BSC) meeting where advisors would finalize any recommended changes before the NTP publishes the final version of its report on fluoride’s neurotoxicity.
The NTP, an interagency program run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that researches and reports on environmental toxins, conducted a six-year systematic review to assess scientific studies on fluoride exposure and potential neurodevelopmental and cognitive health effects in humans.
Its groundbreaking report on those findings — which consists of a “state of the science” monograph and meta-analysis surveying the literature on the links between fluoride exposure and cognitive health effects — concluded that prenatal and childhood exposure to higher levels of fluoride is associated with decreased IQ in children.
It also found that given that children are exposed to fluoride from multiple sources, there was “no obvious threshold” at which fluoridating water would be safe.
That means even when water is fluoridated at lower levels (typically 0.7 mg/L), studies found children had dangerous levels of fluoride in their systems.
At the BSC meeting, the American Dental Association (ADA), with whom Kumar is affiliated, used his meta-analysis as evidence there were problems with the NTP study and argued that the NTP report should therefore be postponed.
This was just the latest in a series of attempts by industry and regulatory agency officials to “weaken, delay, or kill” the report.
The report is a key document in the ongoing lawsuit filed by Food & Water Watch, the Fluoride Action Network, Moms Against Fluoridation and private individuals against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seeking to end water fluoridation.
The lawsuit was put on hold for more than two years pending the finalization and publication of the report. After the NTP scientists finalized their draft in May 2022 — which they deemed ready for publication — U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ruled the EPA could no longer delay the trial.
The case is moving forward as the report goes through the final stages of review.
The plaintiffs hope the report will be published in final, rather than draft, form prior to the next phase of the trial in January 2024.
The report was subject to an unprecedented number of peer reviews and agency commentary, and as a direct attempt by the NIH to block its publication, internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) revealed.
The final step in its publication will be for the NTP director to consider the BSC’s suggestions and make any amendments to the report prior to publication.
The BSC recommended the NTP include comment on the recently published meta-analyses, but they were not aware that Kumar et al. buried data in order to support their findings.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Connett, partner at the law firm Waters Kraus & Paul, provided the evidentiary documents to the NTP last week so the agency can consider the omitted data in its long-awaited final review of fluoride’s neurodevelopmental toxicity.
“We felt it was important to make the NTP aware of the omitted data as it directly contradicts the paper’s conclusion, and further undermines the dental lobby’s main talking point that the neurotoxic hazards of fluoride only occur at high doses.”
How researchers manipulated ‘the science’
Email exchanges between Kumar and his co-authors and transcripts from Kumar’s deposition in the lawsuit show Kumar and his co-authors are professionally committed to water fluoridation.
Kumar is a member of the pro-fluoridation ADA’s National Fluoridation Advisory Committee and one of the nation’s leading promoters of fluoridation. He admitted in the deposition that his job is “to promote fluoridation.”
Dr. Susan Fisher-Owens, one of his co-authors, receives funding from Colgate, which also promotes water fluoridation.
Kumar also admitted that part of his job was to work with the ADA’s marketing consultant to come up “with the best messaging and strategies for how to best advocate for fluoridation,” including messaging to “inoculate policymakers” with pro-fluoride information before they speak with anyone questioning the policy.
The documents show the researchers set out to prove there was no link between low levels of fluoride and lowered IQ in children, specifically to undermine the NTP report.
In a presentation to the Association of State and Territorial Dental Directors in February 2021, Kumar told his colleagues he was hoping to pre-empt the NTP monograph by publishing his own meta-analysis and finding a “friendly editor” to publish it.
He reiterated this point in an email to his co-authors in July 2022, in which he emphasized there was “urgency” to get their paper published. “I wanted to publish the paper before the NTP report,” he wrote.
But publishing their desired results met a series of roadblocks as peer reviewers at the Journal of the American Dental Association rejected the study twice, finding the “discussion is unbalanced and misleading.”
One reviewer expressed concern that “the misinformation in this manuscript will fuel more controversy rather than stimulate prudent science-based decisions.”
Reviewers at Pediatrics Journal similarly rejected the study as marked by “fallacious” reasoning with conclusions that were “internally inconsistent.” Another reviewer said that a “facile style of citation increases concern about the balance of the work.”
But reviewers were unaware that Kumar also omitted data that contradicted his desired conclusions.
In an email to Kumar in February 2022, the study’s biostatistician Honghu Liu, Ph.D., told Kumar he thought the results of his analysis were “headed in the right direction.”
But on March 5, 2022, Liu wrote to Kumar explaining they had done analyses trying to find a safe threshold — ideally, around 1.5 mg/L — for fluoride in water, below which there is no association with reduced IQ in children. However, he wrote, “the results are opposite to what we hoped for.”
Liu told Kumar he would keep trying to produce different results. “Although hard, we can test more models to try to identify a threshold that can lead to a nonsignificant fluctuation in IQ before the threshold and a significant drop in IQ after the threshold,” he wrote.
But further analysis continued to show an association between low levels of fluoride exposure and decreased IQ. According to Liu, the dose-response analysis was “unfortunately not showing what we like to show.”
To resolve the problem, they eliminated the analysis from the study.
On March 24, 2022, Kumar sent his colleagues an email, quoting the particular parts of the NTP monograph that he sought to invalidate with their paper and raising concerns that reviewers would question their research if they included a certain figure that contradicted their conclusions.
When the team submitted the study to Public Health for publication, the analysis showing an association between low-level water fluoridation and IQ deficits had been removed.
The study concluded, “These meta-analyses show that fluoride exposure relevant to community water fluoridation is not associated with lower IQ scores in children.”
Connett sent the omitted analysis along with an explanation of how Kumar’s conflicts of interest influenced the outcome of his study in a letter to the NTP last week and urged them to take it into consideration as they evaluated the meta-analysis.
He wrote:
“The public counts on NTP to provide the best available science on the chemicals that impact their lives. I recognize this is a challenging task, particularly for chemicals with significant political interests at stake, but it is vital nonetheless.”
Through FOIA and public records requests, the plaintiffs revealed how high-level public health officials blocked the report’s publication after the NTP determined it was finalized.
They also showed how the ADA sought to influence the “independent” National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics to insist on further review.
Commenting on what else they might uncover about efforts to protect pro-fluoridation interests, Connett told The Defender :
“The only reason we were able to get Kumar’s emails is because he’s a government official who is subject to Freedom of Information requests. It raises the question of what else we would learn if the emails of private actors, like the PR strategists who Kumar works with, were also accessible.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
As Washington increasingly inflates the China threat, a few pieces of sly propaganda to sell that conflict are coming more into focus. Recent speeches devoted to China by key figures in the Biden administration largely rested on falsehoods that conveniently erase decades of mistakes by the American elite and therefore shift all the blame onto China.
Both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and national security advisor Jake Sullivan recently engaged in this rewriting of history that claims the Chinese stole American jobs and similarly that Beijing nefariously took control of the “clean” energy industry and will now use its position to coerce other nations, potentially slowing climate action.
One can see why it’s an attractive talking point for DC officials as it helps sell the conflict to working class Americans and environmentalists, but it’s simply not true.
The blame for American industry (green or not) relocating to China was caused by the greed of American elites who reaped massive profits in the process. Now they claim taking on China will bring back jobs and help tackle climate change. Nevermind that much of the American industry now being relocated out of China is going to other “low-cost” countries or that the US war machine is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.
How are Yellen and Sullivan portraying the US as an innocent bystander that never could have foreseen the loss of US manufacturing to China?
Here’s Yellen speaking on April 20 at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:
Over the past few decades, China has experienced an impressive economic rise. Between 1980 and 2010, China’s economy grew by an average of 10 percent per year. This led to a truly remarkable feat: the rise of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. China’s rapid catch-up growth was fueled by its opening-up to global trade and pursuit of market reforms. … China has long used government support to help its firms gain market share at the expense of foreign competitors.
…The actions of China’s government have had dramatic implications for the location of global manufacturing activity. And they have harmed workers and firms in the U.S. and around the world…. China’s unfair economic practices have resulted in the over-concentration of the production of critical goods inside China.
And here’s Sullivan in his big speech about the new US international economic policy speaking at the Brookings Institution last month:
The so-called “China shock” that hit pockets of our domestic manufacturing industry especially hard—with large and long-lasting impacts—wasn’t adequately anticipated and wasn’t adequately addressed as it unfolded.
First off, to the point of government support. China no doubt provides subsidies for firms largely in fields deemed strategic. The US also does so (see: Inflation Reduction Act, oil, agriculture, auto, etc.).
No doubt that China has bent and broken WTO rules, but that was working just fine for US officials until it wasn’t. Now that officials like Sullivan have woken up to the fact that offshoring everything to China was a disastrous long-term security plan, they say it’s Beijing’s fault for the “China shock.” But contrary to Sullivan’s claim such an outcome couldn’t have been foreseen, it was “adequately anticipated.” Here’s a piece from the New York Times back in 2000 titled “Unions March Against China Trade Deal”:
Thousands of steelworkers, truck drivers, auto workers and other union members rallied on Capitol Hill and swept through the halls of Congress today in a show of muscle intended to block a trade agreement with China.
Their message, conveyed by union leaders and rank-and-file members who came from as far away as Michigan and Nebraska, was that trade was working for American corporations but not for American workers.
… [the union members] said, they are only opposing a deal with a country that does not respect workers’ rights and would stop at nothing, in their view, to steal the jobs that are the backbone of the American middle class.
It was obvious at the time what was happening; the real story is well-known, but just to recap: it was American elites’ greed that caused the American working class to lose 3.7 million decent paying jobs from 2001-2018.
Matt Stoller and Lukas Kunce tell the story from a national security perspective in a 2019 piece at The American Conservative. Using old US telecom equipment company Lucent Technologies as a starting point. In 1996, AT&T spun off Bell Labs into Lucent, which began to buy up companies in an effort to keep its stock price high. Lucent also lended money to risky startups who would then buy Lucent equipment. Then came the dot-com bust, and the company, already dealing with accounting scandals, began massive layoffs. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Stoller and Kunce write:
In the early 2000s, the telecom equipment market began to recover from the recession. Lucent’s new strategy, as Mottl put it, was to seek “margin” by offshoring production to China, continuing layoffs of American workers and hiring abroad. At first, it was the simpler parts of the telecom equipment, the boxes and assembly, but soon contract manufacturers in China were making virtually all of it. American telecom capacity would never return.
Lucent didn’t recover its former position. Chinese entrants, subsidized heavily by the Chinese state and using Western technology, underpriced Western companies. American policymakers, unconcerned with industrial capacity, allowed Chinese companies to capture market share despite the predatory subsidies and stolen technology. In 2006, French telecom equipment maker Alcatel bought Lucent, signifying the end of American control of Bell Labs. Today, Huawei, with state backing, dominates the market.
The erosion of much of the American industrial and defense industrial base proceeded like Lucent. First, in the 1980s and 1990s, Wall Street financiers focused on short-term profits, market power, and executive pay-outs over core competencies like research and production, often rolling an industry up into a monopoly producer. Then, in the 2000s, they offshored production to the lowest cost producer. This finance-centric approach opened the door to the Chinese government’s ability to strategically pick off industrial capacity by subsidizing its producers. Hand over cash to Wall Street, and China could get the American crown jewels.
Can you blame Beijing? If the US wants to sell off their industry, wouldn’t it be crazy not to take it? The fact is the Chinese used the system Washington built against them, and now the likes of Sullivan and Yellen cry foul.
Long Yongtu, China’s chief negotiator for WTO accession has defended Beijing’s role in the country’s economy, saying “when we promised to adopt a market economy, we made it absolutely clear that it would be a socialist market economy.”
The loss of US manufacturing decimated the country’s research capacity. It means the US relies on components made in China for aircraft carriers and submarines. It means a trillion dollars in defense spending helps enrich China – the very country which is supposedly behind the increased defense spending in the first place.
Of course, Yellen and Sullivan admit no mistakes by the US ruling class. It was impossible to know this would happen, they say, despite warnings at the time that this very situation would arise.
Not surprisingly, when Politico did a 20-year-anniversary story on China’s accession to the WTO, most US lawmakers didn’t want to talk about their vote to normalize trade relations with China in 2000 (which paved the way to the WTO).
But four American “experts” who did the planning and negotiating of the normalization of trade ties with China have zero regrets. That’s hardly surprising as it seems the number one qualification to become an expert is the ability to never admit being wrong. It also probably didn’t hurt that all these experts were rewarded with better positions and often cashed in afterwards.
***
Yellen and Sullivan also play up how confronting China is part of their newfound focus on minerals critical for a green economy, but what they’re really doing is disguising another lack of foresight by American elites. Sullivan says critical minerals are “the backbone of the clean-energy future” and that “clean-energy supply chains are at risk of being weaponized in the same way as oil in the 1970s, or natural gas in Europe in 2022.”
Many of these minerals are controlled by China and are also critical for the US defense industry. Who could have foreseen? Here’s another tidbit from that 2000 New York Times article:
In an effort to counter the unions’ message, the administration released a Commerce Department study showing that every state would benefit from increased trade with China. And Gen. Colin L. Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, endorsed the agreement, saying that among its other benefits it would be in the nation’s security interests.
How has that worked out? Well, it’s now unclear. As Army Technologypoints out:
The US Department of the Interior released a list of 35 minerals it deems essential to the economic and national security in 2018 (updated in 2022), amongst them many REEs. The problem for the US is that the local production of these materials is hugely limited.
The extent of reliance on imports varies from mineral to mineral. Beryllium is mainly used to create lightweight material used in fighter jets, lithium is essential for modern battery production and tin is used in electronics, including soldier semiconductors, a sector that is projected to reach a value of $17.5bn by 2030.
Whereas the US produces some of the minerals mentioned above, it entirely relies on China and other countries for many other supplies. Cerium is used in batteries and in most devices with a screen and magnets forged from neodymium and samarium are impervious to extreme temperatures that are used in fighter jet fin actuators, missile guidance, control systems, aircraft and tank motors, satellite communications and radar and sonar systems.
Here again, it was the US that moved rare earth and other mineral processing to China, that sold off mining operations to Chinese companies, and reaped the rewards for doing so. As Stoller and Kunce describe:
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Defense Department invested in the development of a technology to use what are known as rare-earth magnets. The investment was so successful that General Motors engineers, using Pentagon grants, succeeded in creating a rare earth magnet that is now essential for nearly every high-tech piece of military equipment in the U.S. inventory, from smart bombs and fighter jets to lasers and communications devices. The benefit of DARPA’s investment wasn’t restricted to the military. The magnets make cell phones and modern commercial electronics possible.
China recognized the value of these magnets early on. Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping famously said in 1992 that “The Middle East has oil, China has rare earth,” to underscore the importance of a rare earth strategy he adopted for China. Part of that strategy was to take control of the industry by manipulating the motivations of Wall Street.
And now as the US presses the situation in Taiwan and enacts chip controls (and pressures other countries to do the same), how is China considering retaliating? From Nikkei Asia:
China is considering prohibiting exports of certain rare-earth magnet technology in a move that would counter the U.S.’s advantage in the high-tech arena.
Japan specializes in making high-performance magnets from rare earths while the U.S. produces products that use the magnets… Washington has since moved to forge a rare-earth supply chain on U.S. soil. China’s share of all rare earths produced globally dropped to roughly 70% last year from about 90% a decade earlier, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
At the same time, China still holds a tight grip on processing rare earths. Most rare earths extracted in the U.S. go to China for refining before being shipped back to the U.S.
The CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act have added roughly 77,000 jobs so far, according to Jack Conness who does a neat job tracking the investments. That’s still a far cry from the 3.7 million jobs sent to China from 2001 to 2018, and it doesn’t look like many more will be returning despite the push to move production out of China as ties deteriorate. There’s the problem of automation, which FiveThirtyEight noted back in 2016:
Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.
And there’s always the pesky issue of American workers asking for decent wages. Both Yellen and Sullivan waxed on about “friendshoring” – relocating from China to friendly countries, which also happen to below-wage. This is evidence of more short term thinking and prioritizing profits. Recall that China was initially thought of as friendly, and the selling point was that gifting it American industry would only make it friendlier.
Companies from China are already out in front of the friendshoring trend and are increasingly setting up shop in Mexico in order to be closer to their biggest market in the US.
Sullivan and Yellen don’t touch on that or just how difficult this reorganizing of supply chains will be. A 2020 Bank of America study found that it would cost American and European firms $1 trillion over five years to shift all the export-related manufacturing that is not intended for Chinese consumption out of China.
Additionally, China remains the main player in East Asian production networks, which makes manufacturing electronics products, for example, without Chinese parts and components increasingly unrealistic. Meanwhile, the US is still the largest source of inward foreign direct investment flows into ASEAN. From The Diplomat :
These different roles played by the U.S. and China in the East Asian economic system are a result of the distinct fundamentals of their domestic economies. China has pursued a production – and investment – based growth model in the past few decades, while the United States is a post-industrial, heavily financialized economy, sustained by high consumption and its central position in the global financial order. These fundamentals will prove to be harder to shape than unilaterally altering trade policies.
On the one hand, this means that attempts at isolating China are limited by the economic realities. “Friend-shoring,” “nearshoring,” and newfound industrial policies in the United States (and Europe) could very well lead to the diversification of U.S. imports, lessen the perceived national security risks associated with import dependence, and provide economic benefits to ASEAN countries by shifting some manufacturing activity from China to Southeast Asia. However, these policies are unlikely to fundamentally challenge China’s central position in regional trade and production networks in the mid-term. As Apple’s struggles in diversifying the production of the iPhone show, China-centered production networks are not easy to replicate in other countries, as Chinese logistics and suppliers possess significant advantages.
With that in mind, it’s likely this ends up as another situation similar to the purchasing of Russian oil via India:
When you look into it, "Made in India" is really "Assembled in India with China-made components". I suspect that's what most of those increasing imports are. https://t.co/YuHDGliAbo
As new revelations about the IRS probe into Hunter Biden’s tax affairs are being brought forth, a former US state senator suggests that the Department of Justice and the FBI should probably focus their attention on more serious matters related to the US president’s family.
An IRS whistleblower named Gary Shapley dropped a bombshell this week related to a tax probe into the shady affairs of Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden.
Shapley, who supervised Hunter’s tax probe since January 2020, has alleged he discovered signs of the investigation being “slow-walked” prior to him taking over, and that the Department of Justice tried to interfere with and thwart his probe.
Commenting on this development, former Colorado State Senator Ted Harvey told Sputnik that Shapley’s surprise about how long the investigation has been taking likely stems from the fact that the latter has never previously worked on a case involving a president’s son or an “elite Democrat operative.”
“Everybody that’s part of the Democrat machine never has their day in court because the machine protects them. And this shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody,” he explained while speaking on Sputnik’s Fault Lines podcast.
Harvey did note, however, that he would rather have the FBI look into the “actual criminal behavior of the Biden family” and into how said family allegedly put the US national security at risk, adding that, he does not particularly care about “any tax evasion from the president’s son.”
“I want the FBI and the Justice Department to look into the real issues with the Biden family and the corruption that we’ve seen there,” he added.
Meanwhile, Steve Gill, attorney and CEO of Gill Media, observed that while mainstream American media used to like whistleblowers, that same media now appears rather critical of them due to the media’s job essentially being to “protect the Biden family at all costs.”
He also pointed to allegations of foreign governments “dishing millions of dollars to the grandchildren of Joe Biden,” telling Sputnik’s Final Countdown podcast that it would be interesting to find out “exactly what these under-age grandchildren were doing to generate income from foreign governments.”
Peter Gøtzsche reviewed every randomised mammography screening trial ever conducted for the Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane’s headline is that, assuming a 15% mortality reduction, one woman in 2000 avoids dying of breast cancer over ten years. Ten are overdiagnosed and treated. Two hundred experience false alarms.
But that headline assumes the reduction. When Gøtzsche looked only at the trials with adequate randomisation — the higher-quality ones — the reduction disappeared. No effect on breast cancer mortality. No effect on all-cause mortality.
This is the Cochrane finding, published in the establishment’s own database of systematic reviews.
No woman being asked to consent to a mammogram this week knows it.
That is why the new Unbekoming paperback exists. … continue
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